Michael Chabon

“You always tell me you love Jane when you’re drunk.” He didn’t answer. “Okay, so let’s go, Virgil. Shock me.”

We went over to the big black BMW, leaving behind us two hand-sized bulges in the fence. You could still make them out from fifty yards away, two little blurs in the pattern of wire.

We rode through strange sections to a part of the city that I hardly knew. I knew, in fact, only that there was another good Italian restaurant somewhere around there; my father often mentioned it. We were at the foot of one of the hillside neighborhoods, its houses sparse up along the distant ridge, but coming thicker and thicker toward the bottom, like a cataract, one atop another, sideways and backward and connected by crazy catwalks and staircases, and all tumbling downhill to the river—the Allegheny or the Monongahela, I was not sure which. I made out some children playing on one of the few high streets that cut across the hillside, and a car, and two women talking on a far back porch.

Before he stopped the engine, Cleveland said something I didn’t catch. In the sudden silence I asked him to repeat it.

“This, this is my country,” he said, with a broad Charlton Heston sweep of his arm, “and these, these are my people.”

We started up one of the concrete stairways, which shifted back and forth among the knots of houses, all the way to the top; it looked like a long way.

“There’s a road, but I like to make a stealthy approach. Don’t worry, we only have to go as far as the Second Circle.” His heels tocked concrete, steadily, slowly, and our breath came more quickly with each landing.

“Is this a poor neighborhood?”

“About to get poorer.”

“How much poorer?”

“Depends on the vig.”

“The vig.”

“Depends.”

“Oh.”

That was it for a while. Cleveland stopped once and mopped his forehead with a rose bandanna. He said the agents in his bloodstream were being oxidized too quickly. We were up in the midst of things now, and I looked back down to the motorcycle, and beyond it to the river, its water the color of the water in a jar of used paintbrushes.

“The lovely Monongahela,” I said.

“That’s the Allegheny, Doctor Fact,” said Cleveland. “Okay, I’m better now. Come.”

Another few minutes of silent climbing brought us to a long road that ran perpendicular to the staircase. On the left the road curved all the way down the hill, and on the right it rose to the ridge, which, I now saw, was not as sparse as it had seemed from the bottom. There was a church up there, with a big red sign that said Jesus did something: saved, lived, gave—I couldn’t make out the verb. Cleveland and I gasped for a few moments, then I followed him up the road. Two motorcycles flew past with a huge racket, and we hugged the shoulder to get out of their deafening way. They came extremely close, the near bike with its helmeted enormous rider almost nicking my hip. Cleveland tried to pound its back fender as it pulled away.

“Assholes. Jesus, I just relived every cigarette I ever smoked,” he said, panting.

“Cleveland, why are you taking me here? Do I need to see this?”

“What do you think you’re going to see?”

“Sad people.”

“Never hurts to see sad people. Anyway, it’ll give you something to tell your dad.”

“Right.” Dad. “Do you know what my dad would say if I told him I made the rounds with one of Lenny Stern’s pickup boys? He’d say, ‘I want you out of Pittsburgh. You’ve developed too many unsavory associates.’ No, he’d say, ‘Are you doing this to punish me, Art?’ ”

He spun and faced me. “I told you I’m not Lenny Stern’s anything.”

“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.