"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 I6 in Albuquerque; they were in the driveway. They had barely unbuckled their seat belts before Mrs. Teddy's Mom set upon 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.