It's Superman! A Novel (3 page)

For a moment Clark was too surprised to answer. “No, I’m afraid she’s not,” he said finally. “But thank you for asking,” he said. “Alger.”

With a short nod, Alger finished scooping popcorn into a red-striped paper box. He sprinkled it liberally with salt and added a wedge of butter. As he set the popcorn down on the countertop, Alger’s eyes lifted slightly. Someone had just stepped up behind Clark and cleared his throat.

“Our friend Mr. Jiggs?” says Dutcher.

“Yes, sir.”

“Wanted a candy bar, did he?”

“I don’t know what he wanted,” says Clark. “It never got that far.”

“So how far
did
it get?”

“He started in calling Alger names.”

Said, “You expect to find woolly-heads in Kansas City, but you got ’em
here,
too?”

Said, “Why somebody in these sad times got the
gall
to go and let a nigger work a job could be done by a white boy is just something that burns my ass.”

Said, “And why ain’t he wearing gloves, anyhow? Touching food.”

Dutcher passes a hand over his eyes, gets up, and stretches. “That’s what he said, huh? With no provocation?”

“He just started talking.”

“How did Alvin react?”

“Alger. And he didn’t.”

Not at all. He merely looked back over at Clark and said if there was nothing else, that’d be forty cents, please.

“You ignoring me, sonny?” said the man.

“I didn’t think you were talking to anybody in particular,” said Alger, but he was still facing Clark, saying that like he was saying it to him.

A large bony hand clamped down on Clark’s right shoulder. Brusquely he was shunted aside as the man stepped forward. He was drunk, Clark realized.
That
was no big surprise. What
was,
and it was a big
nasty
surprise that registered itself as a fluttering sensation in Clark’s belly, was the man’s face.

Clark knew it.

Had just seen it.

In a newsreel.

“Only the mustache was new.”

“Master of disguise, huh?”

“Not really.”

“So Alger mouthed off and Makley pushed you away to mix it up. That it?”

“Alger didn’t mouth off. He just said he didn’t think the guy was talking to anybody in particular.”

“Funny boy, huh?”

Alger swallowed, but never blinked. Addressing Clark again, he said, “Your total’s forty cents. Sir.”

“You think you’re a funny boy,
that
what you think? You come on out from behind there, hear me? And you, sonny”—the man Clark had recognized as Jiggs Makley was glaring at him now—“you go on back and take his damn place. I don’t want to be waited on by no woolly-head thinks he’s a funny nigger boy. Hey. What’re
you
looking at?”

Clark said, “Nothing.” But automatically—you stupid sack, he thought even as he did it—he raised his left hand, running the side of his index finger across his upper lip.

That’s when Jiggs Makley grinned.

“Like he was flattered being recognized?” says Dutcher.

“I don’t think so.”

“I bet so. Be right in character, son. Vain little booger. Always strutting like a movie star.”

“No, sir, I don’t think . . . he wasn’t too happy that I knew who he was.”

“He say that?”

“He
grabbed
me. By the front of my shirt. And like he wasn’t
about
to let go.”

“You tell him to?”

“No.”

“Curse him out?”

“No!”

“Well,
something
made him mad enough to want to shoot you, Clark.”

“I guess I pushed him.”

“You
guess
?”

“I pushed him, but not
hard.
I just . . .” He nearly opens his left hand, to demonstrate. At the last moment, though, he lets it fall. “I just pushed him a little so he’d leave. And he, um, hit the wall.”

“And broke one of those big old glass picture frames with a movie poster inside, is what I heard.”

“Yes, sir. But he must’ve lost his balance ’cause I never pushed him hard!” Clark’s face turns red, and his eyes all of a sudden are shiny again. “It was only a little shove!”

“Hey, you didn’t do anything wrong, son. Calm down. But do me a favor. Pretend where you’re sitting right now is where you were standing then, okay? Where’s the movie poster?”

Clark draws a long breath, holds it, and swivels around on his chair. “I guess . . . where those deputies are.”

Dutcher stares at Clark in disbelief.

The two deputies, speaking in hushed voices by the muster desk, stand a good twenty feet away across the station house.

“That was
some
little shove, Clark.”

“He must’ve tripped. On the carpet.”

“Okay.”

“I’m just telling you what happened!”

“And I’m just telling you
okay.
He tripped and went flying and hit that frame hard enough to bust the glass—
then
what happened?”

Makley’s lips separated, they
kept
separating, and it took forever. Then he was bellowing with rage, hurling curses, and his right hand reached behind him, and that took half an hour, a split second, no time at all. And then? He had a pistol, nickel-plated and long-barreled, and he straight-armed it, pointing, aiming, and the shot was the loudest sound Clark had ever heard, ever. It was a cannon, it was a plane crash, it was a planet blowing up.

“But somehow he missed,” says Dutcher.

Clark looks down, looks up. Looks down. And nods.

“But then he fired again. Clark?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything to you first?”

“No. He just—looked at me.”

“Like he was madder at you ’cause he missed?”

Clark says, “Yes,” but that’s a lie. Makley looked across the lobby at Clark like he was scared. Not mad at him, scared of him.

“You told Chief Parker that Makley must’ve had the world’s stupidest—”

“Gun. Yeah, I don’t know why I said that.
That
was stupid. I just—I thought maybe the gun, you know, blew up in his hand.”

“That’s what you thought?”

“Well. I heard it go off again and the next thing I knew he was lying on the floor. So I thought—maybe the gun blew up.”

“But you could see it hadn’t?”

In his mind’s eye now Clark watches himself clutch the right side of the heavy cigarette machine, be reflected in its mirror, discover that angry red welt between his eyes, see Makley’s body sprawled on the carpet, and notice the pistol, smoking but intact, lying a few feet away. “I saw the gun and it was—it looked all right to me. So it must’ve, the bullet must’ve ricocheted.”

“Like they do off of them boulders in the cowboy pictures.” Dutcher smiles pleasantly, but when Clark makes no complementary expression, no expression at all, he says, “I guess that’s what
must’ve
happened. You got any ideas, though, what it might’ve ricocheted
off
?”

“No,” says Clark with surprising vehemence, as though he’d been challenged. “None.”

“Well, that’s our job to find out, not yours.”

They both sit there silently.

The front door opens, and three men dressed in suits and hats, all of them looking freshly shaved at half past eleven at night, file in. Dutcher groans. “Oh lord, my federal betters have arrived.” He laughs and stands up. “I think it’s time we cut you loose, Clark.” He waits a moment, even seems to measure it out, then says, “Clark? You’re a brave boy. You did good over there.”

“I didn’t do anything but see a man get himself killed!”

The sheriff looks down at him and nods. Then puts out his hand. Clark shakes it. Dutcher’s attention cuts suddenly to Clark’s other hand, still bouncing lightly on his thigh, still in a fist. And Clark is certain he’s going to say open it. But no, all he says is, “Cuff link or shirt button?”

“What?”

Laughing, Dutcher says, “Let me get you that ride home.”

“I have my truck. Sir.”

“All right, then. Hope you get around to seeing that wolfman movie one of these days.”

After he leaves the police station, Clark avoids going past the Jewel Theater by cutting down an alley behind the newspaper office and a mercantile store and clambering over a fence that lands him on a wheel-rutted sandy lane that curves away toward the tow mill. He follows that for a while, kicking sulkily at pop bottles and wadded cigarette packages, then veers off diagonally through an overgrown lot where the livery barn used to sit till it burned.

It is half past eleven and a light rain patters down, but at least the wind has quit so he can breathe without tasting dirt—topsoil—that’s been carried east hundreds of miles from those same farms, probably, that he saw earlier tonight in the newsreel. Which he
wouldn’t
have if they’d only showed the stupid Mickey Mouse cartoon when they were supposed to! And that’s not
all
he wouldn’t have seen.

But since it’s a sad fool’s pastime—as his dad is forever pointing out—to compile a list of why-nots and if-onlys, Clark quits doing it, but right away finds himself doing the next worst thing, so far as his mood is concerned: toting up lies he told Sheriff Dutcher, starting with his pretense of having no idea, none, how he had gotten that small welt on his forehead, ending with the fiction that he drove himself to town and could drive himself home again. He didn’t take the family truck. He walked. Well, ran. It’s only seven miles. Ten minutes. Okay,
eight.
Seven or eight. It’s not like he ever
clocked
himself.

He jumps another fence and begins to jog, running through vacant stony lots, putting on speed. A little more . . .

Nearing the perimeter of the Kent farm, he slows from a blur to a sprint to a dogtrot. His heartbeat is unhurried, his breathing as measured as a yogi’s. His legs and calves feel springy. This year, and really for the first time, Clark has begun taking pleasure in his muscles and the ways that his body performs, in his changing relationship to the solid world and the so-called rules of gravity and physics. He’s getting stronger by the week. And faster. Clearly faster. He’s never had a scab. And he is pretty sure he never will.

Bouncing his left fist against the side of his leg, he walks the rest of the way home.

3

With his shoes off but dressed otherwise, Clark Kent’s father is stretched out above the counterpane on his side of the bed, heavily asleep. Under the covers beside him, Mrs. Kent looks up from her poem book—the Sara Teasdale collection Clark gave her last Mother’s Day. In the doorway, Clark pantomimes that he’s going to bed, mouths Good night, Mom, I love you. But she squints in feigned rebuke and beckons him over. When he draws up a chair and sits down, she whispers, “Did you have a good time?”

Clark shrugs.

“You didn’t like the picture?”

“It was okay, I guess. I don’t know.”

“Clark?”

“I’m fine, Mom, just tired.” He slides the book from her hands, lays the green silk ribbon diagonally across her page. “And you should be asleep yourself.” In the weak glow from the gasoline Aladdin lamp, her illness is not so evident as it is in the light of day. Even so, there is no mistaking her condition, how near she is to the end. She weighs scarcely eighty pounds. Six months ago, she weighed twice that.

Clark puts the book on the table, in among brown-glass medicine bottles and a framed family photograph, the smiling Kents posed stiffly outside in front of the gabled house. It was early summer and Clark was seven, and down at the right-hand edge of the picture, you can glimpse just a bit of the county road that passed by the property. His dad used to tease Clark when he was small, saying they’d found him in that very road, the baby that must’ve fallen off a wagon. Naturally,
we
didn’t want you, he’d say, so we took you to the orphan asylum. But you were such a noisy fussbudget, they made us take you back. Oh, Jonathan, that’s enough. I’m only
kidding,
Martha, the boy knows that—don’t you, Clark?

Of course he did, and he loved it. Loved it whenever his father caught the silly bug and you’d see one end of his mouth quirk up in a waggish grin. Yes, and Clark loved being the baby that must’ve fallen off a wagon, too. Where’d that wagon go? Clark, we’re only funning you, boy. Oh sure, he knew
that,
sure, but still. Where’d that wagon
come from
?

Now Clark glances away from the photograph and finds his mother looking at his closed fist.

“What’s the matter, son? You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Mom,” he says, “when was the last time
I
got hurt?”

He kisses her, then quickly leaves the bedroom and goes back downstairs.

With money earned raising his own brood of chickens, Clark bought a used Remington typewriter last year, intending to compose what his favorite magazine refers to as “scientifiction” stories. In school, English always has been his favorite subject, his themes invariably earning grades of B+ or sometimes even A, and whenever he reads anything, from a handbill to a prayer book to
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Clark pays scrupulous attention to grammar and syntax, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary. He doesn’t know if he means to be a
professional
writer when he gets older (he’s afraid his imagination isn’t as rich or lively as, say, Murray Leinster’s or Jack Williamson’s), but he does know that he wants to keep writing for his own satisfaction, that he enjoys it. It takes him away from himself, out of his body—his puzzling, uncomfortable, intimidating body. It’s a pleasure to live in his head. To escape there, no matter how briefly.

Clark has tried to spend at least half an hour every evening at the typewriter. Cushioned by a bathroom towel, it sits on the maple-topped dining-room table where Clark also does homework and his father pays bills. Since getting the Remington, he’s completed two short stories—or “yarns,” as the pros call them—of roughly twenty pages apiece and has been working on a third. His first story was about a brain surgeon who discovers that people’s “used thoughts” get stored in their hair, so in collusion with a big-city barber, whose customers include movie stars, bankers, theater lights, and politicians, he embarks on a doomed blackmail career. Clark titled it “I Hair You!”