Michael Chabon

“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.”

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?”