Michael Chabon - The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"Did he tell you?"

I stood up.

"I'm bombed," I said. "How many cans do you think I can hit?"

I took a nap on the screened porch, over the lapping tide, and suddenly I smelled chili. I lay on the cot, waking slowly, in stages, the warm red odor working its way into my brain until my eyes opened. I went into the kitchen and stood next to Cleveland as he opened one can after another, until he had two dozen targets for tomorrow and a gallon of chili in the pot. He was shirtless and had a drunk's bruise on his left shoulder, as he did on his shin and forearm.

"Gee, you have a big stomach," I said.

He stopped stirring the aromatic brown slop in the tureen and patted his belly proudly.

"Of course I do," he said. "I'm in the process of eating the entire world. Country by country. Last week I polished off Bahrain and Botswana. And Belize."

We sat down at the scratched, old, fine oak dinner table with our bowls of chili, and I started drinking beer again, which was cold and cleared my head. After dinner we went out. It was still, though barely, light. Arthur found a Wiffle ball and a fungo bat, so we went out into the water, and he skillfully hit long flies that we swam yards and yards to field. After we'd waded in to shore, we stood shivering in the breeze and put on our sweatshirts. Cleveland taught me to cup a windblown match, "like the Marlboro Man," and then how to flick the cigarette butt twenty-five feet when I was done. The sun went down, but we stayed on the beach, watching the fireflies and the momentary bats. The woods were full of crickets, and the music from the radio on the porch mingled with the sound of the insects. I sat on the sand and thought, for a moment, of Phlox. Cleveland and Arthur wandered down to the water's edge, too far for me to hear their talk, and smoked two long Antonio y Cleopatra cigars, then put them out in the sand. They pulled off their sweatshirts and ran into the water where years before Cleveland had brutalized his little sister.

I felt happy-or some weak, pretty feeling centered in my stomach, brought on by beer-at the sight of the fading blue sky tormented at its edges with heat lightning, and at the crickets and the shouting over the water, and by Jackie Wilson on the radio, but it was a happiness so like sadness that the next moment I hung my head.

"How can you spend so much time with her?" Arthur was saying, as he threw pine needles into the heart of the fire that Cleveland had built on the beach, where they caught, flared, and disappeared, as my little moods had all day. "She thinks she's such a glamour girl."

"So do you," said Cleveland. Two small campfires burned in the lenses of his black glasses. "And what's wrong with thinking that? She exaggerates herself. It's healthy."

"It's unbearable," said Arthur.

"It's genius," said Cleveland. "A genius you don't possess. Do I myself not claim to be in the process of eating the entire world? A patent exaggeration. Do I not claim to be Evil Incarnate?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes," and I told them about my skyscraper, and my zeppelin, and the hurtling elevator, and Arthur snorted and drained another beer, and said that was a little unbearable too.

"No, it's big-he's got it, it's big," said Cleveland. "Bigness is the goal of life, of evolution, of men and women. Look at the dinosaurs. They started out as newts, little newts. Everything's been getting bigger. Cultures, buildings, science-"

"Livers, drinking problems," said Arthur, and he stood up and went back into the house for some more beer.

"He doesn't get it," I said.

"Yes, he does," said Cleveland. "He's heard this a million times before. We used to have this thing, this image of ourselves-not ourselves, but, well, it was exactly like your thing with the hotel. What would you call that kind of thing, Bechstein?"

"An image. An image of the big stuff you wanted?"

"Come on, you can do better than that."

"How about 'a manifestation of the will-to-bigness,'" I said.

"Exactly!" He threw a pebble at my head. "Asshole. Okay, this was about women. Back when Artie was still ambisexually inclined. Bambisexual. Iambisexual. "

"Come on."

"Shut up. We had this vision-imagine your skyscraper hotel, only think of the whole city around it, think of a whole skyline like that, big and art deco, with searchlights, the beams of searchlights, cutting across the sky, all crazily, frantically. And then you see them. In the sweeping beams of the searchlights."

"See what?"

"Giant women! Gorgeous women, like Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, but the size of mountains, kicking over buildings, crushing cars under their manicured tremendous toes, with airplanes caught in their hair."

"I see it," I said.

"That was the manifestation of our will-to-bigness." There was a long silence. I heard the toilet flush inside the house. "You know, ah, Bechstein…"

"Hmm?"

"When do I get to meet your father?"

"You're crazy."

"No, I can tell I'd like him. He's big too. I've heard about him. I hear he's one of the real wise guys. I'd like you to introduce me. If you don't mind. Even if you do mind."

"What, exactly, are you into with Dave Stern? Numbers?"

"P and D."

He meant pickup and delivery for a loan shark: dropping off the principal to the unfortuante borrower and then stopping by once a week to collect the ridiculous interest.

At first I hadn't taken Cleveland 's supposed involvement with the underworld seriously, but now, suddenly, I did. Cleveland would do it. He would breach the barrier that stood between my family and my life, and scale the wall that I was.

"No, but, Cleveland, you can't meet my father." If a whisper and a whine can be combined, that was the tone of my voice. "Come on, tell me more about the searchlights and giant women."

"I remember them," said Arthur, who had just returned. "He wanted that, not me. I only wanted to know who built the Cloud Factory. Which, by the way, is rather small."

"God built the Cloud Factory," said Cleveland. "And God is the biggest of the big."

"Wrong," said Arthur. "There is no Cloud Factory. Or God, or giant women, or zeppelins."

"Fuck you," said Cleveland. "They'll come for me, one of these days. They'll come for you too. Prepare yourself. Prepare your father too, Bechstein." And he stood up and went into the house and did not come back.

"What was that about your father?" said Arthur.

"Who knows?" I said. "He probably has me confused with Jane."

As I stood looking in the mirror at my hangover the next morning, balancing my headache carefully between two hands, I heard shouts, then some thumping at the front of the house, and then a woman's voice, a familiar southern accent. I trudged out to see.

Cleveland and Jane were squared off just inside the front door, beside two bags of groceries, and Arthur, in his underpants, and wearing the T-shirt that said last call, watched warily, but with a thin smile, his eyes round. I thought of our first meeting outside the library. Jane, sunburned and fine, her hair bleached almost white, wore a pink-and-yellow plaid cotton dress, which did not harmonize with the fists at her sides, or with her muscled shoulders, or with her fierce eyes.

"Go 'head," Cleveland said. "I dare you."

"I will," said Jane. "I'll hit you."

"Hi, Jane," I said. "You look great."

She turned toward me, undid her fists, and smiled, then turned back and gave Cleveland a right hook across the jaw. He fell against the wall; he touched his finger to the corner of his mouth and looked in bemusement at the blood that came away on it. For a moment he smiled at Jane, at me, at Arthur, before he threw himself at Jane and brought her down with a hard sound to • the wooden floor. They began to wrestle, grunting and saying shit, you fucker, et cetera. Cleveland had the advantage of weight, though I doubted he was any stronger than she.