The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

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 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 doorknob 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 Squirrel 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.