It's Superman! A Novel (21 page)

Five days ago, for the first time in his life, he vomited.

Three days ago he discovered what a migraine feels like.

On the movie screen, riders dressed like Roman legionnaires gallop across an American prairie, dodging tear-gas bombs dropped from an airplane. A rider topples from his horse and rolls. It’s Gene Autry, but he’s okay. Smiley Burnett comes along playing his harmonica. Meanwhile, down in her subterranean kingdom, Queen Tika orders an execution. Square-headed robots clank lugubriously around her. Back on the surface Gene’s young friends Betty and Frankie Baxter climb through an open window, searching for evidence that Professor Beetson killed their father. And there it is! A rifle hidden underneath Beetson’s mattress!

But Betty and Frankie’s father wasn’t
really
murdered, it’s just a story, a dumb movie serial, and Donny Poore was buried Tuesday morning following a funeral Clark was still too heartsick and troubled to attend.

He sits blank-faced through Robert Benchley’s
How to Sleep,
a comedy short he must have seen half a dozen times, then through the first reel of
Island of Lost Souls.
By now, his eyes throb like hearts, and the din around him has grown so loud and exclamatory it’s almost painful. It
is
painful:
that’s
never happened before. Enough, he thinks. This isn’t working. Nothing is.

Clark gets up and leaves, with Good & Plentys, jawbreakers, and peanut shells raining down on his head and shoulders from the balcony as he trudges up the aisle to the exit.

After zipping his jacket up (the weather broke on Monday and it’s been cold ever since), he extracts his cloth cap from a vent pocket, unwads it, and puts it on. He is tugging the brim low on his forehead when Sheriff Dutcher comes out of the auditorium behind him. He steps up alongside of Clark and touches him gently, almost gravely, in the small of his back. “Your dad told me where I might find you. But I wasn’t expecting you to leave for three more hours.”

“You were going to
wait
for me?”

“Well, you paid your dime, I didn’t think it’d be polite to interrupt your entertainment.” He pushes open a door, then follows Clark out into the open air. “And I was enjoying the Charles Laughton picture.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect, sir, but I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“So your dad tells me. Tells me you’ve been in the bushes all week. And I can’t say I blame you.” Dutcher shrugs. “But how about we go someplace and sit down?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Clark, I drove all the way here. And it’s not official business.”

The nearest place to eat is in the next block, Freundlich’s, with an electric signboard, café curtains, and the menu white-painted directly on the front window. They sit at a table. Most of the others are unoccupied but at the lunch counter every high stool is taken. Saturday lunch crowd, farmers mostly. They all look over at Clark and the sheriff, to nod or smile slightly, and then—encountering an awkwardness they couldn’t explain—turn immediately back to their franks and kraut, their hash, their oxtail goulash, coffee, and pie. And like it’s suddenly broadcast over a loudspeaker, Clark hears a confidential whisper from twenty feet away: “I thought he got hit by a car.”

“That your favorite kind of picture?” says Dutcher, clipping a cigar.

“What?”

“That horror stuff. First time we met, I recall you were going to see a werewolf picture.”

“Yeah, I like that kind, I guess.”

Dutcher lights the cigar. “How come you left early?”

“I have a headache.”

“Sorry to hear it.” Dutcher smiles at Mrs. Freundlich as she appears with two glasses of cloudy water and sets them down. She is a large round woman, wide-hipped, wearing an out-of-date NRA blue eagle pinned to her apron. She says hello to Clark and, obviously not recognizing the sheriff (he isn’t wearing his uniform or even his star), greets him as “mister.” She asks if they’re ready to order, offering the information that the veal chops are especially good today. “Tasty,” she says. Well then, veal chops it is for Sheriff Dutcher. Clark asks for a hamburger sandwich, no onions.

“I probably should’ve got that myself,” says Dutcher after Mrs. Freundlich has gone.

“You can have mine. I’m not hungry.” Clark takes a sip of water. Puts down the glass. Picks it up and takes another sip.

The sheriff puffs on his cigar.

When their food comes, Mrs. Freundlich serves Dutcher first. As she is sliding the second plate down in front of Clark, she says, “I hope the paper intends to do another story this year about the Arkalalah Halloween Festival. It’s coming up fast, you know, and I’m on the committee.”

“Well, I hope so too, Mrs. Freundlich, but you’d have to ask Mr. Timmins about that.” He purses his lips, nodding to himself. “I don’t work for the paper anymore.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Clark, you always wrote such nice stories.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

She asks if there’s anything else either of them needs. When they tell her there isn’t, she returns to her stool behind the cash register at the end of the lunch counter.

Dutcher tamps out his cigar coal. “Clark. Look at me, son.”

“I got a bad headache, I should go.”

“You know why I came here today?”

Clark shakes his head, but tentatively.

“I came here to thank you for my life,” says Dutcher slowly and quietly. “I came here to thank you, son, from the very bottom of my heart.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I think you did. And it was the bravest damn thing I ever saw.”

“If he hadn’t cut his wheel when he did . . .”

“Clark . . .”

“And thank God there was no gasoline in those pumps.” Clark is speaking in a numb monotone. “That would’ve been. That would’ve been . . . bad.”

“Son, that car hit those pumps
after
it hit you. I don’t care what you wrote in the paper. I was there.”

“That guy turned his wheel . . .”

“Now, why would he do that?”

“Maybe because he wasn’t . . .”

“What? Wasn’t what?”

“All bad? Maybe at the last second he had, I don’t know, a change of heart.”

Dutcher sits back. “That car hit you.”

Clark picks up his sandwich but then puts it down. And mumbles something.

“Excuse me? I didn’t catch what—”

“I said you’re welcome. You said thank you and I said you’re welcome.” Clark shrugs.

For the next two, three minutes they sit there and look at their food.

“We’re not going to eat any of this, are we?” Taking out his wallet, Dutcher extracts a dollar bill and lays it down beside his water glass. “Let’s go.”

Everybody watches them leave.

“Why don’t you let me drive you home?”

“That’s okay, I got my dad’s truck.”

“No, you don’t.”

Clark turns and looks at Dutcher.

“I was at your house, remember? And there was your truck sitting out in front. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

Dutcher’s car—and it’s the sheriff’s own machine, not the county’s: a 1932 cream and blue Pontiac 6 coupe—is parked across the street from the Jewel. “Just throw all that stuff anywhere,” he tells Clark, pointing to folders and clip binders piled on the passenger’s side of the front seat. But Clark just gathers it all up and holds it on his lap.

Leaving the center of town they pass by the Herald-Progress building, which causes Clark to frown and the sheriff to ask, “So why’d you quit?”

“The farm keeps me busy enough.” Clark pats his shirt pocket, finds his Black Jack chewing gum. Takes out a stick, unwraps it, folds it into his mouth.

They don’t speak again till they reach the farm.

Dutcher turns the car into the gravel driveway, stops it halfway between the county road and the Kent house, and sets the hand brake. “What do you hear from your friend the photographer?”

“Willi? Nothing,” says Clark, holding his voice steady and his gaze calm. “He took off with those guys he was traveling with. And he’s not my
friend.
I just met him.”

Dutcher is shaking his head. “We caught up with those WPA boys yesterday in Neosho Falls, and your pal wasn’t with them. He went off to take some pictures in Aliceville Thursday afternoon, they told us, and never came back. Where do you think he went?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Dutcher reaches over suddenly and tugs a sheet of paper from under one of the clip binders on Clark’s lap. After unfolding it he holds it up. It’s another wanted poster bearing Willi Berg’s name, photos, felonies, and a caution that he may be armed and should be considered dangerous. “That federal man—Foley?—sent me this on Wednesday.”

“And you said this wasn’t official business.”

“It’s not.”

Clark levers open his door. “I have to go.”

“One last thing. I can’t imagine how you’d ever need it”—Dutcher grins—“but if by some remote chance you ever do need my help, with anything, at any time, you call me. You call me, you write me, you send me a smoke signal, and I’ll drop what I’m doing. Promise.”

Clark nods and climbs out of the car. Then he bends from the waist, looking back in at Dutcher through the open door.

“Willi didn’t kill anybody.”

“Know that for a fact, do you?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“Good enough for me,” says the sheriff. “But I’m just one cop—so if you
do
see your pal again? Tell him to grow a mustache or something, would you? That red hair wouldn’t fool a Boy Scout.” He picks the wanted poster off the seat and passes it out to Clark. “Souvenir?”

After watching the sheriff back out his Pontiac and drive away, Clark skims the wanted poster again—Murder, Burglary, Interstate Flight—before crumpling it into a chunky ball and lobbing it straight up into the air.

He watches it—more like glares at it—till the paper bursts into flame, dissolves into granular soot, and quickly disappears.

Same as always, Clark’s eyes are left feeling syrupy, almost liquid, like the water glass that his mom would make in the summertime to preserve surplus eggs. But the sensation passes in less than a minute. And it’s a small price to pay for such a—

Gift?

For the first time in a week Clark feels the muscles flex up at both ends of his mouth. It’s not
much
of a smile but for now it will have to do.

He needs to speak to his father.

He needs to tell him good-bye.

2

Last night.

When the knock came at the back door, Alger Lee was complaining again about how much time it took to play a game of Monopoly while simultaneously counting out scrip to purchase six houses for even distribution on his green properties—Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania avenues. Mr. Kent, still scowling for having been assessed for street repairs by a Chance card, looked at the clock on top of the dining-room bookcase. Ten minutes to ten.

The knocking was repeated, more insistently. Alger started to rise from his chair, but Mr. Kent shook his head. “Clark! Somebody’s at the kitchen door.” Although Clark had finally dragged himself out of bed around half past five that afternoon and come downstairs to sit with his father and Alger while they ate supper, he’d gone directly back up to his room once the dishes were done and put away. “Clark! You want to go see who’s there?” While sympathetic, Mr. Kent felt he shouldn’t indulge his son’s melancholy. Martha, you could bet, never would have allowed him to lay in bed all day staring at the ceiling.
“Clark!”

Alger said, “Why don’t you let me go see who it is?”

“Keep your seat, Al. Clark! The back door!”

The first few times Mr. Kent called Alger “Al,” the boy had looked startled—nobody had ever called him
that
—but by now he’d gotten used to it, almost, and come to like it. Yeah, it wasn’t bad.
Al.

Alger carefully positioned two wooden houses on North Carolina Avenue, two more on Pacific. “Your roll.”

“Excuse me, Al.
Clark!”

At last they heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs.

Clark shuffled into the dining room stifling a yawn. His shirttail dangled. His hair stuck out in fifty places. He looked sulky and irritated.

“Somebody’s here,” said Mr. Kent. “Would you mind seeing who?”

Clark nodded, went to answer, pulled open the door, and discovered Willi Berg finishing a cigarette on the short back porch. “Can I come in?”

Clark opened the door wider, indicating the kitchen with a toss of his head. He wasn’t glad to see Willi but he wasn’t not glad either.

Willi had a green duffel that he dragged in behind him. Like Clark he hadn’t shaved in days. The beard coming in was black, and it made his hair look redder, almost comic.

“How’d you get here?”

“Hitched. Walked. You know.” Willi was looking around for an ashtray. Clark passed him a teacup to use. He took it and sat down at the table.

“What happened to those guys you were with?”

“I don’t know. I left.”

“Why?”

“Felt like it.” He rubbed knuckles up and down his bristly cheek.

“You want something to eat?”

“No, that’s okay.” Willi noticed them first: Mr. Kent and Alger Lee standing in the doorway, Alger tapping his lips with a light blue property deed.

“Dad. Alger,” said Clark, “this is Willi.”

“The photographer,” said Mr. Kent. He seemed untypically guarded. “Good to meet you.”

“Likewise.” Willi moved scantly forward on his chair, then decided against standing; just waved hi and smiled instead. “Sorry to drop by so late. But I just, you know, hit town.” He gave a nervous giggle: he was tired, sagging tired.

“Did Clark offer you something to eat?”

“Yes, he did, sir. He surely did. But I’m not hungry. Thank you.”

Alger leaned toward Mr. Kent, and using the property deed to cover his mouth, began to whisper something. Mr. Kent deflected him curtly. “How about some coffee?”

“Sounds good, but a place to sleep sounds even better—if I can impose on you.”

“Well, we’re a little short of beds in the house”—and that was because Alger Lee had moved in and was using the guest room—“but if you don’t mind sleeping on the couch . . .”

“I was kind of hoping I could sleep in the barn.” A grin inched up one side of Willi’s mouth. “So I could say I done it.”