Fly Paper (2 page)

One

1

SOMEBODY WAS BANGING
at the side door. Jon ignored it for a while, focusing his attention on the late movie he was watching—the original 1933
King Kong
. But the banging was insistent and finally, reluctantly, Jon pulled away from the TV and headed downstairs to see what inconsiderate S.O.B. had the crazy idea something was important enough to go around bothering people in the middle of
King Kong
.
Better be pretty damn earth-shaking,
Jon thought,
pisses me off,
and yanked open the door and saw a heavy-set man leaning against the side of the building, his shirt and hands covered with blood. The guy had blood on his face, too, and looked at Jon and rasped, “Who . . . who the hell are you?”

Which took the words right out of Jon’s mouth.

Up until then, it had been a normal day. He’d risen around noon, showered, got dressed, thrown some juice down, and gone out front to the box to see if he’d gotten any comic books in the mail. Jon was a comics freak, a dedicated collector of comic art in all its forms, and did a lot of mail-order buying and trading with other buffs around the country.

He was also an aspiring comics artist himself (as yet unpublished), and while he was disappointed to find no letters of acceptance for any of the artwork he’d sent off, so too was he relieved to find no rejections.

Jon was twenty-one years old, a short but powerfully built kid (he was such a comics nut that he’d actually sent in for that Charles Atlas course advertised on the back of the books) with a full head of curly brown hair and intense blue eyes. He also had a turned-up nose that he despised and that girls, thankfully, found cute. His dress ran to worn jeans, and T-shirts picturing various comic strip heroes, everything from Wonder Warthog of the underground comics to Captain Marvel (Shazam!) of the forties “Golden Age” of comics. Today he had a Flash Gordon short-sleeve sweatshirt; the artwork (a full-figure shot of Flash with cape) was by Alex Raymond, the late creator of Flash. Jon would accept no substitutes.

You see, comics were Jon’s life.

Take his room, for example. When his uncle had first given it to him, this room was a dreary storeroom in the back of the antique shop, a cement-floored, gray-wood-walled cubicle about as cheerful as a Death Row cell. Now it was a bright reflection of Jon’s love for comic art. The walls were literally papered with colorful posters depicting such heroes as Dick Tracy, Batman, Buck Rogers, and the aforementioned Flash Gordon, all drawn by Jon himself in pen and ink and watercolored, and were uncanny recreations of the characters, drawn in their original style. (That was both a skill and a problem of Jon’s: while his eye for copying technique was first-rate, he had no real style of his own. “Give me time,” Jon would say to the invisible critics, “give me time.”) Shag throw rugs covered the floors in splashes of cartoon color, and the walls were lined three deep with the boxes containing his voluminous collection of plastic-bagged and filed comic books, a file cabinet in one corner the keeper of the more precious of his pop artifacts. A drawing easel with swivel chair was against the wall, a brimming wastebasket next to it, and sheets of drawing paper and Zip-a-Tone backing lay at the easel’s feet like oversize dandruff. And the two pieces of antique walnut furniture his uncle had given him were not exempt from comics influence, either: the chest of drawers had bright underground comics decals stuck all over its rich wood surface (Zippy, the Freak Brothers, Mr. Natural), and on top Jon’s pencils, pens, brushes, and bottles of ink were scattered among the cans of deodorant and shave cream and other necessities. Even the finely carved headboard of his bed was spotted with taped-on scraps of Jon’s artwork, cartoonish sketches of this and that, mostly character studies of his girl, Karen, and Nolan, and his Uncle Planner.

His Uncle Planner. Still hard to think of Planner as being dead. Just a few months since it happened, and though Jon was almost used to the absence of the old man, he still didn’t like living alone in the big, dusty old antique shop. Soon he’d be getting around to contacting some people to come in and appraise and bid on the merchandise in the store. Planner’s collection of antique political buttons alone would bring a pretty penny. Of course the stuff in the front of the store, the long, narrow “showroom” of supposed antiques, was junk, crap Planner had picked up at yard sales and flea markets just to keep the shop sufficiently stocked; the good stuff was in the back rooms, because when Planner had run across actual antiques, he’d crated them up carefully and packed them away. Jon’s uncle had had real respect for real antiques, and felt it was silly to sell them, as their value was sure to increase day by day. Jon, however, had no hesitation about selling those back-room treasures, though he’d do his best to find a buyer who’d haul away the junk as well as the jewels.

Mostly, of course, the shop had been a front for Jon’s uncle. Planner had been just what his name implied: he planned things—specifically, jobs for professional thieves. He’d traveled around on “buying trips” and, in the role of cantankerous old antique dealer, had gathered the information necessary to put together successful “packages” for professional heist men like Nolan. Planner’s packages were detailed and precise, at times even including blueprints of the target, and he’d charged a fee plus percentage of the take. Two years ago, with the guidance of his uncle, Jon had participated in the execution of one of those packages, a bank robbery headed by Nolan (whom Planner rated as perhaps the best in a dying craft), and some three quarters of a million dollars from that robbery had rested in Planner’s safe since then—until this summer, when two men with guns came into the antique shop and shot Planner dead and took the money.

Jon and Nolan had gone after the two men and the money, and caught the two men, all right, but the money was lost. And so was Jon’s dream of owning a comic book shop, a mecca for collectors like himself—as were his hopes for having enough money to support himself for as long as it took to break into the comic art field. All of that—up in smoke.

But not really. As Planner’s sole heir, he was now owner of the shop, which he could conceivably convert into his comic book mecca, even if its location (Iowa City, Iowa) was a bit off the beaten track. And he had those two back rooms full of valuable antiques to turn into cash. And, too, Nolan had told him that the next time something came together, Jon was the first man he’d call. So things weren’t so awfully bleak, really.

Jon returned to his room with the mail (not much—just some bills and the latest issue of
The Buyer’s Guide for Comics Fandom
) and flopped on the bed, his eye catching the poster of Lee Van Cleef on the wall over his easel. The Van Cleef poster was one of a few posters in the room that were photographic and not his own drawings. Van Cleef was in his “man-in-black” gunfighter stance and, it seemed to Jon, resembled Nolan a great deal: they shared the same narrow eyes, mustache, high cheekbones and genuinely hard, hawkish look, though Nolan could get an even surlier look going, if that was possible.

He wondered for a moment if Nolan was just being nice when he’d promised to contact Jon when something came up.

No.

Jon was sure Nolan had been telling the truth. He knew that Nolan felt responsible for the loss of their money, and that sooner or later Nolan would come to Jon with a plan to get them both back on their financial feet again.

Karen had once suggested to Jon that he was using Nolan as a father substitute, a bullshit idea that embarrassed and irritated Jon; why, he wouldn’t even talk about it, it was such dime-store bullshit psychology. He’d never needed his real parents; why the fuck should he need a fake one? His father was just some guy his mother knew before Jon was born; and his mother was just a fourth-rate saloon singer who was on the road all the time, leaving him to shuttle back and forth between one relative or another, none of them particularly grateful for an extra mouth to feed. A few years ago, his mother had died in an automobile mishap,
and he hadn’t even shed a tear; he simply hadn’t known her that well. Early on he’d developed a capacity for amusing himself, for losing himself in the four-color fantasy of the funnies, for being a self-sufficient loner. And, in fact, when he moved to Iowa City to attend the university (briefly, as it turned out), he’d taken a cubbyhole apartment for himself rather than move in with a relative again, even if that relative was Planner, the most pleasant of the lot. Only after the robbery last year, when Nolan had stayed at Planner’s, healing from gunshot wounds, only then had Jon moved in with his uncle. And that was to help his uncle help Nolan.

His life since meeting Nolan had been hectic but exciting, tragic but exhilarating. Nolan’s reality put the fantasy of Jon’s comic book super-heroes to shame. Reality was harsh—in fantasy, Planner would still be alive, and last year’s bank job wouldn’t have erupted into insanity and blood—but, as Nolan might have said, jerking off is less trouble than screwing but it’s nowhere near as rewarding.

The Van Cleef poster seemed to be squinting skeptically over at Flash Gordon, as if knowing how ridiculous it was of Jon to equate Nolan with comic book heroes. Ridiculous to think of Nolan as any kind of hero. But Jon did. Even though Nolan was a thief. The way Jon saw it, heroism had nothing to do with morality, or just causes, or politics, or anything else. Heroism had to do with courage; derring- do; a personal code; a steel eye and cool head. And all of these Nolan had. Plenty of.

Jon thumbed through
The Buyer’s Guide
(a weekly newspaper of comics-related ads and articles) and saw some photos of a comics convention held out on the West Coast. He wished for a moment he’d gone to Detroit for the convention there this coming weekend; today was Thursday and the start of the con. He’d attended the New York Comic Con several years running, but hadn’t been to too many of the countless other such fandom gatherings. Seemed a pity with a con located here in the Midwest, for a change, that he hadn’t been able to go.

But this weekend was Karen’s birthday, and he had to be here. She would be justifiably hurt if he chose comics over her. And this would be a traumatic birthday for her: Karen would be turning thirty-one, and the ten-year difference in their ages would be shoved to the front of her awareness. It was something that didn’t bother Jon in the least, but Karen was somewhat paranoid about it. The only thing Jon didn’t like about Karen being older than he was (and divorced) was her ten-year-old freckle-faced brat, Larry, a red-headed refugee from a Keane painting, who was the best argument for birth control Jon could think of.

Which was something he was very much conscious of when, an hour-and-a-half later, he was having a late lunch with Karen at the Hamburg Inn; now that school was started again, he could enjoy her lunchtime company minus Larry. Bliss.

Jon and Karen had been semi-shacked-up for six months now.
Semi
-shacked because Jon hadn’t really moved in with Karen (and vice versa) for the simple reason that Jon and Larry didn’t get along, and besides, Karen thought it might be bad for Larry if Mommy’s boy friend lived with them. A quaint idea in these loose days, Jon thought, but he didn’t bitch: he liked his moments of privacy, and no way was he going to have his comic book collection and Larry under the same roof. It was a pleasant enough relationship as it was, and Karen was happy receiving the healthy alimony/child support check from her lawyer ex-husband (which would stop, of course, if she and Jon were to marry), and Jon had promised himself he wouldn’t consider marriage with Karen until Larry was either old enough to send to military school or got hit by a truck.

Still, Jon
had
toyed with the idea of asking Karen to move in with him—even if Larry
did
have to come along. Karen ran the Candle Corner, a downtown Iowa City gift shop with head-shop overtones: hash pipes, Zig-Zag papers, posters, water beds, and the rack of underground comics that had brought Jon into Karen’s shop in the first place. He’d considered asking her to help him convert Planner’s antique shop into a larger version of her shop downtown, with more emphasis on water beds and apartment furnishings, and he would restrict his “comic book mecca” idea to a mail-order business out of one of the back rooms. She’d have no trouble interesting someone in taking over her long-term lease on that three-story building downtown that housed her shop, her apartment, and another to let above; and she and (ugh) Larry could move in with Jon, since the whole upstairs of the antique shop was a nicely remodeled five-room living quarters that Planner had used. So far, however, Jon had stayed in his room downstairs, only using the upstairs for its kitchen facilities and the living room’s color TV, and that last only lately: it had taken Jon weeks to get used to the idea of Planner being dead and longer to lose the creepy feeling the upstairs gave him.