Michael Chabon (19 page)

“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 windows 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.”

A
S 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 mess; 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.”

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.