It's Superman! A Novel (10 page)

“But why would anybody put a baby inside an airship?”

“That’s what we wanted to know.”

Holding his cup with both hands, Clark stares dreamily at the coffee.

“Clark, it took us maybe thirty seconds to decide that you were ours, that you’d been
given
to us.” Mr. Kent clears his throat. “That’s the
first
thing. We’d never been blessed with children—I was almost fifty-two and your mother was . . . a little younger. And some things it gets too late to happen. But here was this gift. Here was
you.
So that’s the first thing you should know. We adopted you before we took you to any orphanage. As soon as we found you, that was it. You were our son.”

5

Clark has been out walking in an uncleared wood that starts just beyond the Kents’ Big Pasture and ranges cross-country over the next several miles till it thins out and skirts the Lang family’s dairy farm. He’s not sure who owns this wood, if anyone does; he never asked. He never asked about a lot of things.

He braces a foot against a blowdown in his path and pushes, intending to roll aside the big hemlock (actually, he most intended to vent some of the tension that crackles through him like electricity), but he pushes with too much force, and the tree snaps in two with a burst of dust, chips, and bark.
Now
look what he’s done! Torn the sole raggedly off his shoe and the leather upper to ribbons. Likewise a good sock.

Although the sun set a while ago, darkness has not yet brought any relief from the heat and humidity. Heat never has bothered Clark (or cold, either), but he suffers whenever the humidity climbs and the air becomes saturated. Okay, not like other people suffer, but it makes him irritable. He feels that way now, but considering the day he’s had it’s probably not the humidity.

He buried his mom today.

He buried himself today.

And not six feet deep, six
miles,
and now he’s trying to claw his way out.

But which way is
up
?

Clark wonders what his father is doing right this second. Resting? (Mr. Kent doesn’t “nap,” he “rests.”) Maybe Clark shouldn’t have left him home alone, the man buried his
wife
this morning, but—

But Clark needed to get away, to think.

So far he hasn’t done too much of
that.
He’s tramped around all jittered up and ruined a good shoe.
That
he’s done, but think? No.

He sits down on a slab of granite jutting from the bank of a dry streambed. A coarse rind of lichen—the stuff looks like Wheaties—crackles under him.

The wood is utterly quiet. How can that be—in June? But it is, it is silent and still, and he is alone in that.

He is alone, period.

“Of course you’re not alone,” his father said to him earlier, after he’d told him the
why
of the orphanage (“Be pretty hard to explain you at our ages, son. So we left you at the doorstep, like in one of those cartoons you see. And so what? We always intended to come back, and we did”) and the
how
of his adoption (“It maybe wasn’t the only time your ma ever lied about her age, but for darn sure it was the only time she ever put a drop of color in her hair. I used it myself. So we got you, nice and legal. But if they’d said no, we’d’ve found some way to
steal
you back”).

“Of course you’re not alone, how could you even think such a thing?”

“Easy.
You
try coming from another planet.”

“Clark. For goodness’ sake. You read too many of those magazines.”

“It was a
rocket,
Dad.”

“It was an airship.”

“Okay. Where from?”

Mr. Kent didn’t have an answer.

“Dad . . .”

“You’re not from outer space. You’d have four tentacles and a nose like, I don’t know what—a horn.”

Clark stood up from the table. “I need to go out for a while.”

And now, after quitting the tangled undergrowth, he limps back out of the wood, returning to where he entered it. He stands in high bluestem grass, with a light breeze carrying a scent of hay across the meadow, and looks south, beyond the Big Pasture, the calf pasture, the broomcorn, the barn, back to his house bathed in the milky light of a near-full moon. He puts back his head, breathes in, and looks up at the stars.

Around him all the noises of an early summer night erupt again, dissonant and perfect.

New York City. Pressing municipal matters.
Dick Sandglass. Lex visits his mother.
A pleasant evening with Governor Lehman.
Adventure in the hospital.
●

1

Lex Luthor can’t believe it. He
watched
Stick fire three shots into that sneaky little bastard, into his
back
—how could he survive? And now, according to the papers, Willi Berg is expected to “make a full recovery.”

Misdialing twice because of trembling fingers, Lex makes several phone calls. Each calms him down a little bit more. Okay. All right. It’s going to be fine.

The cops like the kid for Leon’s murder . . .

Excellent. Very excellent.

But once he comes
off
the dope and starts to talk . . . ?

The thing to do is to make certain he never comes off the dope.

Within an hour that becomes Paulie Scaffa’s job. “And Paulie? See that he doesn’t sprout another wound. You know how to use a hypodermic needle?”

Hard as he tries, though, Paulie can’t get close to Willi Berg’s room at Roosevelt Hospital. If it’s not his skinny girlfriend hovering over the guy, it’s some blond nurse with a Jean Harlow chassis times ten. Then suddenly there’s an armed bull posted outside his door around the clock.

Lex has considerable sway with the New York City police department, and in ordinary circumstances it would be simple enough to scrounge up some narcoleptic potsy and stick him in the hospital midnight to eight, the only time safe to do this thing. But it turns out that a plainclothes dick working out of Headquarters’ Detective Division down on Centre Street, someone named Dick Sandglass, reputedly clean and apparently not a brownnose, either sits guard himself at Willi Berg’s door overnight or else selects others for the job.

Lex’s hands have begun shaking again. For long periods of time he has to keep them held in his pockets. And he’s started to notice that clumps of his hair come out whenever he brushes or combs it.

Calm down, he tells himself. It’s going to be all right.

It’s going to be okay.

But why should he have to worry about this idiot Willi Berg when he has so many
other
things on his plate? Such as the careful awarding of contracts easily worth twenty-five million dollars for the construction of playgrounds, promenades, and ball fields between the Hudson River and Riverside and Fort Washington parks. Such as the brokering of deals for the expansions of subway trunk lines in Brooklyn and the digging of a new Sixth Avenue subway in Manhattan.
That
construction alone will run in the neighborhood of sixty million dollars. If Lex plays his cards right, cements certain friendships and eliminates certain gadflies, he can see clear to pocketing two or even three percent of the final budget.

So
many things to do.

Not the least of which is the destruction of Lucky Luciano’s alliances and various enterprises by means both legal and illegal.

Everything’s going to be all right.

It’s going to be okay.

But why has he suddenly started losing his hair?

And why the
hell
is this Dick Sandglass character taking a personal interest in the Willi Berg case?

2

“I appreciate you coming here like this, Mr. Sandglass,” says Willi.

“No problem. I don’t know how I can really help you, kid, but you were always a good pal to my son and that’s worth something. He never had it easy, having a cop for an old man.” You can say that again. And not just a cop, a real Dick Tracy who never takes so much as a free sinker and a cup of coffee. He is a good guy, though, and when Spider and Willi were young, Dick Sandglass would take them both out to Yankee Stadium two or three times every season, and on one memorable occasion, in 1926, to the World Series. It’s how Willi got to see Grover Alexander strike out Tony Lazzeri in the seventh game with bases loaded.

As a kid, Willi used to wish that Dick Sandglass was
his
pop, despite all of Spider’s complaints about the old man. No, really—what
other
dad used to be a drummer in a dance band? On summer evenings he’d come outside with a pair of sticks and beat hell out of the tenement stoop like he was still hunched behind skins on some nightclub stage. Yeah, and he owned a terrific Victrola he’d crank up for spinning disks by Red Nichols and Pinetop Smith, Louis Armstrong, the Goofus Five, the Ipana Troubadours. Willi’s musical education started in Dick Sandglass’s little front parlor. “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider.” “Boogie Woogie.” “Sugar Foot Stoop.” A real good guy, Spider’s dad. It used to be said the reason his wife left him was because she’d got fed up by his honesty. A bull’s wife was
expected
to own some jewels that weren’t paste, a seasonal wardrobe, her own Ford motorcar, and a summer cottage in the Catskills.

“So what’s Spider doing these days?”

“Three to five in Dannemorra,” says Lieutenant Sandglass. “Atrocious assault.”

“And you couldn’t—?”

“I
wouldn’t.”

Oh.

Sandglass sends Willi a look that wipes the hopefulness right off his face. But he reaches a hand out and pats Willi’s knee through the bedcovers. “Spider’s holding his own, like I know you will.” He looks at the small radio that Lois brought over yesterday and that’s playing softly on the night table. “Well, I’ll be.” He twists the volume knob. It’s Mildred Bailey singing “Heaven Help This Heart of Mine.” Sandglass listens with obvious pleasure. “Old Mildred,” he says. “The pipes on her!”

Willi just nods.

“That’s Buck Clayton on trumpet—you hear that? You couldn’t miss
him.
”

You couldn’t? Willi could.

“Who’s on drums, kid? Can you tell me who’s on drums?”

“Cozy Cole?”

“The Coze don’t play with Mildred Bailey! Where you been? That’s either Maurice Purtill or Jo Jones, and I’m leaning toward Jo Jones.” He listens a few more seconds, then lowers the volume.

“Hey. Kid. I really am sorry you got yourself in such a jam.”

“You and me both, Mr. Sandglass. And like I said, thanks for coming. Thanks for
being
here. Those other cops today, jeez, I thought they were gonna tear out my stitches and stick their
hands
in there.”

“They won’t rough you up, Willi. I promise. But they won’t lay off, either, not till you start telling the truth.”

“I swear to God, Mr. Sandglass. I
am.
Why would I make up something like that?”

“Maybe it was the first dumb thing that popped into your head. You remember when you and Spider got caught roaming around that Catholic school on Thompson Street? You remember what you said?”

“I was thirteen!”

“You said four nuns grabbed you and locked you both inside till you promised to convert.”

“I was
thirteen
! ”

“When somebody comes by tomorrow to ask you more questions, tell the truth.”

“I
been
! I swear on my mother!” Who hasn’t visited Willi in the hospital, incidentally. His father, either. Or any of his brothers and sisters. What, they’re going to waste their time on a no-goodnik like him? “I swear on my sweet mother! It was Lex Luthor!”

“Please.” Dick Sandglass turns to leave.

“And somebody named Paulie and somebody called Stick. The three of them. I seen them there, believe me.”

“Stick? Stickowski?
Herman
Stickowski?”

“I don’t know any Herman Stickowski, I’m just telling you Lex Luthor was there. I
seen
him there, him and a guy called Stick and a guy named Paulie.”

Dick Sandglass rubs his jaw. Then he says, “Ah, you’ve always been full of it, Willi. But I’ll see they treat you right.”

“I’m telling the truth!”

“I’ll be outside.”

“What, I’d kill somebody for my lousy camera?”

“Willi, from what I hear, you’d kill
anybody
for your lousy camera. Good night.”

3

“Happy Independence Day, Mother.” He let himself in with his key and finds her alone on the terrace in her unnecessary invalid’s chair.

“I just had a
feeling
you’d come by today. Do I get a kiss?”

Lex bends down and lightly brushes his lips against her flaccid cheek, then straightens back up with pressed powder and face paint clinging to them like grit and glue.

Despite the broiling glare of the midday sun—her apartment’s terrace faces west with views of the Palisades, the Hudson, and the high conical roof of Grant’s Tomb—Lex’s mother has on a black woolen dress from Arnold Constable’s. Around her shoulders she’s draped a fringed maroon shawl. Her legs are covered with a plaid blanket. She’s tucked it snugly around her hips.

On a small glass-topped table within easy reach stands a small, squat glass filled, Lex knows, with Kentucky bourbon. Beside the glass is a candy dish containing prescription tablets, barbiturates entirely. Around the clock she keeps that dish near to hand, but every time Lex pays her a visit there are more pills in it. He can’t estimate how many there are at the moment, but fifty at least.

“Sit down, Lex. Are your hands shaking?”

“No, Mother.”

“They certainly look it. And for heaven’s sake, will you please stop humming.”

“I am not
humming,
Mother.”

“I beg to differ, Lex. You were just humming ‘Isle of Capri.’ ”

“Then I beg your pardon.”

“Sit, child.”

He does, directly across from her. She seems smaller than she did even last week, more wrinkled, more crabbed and forlorn, more deeply deranged. “And I think you’re beginning to lose your hair. You should see a doctor. Or else shave it all off. You have a nicely shaped skull, which you can be sure you inherited from my side of the family. My dear father had a skull shaped like the
world.
Excellent. A very excellent skull. He was not, however, bald.
None
of the men in the Dunn family, to my knowledge, ever were bald. You should do something, Lex. It looks
spotty
.”