The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  At this point I should probably say that my father, since our last bizarre, miserable attempt at conversation, had entered into a state of rage that was reportedly terrible, biblical, in its fatherliness and bare restraint, in the fear and trembling it inspired. My father was wroth. Through Lenny Stern he let it be known that Frankie Breezy should call him at once, and when twenty minutes later Frankie did, he encouraged Frankie to see that Cleveland was Frankie’s responsibility. Frankie could see that. What did Frankie Breezy, feeling perhaps a bit numb as he hung up the phone, imagine could be the reason for Joe the Egg’s sudden malignant interest in Frankie’s old pickup and delivery boy, a stupid motorhead? He would have known what everybody else knew, that ever since his wife got dead, Joe Bechstein had been funny about his boy. Now the boy had ended up down in the dirt playing with the rest of the boys, and Joe the Egg was crying about it. He’d told Frankie to teach Cleveland a lesson, but Frankie probably smirked when he heard this, guessing for whom the lesson was really intended.

  He had no reason not to want to do it, either, since Punicki was currently his least favorite person in the whole world. He sent a few ears out into the street. It took very little time to get wind of the Fox Chapel job; and an anonymous phone call at sunset, with a guess at the general address, did the trick neatly. The cops came screaming into the neighborhood, and Cleveland, making a lot of noise, which alerted the Master, tossed the doll over the wall, then scrambled up after it. He heard the rip of the seam at the shoulder of his jacket. Through the woods he crashed, with Baby under his arm, losing his way twice. He imagined the scene back at the house, the crying children, Dad rushing out into the yard, Junior into the street. Police, Police! A branch jammed into his cheek, near the eye, and he saw a flash of red. At last he pounded out onto the blacktop of the deserted parking lot, started his bike, and took off.

  It was as he pulled out onto the road, turned unthinkingly to the right, that he realized two things: He didn’t know where he was going, and he’d had too much to drink. The alcohol had deserted him during his run through the woods, but now it returned, with all the rancor of an I-told-you-so, and he swung around in the road and started off in the other direction, back toward Highland Park, unable to decide what to do next, since it was too early to go around to Carl’s store; anyway, he was supposed to pick up Pete beforehand, in Oakland. As he considered running a stop sign and slowed to a near halt, it occurred to him that more than just the police might be looking for him; and he thought of me, because he had a vague, wild idea that I might be able to say something to someone and take some of the heat off, if heat there was; then he thought of Jane, of that safe, other, tender world, and wondered if he could risk returning to her house, where he had not been now for two months.

  He roared past two police cars headed in the opposite direction, heard their distant squeals as they whirled around and gave chase. The doll still under his arm, he crossed the Allegheny, determined to lose his pursuers. Ten minutes later he stood astride his motorcycle in an empty East Liberty parking lot, behind a cluster of old buildings that hid him from the street, loading docks on three sides of him, empty crates, a forkless forklift. On the fourth side there were a small office trailer and an illuminated pay phone rising up from a patch of weeds. He drained the last draft from his flask, then dug a quarter out of his pocket.

  “Cleveland!”

  “What are you doing, Bechstein?” he said. “Drop everything.”

  I’d been lying on the sofa, trying to read an essay analyzing the notorious transience of the Clash’s drummers, and of drummers in general, but I was continually distracted by the thought that I had no plans at all for the evening, and that I’d had no plans at all since the previous Friday, an evening with Phlox, which I’d destroyed by failing to conceal from her my new, terrifying inability to attend to her speech or body; there’d already been a more subdued but similar evening with Arthur, and I was beginning to doubt that I now had sexual feelings at all, of any prefix. I didn’t know whether my lack of plans was blessing or pain. The ambiguous note on which I’d last parted with Cleveland—scrapping on the steps of my house—seemed insignificant now, small-time ambiguity, and his call promised salvation.

  “Where are you?” I said. “What’s up?”

  “How soon can you be at the Cloud Factory, Bechstein?”

  “Twenty minutes? Five if I make a bus. What? What?”

  “Just come on.”

  “To do what?”

  “I need to crawl beneath your aegis,” he said, dryly. “Just come on.”

  “You’re liquored,” I said.

  “Fuck, Bechstein, just come on. This is your big chance.” Faint thrill of pleading in his voice. “Just come.”

  “It isn’t Crime?”

  “I’m coming to get you,” he said. “Stay put.” There was a lot of noise and rattle as he hung up the phone.

  I shaved and, on an odd impulse, changed into the clothes I considered my battle dress—as close as I came to battle dress, that is—jeans, black pocket T-shirt, high-top black sneakers, then stood in front of the mirror lamenting my feebleness, trying to narrow my mouth, harden my gaze, while laughing. I felt giddy, anxious, and what once was called gay, assuming that I was in for the same taste of fear, illumination, and strange liberty I’d found in our two previous rounds of Crime. I ran out to Forbes Avenue to wait for him, and my first disappointment came when I saw that I’d dressed all wrong. Cleveland, in his blazer, looked ready to eat an obligatory luncheon with a lonely old aunt. I looked ready to vandalize her house and steal her bird feeders. We’d exchanged our usual uniforms. He lifted his visor; I saw the fiery red mark on his cheek, below the eye.

  “Look at you. Ha.” He smiled for half a second. “Get on.”

  I got on, afraid to ask about the doll, put my arms around him, held on tightly; something was very definitely the matter here; I sensed the fatalistic bluntness of Cleveland’s speech. His ever present alcoholic aura of having gone to far was now a rank smell around him.

  “Your father is an asshole,” he began, and then told me, quickly, shouting into the wind, what he’d been doing for the past two hours, and from whom he imagined he was running.

  “Why would my father care?” I shouted. “You’re paranoid. Why would he care what you do for Carl Punicki?”

  He slowed as we turned into Schenley Park, and the wind died for an instant. “Because he’s an asshole! Because, hell, because I corrupted your youth. I don’t know. I took you out to the stockyard behind the family hot dog stand. God knows there’s a lot more you could stand to find out. It would probably kill him.”

  I didn’t answer. We came upon the Cloud Factory, dim in the streetlight, and had just begun to pass it, when there was the hint of a police car in the distance, by the library. We both saw it. He swerved into the museum parking lot, by the cafeteria door, and cut the engine.

  “We’ll wait here for a second,” he said, craning his head around toward me, so that I caught a full whiskey blast. “I want you to stick with me for a while, okay, Bechstein, please?” He was opposed on principle, I knew, to the word “please.” “Just be my rabbit foot.”

  The police car passed, a bit slowly, but passed, and the shadows of the cops within it seemed serene and unpursuing. I exhaled.

  “Okay,” I said, free from doubt for the first time in four days. I clutched his shoulder as kindly as a shoulder may be clutched. “I will. What’s with the doll?”

  He shook it.

  “I see,” I said. Actually, I would have loved to see. Stolen jewels. Who is not stirred by these two words?

  “Just a minute,” he said, sliding off the bike. He started toward the Cloud Factory with the doll.

  I watched him disappear down the hill. It had never occurred to me that my success at remaining aloof from the business of my family all that time might be the fruit of my father’s will as much as my own. I’d always thought I disappointed him by my shame, my lack of interest, my adolesc
ent scorn. And then I thought: Wait a minute, am I going to get arrested? Hold everything.

  “What’d you do with it?” I said, when Cleveland strolled easily back, patting the pockets of his too-small jacket. “Did anyone see you?”

  “No evidence on me n-now,” he said, sounding frazzled, a bit winded. “No one saw. May the Cloud Factory bless and k-keep my little baby. Now listen. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve got to run over to Ward Street to gather up my mentor. I’ll get his truck—he has a beautiful truck—and we’ll be back for you.”

  “Why do I have to wait here?”

  He grabbed my elbow with one hand, my upper arm with the other, and lifted me into the air, about four inches off the saddle. It hurt.

  “Off,” he said, dragging me brusquely onto my feet. To an observer it would have looked as though he were about to beat me up. “You’re staying here because you’re going to be very busy while I’m gone.” He reached into his trousers pocket and drew outa half-dozen quarters. “Here,” he said. “Start calling all the magic names you know. All the wise guys. Your Uncle Lenny, whoever. Ask them—with all the filial humility you’re so good at—to lay off. As a favor to you.”

  “I don’t know any wise guys, Cleveland. I can’t call Uncle Lenny.”

  He climbed onto the BMW, pulled on his helmet. His voice came distant and nasal through the lowered visor, as though he were talking to me from inside a bottle.

  “Sure you can,” he said. “Call your dad, if you have to.” He jumped down hard on the starter, and his drunken foot slipped, pounded on the ground. “Jesus. Call collect.”

  “This is not a good scheme, Cleveland. This is a bad scheme. You can’t even start your motorcycle.” I saw that I was trying to welsh on my promise to help him, so I grinned. “You’re impaired.”

  He jumped again, and the bike began its controlled explosions.

  “I’m huge,” he said, poking his finger into my chest. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Kneading the damp pieces of metal in my hand, I watched him pass again through the shadows between streetlights, shrinking as he went. I wished, with sharp, strange regret, that I had kissed his cheek.

  I stood with a quarter half-slid into the coin slot, my thoughts a jumble of preambles and strategies, having decided firmly but in some bewilderment that I could not call Uncle Lenny. It would have to be my father. I say bewilderment because I still did not really believe that the premature arrival of the police had anything to do with my father, and so I couldn’t quite see why I should call him except that I’d told Cleveland I would. It was intolerable enough to have to alarm my father for a good reason, but for more of Cleveland’s nonsense! I pinched the quarter, full of dread, wondering whether I shouldn’t just call to say hello. I read fifteen times an obscene graffito on the aluminum corner of the phone booth.

  “Collect call to Joseph Bechstein from Art,” I said, and in a minute I heard my father saying that he would not accept the charges. In the second before my heart sank, I felt how odd it was to hear his high, clipped familiar voice and not be able to speak to him, as though the operator had raised an unhearing ghost or oracle; this woman held the switches and wire that connected us. My father would hang up, and then I would, and she would be left wherever it is that operators are.

  “Dad!” I said. “Please talk to me!”

  I heard the sudden silence as the woman broke the connection; then, as she blandly suggested that I dial direct, I heard the sirens growing in the distance. I dropped the receiver with a loud clunk and ran back toward the parking lot. For a few seconds I saw his motorcycle, very far away, before it disappeared from view. He must have flown past the wrong street corner, past two cops in a car with a description and an APB. One, then two, three squad cars went red and glittering after him. For the next few minutes I jogged helplessly back and forth, hopped into the air, climbed the steps of the museum, trying to catch a glimpse, aware of nothing around me but ceaseless demonstrations of the Doppler effect. I knew so little what to do that it actually occurred to me to call the police.

  “Help, oh, help,” I whispered.

  Then I saw Cleveland emerge from a street over behind the library, the street I had walked in my efforts to avoid Phlox, and simultaneously heard the drone and terrible flutter of hundreds of beating dove wings. The helicopter swung low and hung, it swept its single straight beam across Cleveland, and its metal voice issued an incomprehensible command. Cleveland hesitated a moment, probably from the shock of suddenly finding an uproar of wind and brilliance above his spinning head, then shot toward me, toward the Cloud Factory, as the police cars appeared behind him. The helicopter jerked upward, then dropped down again onto Cleveland. He reached the curb not twenty yards from me, let his bike fall, with its rear wheel still whirling, and ran toward the Cloud Factory, pursued by the light from above. I ran after him.

  “Get back!” said the helicopter. “Keep away!” Cleveland scrambled up over the chain-link fence, tottering at the top, and then I lost sight of him. The police pulled up, left their cars, and came jingling and rattling toward me. One of them detached himself from the group and, with a shove and a hammerlock, took me into custody. I could not say that I had nothing to do with this. We watched, I and my cop. The searchlight caught Cleveland on an iron ladder, drunk and terrified and climbing very badly, a flash of white-pink under his arm. I cried out. Down, I thought, down, go down. But he continued his upward climb, running wildly along each catwalk to the next ladder, encased every step of the way in the solid tube of light, until he reached a ladder fastened to the side of the building itself, a series of bars like staples punched into the brick.

  “Go down!” I said.

  “He can’t hear you,” said the cop. “Shut up.”

  Cleveland’s pursuers were already scaling the building around him, from all sides, when he attained the summit of the Cloud Factory. I saw him, legs apart, in the shadow of the magic valve, one waving hand extended toward the oncoming helicopter to shield his face from its light, the other clutching the naked doll. In that one long second before he lost his footing and fell head over heels over head, the spotlight hit him strangely, and he threw a brief, enormous shadow against the perfect clouds, and the hair seemed to billow out from the shadow’s head like a black banner. For one second Cleveland stood higher than the helicopter that tormented him; he loomed over the building, over me, and over the city of secret citizens and homes beneath his feet, and the five-foot shadow of the doll kicked and screamed.

  23

  XANADU

  IT SEEMS I RESISTED arrest when Cleveland fell, and had to be violently restrained. I have no memory of this, or of the other things that happened before the sunny instant I awoke, among bed sheets stiff as white shopping bags, my name around my wrist, suffering from what I thought at first was an atrocious hangover but turned out to be the effects of two sharp blows to the head with a rubber truncheon; I could actually see the ache, a web of phosphenes behind my eyes. As I tried to sit up, I heard a deep sigh of pleasure. I dragged my head around to find Uncle Lenny beside the bed, deep in a white chair that was too large for him. I started.

  “That’s the boy,” he said, giving a little kick of his legs, which didn’t quite reach the floor. “Heehee. Good morning! So? How’s the head? It’s all better, huh?”

  I looked away, too quickly, so that a black, starry wave broke over my eyes, and I said, “Ah.”

  “You like the room, huh? Not bad? Private. Very costly. I got you switched soon as I heard.”

  He waited a moment for me to thank him.

  “Now don’t worry, Art. Your dad, he’s coming, probably’s already at the airport. Don’t worry about anything. You ain’t in any kind of trouble with the police. You got friends, Art.” He leaned forward, grunting, to touch my shoulder with two tan fingers. “You got your Uncle Lenny. And your Aunt Elaine; she’s downstairs. She came too. To comfort you.”

  I was conscious, then, of a different ache,
deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.

  “What happened?” I whispered. My voice cracked, thick and new. Through the window I could see the cascading houses on the distant high banks of the Monongahela, the spread red-and-green dirty tartan of Oakland. So I was in Presbyterian Hospital.

  “You got hit by a cop, a lousy Polack of a cop. We’ll take care of him too.”

  “Great,” I said. “Take care of everything.” I had Friends. I had Friends who owned police chiefs, who killed, who did all the things I’d always regarded as though they were the alarming, unfortunate, faintly interesting plot elements of a television program that I did not myself watch. And now my father and my other Friends were coming to receive thanks for the fix they’d put in, for all the terrible trouble they’d saved me. I looked around my pillow for the call button, and then remembered, or seemed to remember, that Annette, Phlox’s roommate, worked at Presbyterian. I felt trapped, though I wasn’t exactly certain of how; I no longer had a clear impression of where the alliances and fissures lay among the people I knew, of who stood on which side of me and in what relation; which was tantamount, when you consider it, to my forgetting who I was. For a moment, staring at the button I couldn’t bring myself to press, I was terrified, disconnected, falling, and to protect myself I invoked, automatically, the only magic name I knew. What would Cleveland do, I thought, in this situation?

  He would have pushed things, too far.

  “Uncle Lenny,” I said, “why did my father have Cleveland killed?”