It's Superman! A Novel (27 page)

But one he intends to rectify now.

On the twenty-eighth of September 1937, Charlie Brunner delivers his carefully assembled and packaged time bomb to the stoop of bungalow 9 at the Haciendas on Vine bungalow court. The Trinitro-Delux is rigged to explode when the package flaps are opened. And if they aren’t, the bomb will go off in twenty minutes.

2

But Skinny Simon (now Skinny Brunner) doesn’t meet Willi Berg at his bungalow this Tuesday afternoon. Because today is special, a celebration day, and they’ve agreed to meet at noon at Rancho La Brea on Wilshire Boulevard east of Fairfax. After they have a stroll around the famous bubbling tar pits and then walk into Hancock Park to look at the prehistoric statuary, they’ll go grab lunch. Well, no, they won’t just “grab lunch”; today Willi is taking her to a nice restaurant. Which is why he’s disappointed when Skinny shows up in her nursing whites. He understands why, but
still.
She is supposed to be down at the Kernville camp today, so it might’ve looked suspicious if she left home in anything but her uniform. Even so, Willi would have liked Skinny to dress up a little. Not that
he
has. He’s wearing black whipcords, canvas shoes, and a threadbare gray suit jacket over a black shirt with snaps and white piping at the breast pockets.

Skinny has been living in L.A. less than three months, and this is her first visit to the tar pits. Willi has been a resident of Hollywood for eight months, but he’s never been there, either. The tar is amazing (though it looks more like murky water, and the stench of congealed oil is pretty brutal), but they can’t really concentrate on the tour; they’re both too eager to sit down on a bench and look at the contents of Willi’s manila envelope. So they do.

The envelope contains his contributor’s copy of the new Odelle’s of Paris and Hollywood lingerie catalog, which features pictures of Skinny all the way through it modeling peek-a-boo brassieres and frilly corsets, garter belts, bustiers, nylons, and negligees for the full-figured woman.

Skinny laughs as she turns through the coated pages, attracting the attention of several tourists, a few of whom peek at the open magazine and are startled by what they see. “These are great,” says Skinny.

“Well sure,” says Willi, then he draws out a business envelope from the inside pocket of his coat. “And let’s not forget this.”

“Oh God! Did they really pay you?”

“Of course they paid me. I said this was legit, it’s legit. Say, doll, that guy at Odelle’s thinks you ought to find an agent. Just by the way.”

“What guy?”

“The
guy.
That hired me. The art director. He says you ought to take this”—tapping the catalog—“and go find yourself an agent.”

“I don’t know, Willi . . .”

“I’m just passing on what he said. He also wants to know if you’re interested in any glamour work. I told him to ask you himself.”

“You didn’t give him my home number, did you?”

“No. Or your name, either. But what? You’re never going to tell Charlie?”

“I will, I will.” Skinny frowns and takes another pass at the catalog. She points to one picture. “I always thought I had a mole there.”

“You do,” says Willi. “I think it’s sexy, but they wanted it off.” Then he looks past Skinny and frowns. “Let’s walk. Those people over there keep staring.”

“What people?”

“Working that juice stand. Don’t look.”

But of course she does, looking directly at the couple in the “Ice Age Drinks” hut, a man and a woman, both sloppily overweight in cook whites and paper hats. They do indeed seem exceptionally interested in Willi Berg and Skinny Simon, and don’t glance away when Skinny meets their eyes. “Okay,” she says, “let’s walk.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“How do you stand it, Willi? Being on the run?”

“Most of the time I don’t even think about it. And besides, I got a secret weapon. If I’m ever pinched. Would you look at
that
!” he suddenly says, striding over to a cement mastodon planted in the shallows of a man-made lake. “Those babies were big!”

“What do you mean, secret weapon?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be secret.”

They walk on past statues of giant ground sloths, giant bears, giant vultures, giant rats. Twice Willi tries to hold Skinny’s hand but she won’t let him. It makes her too nervous.

She wishes their reunion had stayed platonic. Really. Even if her marriage is a mess. On the other hand, it’s been so much fun seeing him again. And it was so incredible bumping into him by accident two months ago. What were the chances of
that?
Coincidences, in Skinny’s experience, usually mean trouble, not delight. But that coincidence was sheer delight: Skinny volunteering at the Kernville migrant camp, Willi showing up there one day to snap some pictures after he’d dropped off his roommate at the nearby Prudential Studios. Willi Berg! With red hair! She recognized him instantly. It was great catching up (yeah, yeah, she was married, can you beat that?), great spending time together, and more than great posing for Willi’s camera after he landed that catalog assignment. The person who probably doesn’t think it was so great is Willi’s quiet pal Clark Kent. He probably resents it like hell being kicked out of his own apartment every Tuesday afternoon so that Willi can take Skinny’s pictures. Not that he’s ever complained.

“I got a letter from Lois yesterday,” she tells Willi now. “She’s working for the
Daily Planet.”

“No fooling. Good for her.”

“She mentioned you.”

“She did?”

“Yeah, that she hasn’t heard from you in about a year.”

“It hasn’t been that long. God, maybe it has.”

“And there’s something else.”

“She’s got a boyfriend.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I’ve been gone for two years. And it’s not like we were so perfect together. Who’s the lucky guy?”

“A cop.”

“Well, that’s great, that’s just swell!” Willi seems genuinely shocked, instantly bitter.

“She says his name is—”

“Not interested. Look, can we talk about something else?”

They stop to marvel at the giant camel, both saying they didn’t know there’d been
camels
in the United States forty thousand years ago, but as they start to walk on again, discussing the quickest way back to Wilshire, a woman somewhere close behind them begins to shout: “That’s him, that’s him, arrest the bum, that no-good bum,
that’s him
!”

Willi swivels his head around and knows instantly that he’s caught and there’s no point in trying to run: four uniformed cops are approaching obliquely, the closest one not even ten feet away. They all have revolvers drawn.

“That’s him,
that’s
him, that’s the crummy
shamdeh un cherpeh
!”

Skinny squeezes Willi’s arm, but a cop shoves her away and grips Willi himself. “Sir, could you come with us?” As he is hustled away past the statues of gigantic rats, Willi glances at the fat woman from the juice stand now giving him the finger. “You should rot, you should fry!”

Ida?

Oh my God, it’s
his sister
!

“Ida!
What’re you doing in California?”

“If you talk again,” says the cop, pinioning Willi on his right, “I’m going to smash your teeth in with my stick. Are we clear about that?”

Thrown into the back of a pie wagon, into the stench of old stale vomit, Willi starts taking measured breaths trying to calm down.

All right, Clark, you can rescue me now.

3

Somehow he slipped into her apartment while she—and everyone else at home in the court this Tuesday afternoon—ran outside to find the source of an explosion terrific enough to bring down shelves, crack mirrors, shatter windows (none of hers, thank goodness), and heave prints from stuccoed walls. How did he get past her—past everyone—without being seen? What’d he do, crawl? Maybe so, maybe he crawled behind the hedges that bordered the sidewalks. Whatever he did, however he did it, he was standing in her living room fighting an inclination to stagger when she got back. Had she left the door open? Had he walked into the first open door he came to—or had he come specifically to her door?

He looked dazed. At first he couldn’t speak—he tried but couldn’t. He was shoeless, and his dungarees were in tatters. The pocket rivets were melted, and so was his belt buckle. All that remained of his shirt was its left sleeve, part of the yoke, and a wide ribbon of fabric that lay flat on his chest like a battle flag. She peeled that off him before she even walked him across the floor and sat him down. She didn’t know his name so she called him honey or sweetheart or doll.

She said, “Honey, what
happened
?”

She said, “Sweetheart, did you smell gas or . . . ?”

She said, “Doll, you really need to get to a hospital.”

“No,” he said, “they won’t know what to do.”

They won’t know what to do?
Was he nuts? A feeb? Or just rattled?

She sat down opposite him in a chair, folded her hands in her lap, and cocked her head.

He smiled apologetically.

That was half an hour ago.

Now she hears still another siren, maybe another hook-and-ladder, maybe another cop car. Then a jarring
whoosh
as yet another big hose is turned on down at the far end of the bungalow court. And is that crash, that crunch, that splintering from another ax?

Outside the air is densely smoky, so thick she can’t see twenty feet through her front window to the opposite bungalow. She snaps the curtains closed with a noisy
clack
of wooden rings.

Her name is Diana. Diana Dewey. Well, it is and it isn’t. She was christened Gladys Murrah but changed it to Christie Winsom when she landed her first job in pictures playing Harry Carey’s pigtailed niece in Monogram’s
Headin’ West.
That was in 1928. The following year she changed her name again, that time to Ann Blaine, maintaining it throughout her five-year stay at the Mascot Studios on Las Palmas Avenue, where—costumed always in skintight riding pants—she co-starred with Tim McCoy, Tom Tyler, Joe Bonamo, or Rin Tin Tin in a dozen western and jungle-adventure serials, a few of which were recut later and released as five-reel features.

But Diana Dewey is what Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures decided he wanted her called two years ago when he okayed her admission to starlet school—a permission he never would have granted had he known she was twenty-seven. (She just
looked
twenty-three.) But then she caught the grippe, contracted bronchial pneumonia, and her voice changed. It turned so husky it sounded like her throat was lined with carborundum, making her useless for pictures. But even though she washed out at Columbia (she got plenty of offers to smooch, none to act), she kept the Diana Dewey name. It was on her apartment lease and her health insurance, and she was tired of traipsing to court and filing papers.

A petite, athletic-looking woman, the type press agents would describe as “sportaletic,” Diana has sleek black hair parted in the middle (a relatively new coiffure that replaced her head of cutie-pie curls), dark eyes, cherry-red lips (natural, not paint), and a white but healthy complexion. She wears steel-rimmed almond-shaped glasses.

Turning away from the window, she looks across her living room now at the young man seated eerily still, glassy-eyed and practically naked in the smaller of her two loveseats.

His hands clutch at his flat stomach.

“Sugar, there’s probably an ambulance outside right now.”

Again he shakes his head: no hospital, no ambulance, no doctor, no treatment.
Please.
“I’ll be all right.”

“How do you figure that, sweetie?” He doesn’t reply, and Diana drops it. How do you figure
that?
How do you figure
this:
by all rights this narrow-faced boy should be nothing but ash and bone chips, yet here he is plopped in Diana’s loveseat acting like he’s suffering from acid indigestion. Well, no. Something a little bit worse than that.

This isn’t the first time Diana has seen him. The first time was at Grand National Pictures in April, then a month later he turned up on the Republic back lot. He was one of Yakima Canutt’s stuntmen: she watched him leap from a burning hayloft into the saddle of a galloping horse and topple from a cliff in Bronson Canyon. In July she saw him speeding down Melrose toward Western on roller skates. Good-looking, she thought, but no Gary Cooper. More like Paul Muni but without the devils. Or Cagney with jet-black hair and minus the smart-aleck bug. At least that was Diana’s take on him from across the commissary or the street: what could she know or tell for sure?

When she realized a month ago that he was living only fifteen doors away, Diana felt the kind of juicy thrill in her solar plexus that she hadn’t felt in a very long time. No denying it, she had the eagers to meet him. In recent weeks she managed—finagled—to be out and about the courts when he likely would be coming or leaving, and they’d exchanged smiling hellos on several occasions, the smiles growing steadily gladder and friendlier, although twice he’d been with his roommate, a redheaded masher who always gave Diana that
look,
that
leer,
that insulting up-and-down once-over, usually punctuated by a wink. Him she didn’t like. The kid, though. There was something about the kid that she liked. And it wasn’t just his trim acrobat’s physique; every other gee in Hollywood had one of those.

And now here he is.

His eyes are closed. His breathing is . . . shallow. Unnervingly so.

And now his hands separate and drop away from his stomach, revealing a lateral gash no wider and no longer than a toothpick.

As Diana stares, a thin line of blood trickles out and fills in his navel.

4

Earlier today Alger Lee drove the Ford pickup from Smallville to Kansas City, Missouri, leaving the Kent farm before daybreak and arriving at Union Station by eleven. Wanting to allow himself plenty of time, he’s allowed himself too much and ends up sitting on the platform for nearly an hour and a half.

When the train from Detroit pulls in at last, Alger searches for his mother and Claude Clemments in the hubbub of reunions and passengers in a hurry but can’t find them. He stands there puzzledly with his hands in his pockets looking down the length of the train, past the coach cars and the Pullmans, sighting toward the caboose. He notices a number of shabby boys and men dropping from grab ladders and catwalks, picking up their bindles and darting across cinders and the maze of track. When he looks the other way, toward the locomotive engine, suddenly there is his mother and Mr. Clemments hopping off the narrow ledge between the coal tender and the baggage car. They wave.