It's Superman! A Novel (22 page)

“Did
it,” said Mr. Kent. “And that’s completely up to you. But it’s a cool night.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Willi, slapping his duffel. “I got a blanket.” In fact he had two: each one stolen from a boardinghouse.

“Then Clark’ll get you set up.”

“I appreciate this, Mr. Kent. Well then,” he said, rising from the table. “Why don’t I go on out there now and let you all . . . get back to whatever you were doing.” He turned to Clark and their eyes met. “Walk me?”

Clark struck a match and lighted the kerosene lantern hanging on a nail just inside the barn’s great door, then he carried it down the feed passage and up the ladder to the hayloft, which sloped hard toward the back wall. Willi clambered up behind him. He flung down his duffel. “Can you smoke in a barn?” he said, and Clark looked behind him and found an old milking pail that had been up there to catch leaks before he and his father repaired the roof and the weatherboarding.

“Just don’t burn the place down, all right? And give me one of those.”

As Clark was firing a cigarette, Willi dug through his duffel bag. He drew out a small, flat bottle of bootleg whiskey with a hand-lettered pasted-on label that read: “Aug. 2, 1928.” He offered the bottle to Clark.

“No, thanks.”

Willi unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow.

“Tell me something. Why are you on a wanted poster?”

So Willi took another long drink, then a short glug, twisted the cap back on the bottle, and told the story. Not the
whole
story, but nearly: he neglected to mention he’d used burglar’s tools to get into the pawnshop. In this version, the front door was unlocked and he had merely walked in.

It took twenty minutes to tell, and when he was finished Clark said, “Could you be mistaken about the alderman? Maybe it just
looked
like him?”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“It’s just hard for me to believe that a man like that—he’s a public
servant,
Willi!—could be a gangster.”

Willi stared at Clark with dismay and near contempt. “What
planet
are you from, Clark? Politicians are
always
crooks. It’s their
job.
”

“That’s just city talk.”

“You need an education, my friend. A degree in what’s what.”

“Is that right? You’re so smart, what are you doing with your picture on a wanted poster and that stupid red
dye
in your hair?”

“I was framed!”

“You and the Count of Monte Cristo.” Clark frowned. Then he stretched out his left arm, wiggling his fingers at the bottle. “Let me try some of that.”

For half an hour they sat under the ventilator with their backs to the hay door, smoking cigarettes and drinking colorless whiskey but not speaking. At last Willi said, “I need to show you something.”

“What?”

But as soon as Willi had scrambled his hands through his bag and brought out a large mustard-yellow envelope, Clark knew
exactly
what he was going to be shown. He’d probably known it from the moment he opened the door and found Willi on his back porch.

Photographs.

One second Willi was holding the prints in his hand, the next they were gone and Clark had them.

Going rapidly through all of them—a series of nine prints—Clark would glance at one, slide it to the bottom, glance at the next, slide it to the bottom, the next, the next, the next . . .

When he came to the last one, though, he sucked in and held his breath and let them all drop from his hands. They swished down, glided and scythed, a few to scatter free on the plank floor, the rest to overlap near his feet.

Willi said, “They’re kind of . . .”

He said, “They’re pretty grainy but . . .”

He said, “Still you can see . . .”

Clark’s shoulders moved up and down.

Willi said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

He said, “I thought you’d want to . . .”

He said, “I haven’t showed anybody else.”

“Why not?” Clark’s eyes were red-rimmed but not wet.

Willi said, “I didn’t think . . .”

He said, “It didn’t seem . . .”

He said, “I wish I knew.”

Stooping, Clark picked up one of the prints. The image was grainy, as Willi had said, and poorly lit, but not so poorly you couldn’t see it was an image of Clark hoisting above his head a service bay door, the rollaway kind.

Willi said, “Hey!” when Clark tore the print in half. As Clark tore it into quarters he said, “I still got the negative.”

Clark looked at another print on the floor, the one that showed him twisting an iron jack around both wrists of a man lying facedown on the ground. A pencil notation on the back read: “CK & Claude Draper.”

Willi stooped and picked up one of the prints. He held it in front of Clark’s face. “Those damn bricks almost
hit
me when you came busting through that wall.” Willi dropped the print, snatched up another. In pencil on the back it read: “CK & Milton George.”

“When you hung that moron on the tree, did you fly up there or jump?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not
sure
?”

“Jumped. I think. But maybe not. I haven’t had much practice.”

“Then we should do something about that.”

“
We
should?”

Willi shrugged. “What do old Claude and Milt have to say about everything?”

“Nothing.”

“At all?”

“They still don’t know what hit them.”

“No kidding. But . . .”

Clark hitched an eyebrow.

“. . . you worked them both over pretty good.”

“They deserved it.” Clark was staring down at a print that had slid to the front edge of the hayloft.

Willi walked over there and looked to see which one it was. Oh. That one. “The kid was
how
old?”

“Nine.”

Clark kept staring until a pinprick-size hole, faintly smoking and brown-edged, appeared in the photographic paper. Yellow points of flame struggled up, followed by a heavier scribble of smoke.

The hole widened out, chewing at the picture.

Willi moved to stamp out the fire. Clark pushed him away. When there was nothing left of the photograph but wafers of delicate ash, he ground those to soot and scraped it over the edge of the loft with the side and the heel of one shoe. Then he sat down with his legs dangling in space.

His eyeballs felt gummy.

Then they didn’t.

“Why don’t you come with me?” Willi dropped into a squat. “Why don’t you?” He’d
thought
he was going to ask: How’d you
do
that? “Come on, Clark: haven’t you ever thought about hitting the road? Seeing what’s going on?”

Clark turned his head. “You make me tired, you know that?”

“What else are friends for?” He laughed. “At least think about it, would you? We could have some fun and you could, you know—
practice
.”

“Good night, Willi.”

“Night, pal.”

The moment Alger saw Clark leave the barn he said to Mr. Kent, “Here he comes.” They were in the kitchen, Alger standing at the back door with his arms wrapped around himself, Mr. Kent seated at the table cleaning his eyeglasses. They’d put away the Monopoly game half an hour ago, neither of them much interested in playing after Willi’s arrival.

“Why don’t you go on up to bed?”

“You want to talk to him alone?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay. Then I’ll be saying good night to you.”

“Good night, Al, sleep well.”

Clark came in a few moments later.

“Well?” said Mr. Kent. He smelled cigarette smoke and liquor. But that was the least of his worries.

“He’s leaving tomorrow.”

“And?”

Clark opened his mouth, then shut it. “Nothing. He’s just . . . leaving tomorrow.”

After his son went to bed, Mr. Kent remained in the kitchen, eventually getting up and opening the cutlery drawer, gently touching some of the forks and spoons with the coarse pads of his fingertips. He opened the stove door and took out the saucepan and the iron skillet, looking at those and then putting them back, opening the cupboard door and reaching down for a particular coffee cup with a chipped handle, turning it, blowing out the dust, replacing it on its shelf, then picking up from the windowsill a five-and-dime-store ceramic shepherdess-and-lamb. Something’s happened, Martha. Something’s different. Something’s changing.

Something’s changed.

Opening the sink tap, he rinsed grit and house dust from Martha’s little figurine, dried it with a flour sack he’d been using as a dish cloth. At last, he trudged upstairs and got ready for bed, the worst part of his day. He read a few pages in
Spoon River Anthology.
The last poem he read (and he didn’t actually finish it) before he closed the valve on his Aladdin lamp was the one titled “Ernest Hyde,” the one that begins, “My mind was a mirror: It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.”

That all happened last night.

3

Today. Twenty past one in the afternoon. The hayloft. Neither Willi Berg nor Alger Lee meant to go flapping their jaws about Clark, about what he could do, what he might be: it just
happened.
They’re both feeling vaguely guilty about it, too, but still. It’s been an interesting conversation.

“I figure he’s a hoodoo man.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

“I’m not sure,” says Alger. “But don’t
you
be smirking at me. I suppose
you
know what he is?”

“A freak of nature, my friend. Merely a freak of nature.”

“Oh yeah, that explains everything! You’re full of hops, you know it?”

“Didn’t you ever read the Bible? Never heard about Goliath? What about Samson? You ever hear of Paul Bunyan?”

“Paul Bunyan’s not in the Bible!”

“I know
that.
I was just giving you some
examples.
Every so often, like maybe every hundred years or every million people, there’s somebody that’s born a freak of nature. You can’t
explain
it. But that’s all there is
to
it.”

“Paul Bunyan was a giant—Clark is three inches shorter than I am!”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Willi. Then he says, “Excuse me,” and shakes out one of his blankets, beats off some clinging bits of straw with his hand, then folds it quickly and squats down to stuff it into his duffel bag.

“I never heard about bullets bouncing off
Samson’s
head.” Alger taps his index fingertip against his forehead, then flings it off, way off, to pantomime a ricochet. “Seen it myself.”

“In your hat.”

“I seen it!”

Willi looks down at his feet. “You ever see him . . . fly?”

“Fly?” Alger laughs. “Naw, he can’t do
that.”

“Yeah?”

“What do you mean:
yeah?”

“Nothing.” Willi jams in his blankets and cinches the duffel. Then he takes a tab of paper—it’s been folded again and again till it’s the size of a matchbox—and hands it to Alger. “Don’t forget to give this to him.”

“I won’t forget. But why do you got to leave before he comes home? I think you should wait.”

The thing is: so does Willi. So then why is he rushing to leave?

He wishes he knew. Baloney. He
knows.

All it would take would be a few hours more with this Boy Scout, this
Cub Scout,
and he could have himself a new best friend. His
first
best friend. Not that Willi
wants
one, necessarily. Acquaintances have always been more than enough. Friends, he feels pretty certain, are nothing but a nuisance. But this kid, this freak of nature, this Clark:
well.

He could be Willi’s Get Out of Jail Free card.

It was the scheme he was hatching all week long, the hope he’s been flush with and the reason he walked to the highway in Aliceville, stuck out his thumb, and hitched an erratic series of short rides back here to Smallville.

But overnight he changed his mind.

It sounds stupid, it seems gloppy, but he really likes the kid.

“Well, let me get out of here if I’m going.”

When Alger pushes open the great door, Clark has to jump back from the apron onto the service court so it doesn’t strike him in the chest.

In his left hand he is holding a Gladstone bag that his mother used as a young woman moving to Kansas from the Dakota Territory with her widowed father.

Beaming at his new best friend, Willi Berg says, “If you’re ready, let’s go.”

Open-mouthed, Alger watches them walk off together. Then he half turns back toward the house. And there’s Mr. Kent at the kitchen door. They look at each other with frail smiles—Alger’s frail and baffled, Mr. Kent’s frail and full of sorrow.

“Al?” he calls after a minute. “Join me for some lunch?”

With a nod Alger starts back across the dooryard. He is almost at the porch when he remembers Willi’s letter. He stops, pulls it from his dungarees, unfolds it, and reads: “Dear Clark, I burned those other prints this morning, along with the negatives. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. I burned them in the barrel over by that I don’t know what you call it, where you keep the chickens. You’re an amazing guy. Be careful or people will eat you for breakfast, if you know what I mean. Good luck. I’m glad I met you.” He signed it Willi Boring, but then struck that out and wrote: Willi Berg.

Today is the twentieth of October 1935.

PART TWO

WAYFARING STRANGERS

Dear Father, how are you? Good, I hope. I am fine . . .
●

1

From Smallville, Clark and Willi tramp cross-country till they reach a railroad division point where freights stop to change engines and crews. There they jump into the first open and empty boxcar they find and catch out before long on a hotshot that takes them upstate, then across the Missouri River bridge into the Argentine yards.

Between them they have seventy-five dollars, but they want to be frugal. Even so, the two nights they stay over in Kansas City (jazz, barbecue, the stockyards, the War Memorial) they splurge and stay at the YMCA. On the morning following the second night Clark wakes to find his wallet stolen. Suddenly their joint resources are less than thirty bucks.