It's Superman! A Novel (4 page)

His second story was about a robot named Cassidy who falls in love with a Model A Ford. He called that one “A Chassis for Cassidy.” Both stories were rejected by every science-fiction magazine Clark mailed them to, and none of the rejections were of a personal nature or came with even the slightest encouragement. Nonetheless, Clark perseveres.

His most recent effort, which he began in early April, was inspired by a recurring dream he’s had every few weeks since he was thirteen. The story (and the dream) is set in the distant future when the earth has grown old and is being wracked by earthquakes and tidal waves. The scientist-hero believes the planet eventually will blow itself to smithereens, but since he can’t convince anyone to believe him or to act upon his warning, he sets about constructing, all by himself and in secret, a small rocket ship that will take him and his wife and baby to safety on Mars.

Up until last month, Clark had been making progress on the story, but his concentration fizzled after his mother’s illness took a turn for the worse. He can’t write when he’s distraught; it’s impossible.

Which is why it’s such a stupid idea trying to do it now—does he
really
imagine he can work on his dumb old story after what happened at the Jewel?

No, but it sure would be nice to escape, for a while at least, into his head.

Slumped in a dining-room chair, Clark stares dully at the sheet of yellow paper, the cheap kind flecked with tiny bits of wood fiber, that he rolled into his typewriter more than two weeks ago. The sentence he was typing that evening when his mother thumped her cane twice on the bedroom floor, signaling that she needed him, remains unfinished:
Giant orange flames
(it reads)
soared from great fissures and—

And? thinks Clark.
And?
And skyscrapers crashed down, shattering into dust. And the sky turned black. A terrible
rumbling
began, and grew louder.

Abruptly, he sits forward, remembering that dream, picturing it clearly in his mind, but as he raises both hands to the keyboard he sees with a pang that his left is still clenched.

Stupid story.

Stupid dream.

He gets up from his chair and goes out on the front porch, where he leans against the newel post and looks past the lilac hedge to the picket fence he and his mother painted last summer, then to the county road that just recently, and to his father’s dismay, was macadamized.

“Surprised to find you still up, Clark.” Mr. Kent catches the screen door with his hip and lets it close gently behind him and latch. “Can’t sleep?”

“I ain’t sleepy.”

“I’m
not
sleepy.”

“You neither?” says Clark, and they both laugh.

“Your mother thinks something’s bothering you.”

“She wake you up to say so?”

Mr. Kent smiles, steps closer. “Look, son, you shouldn’t feel guilty about going out and having a little bit of fun. Your mother doesn’t want you to stop doing things just because she’s—”

“That what she thinks is the matter?”

“Well. Yes.” He rubs his jaw. “It’s not?”

Clark looks into his father’s face—one cheek a tracery of red creases where it was pressed against the pillowcase—then glances away, back to the road.

“Son, what’s the matter?”

Clark lifts his left arm, holds his tight fist in the air between himself and his father, then slowly opens his fingers. “This.”

It glints on his palm.

“I don’t understand,” says Mr. Kent.

“It’s a
bullet,
Dad. That somebody fired from a gun.”

“I can
see
it’s a bullet.”

“I caught it. I put out my hand and I caught it.”

4

Although technically part of Smallville, the place where Alger Lee lives is a good ways out Highway 75, three-quarters of a mile past the grain elevators that everyone generally considers the north edge of town. In the newspaper and in polite conversation, the community of forty or so board shacks facing each other across a dirt midway is referred to as “Smallerville,” but otherwise it’s called “Smellville.” It is the “Negro Section,” although several Mexican families have settled here too in recent years, migrants whose automobiles or spirits finally quit on them. Children outnumber adults, three to one. Dogs, stray dogs—nobody
owns
a pet—outnumber children. There is just one long-handled well pump that everyone uses, and normally you have to stand in line. But at ten minutes before three in the morning, Alger Lee has it all to himself.

Seated on an upended milk crate, he primes the pump, catches a burst of water in his cupped hands, drinks it quickly, wipes his palms dry on his pants. Then he reaches back into his candy sack, helping himself to some more chocolate-covered raisins, Mary Janes, and sugar dots, courtesy of the Jewel Theater.

How did Clark Kent
do
that? he thinks. What’s he
made
of?

A scruffy yellow dog sidles over and pushes its nose into the candy sack on the ground between Alger’s feet. “Go on, get outta here, you,” says Alger, and the dog shies away, but only a short distance.

The dog sits, cocks its head, and watches Alger pick white and yellow sugar dots off a long strip of waxed paper.

I didn’t see that no-account donkey shoot the first time, thinks Alger, but I sure as hell seen him shoot the second time. And he couldn’t’ve missed. Well, he
didn’t.

I seen what I seen.

The dog whimpers now and Alger takes pity—throws a sugar dot that the dog snaps from the air. Alger throws a second one. Same thing. Great catch. But the dog isn’t expecting the third piece of candy to come so quickly, he isn’t looking, and it hits him between the eyes, then bounces back at Alger.

There you go! See that? Same thing, Alger thinks, same damn
principle.

I seen what I seen.

But how’d that
happen?
How
could
it?

I don’t know, thinks Alger, but I’ll find out. One way or the other, I’ll find out.

The dog trots over, sits on its hind legs, and greedily eats the rest of the sugar dots right off the paper.

5

Mr. Kent creeps back into the bedroom, but then his heart seems to freeze in his chest. Martha’s breathing is so . . . quiet. He is not a believer in the way that his wife is, but still he finds it hard not to pray for a miracle, even when he knows it’s—what? Hopeless? Hopeless. Nevertheless, he can
ask,
can’t he?

And so he does, again.

Sitting down on his side of the bed and kicking off his shoes, Mr. Kent stretches out in his clothes again. A dull ache spreads through the small of his back. A bunion throbs on his left foot. A tiredness shudders through him.

He should sell the farm. Clark won’t be staying,
he
knows that even if his son doesn’t yet. Sell it for whatever he can get and move into town. And do what? Does he have to
do
something? Open a grocery store, then. Which is what he intended to do before he met and married Martha Clark. Their land, this land here, was her family’s, just a parcel of what had once belonged to her father.

He shifts around, trying to get comfortable, hoping to ease the chronic ache in his back, then leans over, careful not to wake Martha, and blows out the Aladdin lamp. In the darkness he thinks again how foolish he was for not wiring the house for electricity when crop and pork and beef prices were high and he could have afforded that sort of thing. Not that electric light meant much to him, it meant nothing, but Martha would’ve enjoyed it. Her being such a great reader. It would’ve saved her eyesight. Was from reading all those books by gasoline lamp that finally gave her pretty green eyes a permanent squint. Green eyes. His mother had green eyes, too.

And thinking of his mother—whom he loved and who died in her thirty-ninth year, diphtheria—he can’t help but remember his father, whom he did not love, though he tried to show the proper and natural respect, even when it was difficult, even when he was treated more like a slave than a son. His father working him on that miserable land near Tillerton that he leased from a suitcase farmer, working him from before sunrise till late at night. Working him half to death. A difficult man, Silas Kent, an angry, prickly, unlucky man, and finally a demented one who deliberately slashed himself across his abdomen with a butcher knife while standing in front of a mirror.

During the years when Martha, who so yearned to conceive, would sometimes cry out in dull anguish at the first sign of her monthly visitor, Mr. Kent would feel only relief; guilty, unseemly relief. He didn’t know how to be a good father—he knew what it meant, was
supposed
to mean, but not how to be one—and feared he would become, over time, not just a disappointment to any children of his own, but also the object of their confused outrage and hostile pity. No. Better he was childless.

Then Clark arrived.

Mr. Kent pushes himself up in bed and wedges a pillow behind his back.

Oh, Jonny, it’s a miracle, isn’t it? It was meant to be, wasn’t it? Oh, look at this poor, poor beautiful baby boy. Oh, Jonny, they can’t have him back! You won’t let them take him back, will you, Jonny?

“They.” “Them.”

No, Martha, they can’t have him. If they come, I won’t let them take him back.

“Back.”

Back
where?

Our son, Jonny! At last! God is good, God is great. God has blessed us!

But had He? Had He, really?

Clark changed their lives, filled them with new feelings, chances, and chores, glad ones mostly. There was no denying Martha was a good mother; born to it, as she’d always known. And Clark, no man and woman could have gotten a better son, even if sometimes—especially as a young boy—he seemed remote, unhappy, preferring solitude to the company of schoolmates, to the company of his parents. Catch him when he didn’t know you were looking—his eyes fixed upon his hands or his knees, a point on his bedroom wall or a knot in the table—and his expression was inscrutably morose. He’d see you and smile, and those were the times when Mr. Kent’s heart came nearest to breaking, because those smiles were so awkward and so pretended.

When Clark was four and five and six years old he rarely spoke, just mumbling out a few words and shaking his head, yes, no, and holding his eyes down, chewing steadily on the side of his thumb or snapping his teeth around his thumbnail. Mr. Kent secretly feared that his son might be slow or dull, “not right.” He was afraid people in town might be saying just that, quietly among themselves, pitying Clark the way they pitied children with stutters or club feet or faces cratered from the smallpox; pitying Clark the way they pitied, yet felt repugnance for, the mongoloid children or the polio children, or those children who would scream as though possessed and fling themselves about and cut themselves and had to be kept indoors, locked away, always. Even in a town like Smallville there were many such children, and in those first years Mr. Kent sat awake all hours worrying that Clark was afflicted in his own way, then feeling black waves of shame for caring what other people might think or say about his son, despising himself for holding such vanity.

Eventually Clark outgrew what Martha always called “just a shyness” and in time managed to hold his own with others outside the family, to look people in the eye and speak for himself, always speaking politely, finding the right smiles and small talk for most occasions. But the boy never seemed fully comfortable in the world. But why was that any surprise? The unnatural things he could do! And the natural things that never happened to him, but should have.

Every town or region has its strongman, and for a long time Mr. Kent could, and did, tell himself that Clark was just one of those rare and lucky specimens. Extraordinary but not impossible, that effortless strength of his. What he could lift, shove aside, knock over. Once, when Clark was about seven, Mr. Kent saw the boy drive a nail into a fence post with just his fist!

The other parts of it, though:
those
parts were harder to deal with. Never a scrape, never a bruise or a cut, never blood.

There were several occasions over the last dozen years when Mr. Kent had dropped what he was doing and run, expecting—and God forgive him, almost
hoping
—to find Clark with his leg twisted under him, a white bone showing, from a bad spill he’d taken off the binder, or with one arm cradling the other after he’d been kicked by a horse, or with his face and neck and hands erupting in twenty different places from hornet stings. But every time he would discover, with a pang of fear and confusion, that his boy, his son, was not only unhurt, but unshaken.

Outwardly, at least.

What must’ve gone through Clark’s mind on those occasions Mr. Kent can’t imagine, and because he can’t, and because he can’t bring himself to
ask,
he’s afraid that he’s failed the boy, miserably. Failed him as his father.

With broken bones or hornet stings, with sprained ankles, pulled muscles, measles or the mumps, the damn chicken pox, poison sumac, the croup, a
splinter
he would’ve known what to do. And done it.

Our son, Jonny! At last! God is good, God is great. God has blessed us!

Yes and no. Yes and no. Maybe and no.

He hasn’t been a good father.
Tried,
but he just hasn’t been a good father to Clark. He doesn’t know
how
to be. Still doesn’t. Not to the son he was given.

He never knows what to say.

It’s a bullet, Dad. That somebody fired from a gun.

I caught it. I put out my hand and I caught it.

He just never knows what to say.

“Did you talk to him?” Martha’s hand, dry and thin and nearly without substance, finds his.

“I’m sorry,” says Mr. Kent, “did I wake you?”

“Not really. I was just resting my eyes. You spoke with Clark?”

“Yes.”

“And?” When half a minute passes and there is no reply, she says, “Jonny, did you find out what’s bothering him?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to make me
drag
this out of you, are you? In
my
condition?”