A Once Crowded Sky (24 page)

“Still could beat him up.” Pen rolls up his T-shirt sleeve and flexes.
Veins ramble through his arm, the artificial ones Ultimate left there. From this close, she can see their pulse, the purpled-yellow streaks waxing and waning against his tight, pink skin. If she were closer still, she’d hear their hum as they vibrate through her husband’s responding tissue.

No matter how many times—it still scares her. A ten-year-old boy strapped to a sterile table, his eyes draining, pleading; a giant robot towering over him, sewing wires into his body, tying off knots that had been needled through muscle.

“Well,” she says, “least he made his bed every day.”

She doesn’t see Pen move. She never does; he’s too fast. She’s in the air, then she’s on top of him, his arms tugging her deeper into the comforter.

“But did he get to make our bed every day?”

“God, you’re a nerd and a cheese ball.”

“Yes, but I’m your nerd and your cheese ball.”

She turns her head, and they kiss. “All this stuff, this superteam stuff—”

“Team-up stuff.”

“Team-up stuff.” Her eyes roll and then come back to him. “It’s all safe, right?”

The doorbell to the apartment rings, but she ignores it. When he begins to move, she grasps his shirt and pulls him closer. She touches her nose against his, allows the small hairs on his face to scratch her chin.

“You don’t have to worry,” Pen says.

“All these heroes, they’re dying.”

“C’mon, we’ve been over this.” The bell rings again, and Pen doesn’t move.

“Go over it again.”

“Yes, okay, people get hurt, yeah. But, look, other people’re dying too. These explosions, right? Maybe we can help.” The door rings frantically, repeatedly. Someone’s yelling on the other side. It’s the morning. It’s a weekday. “Look, I’m trying to do this the right way. Safe, like you said.”

“Safe.”

“Yeah. Yes, safe. Okay? Safe?”

She cups his head in her hands; he’s smaller than she thought. “Didn’t you give this up? Didn’t you not go?”

He looks away and back, and when his eyes return, there’s
desperation in them, though she’s not sure what they’re desperate for: to get away, to say something better, to crawl back through time, stand up again, and tell a man with a metal face to go fuck himself. Folding herself into him, she kisses his forehead and enjoys the wet of his breath at the cusp of her shoulder.

“Get the door, we can talk later.” Then, with a smile meant to draw out his smile, she adds, “Nerd.”

He smiles back. In his arms she’s safe, found, and when he lets go and heads toward the living room, not so far away, she’s lost again. Every time. Every damn time.

The bed’s ruined: blankets, sheets, and pillows hopelessly scattered, and she lies back and drags a snow angel through the chaos. The ceiling fan above her coaxes down a lazy breeze. Now, she’ll have to start all over; maybe this time he’ll catch on, and maybe next time he can do it himself.

The muffled calls behind the door grow louder, and she recognizes the voice as the only voice it could really be at this time of day. “What do you want?” she hears her husband yell in his truest faux-authoritative tone.

“C’mon, dude,” Sicko shouts from the other side, “let me in!”

“The king of the nerds and his ever-faithful subjects,” she says to no one, and she gets off the bed and walks to the smaller dresser, getting some pillowcases out of the bottom drawer.

“Man, I’m a little busy,” Pen answers. She can already hear him turning the locks, letting his scruffy friend in.

“Dude, I was coming to see you, and then I, holy shit—you are not going to believe this. . . .”

Sicko’s certainly the dumbest of all of Pen’s subjects, but perhaps the most loyal. He’s been by the house a dozen times since the hospital attack, proposing one silly scheme after another, always trying to get out with Pen and Soldier. It’d be creepy if there weren’t something a little sweet about it. He’s the only one of Pen’s friends who sees Pen the way she suspects Pen might see himself, the way she suspects she might see her husband—which is sick in its own way.

“All right, one sec, one sec.” Pen finishes with the locks, and the door creaks open.

“Dude, dude.” Sicko’s voice is louder now; he must’ve slipped inside. “He’s back! Ultimate came back!”

2

The Soldier of Freedom #526

What saves the day? What makes the man?

A searing burn gouges across his face, and Soldier tries to hold on to his holstered pistol. As his knees strike the ground, Soldier manages to stay upright for a second before his center of gravity lurches forward, and he smacks onto the porch, taking the impact in his shoulders and neck.

Above him a boy, DG’s boy, Runt, rushes to him, a familiar gun clutched in his unsteady hand pointed at the man that got Soldier. Three men. Three guns. What saves the day?

Soldier can’t remember what he’s fighting for. Not through the blur and the blood. But that’s all right. Lots of times he couldn’t remember what he was fighting for. Go that way and win. When you win, stay there until someone tells you to go some other way. If someone’s shooting at you, shoot back. Wasn’t much more to it than that. Now, he can’t remember who told him which way to go or how to win, but he damn well knows someone was shooting at him, and from that stink of new blood, he knows they got off a fine one.

Soldier starts to draw his gun out. Won’t be too hard. Just be quick about it. Soldier’s body cocks into position, readies for the fight.

What saves the day? What makes the man?

Like most, Soldier’s story begins with a lie. It’s not well-known, but Soldier’s famous grandfather lied twice, first about a cherry tree he hadn’t cut down and later about a girl he hadn’t gotten pregnant. She was a slave, and he was an owner, so it had something illicit to it beyond being an unnecessary affair; he undoubtedly descended the mountain that separates a man from heaven and hell. But soldiers pace up and down that path all their days, and he was nothing if not a soldier.

Besides, he tried to do good by her and the kid, made sure after he and the wife had gone that the girl was released, that her and the boy got a bit of money. To hide the thing, he granted freedom to the slaves of his estate; a cover-up to let his child slip out with the bathwater, as it were. Needless to say, it was a disgusting time full of irredeemable men. That one of these men happened also to be a noble warrior and a virtuous leader was just a sign of ironies to come.

The slave and her son lived a hard life, as would be expected. The money didn’t last, but still she raised her boy best she could. His name was George, of course. He had a destiny, she’d say, there was greatness in his blood, the only child of the Father of Our Country. Father of the whole country and this boy. Someday he’ll become a soldier and lead us all, just like his father. He has to, she’d say; he’s got a destiny, she’d say.

Apparently, she was a terrible whore, but work was work back then. It had to be tough going from sharing the bed of the Virginia-gentleman first president to fighting off the advances of whiskey-dipped strangers groping and punching their way to climax. She never made much of a living from it, and she died young. It was her son actually who found the body pretty soon after it was done, though no one found the two of them until days later, mother and child mixed together on the urine-yellowed floor of what was going to be their place; she’d finally gotten just enough money to pay just enough rent so that somebody considered her worth robbing and killing.

That’s a thorny way to get your start in the world, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that George didn’t come to be the best of men. A lot of time was spent suckling off the streets, panhandling from city to city, scoring food and drink any way he could. A couple of times he tried signing up
for the army to go off and fight in Mexico, but despite his light skin they always recognized him for what he was: a half-drunk, half-blood son of a slave. Sure, he’d scream at them about his lineage, his fate to do something mighty one day soon, but no one paid it all that much mind. This likely frustrated him to no end.

By all accounts he was quite a violent man, tearing and spitting at a world that didn’t have much use for him even as it deified his father. He killed one of his wives, that’s pretty much confirmed. Beat her to death for taunting him, for mocking his story. Afterward, a bottle at his lips, he knew it wasn’t his fault anyhow. He was a sword to be wielded in a great battle; that he didn’t have a field of war on which to stand, that he only had this blood-wet dirt floor, wasn’t all that important in the long run. This was merely a speck of his destiny poking out, the smallest hint of the man he was meant to be.

There was a theatricality about George, which makes some sense. You unite the public leadership of his father’s life with the tragic suffering of his mother’s, and you’re bound to produce some sort of performer, the type who revels in a sham identity, if only to hide from the one he’s got. So it really wasn’t a surprise when George finally discovered his only path to success in life was to be clamored after while shouting lines from a shoddy stage under shoddy direction.

It started small, just some misbegotten bragging and wailing, but it grew: it was a kind of circus act, “The Negro Washington,” where he would go from town to town spreading the ludicrous story of his conception, which happened to be true, but which paid more when recited for laughs. He spent the last thirty years of his life ensconced in this performance, finally finding some level of peace in pretending to be a man pretending to be him. The show became so popular that, when he raped Soldier’s mother, he was actually on his second visit to the White House.

Not much is known about her; she wasn’t the type that felt obliged to leave a trail of her comings and goings. Probably figured someone of her stature didn’t really warrant a great deal of investigating. Mary was Irish, Soldier knows that much, and there were times on lonely fields when he could swear he remembered some Gaelic poem or another that she’d lullabied to him as a babe, but that was probably just false hope.

There are rumors her family originated from the lines of the great paladins of that contentious island; however, every family likes to cling to
such tales when the evidence almost always suggests their mother was but another of the millions who floated in a precarious boat to a new land, coming with the tide, away from starvation toward something unknown, but perhaps better.

Almost as soon as she arrived from the old country in the early 1850s, Mary’s family married her off to a clerk in Washington, DC, sporting the name Virgil Wilcox. She apparently had some beauty, and he apparently had some prospects, and that was enough in those days.

Now back then there wasn’t really a public name for what this clerk should’ve been, but needless to say he wasn’t much interested in a fifteen-year-old mick waif beyond her offering him a cover to claim he was a nice married man with the legitimacy to scale the system. The relationship was not a happy one, and soon the clerk was looking for a way to get his foreign wife out of the house and have her serve him some other, more convenient way.

And so the clerk procured Mary a job as a maid at the Buchanan White House. Buchanan, the only bachelor ever to occupy the position, had tasked his friends to find people to care for the household, and the ambitious clerk was only too eager to please his commander in chief. If his beloved wife had to endure unending shifts scrubbing spittooned-spilled floors, then that was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

So it was that after the elderly George Jr. finished gathering up applause for another superb performance of “The Negro Washington” in a park just south of the White House, he spied a slim Irish woman charged with gathering up the stray cigars abandoned in the surrounding field. It’s not historically clear how the two consummated their short time together, but it was likely there, in the dirt and the grass, behind a stage set out in the shadow of the half-formed Washington Monument.

There is no evidence the two were ever in each other’s presence again. George Jr. continued to perform and continued to drink, as ever espousing his own one-day, someday greatness even as the grave beckoned nearer. Though people thought it would be the drink, it was a knife that killed him in the end. Apparently, he had returned to a brothel, the playground of his childhood, and was in the midst of bellowing out his speech on his noble lineage and destiny—this time for free—when another patriotic patron could take no more of these slurred ramblings and insults to country and stabbed George in the stomach. That’s how the son
of Our General found himself buried in the same grave as the prostitutes and johns that always die in the course of their business and always need a nice, quiet space to finally come to rest.

Sadly, wee Mary did not fare much better. The clerk was not amused by her expanding belly, fully aware that he had not provided the material for such an unexpected miracle. Nonetheless, ever in need of acting the gentleman, he agreed—after some deep thought and some hard blows—to accept the part of daddy to his unnamed child. Unfortunately, in the foolish hope of gaining sympathy, Mary confessed that it had been the Negro Washington who had done this to her, casting some doubt on the clerk’s ability to play the bastard’s father. Faced with quite the dilemma, the clerk resolved to manipulate the situation for politics: once the child was born, he would dispose of it, fake a stillbirth, thus gaining the sympathy of his eminent colleagues and arresting any speculation as to his ability to impregnate his wife.