It's Superman! A Novel (16 page)

“His father?” Returning the brown bottle to a cabinet shelf, Miss Colman takes down another. Dark blue, without a label. “Why would I call his father? We don’t
speak.
He’s an
awful
man. And I’ll tell you something else: he wears
toilet water.”

After rinsing her glass at the sink, she fills it again from the blue bottle.

Standing in the doorway, Clark can smell its alcohol content.

“Do you know the Sherpas, Mr. Kent?” she asks.

“No, ma’am.”

“They live up in the Himalayas”—she pronounces it Him-AHL-yuhs—“and they live practically forever and have terrific strength and the most perfect lungs.” She raises her glass slightly, “This is what they drink. I’d offer you a sip, but you’re too young.”

Miss Colman takes two short pulls, then carries the glass with her while she leads Clark back up the stairs and down along the hall—hung with oval family portraits, everyone unsmiling—and into the front parlor. She sits facing the window, and Clark takes the chair opposite her. He opens his carryall for his notepad and a pencil. “Shall we begin?” he says, noticing that already Miss Colman has produced from somewhere—the table beside her?—a small flat packet of hand-tinted postcards, the Grand Tetons on top. She begins to untie the packet but stops for another sip of her Himalayan nostrum.

“As I told Mr. Timmins,” she says, “I’ve arranged for a display of my collection at the public library, but I thought. I thought.” She yawns, her eyes begin to water. “Now, this one . . .”

Clark watches her shoulders droop, her eyelids close and stay closed. “Ma’am?”

She begins to snore.

“Miss Colman?” he says, rising slowly from his chair, eyes fixed on the old woman whose head has plopped onto a shoulder. As he reaches to take the postal cards from her hands before they can spill all over her lap, the old woman springs up like she’s been shot off the chair by a broken coil, colliding with Clark and shouting, “My God!”

“Miss Colman, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry!”

Her eyes are as big as eggs, but she is looking
past
Clark out through her front window.

She grabs him by his arm and points.

Across the street little Donny Poore, still with his rifle in hand, is walking, foot in front of foot, along the roofline of his house, a good sixty feet above the ground.

Clark has no sooner registered that sight than the boy slips. His rifle flies off in a wide arc, and Donny goes sliding down the inclined roof, bumpeting over the blue scaly shingles, his sneakers dislodging pieces and flinging them into space like skeet.

He rolls off the edge, grabs at a gutter.

But that tears free and then he’s falling . . .

Later at dinner Mr. Kent says, “I figure something like that must’ve taken, what, five seconds, all told?”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“But you caught him.”

Clark grins. “I caught him. Yes I did. By the time
he
got there,
I
was there.”

“Lord have mercy.”

“Yeah, well, even
he
couldn’t have done it much faster, if I do say so myself.”

“Whoa there, cowboy.”

“Only kidding. Dad.”

“Uh-huh. And Miss Colman saw all this?”

“Sure did.”

Mr. Kent rests his forehead on the cup of his palm.

“What? What’s wrong, Dad?”

“Nothing.” He pushes the heel of his hand up his forehead, making wales. “So I guess that means everybody is going to know about you now.”

Clark’s expression, which had darkened for just a moment at his father’s distress, turns suddenly waggish. “Don’t worry, Dad, she thinks I sneaked a drink of her patent medicine.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“And did she ever bawl me out about it!”

They both laugh.

“But you should’ve seen that catch, Dad!”

Mr. Kent gets up slowly from the table and taps a hand on Clark’s shoulder as he goes past, knowing he’ll stay up long past his usual bedtime tonight, remembering Clark’s adventure and the starry gleam in his son’s eyes as he recounted it. And worrying, just worrying.

Photography in the rustic districts. Willi and Clark.
Out of gas. A kidnapping in Smallville.
●

1

In late August 1935, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt allocated $6,288,000 to the Writers Project, a branch of the Federal Arts Project, itself a branch of the monolithic Works Progress Administration. Part of the money was paid out in salaries for hundreds of career writers on the public dole. These men—some women too, but mostly men—were given a few days’ training and then dispatched in groups of five or six to drive government Fords, a whole fleet of Rolls Royces, around the forty-eight states, collecting raw data for a planned series of motoring guidebooks. Not that anyone in official Washington believed such things were
needed
—honestly, how many people were itching or able to take scenic automobile trips during a depression? The project primarily was a way for some idle citizens to earn ten or twelve dollars a month. Particularly a special category of citizens you had to figure wouldn’t be much help building dams and bridges.

Each carload of fieldworkers included at least one academic who knew something about demographics, survey taking, and interviewing techniques; the rest could be fiction writers, ad copywriters, jingle writers, gag writers, playwrights, poets, or radio scripters. And there was usually a professional photographer, although sometimes one of the writers would be tapped for the role and issued a box Brownie.

Among the five fieldworkers covering the territory of eastern Kansas late that summer was a photographer who knew what he was doing even though he usually groused about doing it.

A redhead named Willi Boring. (Lois couldn’t pick a better alias?)

The team assembled in Kansas City, Missouri, on Wednesday, the eleventh of September, Willi having trained out there from Union Station in D.C., his ticket—as well as his safety razor, a package of blades, two pairs of white socks, and a blue shirt—purchased with money borrowed from Lois Lane.

On his way to Missouri all of the papers he read were filled with stories about the assassination of Senator Huey Long in Baton Rouge. Although Willi had no love for Huey Long, who had always struck him as a little dictator with a gumbo drawl, he felt sorry for the poor slob, his sympathy connected, he realized, to the fact that he’d been shot himself recently and that only luck had saved him from sharing the Kingfisher’s fate. In the same papers it was also reported, but with far less coverage, that Lucky Luciano, charged in August with sixty-two felony counts of “compulsory prostitution” (the best the Dewey commission could come up with), had had his bail revoked by New York’s Governor Lehman and been confined on Riker’s Island. In a funny sort of way Willi felt even sorrier for him than he did for Huey Long. Luciano had those good manners and hated Lex Luthor.

In Kansas City, Willi mailed Lois a nostalgically tinted picture-postcard (horse-drawn streetcar, men in derbies, pink clouds at dusk) and then didn’t write her again.

What could he say? Once he was on the road he could itemize his complaints, tell her how much he loathed this stupid job, but that would be too . . . boring. Plus it would sound ungrateful. She went out on a limb for him. It wouldn’t be fair now to turn around and
kvetch.

No, but—damn it, he was taking pictures of
mile markers,
of mile markers and
fence rails,
water towers and Main Streets, all exactly the same! Eastern Kansas! Subsistence farms, poor little towns, nearly every place the site of some atrocity committed before, during, or after the Civil War. And wherever his team went they heard the same stories from amateur historians, the oldest living widow, the butcher at the Piggly Wiggly, the same dopey legends, local lore, and tall tales. Lem Blanchard. Jesse James. Big Nose Kate. Carry Nation. Butternut squash the size of glacial boulders. The ghosts of massacred Free Staters groaning on the wind. The superbaby in the orphanage.

But whenever Willi finds himself buzzing with discontent he still can hear Lois’s voice whispery in his head: It’s not better than Riker’s Island?

So it’s better than Riker’s Island.

Okay, all right, but
still
!

While his companions read leisurely in county libraries or talk to leathery old-timers, Willi clomps around snapping the kinds of pictures you’d find in the dullest geography textbooks. Some grassed-over stop along the original Pony Express trail, lambs fattened for the State Fair, So-and-So’s mansion, that Grecian Court House, this land-grant college, those cement silos.

Today—Saturday, October 12—in the town of Tabor Lodge (816 alt., 1,249 pop.), Willi passes half the morning taking pictures of buffalo troughs and a war memorial, then hikes back to the house in town where the team has rented a couple of rooms.

He shares the attic with Dave Nero and Studs Dillon. Their names make them sound like pulp-magazine writers, but in fact they are partnered-up playwrights working in the light-comedy mode. Nero is quick with the one-liners, Dillon is the plot man. Their plays, which have gone unproduced over the last several years, are set on the Philadelphia Main Line or in some Manhattan penthouse, worlds of money and pedigree Willi cannot imagine they know about firsthand. They resemble a couple of stew bums, dressing identically in dingy white dress shirts and cheap gray trousers. Dillon has a dead leg, wears a stirrup around his left elevator shoe that connects to a brace strapped to his calf. Maybe he had polio. Willi wonders about it but never asks. Early on he decided it was best not to get too chummy with his traveling companions. He doesn’t have his new autobiography worked out enough that it could stand close scrutiny.

When he comes in this morning a little after ten, the superheated attic air is oppressive. Instantly Willi feels cranky. If this crazy unseasonable heat wave doesn’t break soon . . .

Nero is pacing. Dillon sits at the typewriter.

“ ‘. . . taken all of the bruises from that beast that I intend to,’ ” says Nero. “Hey, Willi. Okay. ‘Taken all of the bruises from that beast,’ et cetera. And
then
she says, ‘Metaphorically speaking, of course, darling.’ ”

Dillon stops typing. “I don’t like it.”

“You’re mad! It’s a guaranteed laugh!”

Willi lays his camera and paraphernalia on his cot, then changes into a clean shirt. Sits on a chair and reties his work boots. He is wearing dungarees rolled twice at the cuff. “I seen the car down in front,” he says. “Be all right if I took her out for a couple hours?”

“You’ll need a fill-up,” says Dillon. “And get a receipt.”

“Yeah, all right. See you guys later.”

Nero says, “Willi—hold on. Before you go. Would Candace let herself be
actually
bruised?”

“Which one is Candace?” In the car (riding west, riding south, riding east, riding south, riding west, riding . . . ), Nero and Dillon usually read new scenes out loud to Willi and the other two guys, Whitey Wolverton and Floyd Price. The former is a greeting-card poet, the latter a laid-off lecturer in sociology who also writes but rarely publishes English-style detective novels under the pen name Abigail Lyric. Everyone has agreed that
Never Too Tired
is a pretty good play. It’s about soul mates, marriage, monogamy, adultery, and divorce. “Is Candace the ghost?” Willi asks.

“No, the actress!”

“Oh, she’s pretty tough. Nah, the actress wouldn’t let anybody
really
bruise her.”

“Did you hear Willi, did you hear what he just said? Smart guy.”

Dillon says, “All right. But somebody else says that same line, ‘metaphorically speaking,’ in the first act. I forget who.”

“Amanda,” says Willi.

“Amanda,” says Dillon.

“Oh damn,” says Nero.

Willi says, “See you guys later.”

Outside it is hot as blazes, but driving with the windows rolled down he can at least catch a breeze. Bedraggled fields of stripped cornstalks press against both sides of the concrete highway. The occasional crossroads are marked with arrow-shaped signs: 7 miles to Parris, 10 miles to Tillerton, 14 miles to Smallville. Smallville! Right away Willi imagines an animated-cartoon village, everybody tiny, an elf with a high, chirpy voice. He’d be like Gulliver.

I’m losing my mind, he thinks.

Just beyond a bridge that spans a slow river comes Parris. It doesn’t seem like it’s even a town anymore—the few clapboard houses look abandoned—but when Willi sees a filling station on his left he steers off the road. He stops alongside of the two Perfection Gasoline pumps before noticing that both the office and garage bay windows are swirled over with glass wax. Out of business. His gas needle jiggles above empty. Maybe he should turn around and go back. But according to the last sign it’s only a few miles to Tillerton. With any luck he can find a station open there. Willi is about to release the hand brake when he changes his mind, opens the door, and gets out. Here’s as good a place as any to relieve himself.

He walks on around to the back of the small white building and waters the ground. As he rebuttons his fly, he glimpses a carport up a slight incline. It’s slat-sided, decrepit, and jungled over with crispy vines, but there are gaps enough to glimpse an automobile parked inside. A DeSoto woodie, he discovers when he takes a closer look, the body filmed with powdery dirt, a headlamp shattered, and not much tread on the front tires. Once upon a time, though, it was a nice machine.

Willi’s heart jumps when he comes back around to the front of the station and discovers a wide-shouldered older man standing in front of the government Ford, one foot braced on the fender. The man is dressed in overalls heavily spotted with grease. A yellow cigarette dangles from his bottom lip. One cheek is badly waffled with acne scars. His high bush of curly brown hair is shaped like a footballer’s helmet.

The office door stands partly open now, and Willi has the feeling somebody’s in there.

“I was hoping to get a fill-up,” he says.

The curly-haired man stands there scowling. Then he tosses away his cigarette and points at the smeared windows. “Look open to you, mope?”