It's Superman! A Novel (2 page)

“Kent,” says Chief Parker. “Clark Kent.”

2

His left hand curls into itself and he keeps squeezing it like a slow pulse, but every time Clark thinks he might actually
open
his fingers and
look,
he feels another bolt of panic and changes his mind.

“How you doing, son?”

Clark’s fist draws back to his waist, pressing there.

“Something wrong with your hand?”

“No, sir.”

The man nods, a few times too many. “Bill Dutcher, Clark. I’m sheriff of Osage County.” Grabbing a small chair, he twirls it casually and sits down, his thick folded forearms across the back. “Say, you wouldn’t be related to the Kents live over to Osawatomie, would you? Own that big stove company?”

“I don’t think so.”

“My wife’s cousin does their bookkeeping—or she did. Maybe don’t anymore. Things being how they are.” Dutcher leans forward. “Sounds like you had yourself quite an evening.” He sits back, plucks out a hand-rolled from his shirt pocket. “So hows about you tell me what happened?” Dutcher holds the paper of matches in his right hand, tears off a match, and runs it across the friction strip with his left. And seeing that, realizing Dutcher is left-handed, same as he is, Clark relaxes a little. He feels an odd kinship with lefties. Just as he feels one with blue-eyed people or people with black hair. With fingernails shaped like his: square and blunt.

Finding people who are like him, even in the smallest ways, is always a comfort. It’s stupid, he knows, but still it’s
some
comfort.

“Clark,” says Dutcher, “I surely don’t mean to push you, son, but do you think you might tell me about—”

“Excuse me for just one second, Sheriff.” Holding a cup of coffee, Chief Parker settles himself, carefully so he doesn’t spill any, behind his desk. “Clark, you
sure
you don’t want me to send somebody for your dad? It’s no trouble.”

“I don’t want to worry him, with my mom and all. But thanks.”

“Up to you.” Earlier the chief had offered to call Clark’s father—or let the boy do it himself, of course—except the Kents don’t have telephone service. Or electricity, either. Truth be told, they’re lucky to have a roof still over their heads. Things being how they are. “Well, if you change your mind. And oh, Clinton drove your girlfriend home, she’s fine.”

“I just took her to the pictures,” says Clark. He feels heat rise in his neck. “She’s not my girl.” The chair under him creaks. “But what about Alger Lee? He all right?”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” says Parker. “We told him to stick around, but he left. I expect he ran on home.”

“Alger Lee?” says Dutcher.

“Colored boy I told you about, was there. I’m sure he just—I expect he ran straight on home. We can go fetch him now for you if you like.”

Dutcher seems to consider the offer but doesn’t respond to it. Just pulls at his cigarette and exhales. Then: “What movie you go see?” he asks Clark.

“We were
supposed
to see
The Werewolf of London.”

“Now, somebody told me about that one. It’s with the guy plays Charlie Chan, right?”

“Warner Oland,” says Parker.

“I bet it’s good,” says Dutcher, then he says, “Chief, could I bother you for some of that coffee? Sweet if you got sugar, no milk.”

One end of Parker’s mouth quirks up. Then he purses his lips slightly and smoothes them out again, and Clark figures all that pantomime is to let the sheriff know he’s amused by the request, takes no offense, and sees it for the rank-pulling take-a-hike that it is. “Clark, how about you? Coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“Be right back, then.”

“Take your time,” says Dutcher. “This young fella’s gonna tell me what all went on, and you heard it before. So Clark,” he says, “what time the picture start?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Lot of other folks there tonight?” Dutcher asks. Then asks him again because the boy is getting more and more remote every moment. “Full house?”

“About regular for a Saturday.”

“And what’s about regular?” Dutcher finds an ashtray on the chief’s desk and rubs out his cigarette. “Thirty people, fifty, a hundred?”

“I couldn’t say. I guess half the seats downstairs were filled. I don’t know how many that’d be.”

“Uh-huh.” Dutcher looks thoughtfully at Clark’s face. Points. “You get whacked by something?”

Clark’s right hand goes promptly to his forehead, tapping his fingertips around, playing dumb.

“You got a red mark, there, right there. Like something might’ve hit you.”

“No, sir.” But two hours ago, little less, Clark saw it himself, what the sheriff is squinting at now. A small welt barely an inch above his nose. He saw it when he leaned against a cigarette machine,
hugged
it, laboring to get control of himself. Saw it reflected in the panel mirror the same moment he saw the body of Jiggs Makley lying spread-eagled behind him on the Jewel Theater’s fake-Persian lobby carpet.

“Son?” Dutcher holds up a wastebasket, offering it. “You going to be sick?”

“If they’d done it in the right order,” says Clark, “this wouldn’t of never happened.”

“Done what in the right order?”

“Before the picture, it’s always you got your coming attractions and then you got your cartoon and
then
you got your newsreel.” Clark smacks his knee savagely with that doubled fist. “But oh no, tonight somebody had to go and do it different.”

“What’d they do?”

“Showed the newsreel right after the coming attractions.”

And it wasn’t just the goofus running the projector machine, either. When you came right down to it, and Clark isn’t
blaming
anybody, not exactly, it’s just that . . . well, before heading into the auditorium, he
asked
Janey Laster if she wanted him to stop by the candy concession for a box of nonpareils or a chocolate bar or a drink, whatever she liked. He
asked
her, he
offered,
and if she’d only said yes. If only she’d said yes
then.
But she didn’t. She said she was still too full from dinner. Thank you, though.

This was only Clark’s second date, and his first with Janey Laster from his typewriting class. He’d expected to run into some kids from their high school, was
hoping
he would, since Janey not only was a pretty blond with the kind of figure people called “cute,” but was known to be awfully picky about boys, which could only help Clark’s standing with his peers. Although why in blue blazes he cared about
that
at this late stage of the game, he wasn’t sure.

At school Clark is not actively disliked, he isn’t unpopular, he’s just . . . there. There-but-not-there. You say hello, he says hello back. You don’t, he doesn’t. Overall, he’s good-enough
looking,
but not what you would call handsome, either. His ears are too small for his head, and his crowded teeth crooked on the bottom. He’s a quiet boy, a struggling B student, does all of his homework, and while it seems by appearances that he’d be strong, well-coordinated, quick—he has good shoulders and graceful legs—he has never gone out for athletics. And he was invited to by coaches any number of times. He reads a lot, but mostly the junkiest, dopiest pulps, the kind with tentacled green Martians on the covers. He likes movies, all sorts of movies, and often goes by himself. Even still goes to the kiddie show on Saturday mornings because he especially likes chapter-plays with cowboys and masked men, death rays and robots. And he writes—carefully, accurately, but with no special flair—for the school newspaper. He’s okay. He’s all right. In the opinion of his peers at Smallville High School, Clark is all right but nothing special. And Janey Laster was at the Jewel with him on a Saturday night, she went out on a date with Clark Kent, but nobody that he knew—at least nobody his own age—was there to notice.

“I think I should’ve gotten a Coke,” said Janey during the preview of Katharine Hepburn’s latest picture, something called
Break of Hearts.
Which didn’t look so hot. “Do you mind?”

“Course not,” said Clark, already on his feet.

“Oh, you know something? Forget it. I’m not really thirsty.” She waved a hand in front of her face, then clucked for saying anything.

Clark sat down, wondering whether he should put his arm around her now, or wait.

A second preview played, for the new Mae West, then another, for a picture called
The Informer,
starring Victor McLaglen, an actor Clark recognized from some westerns he’d liked.

But when Mickey Mouse should have come on, instead it was
News of the World.
Not that it seemed any big deal at the time. In fact, it would’ve been okay with Clark if they skipped the cartoon entirely. He was never much impressed by that Disney stuff. Those things didn’t make him laugh. Although he wished they did, since everyone else in the whole country, maybe the whole world, obviously found them hilarious, and whenever he would sit in the Jewel with a make-believe smile frozen on his face watching a bunch of cartoon animals play baseball or hot jazz, he’d just feel crummy—dumb and different and set apart.

He put his left arm around Janey’s shoulder, and that seemed fine with her.

“That’s when I first saw him,” says Clark.

“In the theater?” asks Dutcher. “That what you’re saying?”

Clark sighs and looks sadly up at the ceiling. “No,” he says. “In the newsreel.”

But first there was the May Day Parade in Russia, it looked like the entire Soviet Army was marching past the Kremlin with helmets on and bayonets fixed, Stalin not cracking a smile, not once, and then Hitler in the Reichstag shaking a fist,
both
fists, and screaming that he didn’t care
what
the League of Nations said, Germany was set on building tanks and planes and submarines, whatever it wanted, and then came the funeral for Lawrence of Arabia, who’d been killed in England on his motorbike, and then it was back to the USA, and there was half a minute about the Boulder Dam, how’d they’d finished it finally. Then you got the running of the Kentucky Derby, and then farms buried deep in black sand dunes out in Texas and Oklahoma and western Kansas, then people on street corners selling dust masks for a dime, and families by the dozens leaving for California in rattletrap Fords, even on foot, and then there was a highway patrolman somewhere in Missouri pointing to a little grocery store that was all shot up, and to a wide dark stain on the ground outside near a filling pump that looked like motor oil but he said was blood. Then he said it was a massacre and for what? Far as he could tell the Jiggs Makley gang didn’t get more than ten, fifteen dollars, at most, and—

“But when did you see
him?”
says Dutcher. He moves closer to Clark, bringing his face as near as six inches. “When did you see Jiggs?”

“Right after that highway patrolman finished talking. His picture came on. But if they showed the Mickey Mouse when they
should’ve
—”

“So you got a good look.”

“Well,
yeah.”

“Go on.”

So next came Admiral Byrd and his men from the South Pole being congratulated by the president at the White House, and then—

Then Janey Laster hated to be such a pest, but would Clark mind a whole lot getting her that Coke now? Before the picture started? And if it wasn’t asking too much, some popcorn?

Ahead of him at the concession was an elderly couple Clark recognized from the Methodist church he and his mother used to attend before she got sick. The Kemps. And as they bent forward together and pushed their faces nearer the slanted glass of the candy showcase, trying to decide if they wanted Sugar Babies or Charleston Chews and whether or not they felt like licorice tonight, Clark fidgeted and looked at his wristwatch. He glanced over their bobbing gray heads at lanky unsmiling Alger Lee patiently waiting for the Kemps to place their order. In one hand he had a paper sack he’d snapped open, and in the other hand an aluminum scoop.

Alger is a year or two younger than Clark but half a head taller. A good thirty pounds slighter, though. He wore a white uniform jacket, like a waiter’s but with the red word “Jewel” stitched over the pocket, a ruffled shirt much whiter than the jacket, and a black bowtie pressed snug to his throat. When he noticed Clark, Alger nodded in that scant, almost formal way that he had. He said to Mrs. Kemp, for the third time, “Those are still a penny, yes, ma’am.”

The usher had gone inside the auditorium, and the ticket taker was out on the sidewalk having a smoke. It was just the four of them in the lobby.

“And the gumdrops we sell by weight, yes, ma’am.”

When Clark was much younger, Alger’s father, Darron, worked on the Kent farm twice a year, once in high summer when they cut and put up the hay and then again in late summer when they brought in the corn. Clark well remembered Darron Lee both because he’d been an impossibly huge man—six-eight or -nine and as wide as a bear, a build his son hadn’t inherited—and because he was the first colored person Clark had ever seen. He died, drowned, five years ago in a freak accident during a spring flood. Driving a team of horses to a hog farm west of town, he’d banked a curve and his cart turned over.

“And those, yes, are three for a penny, yes, ma’am,” said Alger Lee.

Clark checked his watch again.

“Yes, sir,” said Alger, scooping up a dozen malted milk balls and depositing them into the white sack. Then he scooped up and deposited half a dozen Bit-O-Honeys, and finally half a dozen Sugar Babies. “That all for you, ma’am? Sir? Then that’ll be”—Clark watched Alger narrow his eyes, doing the math—“twelve cents, please.” Then: “No problem at all, ma’am,” he said and removed one Bit-O-Honey and one Sugar Baby, to bring the sum down to a dime. “Thank you, folks. Enjoy the picture. Next.”

It made Clark uneasy when Alger, as usual, looked him straight in the eye and called him “sir.” “What can I get you, sir?” Why’d he
do
that?

“Just a Coca-Cola and some popcorn.”

“Small or large?”

“Large, I guess.”

Watching Alger pump out the syrup and draw carbonated water from the fountain tap, Clark could hear tuba, banjo, and washboard music playing inside the auditorium—so he still wasn’t missing anything but the mouse. Alger placed the fountain soda on the counter and turned to the popcorn machine. Clark was sliding a single from his money fold when Alger Lee clear out of the blue asked him, “How’s your mother, is she feeling any better?”