It's Superman! A Novel (29 page)

“No, tell me.”

“I like you with your glasses on.”

“You’re crazy. They make me look like a sweatshop girl.”

“No! They make you look even more beautiful than you—” He can’t believe he just said that! Color floods his face.

“Thank you, Clark, that’s very sweet.” She puts her glasses back on. “Better?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Thank you,
I said. Now let’s eat.”

They do.

“Clark . . . ?”

“Uh-huh?”

“It’s Friday.”

“Yes . . . ?”

“You got blown up on
Tuesday.
That’s just three days ago.”

“The bungalow got blown up, not me.”

Diana’s expression—almost-but-not-quite afraid, the fear mitigated by confusion and awe—is the same one he’s been seeing again and again over the past two years. He saw it only last week at the Prudential lot after he’d fallen off the back of a galloping horse and slid under the left rear wheel of a stagecoach. Rolling over Clark’s abdomen, the wheel shattered into great wooden chunks. The wagon pitched over, dragging the team of horses with it, injuring two of them. But Clark just got up apologizing—apologizing!—even before the production crew reached him.

“Clark?”

He starts clearing plates from the table.

“Clark, we have to talk.”

He runs hot water in the sink, shakes in a little detergent. “What about?”

“ ‘What about.’ About
you.
About how—”

“I think I might be from another planet.”

He looks timorously over a shoulder.

Diana laughs. “You too? What’s the name of your planet? Mine’s Tennessee.”

Stormy night. Skinny in transition. Meyer Lansky
again. The problem with capes. Bronson Canyon.
●

1

Diana and Clark listen to the rain crash against the bungalow roof. They are lying together fully dressed on her bed. Impulsively, he reaches over with two hands and removes her eyeglasses. She smiles . . . until he fits the side wires around his own ears. Then she bursts into laughter. Again.

“What do you think?”

“They make you look very . . . intelligent.”

“You think?” He rolls off the bed to go and stand in front of the bureau mirror. “Really?”

“Yes,” she says. “Really. Now come back to bed, superman.”

“Because if there’s one thing that I wish I was it’s—
what
did you call me?”

Later, after Diana falls asleep no longer in her clothes, Clark watches her for hours. He wants to wake her up and do it again. Do it all over again. But what if she gets mad? He doesn’t want her to think he’s a guy with no self-control. He wants to touch her breasts. He doesn’t. Wants to kiss her mouth. Doesn’t. Instead he picks her glasses up from the table and puts them on in the dark.

Intelligent?

Really?

2

Skinny Simon sits at the open window of her hotel room looking out at the rain, relishing the breeze, smoking Chesterfield Kings, wondering what next. After Nevada, what next? Take the Super Chief back to New York or stick around here, become a lingerie model? A model! She’s a nurse, for God’s sake. Yeah, but is that inborn, is that
innate,
like eye color? When you come right down to it, nursing is a job, you do it for pay, same as modeling brassieres. And it’s much harder work. Draining work. Every time Skinny returns to that migrant clinic in Kernville she discovers that another little girl or boy she saw the previous week has since died from a ruptured appendix or diphtheria. That takes its toll. At least when you’re a model nobody dies.

At a crash of thunder Skinny jumps, then giggles for being skittish. She turns on the radio, leaves the dial at Rudy Vallee, lights another cigarette. When she finds the energy she’ll call the hotel kitchen and order up room service. It’s too bad about Willi. She wishes she could do something. What, though?

3

At the Palomar Ballroom, Charlie Brunner (Skinny’s “gun,” of course, was only a novelty lighter) doesn’t realize that it’s raining out till he looks down from the bandstand around ten o’clock and sees wet hair on dancers crowding the floor. So far tonight he’s made a lot of chart errors, missed his solo cue twice. Because all he can think about is Skinny and how she can put him in prison. He blew up a
house,
maybe
killed
somebody! He could rot in San Quentin! She promised she won’t tell, won’t make trouble for him if—
if
—he leaves her alone, agrees to a Reno divorce, agrees to
alimony
and then actually
pays
it. But can he
trust
her?

Women.

4

Captain Gould, off duty, stands watching it rain through the sliding glass doors of the pool room at an exclusive men’s club in the San Fernando Valley. Wearing a robe of white Turkish toweling, he raptly gazes at the bazillion animated rings on the swimming pool water outside.

Behind him a man steps naked from the sauna. He is extremely white, potbellied, fleshy. He has a long circumcised penis. “Did you have an opportunity to pass on my gift?”

“I did indeed, Mr. Lansky.”

“Thank you.”

“Glad to do it. So. Did the two of you know each other back in New York?”

Lansky doesn’t choose to reply. He raises a hand instead, languidly. “This rain! Maybe it’ll bring down the temperature.”

“Just more humidity.”

“Pessimist.” Lansky wags a finger. “Pfui on pessimists. They get you killed.”

“I thought it was the optimists did that.”

“You thought wrong.” He starts to go, shuffling off back toward the showers.

“Mr. Lansky. Who is . . . Lou Dexter?”

“I have no idea.”

“He’s a politician in New York. The Berg kid—”

“Lex Luthor?”

“That’s it. What do you know about him?”

“Why are you asking? The Berg kid
what?
”

“Said he didn’t kill anybody. That he was framed by this Lex Luthor, whoever he is.”

“He’s an alderman. And the kid’s right. Which is too bad for the kid.”

Meyer Lansky pads away.

Gould resumes watching the rain plink rings in the swimming pool.

5

By morning the rain has stopped, the skies are clear, and it’s a glorious rinsed day in Los Angeles.

Diana wakes to find herself alone in bed but then hears Clark directly below in the kitchen: the refrigerator door closing, a cabinet door opening. She smiles and stretches.

After showering, she dresses in black slacks and a green blouse and goes downstairs. At the kitchen doorway she stops dead in her tracks. “Today, my friend, I am definitely going out and buying you some real clothes.”

Clark has put on that Saucer-Man costume, the blue tights with the red trunks, the yellow belt, a red
S
inside a black shield appliquéd to the chest. He turns from the stove where he’s using a whisk to scramble eggs. “Fits good,” he says.

“Like a glove. You could get arrested for indecent exposure.”

She has embarrassed him and he loves it. “But I got a question. What’s the
S
stand for—
Saucer-Man
or
Saturn
?”

“Take your pick.”

“Okay,” says Clark, “but why would they even
have
the letter
S
—if they’re from Saturn? I mean, do they write in English there?”

She sticks out her tongue and says, “Shut up and feed me, mister.”

Using a spatula, he shovels the eggs—slightly watery, a little charred—onto her plate and his. “There’s toast. And coffee. Anything else?”

“Only you.”

He blushes again. Then, reaching behind him, he sweeps aside the long red cape before sitting down at the table.

“Personally I never liked capes,” says Diana, watching Clark finally just hang it over the back of his chair. “But they always want villains and spacemen to wear them, don’t ask me how come.”

“I think they’re great. Way better than neckties.”

Diana takes a sip of her coffee. Smiles again. God, she feels like a smiling fool. Last night was so—

“Listen,” says Clark, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Always a dangerous thing.” When he frowns, Diana adds, “Don’t mind me. Thinking about what?”

“I have to go get Willi.”

Diana smiles—again! The guy is completely adorable. Too bad he’s nuts. “Clark. Sweetheart. You can’t just go bust your pal out of jail.”

“But he’s innocent!”

“So you told me. You
still
can’t do it.”

“No,” says Clark. “See, that’s the thing: I can. I really can.”

And suddenly Diana is no longer smiling.

6

Clark sits on a cliff at Bronson Canyon, a short distance from Hollywood. Legs dangling, he stares at the green lagoon fifty feet below, then out to the rough, undulating, boulder-strewn wasteland beyond, where most of the Poverty Row studios film their western chases. He’s worked here a dozen times over the past seven months, has in fact leapt from this very cliff, pretending to be shot.

Clark was pretty awkward at first. Yakima Canutt kept saying he didn’t know how in hell Clark hadn’t broken his collarbone, at the very least, toppling off that Indian pony, the driver’s box on that Wells Fargo stage, that promontory. In time, though, he got better—so good he was bombarded with offers of work, too many for Clark’s liking. But it sure was nice making money.

Not that he has any of it now. He kept all of his savings at home, and now that his home is gone, blown to smithereens, his cash is gone, too.

After breakfast Diana went out and bought him some new clothes—the shirt and trousers, socks and shoes he’s wearing now. She also gave him a hundred bucks. He promised to pay her back as soon as he could. She said don’t worry about it. No, he said, he
wanted
to. She nodded, not smiling, and because he was so crazy about it she made him a gift of the Saucer-Man costume, acrobat’s cape and all. She stuffed it into a string bag and threw in a pair of shiny red boots that belonged to another costume from another picture she worked on,
Santa Claus vs. the Gila Martians.

He left her bungalow a short time later.

He purses his lips now and sighs, rattling the dusty leaves on a yucca tree some forty feet away. Two of them break off and flutter to the ground.

The idea of rescuing Willi makes Clark sick to his stomach. He may never have experienced the majority of natural aches and activities—he’s never hiccupped, never had the sniffles, he doesn’t need to shave more than once a month—but he knows about feeling nauseous and he knows about headaches and he knows about strained nerves. And right now he knows about all of those things all over again.

What if somebody gets hurt or killed while he’s trying to break Willi Berg out of the L.A. County Jail? He’d feel so guilty, such Methodist guilt! What if they put him in jail for life and his lifetime is two hundred years! (Yeah, but—how could they
keep
him there?)

Without Willi around he doesn’t have anyone to fret to. He used to fret to his mom, hardly ever to his dad. But even with them he felt they couldn’t understand how strange, how lonesome it is being one of a kind. Being singular has always made Clark feel as though he’s not quite genuine, that he’s a made-up character in a story. And that’s hard. Especially since he’s not smart the way that he feels he should be, all things being equal. Intelligence to match his physical powers: is that too much to ask?

Maybe he should start wearing glasses.

Getting to his feet, Clark looks out across the canyon, a landscape that always seems to him both magical and personal since it is identical to the one, it
is
the one, that he used to see in western serials and African-safari movies on Saturdays at the Jewel. He notices a crevice in a rock formation and can imagine the Lone Ranger or the Laughing Caballero ducking inside while dodging a hail of bullets.

Tucking his elbows against his ribs, he crouches, trembles, and leaps. When he lands on a boulder down below, the soles of his new shoes give him no traction. Swooping both arms for balance, he flings off his string bag and sends it whizzing a hundred feet down the canyon. Clark hops to the ground and retrieves it. Then decides to jump from here to that shelf of granite down there and does, kicking up alkaline dust behind him. Leaping from outcrop to boulder to boulder to outcrop, he makes his way ever farther down the canyon. He doesn’t notice when yet another long jump becomes a very
high
jump, but all of a sudden he’s rising straight up into the air, the clouds. A small tickling electrical charge starts pulsing around his body, his velocity becoming so extravagant so quickly that his shirt and trousers and shoes all seethe from the friction. Without conscious thought, Clark tucks his head toward his left shoulder, makes a fist with his left hand, and his body immediately follows that direction. A few dozen starlings burst apart just moments before he passes through the flock.

He
can
fly!

But now he’s plummeting. A moment later he hits the ground and keeps going, shredding his clothes, burrowing deeper and pulverizing bedrock before coming to a stop twenty feet underground at an oblique angle.

Clawing his way back to the surface, Clark pulls himself from the hole he made and sits on the edge of it, covered with dirt and earthworms and beetles.

Whoa.

He gets up at last and dusts himself off, locates Diana’s string bag tangled on the branch of a low, stunted tree and starts to hike back toward the cliff by the lagoon. He hasn’t gone twenty feet when he stops again. He looks at the rags on his body, he looks at the bag in his hand, then looks around for a cave he remembers being catapulted, literally catapulted, from during a mine explosion scene in
Law West of the Pecos.

Even though there is nobody around to see him, he’d feel funny stripping down and changing clothes right out here in the open.

A secret investigation is revealed. The Ghost Gang
strikes. A new beau for Lois. Mrs. O’Shea and the
dangerous caller. Jailbreak. A defrocked priest.
●

1