The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  Jesus.

  “So?” I said.

  “Six thirty-four,” said Lurch. He walked over to the old man’s dresser. Its top was covered with nickels and pennies, a clip-on bow tie, a wallet, a bottle of Aqua Velva, a photo of the old lady when she wasn’t old. He swept his huge fist across the dresser, and it all went onto the floor. The glass on the picture frame broke with a gritty sound. I looked at Cleveland, who seemed to be trying to stare into my eyes, although without his eyeglasses he was unable to do more than squint intently.

  “Cleveland, what is this?” I said. “Is, this a test?”

  Lurch unhooked an old felt homburg from the door knob of the closet and walked over to the old man. He bent far down and pulled the hat onto the man’s head, and kept pulling, until the hat came unblocked, the felt stretched and took on the shape of the man’s skull, and his eyes disappeared under the crumpling brim. Lurch pulled, the man cried out and grabbed at his tremendous forearms, the felt stretched, a small tear opened.

  “Stop!” I said.

  Lurch stopped. He lifted the hat, delicately dented in its torn crown, and hung it from the doorknob. The old man lashed out at Lurch and hit him feebly on the thigh.

  “Let’s go,” said Feldman.

  “After you, Mr. Bechstein,” said Lurch.

  We went out. I turned my eyes from the sickening look of hatred and thanksgiving in the eyes of the old man—the look, that is to say, of respect.

  They drove us down to the foot of the hill, Cleveland behind Lurch, me with a great view of the smelly expanse of Feldman’s back; as usual, things were proceeding too quickly, and also as usual, I was hesitant to acknowledge the implications of these things; so instead I shouted through the sweaty wind to Feldman, whom, despite myself, and despite my anger at Cleveland, and despite the lingering fear of guns and brutality, with which I was still trembling, I rather liked.

  He said that he and Lurch had been members of rival motorcycle clubs—Feldman of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Outlaws, and Lurch of a black gang called the Down Rockers—who had met in the thick of a race riot, crowbars in their hands, bitter curses on their lips, and had for some reason begun to laugh. After that they were inseparable. They’d quit their gangs to work as a team, and had been hired as muscle by Frankie Breezy, the same man who had hired Cleveland, and the man whose “franchise”—it certainly didn’t belong to Cleveland—we were just now leaving.

  We were almost to the bottom of the hill. I could see Cleveland’s parked motorcycle and smell the cloying sugary stink of the algae roasting along the riverbank.

  “Feldman. Tell me. This whole thing was a setup, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “Hey, he’s your friend, Dennis. And you know,” he said, in a softer voice, easing up on the throttle, “you ought to take better care of him.”

  We pulled up behind the other Harley, I got off the bike, and we shook. Then he and Lurch roared away across the shimmering blacktop. It was quiet for a long time.

  “Well,” Cleveland, said finally. “So your father’s in town. That’s interesting.”

  “You make me so angry, Cleveland, fuck. What was that? What was the point of all that?”

  “The point? The point was those guys would have done your nails and made you a cheese omelet if you’d asked them to. Your father’s a wise guy, Bechstein, he’s big. I told you. And by extension, see, you’re big too. You partake of the bigness of your father. What is there to be ashamed of? The point was—”

  “If you think now I’m going to let you meet my father—”

  “I don’t need you to make the introductions. Dennis. I can just pick up the red courtesy phone in the lobby.” He lit a cigarette and shook out the match. “Look, Art, I guess this is sort of insane.”

  I was overcome with a feeling of great, wary relief, the way one is when one grasps at a straw. “It is insane, Cleveland. Yes. It is. Let’s not even discuss it.”

  “Of course you don’t have to come along. I can drop you off at the bus if you want. Or you could just wait around, kill some time in Kaufmann’s or something, and then I’ll take you home.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I would like you to come with, you know, it would make everything so much simpler. I mean, what is the big deal? I’m your friend, am I not? You don’t introduce your friends to your father? I take it he’s met Phlox?”

  “Yes, he has.”

  “Well? I just want to meet him, that’s all. Just shake his fabled iron hand.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t. I just won’t. No, you are not my friend, Cleveland. You’ve played around with me too much. Forget it.”

  “Fine. I’ll have to call for an appointment.”

  “You really would go without me.”

  I turned from him and walked down to the riverside and stood in weeds and rusty cans. I was hot, overcome by a feeling of brute sleepiness, and I was two hours late for my foredoomed rendezvous with Phlox. I saw that I’d been mistaken when I thought of myself as a Wall, because a wall stands between, and holds apart, two places, two worlds, whereas, if anything, I was nothing but a portal, ever widening, along a single obscure corridor that ran all the way from my mother and father to Cleveland, Arthur, and Phlox, from the beautiful Sunday morning on which my mother had abandoned me, to the unimaginable August that now, for the first time, began to loom. And a wall says no; a portal doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m not your friend?” He crunched into the grass beside me. An old, yellow flap of newspaper wrapped itself around his boot.

  “Cleveland, do you realize what you’re asking me to do? Do you appreciate the misery this means for me?”

  “No. I can’t,” he said. “You never let me.”

  I looked at him. He almost smiled, but his eyes were fixed on me, unblinking, his forehead wrinkled. Then he started over to the motorcycle. I followed with his broken eyeglasses, and he fit the parts together as well as he could.

  It is true, I know, that I failed to permit Cleveland any real sense of the world within me, which was, and is, a world of secrets (but that is putting it too grandly, for it was only a world of things that I could not—no, that I needed not to say), and I regret this failure all the more now, when I realize that he—oh, Cleveland—five times opened wide to me the doors of his strange world. Five times that summer I rode Cleveland’s motorcycle, my head squeezed into the banana-yellow helmet that had once belonged to his little sister. Each time, as we set out, I would clutch the metal bar behind me, but he drove, of course, like a maniac, threading his way among speeding cars, running down yellow lights, even hopping briefly up and off the sidewalk to avoid tie-ups, and I always finished with my hands more securely upon his hips, and would shout and laugh into his helmet. It was at these times, these five quick, alarming times, my fists full of hot black jacket, my helmet clicking against his, that I felt most linked to him, most understanding. I knew why he did the things he did. There would be nothing but his wide back, his laughter, and Pittsburgh whirling past, each of its trees a short hiss. The speed and the roar and the nothing that isolated us were more exciting, more true and intimate, than anything I ever felt that summer with either Phlox or Arthur; there was no shadow of sex to mar or deepen it. There were only laughing fear and my hands, like so, on his hips. We were friends.

  He took me to his house so that we could shower and he could change his torn clothes, dig up an old pair of glasses. If I have not already described Cleveland’s own abode, it is because the first time I saw it was that day, when everything seemed new and newly foreboding, when I was filled with giddy fear and with curiosity. Arthur had already made me a little apprehensive of what he called the Casa del Fear, by alluding darkly to its ever changing roster of inmates, its collapses and minor fires, strange animals, dunes and towers of unwashed clothes and dishes. “It’s not a house,” he had said, “it’s an implosion.” It sat in the middle of a small wood in the middle of a Sq
uirrel Hill city block, a forgotten place gained by a narrow, cracked drive that was barely visible from the street. It might have passed for haunted, had its exterior not been decorated with tricolor giant wooden cutouts of Felix the Cat, Alice the Goon, Beany and Cecil, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Ignatz Mouse and his flying brick. But it had gables, a queer, peeling turret, an iron fence, its shutters dangled crazily, and there was something vaguely human about its visage.

  “Who owns this place?” I said, unscrewing my head from the helmet as we climbed off the bike.

  “No one knows.”

  “Ah.”

  “Every month, on the first night of the full moon, I leave the rent money in a little paper bag at the end of the driveway. In the morning it’s gone.”

  We climbed the steps of the house and crossed the creaking porch, went through the living room. Paperback books were piled everywhere, on tables, on the floor, in corners, and I glanced at their titles, an eclectic assortment that ran from the true stories of famous murders to Knut Hamsun, from diet books and horoscopes to Vonnegut and comic books. I supposed that all this odd variety represented the many and multiform roommates and previous occupants of the Casa del Fear.

  “Have you read all of these?”

  “Of course. Why else would they be here?”

  “You bought all these books?”

  “I don’t buy books,” he said.

  This was before I knew about Cleveland’s magical coat of many pockets, which inexhaustibly brought forth cigarettes, canned goods, books and magazines, and the occasional rubber snake or chattering wind-up dentures plucked from a variety store. Perhaps the greatest single miracle that Cleveland ever performed was to have run through his mother’s considerable legacy in six years without ever purchasing anything more expensive than his motorcycle.

  We cleaned ourselves up, and while he changed I wandered the halls, looking into the bare rooms, each with a stereo and a mattress. None of the evil roommates appeared to be home, although traces of them, visual and olfactory, were everywhere. Some of the bedroom doors were padlocked, others were torn from their hinges and set tilted against a wall. I stepped into one room and stared absently for a few moments at a poster that promoted a rock-and-roll band, before noticing that it depicted a garish Aztec sacrifice atop a pyramid—the heart, bereft of its body, lovingly rendered. I was thinking that I had to call Phlox, and the thought of Phlox was so appealing that I almost decided just to go to her, to sneak out of the house and let Cleveland head downtown alone. Perhaps that would have been an even more foolish thing to do, although it is difficult to see how. In any case, he stuck his head in the door.

  “Okay, Bechstein.”

  I turned. He had on round white-rimmed glasses that made him look rather fey.

  “All right.” I sighed. “Just let me call Phlox.”

  But there was no answer; so we went downtown, which was my fourth time on the back of Cleveland’s motorcycle.

  17

  B AND E

  ON THE WAY DOWNTOWN, I considered the possibility that I might end up once again in the ill-starred Italian restaurant. It would have made, at least, for a kind of gruesome symmetry. But my father, as it happened, was in his hotel room, with several other men. Dimly we could hear them laughing as we came down the worn plush in the cool, faded hotel corridor. My cheeks tingled from exercise and anxiety. And then Cleveland astonished me: When I stopped at the numbered door and for a last look of encouragement turned to face him, he drew a necktie from the pocket of his leather jacket and began to loop it around his shirt collar. The tie was gray-brown, with an intricate pattern of unusual squares and ovals.

  “Rattlesnake,” said Cleveland.

  Another round of guffaws from the other side of the door. I waited, so as not to cause an ominous, abrupt cessation of laughter; when I heard the final sound of my father clearing his throat, I knocked. After the several seconds that it took them silently to discuss and to delegate, a man opened the door, one of Them. I tried to look into the room, but there was a white vestibule—a bench, a mirror, and a gladiola in a vase—and nothing else. The man, in shirtsleeves and suit pants, had a pale face and an uncool haircut. He recognized me, and I wondered how many times I had seen him before. He smiled and stepped out into the hall, shutting the door behind him.

  “Hey,” he said. “How do you like that? It’s Joe Bechstein’s boy.” He shook my hand. “Jimmy. Jim Breezy. Last time I saw you, you were a kid. Say, Art, listen.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me a little toward him, and a little away from the door, then he looked over my shoulder and seemed to notice Cleveland for the first time. “This a friend?”

  “Yes; right. It is good to see you, Jimmy.”

  “Say, Art, listen—your dad’s kind of busy right now, you know, he’s talking to some people. So. He’s busy.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah, you know? I think maybe you better come back in an hour, like an hour and a half, maybe.”

  “Oh. Okay, Jimmy, sure. Five o’clock, say?”

  He said sure, without looking at his watch, and went back in; the door shut.

  “Oh, well,” I said, “five o’clock. My dad’s busy.”

  Cleveland rolled his eyes.

  “You’re jelly, Bechstein, you’re like fish jelly,” he said, and knocked on the door.

  “Yeah?” Jimmy Breezy said this time, still smiling.

  “Couldn’t we see Mr. Bechstein now, and not at five o’clock?” said Cleveland.

  “Who are you?” said Jim, smileless now.

  “I’m the friend. Cleveland Arning.”

  “Send them in,” I heard my father say.

  Jim Breezy swung out of our way, like a gate.

  There were seven men in the room, not counting Them, sitting in a variety of armchairs around a long, low coffee table, on which lay a read and refolded newspaper, a key, and my father’s airplane ticket: my father, dressed for golf and looking hard but relaxed; Uncle Lenny, also in white shoes and big pastel pants; and five other men, one of whom, also pale-faced, sat bolt upright when he saw Cleveland. He had to be Frankie Breezy, a bit surprised to find his motorcyclist employee in the same hotel room as he. Frankie was a frail-looking man who wanted you to know, I saw at once, that he had a lot of money invested in his clothes. He was the flashiest thing in the room, which was, like the whole hotel, old, stale, elegant, and large. The men were enjoying their long cigars and their drinks; my father and Lenny had the usual glasses of iced coffee, all the other men something ginger or clear with a twist; and everyone had his smile on, with the exception of Frankie Breezy.

  “Hello, Dad; hello, Uncle Lenny,” I said, deciding against going over to kiss my father’s cheek. I nodded to the other men, who nodded to me. “I’m sorry to bother you. And this is my friend Cleveland.”

  My father rose toward me, and he gave me a kiss. He shook hands with Cleveland.

  “Joe, I know Cleveland,” Frankie said, in an intentionally very strange tone of voice. My father looked at me.

  “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Bechstein,” said Cleveland. “And it’s really all my fault that we’re interrupting you this way. I wanted to meet you.”

  “Glad to meet you,” said my father quietly.

  “He’s one of mine,” Frankie said.

  “Why don’t you and Cleveland amuse yourselves downtown for a couple of hours, Art. Then I’ll take you both to dinner.” He did not blink.

  “Yeah, some of us ain’t got a summer vacation, Art,” said giggling old Lenny. “Some of us have to work even on the hottest day of the summer.”

  “All right, fellows. I’m busy. Good-bye.”

  “Aw, Joe, let them stay a minute,” said one man, an older, balding once-blond man with friendly water-blue eyes and a nose destroyed by boxing. He picked up the newspaper and laid it beside him. This was Carl “Poon” Punicki, although I didn’t know it at the time. Three other things I did not know then about him were, first, that he was a big-
time jewel fence; second, that he and Frankie Breezy had been feuding all year over a small piece of the Monongahela Valley; and third, that he had a son, whom he prized and ate dinner with every Sunday afternoon, who was a biker. “I never met your boy, Joe.”

  My father had been required to do business with this man; he turned and put his arm around me.

  “Arthur, this is Mr. Punicki.”

  He went all around the room. I shook a bunch of hands; so did Cleveland. I saw Mr. Punicki eyeing with paternal amusement Cleveland’s snakeskin tie.

  “So?” said my father at last. “You just wanted to drop by?”

  “Yes,” said Cleveland. “That’s it.”

  “No,” I said. “There’s a reason, actually.”

  Cleveland and I must have exchanged a pair of real Hayley Mills now-what-do-we-do looks, because everyone laughed.

  “This guy doesn’t belong in here. He’s a squeeze,” Frankie said. “He’s an employee.”

  “Pops, Cleveland wants a job,” I said.

  Frankie Breezy stood up and made two partial but probably automatic fists. “Cleveland needs a job,” he said.

  “This is very foolish,” my father said.

  “I’ll give Cleveland a job,” Mr. Punicki said. He took a pen out of his pocket and wrote on the colored paper folder of my father’s airplane ticket. He tore off a neat corner and handed it to Cleveland.

  “I’ll see you at five,” my father said to me, in a near whisper. His forehead was so furrowed with anger that it was as though he had only one long eyebrow, running all the way across. He was very red. “Alone.”

  I felt, momentarily but acutely, that I had gone too far, this time, even to bother with another goddamn dinner.

  “I can’t, Dad,” I said. “I have things to do. I’m sorry.” I started to cry, then stopped; it was like a yawn. “Come on, Cleveland.”

  “And I’ll bet it’ll be a much more fun job too,” said Cleveland softly as we went out through the pretty vestibule. “More suited to my zany tastes and idiosyncrasies.”