The Bend of the World: A Novel by Jacob Bacharach Read Free Book Online Page B

bastard ziggurat and from whose satanic bowels there emitted a constant Luciferian thrum. Packs of students crowded across the intersections. A helicopter passed overhead. We ran a red light. Honey, Helen said, red means stop.
    It was yellow.
    It may have been yellow at one time.
    Don’t worry. If I kill someone, we’re by the hospital.
    Again, Helen said, a timing issue.
    Beyond the hospital the road dropped in a steep S-curve toward the cantilevered highways that clung to the cliffs between the high bluff of the Hill District and the Monongahela. Across the river, lights stepped across the Flats and up the Slopes, and it struck me, not for the first, more like for the thousandth time, just what a preposterous place it was for a city, what a precarious topography. We crossed the Birmingham Bridge in a tight single lane between traffic cones. Whole lanes and great portions of the high arch and suspension cables were blocked and swathed in sheets of translucent plastic, which were illuminated from within by powerful work floodlights, revealing the silhouetted work of the tiny men within—tent caterpillars, ten million years hence, our successors.
    We were on Carson Street briefly. A girl in tight pants vomited. Young men stood in gaggles outside of bars, simultaneously sinister and preposterous in their puffy jackets. I hate the South Side, I said.
    Doesn’t Johnny live above Margaritaville? Lauren Sara had seemed to be sleeping before she spoke, her head canted back against the seat.
    Yeah, I said. I keep telling him to get out of that shithole. We should stop and say hello.
    Who’s Johnny? Mark asked.
    My best friend.
    Your only friend, said Lauren Sara, not cruelly, and anyway, I reflected, it was awfully close to being true.
    We turned onto Eighteenth Street and wound our way up the Slopes. In the daylight, these were lovely neighborhoods, if a little run-down. The houses sat at odd angles to the streets, and the streets ran in switchbacks crosswise to the hills, and the whole thing was reminiscent of an Adriatic hill town, suggestive of a militarily defensible poverty, or else, not in the least because of all the little Slovak churches, of a winding stations of the cross, but there, at night, with the stands of houses suddenly replaced by bare sagging trees, with the occasional howl of a distant dog, with the old, orange streetlights buzzing and the intermittent creepy pickup truck rattling in the other direction with a slight few inches between sideview mirrors, with—was it me, or did everyone sense it?—something vague, insubstantial, and yet still threatening among the stands of weedy woods, something misty, something that, even if it didn’t have the material form to drag you down into a ravine and have its murky way with you, might just have the power to compel you to wander off on your own into the weeds, well, the point I’m making is that on a strange road in a strange car with people who were, after all, still strangers to us, there was something odd about that drive, something unsettling, something that strongly suggested no good would come of it.
    But then, quite suddenly, we were above the city. We’d stopped climbing several minutes before and were winding through an unfamiliar neighborhood when we burst out onto Grandview. The city, at night, was like a strange ship, like a sharp barge splitting a larger river; the black tower of the Steel Building like a crow’s nest; the filaments of bridges like gangplanks, and you could almost imagine the whole thing plowing right on down the Ohio, hanging that gentle left onto the Mississippi at Cairo, and floating toward the Gulf; you could imagine waking one day to find yourself on an urban island, surrounded by water; or, anyway, I could imagine it, Atlantis, or thereabouts.
    We ended up somewhere just off Grandview in a little commercial district with an Italian grocery, a storefront pharmacy advertising diabetic socks, and a few square cement-block