The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  “Okay, okay.”

  “And what—is your father ashamed of what he is?”

  “I’m ashamed.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll tell him what we’ve been up to, then. You know I want to meet Joe the Egg.”

  I must have flinched at this nickname. “So you’ve said.”

  “Sorry,” he said, not very apologetically. “Look, here we are.”

  We reached the first house in a row of houses all built across the tiny stretch of earth that lay between the road and nothing, empty air. The houses were supported at the rear by an intricate and feeble-looking system of peeling gray two-by-fours that worked their capricious way down to concrete anchors set into the hill. The greenish paint was also peeling from the side of the first wooden house, which had one newspapered window cut into it, toward the top. We picked our way to the front door along a cracked walk littered with old toys, an enormous Sony television carton, and a soggy pink sneaker.

  “I really would like to talk to your father,” he whispered, knocking.

  “Cleveland.”

  He patted me once on the shoulder, and then tapped again on the door, with the same hand.

  The woman who answered Cleveland’s three lazy knocks had a nice smile that lasted for the fifth of a second before she realized who was at the door.

  “He ain’t here,” she said, looking back and forth between us several times, not nervously but with annoyance, and as though memorizing our faces.

  “Well, I am.” There was an instant and very convincing meanness to his voice. “And there is that invisible man who has been so generous to your brother. He’s here too. In spirit.”

  She glanced at me before realizing whom Cleveland meant: probably not Uncle Lenny, or whoever was over him, but one of the Stern soldiers. The woman, or girl—she looked about sixteen—had narrowed the space between the door and the jamb, and drawn her body back into the house, so that now only her face showed.

  “Who is it?” a man shouted from somewhere within.

  The girl blushed. Cleveland smiled.

  “Wait,” she said, and shut the door in our faces.

  “Come in? No, thank you; I’ll just wait right here on the porch.” He turned toward me and smiled again, lit a cigarette, and leaned against the crumbling side of the house.

  “Get a load of this ménage,” he said. “I always come here first; it’s my favorite.”

  “Ha.”

  “They’re your father’s kind of people.”

  “Come on, Cleveland, stop.”

  This time a tall, unshaven young man in an undershirt, with long black hair like Cleveland’s, opened the door, wide. His smile did not fade as his sister’s had, but lingered too long, big and yellow and pitiful.

  “Come on in.”

  We stepped into the house, which was full of odors. There was an immediate tart and sweaty smell of marijuana, and then, beneath or woven into that smell, fainter ones of tomato sauce, sex, and old furniture. The place looked grandmotherly and clean: easy chairs, frilly lamps, a beat-up china closet. The girl, her hair black like her brother’s, sat on a sofa beside another young woman, who held a toddler on her lap. The little kid didn’t look at us—he played with a toy helicopter. On the television, a game-show audience screamed out counsel.

  “Who’s this guy?” said the tall man, jerking his head at me.

  “My dad,” said Cleveland. “He doesn’t believe I have a steady job.”

  We all laughed: we men, that is; the two women glared at Cleveland. Then we listened awhile to the television.

  “Well,” said Cleveland.

  “Just give it to him and get them out of here.” It was the woman with the baby; she spoke into the top of the bald little head.

  “Why don’t you shut up.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out a black plastic wallet, which looked new, and took from it two crumpled twenties, which he handed to Cleveland. “Not this week,” he said.

  “No problem,” said Cleveland, producing a small manila envelope from his own pocket and poking the bills into it. “No problem at all.”

  “They say they’re going to be hiring back some guys before September, you know, so, like, well.” He smiled that awful smile again.

  Now the little boy climbed down from the woman’s lap and lurched across the living room, stopping when he reached the three of us. He looked up at me, with a crease in his brow, and uttered a few syllables, very seriously.

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  After the door had closed behind us and we came down the shattered walk, I asked Cleveland what he found so remarkable about the household.

  “They’re both his sisters,” he said.

  There was a short silence while I digested this.

  “Whose…?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not even his. You should see them on a good day, though. Today they were all stoned. On a good day, that place is like a circus.”

  This made me angry.

  “Cleveland. You— This is horrible. You’re taking advantage of this unemployed guy, you walk into their house once a week and you ruin their day, I’ll bet they have huge fights after you leave, and you think the whole thing is funny. You get a kick out of it. Those people hate your guts. They hate you. How can you stand to look at that guy’s shit-eating grin every week?”

  “The world of business is built on shit-eating grins.”

  “You can cut the fake cynicism, Cleveland.”

  “You’re the economist. You know what economics is.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You remember. It’s the precise measurement of shit eating, it’s the science of misery. Look, I have to think it’s funny, don’t I? Okay.”

  He stopped. We were halfway along the row of houses, and the sun had just come out, making it hotter than before. He bent down to pull the fabric of his jeans away from the backs of his knees, and I realized how stuck together I felt, too, and bent down alongside him.

  “Okay. Look. I brought you along, Bechstein. I’ve never brought anyone before. No one else except Artie even knows that I do this. Jane doesn’t know. And I would never have brought Lecomte. Why? I don’t know. I’m not supposed to bring anybody at all. But for some reason I wanted you to see this. You should understand this. Can’t you see why I do this?” He was almost shouting, seemingly angrier than I had been a moment before. Drops of sweat had pooled over his eyebrows and poured down the sides of his face. But I didn’t believe him. I felt all at once like Arthur with his X-ray heart, and I was sure that Cleveland was misleading me somehow, that he did know why I was standing on that hill with him, soaking wet, ashamed, and in a sudden rage.

  “Because it’s easy,” I shouted. “Because it’s easy, and it pays well, and it makes you feel like you’re better than the people you exploit.”

  I thought he was going to punch me. He made fists and kept them, barely, at his sides. Then the anger went out of his shoulders; he unballed his hands and smiled, faintly.

  “Wrong. No. Wrong. I do it because it is fun and fascinating work.”

  “Ah.”

  “See, I’m a people person.” He gave an airy toss of his great head.

  “I see.”

  “And also—I’m surprised that you haven’t guessed this, Bechstein—I do it because—”

  “I know,” I said. “Because it is Bad.”

  He grinned and said, “I wear a rattlesnake for a necktie.”

  I laughed.

  “I have a mojo hand,” he said.

  It was very difficult for me to admit it to myself, almost, as difficult as it would have been to express admiration for my father’s job and associates (and still I took his money), but collecting illegal interest on loans, although perhaps not fun, was terribly fascinating work. I had always felt pleasure on looking into the houses of strangers. As a child, coming home at sunset through the infinite chain of backyards that led from the schoolyard to our house, I would catch glimpses in window
s of dining rooms, tables set for supper; of crayon drawings tacked to refrigerators, cartons of milk standing on counters; of feet on low hassocks, framed photographs, and empty sofas, all lit by the bland light of the television; and these quickly shifting tableaux, of strange furniture and the lives and families they divulged, would send me into a trance of curiosity. For a long time I thought that one became a spy in order to watch the houses of other people, to be confronted by the simple, wondrous fact of other kitchens, other clocks, and ottomans.

  Cleveland took me to ten or twelve houses on that hill, and I stood in kitchens, on patios, wanting so little to watch the smarminess and resentment passed along with each ten-dollar bill that I noted every thing in each room, feverishly—the silk flowers on the televisions, the statues of Our Lady, the babies’ stockings on the floors. At first I pretended that Cleveland was conducting me along the galleries of a Museum of Real Life, a series of careful, clever re-creations of houses, in which one could almost but not quite imagine plain and awful things happening, as though the houses were uninhabited, fake, and for my amusement; but by the seventh or eighth house, with its blue-veined pair of legs, filthy child, pretty sister, spoiled lunch hour, I was out of the museum. His “people” had me in their spell. They did not like him, nor did he care very much for them; but there was a basic, hard, genuine acquaintance, an odd kind of comfort between them and him, and I felt as though I were being shown, in this world that seemed somehow better than mine, yet another way in which I would never come to know Cleveland.

  “Cleveland,” said one older woman, whose husband had borrowed one hundred and fifty dollars at an endlessly compounding rate of interest long enough ago that she now thought of Cleveland in the same way she thought of the mailman, “you look more like Russell every day. It makes me want to cry.” She’d been treating her hair when we arrived and now wore a see-through plastic babushka that crinkled when she shook her head. The whole place smelled of bad eggs.

  “Why is that?”

  “Do you know where Russell is right this minute?”

  “At the mill?”

  “Nope, he’s in the bedroom sleeping off a hangover. And you’ve got that same swoll-up face that he does. You got a girl?”

  “Yeah.” I was surprised to see that he put his fingers to his cheeks and pressed them tentatively.

  “Well, I feel sorry for her. You get uglier every week.”

  16

  THE CASA DEL FEAR

  AS WE CROSSED THE cracked flagstones on the lawn of the last house, he stopped short, stood rigid. I bumped into him from behind, hard enough to knock his glasses off.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  He hissed, “Shit,” then took an unlucky and false step. I heard the flat crack of boot heel against lens.

  “Shit!” he said again, but he kept on running downhill, a bit tentatively, holding out his hands before him; I bent down quickly to pick up the rubble of his Clark Kents and then went after him. In the road, farther down along the row of houses, sat the two motorcycles, one of which had almost torn off my pelvis earlier that morning. A very fat man was leaning against a kickstanded bike, smoking a cigarette, and it was toward him that Cleveland so faultily ran. I caught up just as my friend stumbled over a pothole, fell, and slid hugely across five feet of blacktop on his stomach, like a parade float.

  “Jesus.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He was instantly on his feet and running again, although now it was with more of a lumbering sideways hop, his long hair whipping out to one side with every step. I’d seen a flash of blood and black gravel on his palms, and I ran behind him, frightened by that flash, by the thud of his impact, and by his silence. The fat man had noticed us immediately and had stood up straight, and as we drew near to him he flicked away his cigarette and did the twist on it with one foot. Cleveland flew right up against him until their faces were an inch apart; I didn’t know whether this meant battle or myopia.

  “Feldman.”

  “Hey, Peter Fonda,” said Feldman.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Feldman was maybe in his late twenties, drenched in cotton undershirt, sweat beading on his little black mustache. He had a big, bushy chest and on his thick left arm a tattoo that said GONIF. His eyes and his entire face looked smart, mean, and amused; he reminded me a little of Cleveland, whom he pushed lightly away with the tips of his fat fingers, as he tugged another cigarette from behind his ear.

  “I’m leaning against my motorcycle,” he said. He lit a match with one hand and smiled. “Took a hell of a fall back there, Fonda.” Feldman snickered: Ss-ss-ss, like a pool float being deflated by a bouncing child. “And who’s this? Dennis Hopper?” He blew a cloud of smoke at me.

  I looked away, and I recognized the battered blue watering can on the front porch of the house where an ugly husband named Russell was sleeping off a hangover in the bedroom.

  “Damn,” said Cleveland, and he ran past, up the wooden steps and into the house, squinting back at me before he vanished, as though he expected me to follow, but Feldman put a heavy hand on my arm. I turned to him, beginning to make tentative sense of the situation.

  “There’s someone in the house,” I said.

  “At the moment, as far as I know, there are exactly four people in the house,” said Feldman. He kept his hand on my arm. Silently I counted. Feldman had settled back against his motorcycle, an elephantine Harley-Davidson, and after a few minutes he launched himself from it with a lazy bounce of his beach-ball waist and started up the walk, dragging his toes. He was a big, sweaty bundle of tough mannerisms in an undershirt. As he walked away, he tilted his head over backward and looked at me from that odd vantage.

  “Coming, Bechstein?” said the upside-down face.

  Inside the house it was like this: The egg-bad smell was still everywhere, but it had its locus on the sofa in the living room, where the old lady was stretched out flat in her cellophane kerchief, breathing quickly, one trembling blue-and-white hand on her breast. Her eyes were open, and she looked at us wildly as we entered the house, but did not raise her head. I heard voices in the other room, Cleveland’s among them, and then the groan of a table or dresser or something being shoved across the floor. Feldman, who knew my name, walked the hall as though it were the hall in his childhood home, dragging his fingers along the walls, looking at his feet, like a boy who has been sent to his room but is unafraid of punishment or of his father. Another piece of furniture creaked and then crashed to the floor, and the sound of broken glass went everywhere. I jumped. As we reached the half-open door at the end of the hallway, I heard men grunting, feet shuffling, a curse. Feldman nudged the door open with the lizard toe of his fancy loafer.

  Cleveland and a black giant were locked in each other’s arms, tearing at each other’s hair and clothing; the giant, who looked to be about seven feet tall, apparently had as his goal the messy old man who was scrunched against the wall at the head of the bed, his eyes wide with terror. The ruins of a vanity lay at their feet, its mirror scattered across the floor around it, and an old electric fan, grille caked with webs of dirt, whirled uselessly on the windowsill. Cleveland had set himself between the giant and the goal.

  “Lurch,” said Feldman. “Lay off.” He had a revolver in his hand, and suddenly I could not swallow the spit in my mouth, or move, or think; the abrupt black fact of a gun always acts on me as a kind of evil jacklight, transfixes me. At once, the giant freed Cleveland, or freed himself of Cleveland. He unbent his body, and his slick, processed ringlets nearly grazed the low ceiling of the room. He came to stand beside Feldman and draped his vast arm across his partner’s distant shoulders. They smiled at each other across a foot and a half of bad air. Feldman lowered the gun slightly. The old man had not moved; his chin was wet.

  “Cleveland,” Lurch said, his voice deep and beautiful as a radio man’s, “what is your problem, baby?” He wasn’t even winded. Cleveland, on the other hand, was a m
ess; he could not see, his hands bled, his shirt was torn, he gasped for breath; he didn’t say anything, but he smiled at Lurch. It was a strange smile. It was knowing.

  “Oh, Lurch, here’s someone you’ve been wanting to meet,” said Feldman. “This is a Bechstein.”

  “Wow,” said Lurch. He held out a hand the size of a dictionary and showed me his expensive teeth. “I guess Cleveland’s been showing you the other end of the family horse?”

  I hate to say it, but I was incapable of the usual bubbly little comeback; I had my eyes on the bright black revolver.

  “Feldman, Lurch, don’t do this,” said Cleveland, streaking his pant legs with the bloody palms of his hands. “He’s an old guy. I got juice from the old lady an hour ago.”

  Amid all that, I admired Cleveland’s slang. Juice. I made an immediate mental note of it.

  “How much did you take?” said Feldman, and now he had put the gun somewhere; his hands were empty. “Seventy-five fifty? That’s not enough.”

  “We aren’t supposed to depart until Mr. Czarnic here has remunerated a certain person to the sum of three hundred and fifty dollars and thirty cents, cash. More or less. Cleveland. Or else we show his wrinkly old butt some impressive feats of strength.”

  “Unless,” said Feldman. He turned to me.

  “Unless what?” said Cleveland.

  “Unless what do you think of all this, O Son of Joe the Egg?” said Lurch.

  “What do you mean? What difference does it make what I think of it?” I looked from one to the other of their faces, looked at the old man, who had stretched himself out now and was trying to slide his legs over the edge of the bed. He held one hand gingerly to his hangover. “This isn’t any of my business.”

  “Aren’t you your daddy’s little boy?”

  “My daddy doesn’t live in Pittsburgh. My daddy lives in Washington, D.C.,” I said. “We talk on the telephone once a week.”

  “Oh, but, Dennis, that’s just the next best thing,” said Feldman. “You can be there. Your daddy’s right downtown at the Duquesne, Dennis. Room six twenty-four, if I’m not mistaken.”