“I’m in the Out column of the Bellwether Fashion Forecast,” Cleveland told me, crushing another empty can and flinging himself out of the paisley recliner out of which—it was on page eight of the list—Dr. Bellwether had forbidden anyone to fling himself. As he catapulted his big self toward the refrigerator, the La-Z-Boy produced exactly the metallic groan I supposed Dr. Bellwether most dreaded.
“Does that include Jane too?” I said, trying not to sound hopeful. I didn’t, truly, entertain any hopes about Jane; some questions just have a dangerous tone built in.
“Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t,” Arthur said. “Jane and Cleveland have been in love for about three of the six years they’ve been in love.” He grinned—another first. “Bring me a beer, Cleveland?”
“The problem,” said Cleveland, tossing an emerald can of Rolling Rock right at the nook between Arthur’s stretched-out feet, where it lodged perfectly, and then grinding back in the unfortunate chair, “is her parents. In their opinion, of course, the problem is me.”
“Evil Incarnate,” I said.
“Oh, yeah; I’m the problem in Arthur’s mother’s opinion too. In fact, however, I am not a problem.”
“Only a little socially disturbed,” said Arthur.
“I am only in love with Jane Bellwether,” Cleveland said, and then said it twice again. “This is a reality that Nettie and Al will just have to accept. However unpleasant. I wish they would just die. I hate both them and their guts.”
“When are they coming home from New Mexico?” I said.
“Soon,” said Arthur. “And I’ll have to move.”
One of the big songs that summer came on the radio.
Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?
Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?
Subtle innuendos follow:
“Must be something inside.”
Before the next song there was a short silence and we could hear some shouting—not angry shouting, more like a cry of “Telephone!”—from inside the next house.
“The kid next door is really kind of unusual,” said Cleveland. “He keeps pit bulls. Of course Nettie and Al hate him because of the dogs, which, as you’ve probably seen on TV, will eat helpless infants and the elderly. And Jane claims that Teddy is violent, and—what does she say?—lewd. I’ve known about him for a long time, but you know, I’ve never met him. Currently he’s nothing but a joke. A Figure of Fun. In fact,” he said, and he got up and went over to the open window and shouted, “Teddeeee!” and from inside the other house someone said, “What?” and we laughed. “Let’s go out back,” said Cleveland. “Fuck the fucking Bellwethers.” Arthur went to put on his pants.
The two backyards were separated by some half-dead shrubs and that was all. They formed one big lawn, filled with fireflies.
“Hey, Teddy!” said Cleveland.
Teddy came out onto the grass with the dogs, three of them, at his heels, in a very obedient kind of arrangement, like a squadron of navy show jets. We waved.
“Hello, Teddy,” said Arthur, his tone cool and condescending again.
“We think he’s retarded,” Cleveland said to me, sotto voce. I made an inquiring face. “Well, because Jane always refers to him as ‘poor Teddy,’ you know? See—his hair is cut too short, the way retarded kids’ hair is, like no one asks him how he wants it, and he can’t sit still for very long, so they just lop the hell out of it one two three.” He lopped the air with two scissoring fingers. “Big shoes. Hey, Teddy, can we see your dogs?”
“Wait,” I said. “Stop. You aren’t going to torment a retarded kid and his pets.”
“Wait,” said Cleveland.
“No, I’m not ready for ugliness from you guys. Sordidness, maybe, but not something brutal, or cruel, okay? I don’t know you well enough.”
“Wait. Everything will be jake.”
Teddy and the pit bulls came snapping through the hedge and crossed over to us.
“Where are the Bellwethers?” he said. “What have you done with them?” He smiled. It was immediately clear that he was not retarded. He was probably eighteen and bright, but his terrible haircut, his small nose and eyes, and his fat cheeks made him look younger and more stupid. Arthur asked him if he would care for a beer and then went back into the house to get him one.
“Terrific dogs,” said Cleveland.
“I trained them myself,” said Teddy. “They’re perfectly trained.”
They sat in a row, panting almost in unison, three tough little good-natured knots of dog muscle that attended every movement of Teddy’s hands. He commanded them to stop panting, and blip! their tongues shot back into their mouths.
“Amazing,” said Cleveland. He knelt down and patted the series of heads. Then he grinned a sinister grin. “Well,” he said, “what should we have done with the Bellwethers?”
“Talked them into moving away.”
Arthur came out with Teddy’s beer.
“Say, Artie,” said Cleveland. “Didn’t you mention something about Happy being in heat?”
“Aw, no,” I said. “Aw, no. Come on. Don’t do it.”
“It’s one of the items on the list,” said Arthur, looking up as he tried to remember the wording. “Somewhere toward the end: ‘Do not…do not be alarmed if Happy seems to behave strangely, as she is in estrus right now.’ Good Queen Estrus. As if the dog could get any stranger than it is. Why?”
“Well, just look at these fellows,” said Cleveland. “I imagine they’re dying for some high-class tail. And they have a right to it. Isn’t that so, guys?” he asked the dogs, speaking now almost as though he were their attorney. “They’ve probably had three little pit-bull crushes on Happy for years and years, sending her flowers and gifts and love letters that Nettie always intercepts and throws away. Think how many times these guys have had their hearts broken.”
7
THE CHECKPOINT
SO CLEVELAND COULD NOT be stopped from bringing Happy up from one of her basement hiding places and mating her to Teddy’s three pit bulls, which, when introduced to Happy in the Bellwethers’ dining room, showed a great deal of alacrity in mounting to the distant heights of her vagina.
Initially Happy froze, stood rigidly with her tail down and her ears collapsed against her long head, eyes half-closed, in that distinctive near-catatonic state which Cleveland called a ball-peen trance. Manny (the dogs were named for the Pep Boys), her first consort, tupped a trembling, unresponsive statue of a dog, but by her second partner, Moe (who scramblingly presented himself half an hour later, as it took Manny rather a long time to extract himself from Happy’s tightly clenched depths), she began to loosen up, and even appeared to be enjoying herself. When Jack’s turn came (in the interval Cleveland went out and came roaring back with more beers), Happy sniffed at him as much as he sniffed at her, and even crouched a little, to make his ascent easier. We yelled and cheered the boys on, and kept drinking.
And then we hit the Checkpoint, as Cleveland called it—the bane of his career as one who always tried to push things; and at that inevitable one-way Checkpoint of Too Much Fun, our papers were found in order and we crossed into the invisible country of Bad Luck. Teddy’s mother—whoops, Teddy was only fifteen years old, after all—came looking for her son and found Mr. Genteel, Evil Incarnate, her unretarded, badly coiffed boy, and myself lying on the floor of the Bellwethers’ salon, surrounded by empty green cans of Rolling Rock and four exhausted dogs, two of which were still linked in the midst of a painful-looking dance of extraction. The livid (bluish-white) woman grabbed her son, inhumanely commanded him to liberate Jack, and, after having terrorized Arthur into giving her the name of the Bellwethers’ motel in Albuquerque, started home, trailing her woozy son and Manny, Moe, and Jack, a flawless triangle of dog.
The Bellwethers, however, were no longer at the Casa del Highway on Route 16 in Albuquerque; they were in the driveway. They had barely unbuckled their seat belts before Mrs. Teddy’s Mom set upo
n them with a furious and fairly accurate account of our bad behavior; we could hear every word. Arthur jumped up and began quickly to collect the wreckage of twisted green aluminum that covered the furniture and the shimmering blue carpet.
“Get out, Cleveland!” he said. “Run out the back!”
“Why?” said Cleveland. He went to the refrigerator and got another beer.
At the time I thought this foolish, an overly cinematic gesture. I was wrong. In my innocent cynicism I didn’t see that Cleveland was not trying to look tough; he just didn’t care. Which is to say, he knew what he was, and was, if not content with, at least resigned to knowing that he was an alcoholic. And an alcoholic is nothing if not sensitive to the proper time and place for his next drink; his death is one of the most carefully planned and prepared for events in the world. Cleveland simply foresaw his imminent need of another beer. An era of covert hatred and distance-keeping between him and the Bellwethers was ending, in what would probably be an unpleasant fashion, and he wanted it to end; but he would need help.
He had just popped the tab with the fingers of one hand when an elephantine, pink version of Jane Bellwether, in a big flowered dress, filled the front doorway. Mrs. Bellwether stared for an unusually long time at the severed screen door that leaned against the front of her house, as though this were all the damage she was, for the moment, capable of understanding. Dr. Bellwether’s head and left arm appeared in the shadows behind her, a garment bag slung over the arm. He spoke to us across his tremendous wife.
“We are going to prosecute,” he said, very softly, with an English accent.
Mrs. Bellwether entered her house and attempted to sink to her knees before Happy; but the dog, relaxed and regal and leisurely only moments before, shrank from her mistress’s touch and slunk off down the hall.
“What have you done to our dog?” said Mrs. Bellwether—to Cleveland, I decided.
Arthur started to say “Nothing,” but Cleveland interrupted him.
“We bashed her head with a ball-peen hammer,” he said.
Dr. Bellwether, who had stepped into the house, glanced quickly at his wife, who blushed.
“You were forbidden to enter this house,” he said, or rather I afterward realized that this is what he must have said. Each of his words was a softly falling little dollop of English mashed potatoes. This speech, the last I ever heard him utter, was apparently hard on him; he sat down on a hassock and let his wife do the rest of the talking.
“Where is Jane?” said Cleveland.
“Get out,” said Mrs. Bellwether.
Cleveland pushed past her; she fell against the fortunately empty birdcage. He ran out the front door.
“Who are you?” Mrs. Bellwether asked me.
“Art Bechstein.”
She frowned. “Arthur,” she said, “if you get out of my house right now—and take your young Hebrew friend with you—we will keep our two hundred and fifty dollars and will not call the police. That is only fair, considering the harm you have done to our house and our pet. Cleveland we will not forgive. Cleveland will pay for this.”
“Where is Jane?” Arthur said. He had drawn himself erect, in the way a drunken person will when alcohol cowardly flees in the face of whatever trouble it has caused, and he tucked in his shirt as though ready for business.
“She stayed on. She’ll be back in a few days. But not for Cleveland, she won’t.”
Cleveland came back into the house, beer in hand, wearing an ornate black felt sombrero, embroidered in silver thread, that he must have found in the Bellwethers’ car.
“Where is she?”
Mrs. Bellwether’s face lit up, and she said that Jane was dead. “It was awful, wasn’t it, Albert?” Mr. Bellwether shook his head and said something. “And here we come home in our grief, we want only to remember Jane in the peace of our own home, and what do we find? Depravity! Cruelty to animals! And you!”
Arthur started to speak, after Jane’s mother said that she had died—to deny, I suppose, the most ridiculous lie I had ever heard in my entire life, a lie made with such wild disregard for probability of success that I saw then how crazed she really was, and I saw that telling a good, simple lie was a sign of sanity; but Cleveland smirked, very briefly, and Arthur said nothing.
“Dead! No, it can’t be!” said Cleveland. “Not Jane! Oh, God, no! How—how did it happen?” He started to cry; it was beautifully done.
“Dysentery,” she said, less harshly, perhaps brought up short by the effect her lie was having on Cleveland.
“And this hat…” He was overcome, and could not speak for just the right amount of moments. “This hat is all that’s left of her isn’t it?”
“Yes. We had to burn her clothes.”
“Look, Nettie, in a minute I’ll walk out your front door, never to darken your welcome mat again. That’s a promise. I know that you hate me, and I certainly always hated you—until now—but I loved your daughter, passionately. I know you know that. And so—may I keep this sombrero?”
Here Dr. Bellwether raised a pale hand and started to speak again, but his wife overrode him and said that Cleveland might keep it.
“Thank you,” said Cleveland, and stepped over to her, and kissed her fat cheek with the reverence of a son. He put the hat on his head, then doffed it, bowed, gracefully swept the floor with the tacky thing, and split. He had won something: Now that Jane was dead at her mother’s hand, she was someone else, she was a girl without parents, which is the dream of every young man like Cleveland, if not every young man, period.
Mrs. Bellwether went over to the La-Z-Boy and fell into it. She had won something too, but it was something made up and pretty stupid.
“He believed you,” said Arthur in a suitably awed tone. “He’s probably wild with grief.”
“I hope he doesn’t try something foolish,” I said.
“Let him jump off a bridge,” said Mrs. Bellwether. “And good riddance.” A sudden pragmatic thought seemed to invade her perfectly factless mind. “You’ll tell him. I shouldn’t have told you. You’ll tell him she’s alive!”
“Gee, I just might, Mrs. B.,” said Arthur. He had sat back down in his chair and was lacing up his sneakers.
“Don’t tell him. Please. Let him think she’s dead.”
“But what if they end up on the same bus someday? Or at adjoining tables in the Dirty O?”
“I’ll send her away. I’ll send her down to my mother’s farm in Virginia. She’ll be safe there. Don’t tell him!”
Arthur sat up and gave the demented woman the relentless, clear stare that was going to make his career at the State Department.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said.
While Mrs. Bellwether, looking pleased with herself, made out the check to Arthur on the kitchen table, I carried his suitcase out of the house.
“Nice meeting you, Mrs. Bellwether,” I called. “Shalom!”
We walked all the way back to my house. For some reason I felt depressed, and we didn’t laugh. Arthur smoked cigarette after cigarette; when I gave him an account of my abduction by Cleveland he only sighed; he cursed the humid weather.
“Do you feel bad because you failed in your responsibility to the Bellwethers, or something ridiculous like that?” I said.
“No.”
We reached the corner of Forbes and Wightman, wide, empty, and phony-looking in the light of the halogen lamps. Chained to one of the lampposts was the vending machine, now empty, that I had watched the dwarf fill with newspapers that morning. The sky to the south, over the steel mills, looked evil and orange and miasmic. We came to the Terrace and walked up through the maze of garages to my apartment, and I fumbled with the house key. I was still very drunk.
As I pushed open the door, Arthur put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned to face him.
“Art,” he said. He touched my face. His beard was too heavy, there was a puffiness under his eyes, and he seemed almost to waver on his feet, as though he might fall over
at any moment. There was something so drunken and ugly about him that I flinched.
“No,” I said. “You’re tired. You’re just tired. Come on.”
And then, as the song says, he kissed me, or rather pressed his lips against the upper part of my chin. I stepped back, into my apartment, and he fell forward, catching himself as his knees hit the floor.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” I said.
“What an asshole I am, huh?” he said, standing carefully. “I’m just tired.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s all right.”
He apologized, said again that he was an asshole, and I said again that it was all right. I loved him and I wished he would leave. He slept on my floor among the boxes, while I trembled in bed under my cool, damp comforter. When I woke up the next morning, he had gone. He had ripped open his pack of Kools and folded it into the shape of a dog, or a saxophone, and left it on the pillow beside my head.
8
THE MAU MAU CATALOGUE
WORK THE NEXT DAY was not the circus I had expected. People are always ready to hear that something disturbing was after all only a prank—and that includes the police, who had come shortly after my abrupt departure. I called and explained to them, and to my fellow employees, that the Black Rider was a Pi Kappa Delta brother, upset over the fact that I had been seen dancing with his girlfriend, but essentially a nice guy who had only wanted to put a little of the fear of God into me. This story went over big, and even earned me some points, in the strange estimation of the apprentice paramedics and the Pittsburgh police, for having had the balls to dance with the girlfriend of a Pike, notoriously large fellows. By eleven o’clock I was able to go about my work as though I had never been torn from the register stand, manhandled, and driven away on the back of a gigantic motorcycle, and the momentary vortex I had created in the usually calm surface of Boardwalk Books closed over me.