It's Superman! A Novel (20 page)

Soon he found himself driving through residential neighborhoods, completely lost. He kept passing the same boxy little houses, or perhaps they all just looked the same. When he finally got back “downtown” and to the motor company, another half an hour had passed. But at least the kids were gone! He dug out a nickel and trotted to the phone booth, pulled open the bifold door—then froze. Not only had those damn delinquents pried open the money slot and looted the phone, they’d torn the earpiece off the box! There it was, down on the floor. He picked it up, held it like a club, and whacked the horizontal coin shelf till it was vertical.

In the town of Reedville, four miles from Somerset, he found another booth, only to have it take his nickel, sound a gong, and go dead.

That’s when Curly Ike gave himself five more minutes, five minutes and not a second more.

Either he finds another phone, one that works, in five damn minutes or he is going to blow off his own head.

He has turned the car around and is heading back in the direction of Tabor Lodge, Parris, Tillerton, and Smallville, driving on a two-lane concrete road past fields bristling with cornstalks. Clouds move away from the moon and—providentially, Ike thinks—silver a telephone pole about twenty yards ahead on the left. Now it dawns on him: why does it have to be a
public
telephone? Easing his foot off the gas, Ike lets the DeSoto come slowly to a stop. After setting the hand brake he climbs out.

With his eyes, he follows the telephone wire from the pole to a farmhouse with lighted windows up a curving dirt access road. A single RFD mailbox sits atop a short pole, the only such mailbox in either direction as far as Ike can see.

There is also a little wooden sign shaped like a parchment scroll that says in fancy script: “Clara’s Creations.”

Ike drives up to the house.

In the yard is a weird hodgepodge of functional pottery—bowls, cups, vases, and plates set out on planks straddling sawhorses—and dozens of three- and four-foot-high ceramic sculptures carelessly glazed. Dutch windmills. Log cabins. A fairy-tale castle. Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp. Felix the Cat on a Grecian pedestal. Will Rogers swinging a lariat. Underneath a lean-to at the far side of the front porch stands a potter’s kick wheel. Beyond that, a kiln.

Curly Ike sits in the DeSoto, mesmerized. That Will Rogers is pretty good. Chaps and all. And he especially likes how the lariat is frozen midair in a big loop. Look at that! He can’t imagine how you’d
make
such a thing.

A white-haired and bearded man, bearded like Santa Claus, comes out of the house and stands at the top of the steps with his hands in his dungaree pockets. Ike gets out of the car.

“Why don’t you come back tomorrow when you can see better?” says the old man.

See better? Ike doesn’t know what the guy’s talking about. “I see fine.”

“I thought you were here to take a look at my wife’s pottery.”

“Nah. I need to use your phone.”

The old man removes his hands from his pockets. “You got some kind of emergency?”

“Could say that, yeah.” Ike sticks his arm straight out so that Santa Claus can see the gun.

The old man takes a few steps back from the edge of the porch. Ike comes rapidly up the steps. “Just show me where your phone is, grampy. And don’t tell me you don’t got one. I seen the wire.”

“We got one, we got one.” He raises his hands like outlaws do in Harry Carey oaters. “It’s right in the parlor.”

“Show me.”

The telephone rests in a semicircular niche built into the wall, and Ike is surprised to find that it is one of those new-style models he’s seen only in Kansas City—a sleek and chunky metal body with a Bakelite receiver. It comes with a side crank
and
a rotary dial. Finally, some luck! He doesn’t have to go through Central. He can dial the bank himself.

“Stand over there, where I can keep an eye on you,” says Ike. After he points to the upright piano and the old man does as he’s told, Ike sets his revolver down on the shelf next to the telephone.

He’s memorized F. H. Poore’s number. Which is another lucky thing, since the number was written on the same piece of paper he left behind in Parris.

But as soon as he lifts the receiver, Ike can hear voices on the wire, one saying, “. . . laugh to split a gut,” and the other saying back, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh, that Sapphire’s some battle-ax, uh-huh!”

“Ladies,” says Curly Ike, “get off the line.”

“Who’s that? Who’s talkin’? Where’s your manners?”

“Why should we?”

“Ladies, please, this is an emergency.”

“Says who?”

“Says the police, that’s who,” says Ike. “And if you don’t want me taking down your names . . .”

There are two clicks on the party line.

As he is dialing at last, something, maybe God, causes him to glance over at the old man in time to see his eyes widen. Dropping the phone, Ike grabs up his gun, spins around, and she is almost on him—a gaunt gray-haired woman moving swiftly, both arms up, elbows bent and jutting, a footed urn that must weigh twenty pounds raised above her head.

She lets it fly the same instant he shoots her in the cheek.

The urn misses Ike, explodes against the papered wall. The woman staggers but doesn’t go down. She whips her head from side to side as if to clear it, then spits out blood, bits of teeth, a piece of her tongue, and the bullet. The sight of that fills Ike with such bright terror that his trigger finger instinctively flexes two, three, four more times. Her eye, her throat, her breast, her arm. Blue smoke churns in the parlor, especially above the lampshades. Ike is breathing hard. Then his feet lift off the floor and he’s choking.

The old man’s arm, wrapped around Ike’s throat, squeezes his windpipe so tightly that his eyes pop. The air in front of him wriggles with sizzling threads of black and magenta.

Like he’s trying to find a stud in a wall, Ike reaches behind him and pokes with the gun barrel till he’s sure it’s pressed up against the old man’s side in between ribs. Then he pulls the trigger.

Nothing happens.

Ike is about to lose consciousness.

If the gun is empty he’s finished.

But if it was a misfire, which isn’t out of the question, the revolver being a piece of junk made in France by frogs . . .

The gun goes off, the flash bright, its report muffled. The old man shudders. His forearm drops away from Ike’s throat as he topples backward over a piecrust table.

Collapsing onto the piano bench, Ike draws a long breath and exhales.

Would you just
look
at this mess!

Returning to the telephone, he picks up the receiver, jabs his index finger toward the rotary dial—and for the life of him can no longer remember the bank’s exchange. He’s just too rattled. So he uses the side crank to call Central, who asks, “Number, please?” and Ike says he doesn’t
know
the number but he wants the Smallville Bank.

“I can’t understand you, sir. Could you repeat that?”

The Smallville Bank, dammit, the Smallville
Bank
!

“Sir, I’m very sorry but I still can’t understand you.”

Of course she can’t: words are not coming out of Curly Ike’s mouth,
croaks
are.

That old bastard damaged his larynx!

The Smallville Bank. The Smallville Bank! The Smallville Bank!

Central disconnects.

Slumping against the wall, Ike tips his head back and gazes at the ceiling.

Somewhere a clock chimes and he counts along: eleven.

Out on the porch he leans over, places both hands flat on his thighs, and takes another deep breath. Another. By the time he straightens up he is sure of two things: that he isn’t going to get any part of twenty-five thousand dollars or ever make it to Canada.

Beyond that he isn’t sure of anything.

No. No, he
is,
he is sure of
three
things.

He is sure that he has to have that ceramic Will Rogers,
has
to, it’s just too good to leave behind.

So he hefts it off the grass, lugs it to the woodie, and loads it in, setting it right down on the front seat beside him.

Nosing the big car down the dirt road, Curly Ike turns right on the two-lane and heads back to Parris . . .

He wonders if Milt and Claude will shoot him.

But how could they shoot him? He’s the boss. You can’t shoot the boss.

They might.

The drive back from the potter’s house to the failed Perfection Gasoline station seems to take no time whatsoever. When Curly Ike sees the sign announcing the Parris town limits he flinches as if surfacing from a dream, the kind that’s instantly and utterly gone. It spooks him for a second. He could have had an accident. But then looking over at Will Rogers propped on the seat, Ike laughs, feeling a bubble of joy burst in his chest. That is some beautiful piece of art, that is.

But remembering he shot the woman who made it, shot her not just once but five times, his joy all but vanishes. She was going to brain me, what
else
could I do? Still. He’s not just an outlaw, he thinks, he’s not just a bad man, he’s a
bad
man. But how did that
happen
? Look at old Will Rogers there. Did you ever see such tears when the poor guy died? Everybody loved him.
I
loved him. But you know something? I could’ve
been
him! I could’ve. Me and him both were Oklahoma born, born the very same year, 1879. Both of us worked the longhorns, threw the lariat. But he turns out the hero and I turn out the bad man. Why do things happen like they do? How does it work? It’s like—it’s like that Bible story, it’s like Moses. No, listen. His old lady puts him in a basket, sends him floating down the Nile River, and then what? The Pharaoh’s daughter finds him in some reeds, plucks him out, and takes him home. Look what I found, Daddy! Great for Moses. Good for him. But what’d he
do
to deserve it? Another mother just as nice could’ve put
her
little baby boy in the same kind of basket, exact same day, gave it a little shove, let it drift, and twenty minutes later, what, he’s crocodile food. It doesn’t make sense. How can it? When it’s all just a matter of who does or who doesn’t find the little damn baby in the basket. I don’t
feel
like a bad man. I don’t. I don’t feel like a bad man at all.

He slows down to cross the bridge over the Sin River, but even so every thumped plank sends vibrations pulsing up through his feet, his legs, his groin.

Curly Ike is so preoccupied thinking his thoughts that he’s rolling into the filling station, coasting to a stop, before he realizes that the rollaway door is missing from the service bay—no, not missing: torn off and lying crumpled on the ground beyond the pump island.

And there’s a big gaping hole in the tiled wall between the service bay and the office.

The office window is shattered, glass strewn everywhere and—

A red-haired kid is pointing a box camera at Ike’s car and—

And—

A craggy-faced man with a sheriff’s star pinned to his jacket is cradling a limp and bloody-faced Donny Poore in both of his arms.

Ike shifts down, steps on the gas, and the woodie lurches forward and—

From somewhere—left side? right side?
above
?—a dark-haired slender boy, white shirt and gray trousers torn and filthy, thrusts himself in between the sheriff and the plunging DeSoto.

He sticks out his arms and splays his fingers and—

In the last moment before the car’s teardrop-shaped front end crumples, the big straight-eight engine calves up through the hood, and Curly Ike (along with the Will Rogers statue) catapults through the windshield, he sees (and it will be the last thing Curly Ike
ever
sees) the expression in the boy’s wide-open blue eyes.

It isn’t, as Ike would expect, a look of terror. It’s one of crushed and absolute hopelessness, the blackest of black despairs.

Gene Autry at the Jewel. Sheriff Dutcher again.
An expression of gratitude. Serious conversations in the
barn. Samson, Goliath, and Paul Bunyan. Good-bye to
Smallville.
●

1

Every Saturday, beginning at eleven in the morning and concluding around three-thirty, four o’clock in the afternoon, Smallville’s Jewel Theater presents a full-blown kiddie matinee: two B-pictures, a dozen cartoons, various short subjects, and a sixteen-minute installment of a Republic or Mascot chapter-play, all for a dime.

Today the features are
Mystery of the Wax Museum
and
Island of Lost Souls,
both of which Clark has seen before. But that’s all right. He’s not here for the pictures. It doesn’t bother him the soundtrack is gargly, the focus blurred, and the projection misaligned, nor is he fazed by the candy boxes bleating like cornets, the fleets of paper airplanes crashing into the screen, the boys firing peashooters and the girls getting up in packs to change their seats fifty times. Clark has come here to think, and when he wants to, when he concentrates, he can block everything out.

He knows he shouldn’t be here, though, not at a
kiddie
show, he’s too old, too
tall.
But where
should
he be? That’s one of the things he needs to think about. Where
should
he be? And what next? What comes next? That’s what he ought to be thinking about. But all throughout the Bosko and Farmer Al Falfa cartoons, the coming attractions, the first short subject (magic you can do at home with a milk bottle, a sewing needle, and a hard-boiled egg), the Popeye cartoons, and the inevitable Mickey Mouse
(Mickey’s Man Friday),
the only thing that Clark does think about,
can
think about, is the fixed stare in Donny Poore’s eyes. The fixed stare in Donny Poore’s dead eyes. The blood on his face and his crumpled-in skull. A week ago tonight.

How could that have happened?

Gene Autry, Radio’s Singing Cowboy, in
The Phantom Empire.

How could somebody just pick up a wrench and
do
that?

Chapter 3: “The Lightning Chamber.”

As the recap legend quivers beneath a fake-looking futuristic city (“Murania, located thousands of feet under the earth, is rich in radium deposits . . .”), Clark puts his fingertips to his temples, pressing hard. His eyes seem to burn.