It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  “Course not,” said Clark, already on his feet.

  “Oh, you know something? Forget it. I’m not really thirsty.” She waved a hand in front of her face, then clucked for saying anything.

  Clark sat down, wondering whether he should put his arm around her now, or wait.

  A second preview played, for the new Mae West, then another, for a picture called The Informer, starring Victor McLaglen, an actor Clark recognized from some westerns he’d liked.

  But when Mickey Mouse should have come on, instead it was News of the World. Not that it seemed any big deal at the time. In fact, it would’ve been okay with Clark if they skipped the cartoon entirely. He was never much impressed by that Disney stuff. Those things didn’t make him laugh. Although he wished they did, since everyone else in the whole country, maybe the whole world, obviously found them hilarious, and whenever he would sit in the Jewel with a make-believe smile frozen on his face watching a bunch of cartoon animals play baseball or hot jazz, he’d just feel crummy—dumb and different and set apart.

  He put his left arm around Janey’s shoulder, and that seemed fine with her.

  “That’s when I first saw him,” says Clark.

  “In the theater?” asks Dutcher. “That what you’re saying?”

  Clark sighs and looks sadly up at the ceiling. “No,” he says. “In the newsreel.”

  But first there was the May Day Parade in Russia, it looked like the entire Soviet Army was marching past the Kremlin with helmets on and bayonets fixed, Stalin not cracking a smile, not once, and then Hitler in the Reichstag shaking a fist, both fists, and screaming that he didn’t care what the League of Nations said, Germany was set on building tanks and planes and submarines, whatever it wanted, and then came the funeral for Lawrence of Arabia, who’d been killed in England on his motorbike, and then it was back to the USA, and there was half a minute about the Boulder Dam, how’d they’d finished it finally. Then you got the running of the Kentucky Derby, and then farms buried deep in black sand dunes out in Texas and Oklahoma and western Kansas, then people on street corners selling dust masks for a dime, and families by the dozens leaving for California in rattletrap Fords, even on foot, and then there was a highway patrolman somewhere in Missouri pointing to a little grocery store that was all shot up, and to a wide dark stain on the ground outside near a filling pump that looked like motor oil but he said was blood. Then he said it was a massacre and for what? Far as he could tell the Jiggs Makley gang didn’t get more than ten, fifteen dollars, at most, and—

  “But when did you see him?” says Dutcher. He moves closer to Clark, bringing his face as near as six inches. “When did you see Jiggs?”

  “Right after that highway patrolman finished talking. His picture came on. But if they showed the Mickey Mouse when they should’ve—”

  “So you got a good look.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Go on.”

  So next came Admiral Byrd and his men from the South Pole being congratulated by the president at the White House, and then—

  Then Janey Laster hated to be such a pest, but would Clark mind a whole lot getting her that Coke now? Before the picture started? And if it wasn’t asking too much, some popcorn?

  Ahead of him at the concession was an elderly couple Clark recognized from the Methodist church he and his mother used to attend before she got sick. The Kemps. And as they bent forward together and pushed their faces nearer the slanted glass of the candy showcase, trying to decide if they wanted Sugar Babies or Charleston Chews and whether or not they felt like licorice tonight, Clark fidgeted and looked at his wristwatch. He glanced over their bobbing gray heads at lanky unsmiling Alger Lee patiently waiting for the Kemps to place their order. In one hand he had a paper sack he’d snapped open, and in the other hand an aluminum scoop.

  Alger is a year or two younger than Clark but half a head taller. A good thirty pounds slighter, though. He wore a white uniform jacket, like a waiter’s but with the red word “Jewel” stitched over the pocket, a ruffled shirt much whiter than the jacket, and a black bowtie pressed snug to his throat. When he noticed Clark, Alger nodded in that scant, almost formal way that he had. He said to Mrs. Kemp, for the third time, “Those are still a penny, yes, ma’am.”

  The usher had gone inside the auditorium, and the ticket taker was out on the sidewalk having a smoke. It was just the four of them in the lobby.

  “And the gumdrops we sell by weight, yes, ma’am.”

  When Clark was much younger, Alger’s father, Darron, worked on the Kent farm twice a year, once in high summer when they cut and put up the hay and then again in late summer when they brought in the corn. Clark well remembered Darron Lee both because he’d been an impossibly huge man—six-eight or -nine and as wide as a bear, a build his son hadn’t inherited—and because he was the first colored person Clark had ever seen. He died, drowned, five years ago in a freak accident during a spring flood. Driving a team of horses to a hog farm west of town, he’d banked a curve and his cart turned over.

  “And those, yes, are three for a penny, yes, ma’am,” said Alger Lee.

  Clark checked his watch again.

  “Yes, sir,” said Alger, scooping up a dozen malted milk balls and depositing them into the white sack. Then he scooped up and deposited half a dozen Bit-O-Honeys, and finally half a dozen Sugar Babies. “That all for you, ma’am? Sir? Then that’ll be”—Clark watched Alger narrow his eyes, doing the math—“twelve cents, please.” Then: “No problem at all, ma’am,” he said and removed one Bit-O-Honey and one Sugar Baby, to bring the sum down to a dime. “Thank you, folks. Enjoy the picture. Next.”

  It made Clark uneasy when Alger, as usual, looked him straight in the eye and called him “sir.” “What can I get you, sir?” Why’d he do that?

  “Just a Coca-Cola and some popcorn.”

  “Small or large?”

  “Large, I guess.”

  Watching Alger pump out the syrup and draw carbonated water from the fountain tap, Clark could hear tuba, banjo, and washboard music playing inside the auditorium—so he still wasn’t missing anything but the mouse. Alger placed the fountain soda on the counter and turned to the popcorn machine. Clark was sliding a single from his money fold when Alger Lee clear out of the blue asked him, “How’s your mother, is she feeling any better?”

  For a moment Clark was too surprised to answer. “No, I’m afraid she’s not,” he said finally. “But thank you for asking,” he said. “Alger.”

  With a short nod, Alger finished scooping popcorn into a red-striped paper box. He sprinkled it liberally with salt and added a wedge of butter. As he set the popcorn down on the countertop, Alger’s eyes lifted slightly. Someone had just stepped up behind Clark and cleared his throat.

  “Our friend Mr. Jiggs?” says Dutcher.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wanted a candy bar, did he?”

  “I don’t know what he wanted,” says Clark. “It never got that far.”

  “So how far did it get?”

  “He started in calling Alger names.”

  Said, “You expect to find woolly-heads in Kansas City, but you got ’em here, too?”

  Said, “Why somebody in these sad times got the gall to go and let a nigger work a job could be done by a white boy is just something that burns my ass.”

  Said, “And why ain’t he wearing gloves, anyhow? Touching food.”

  Dutcher passes a hand over his eyes, gets up, and stretches. “That’s what he said, huh? With no provocation?”

  “He just started talking.”

  “How did Alvin react?”

  “Alger. And he didn’t.”

  Not at all. He merely looked back over at Clark and said if there was nothing else, that’d be forty cents, please.

  “You ignoring me, sonny?” said the man.

  “I didn’t think you were talking to anybody in particular,” said Alger, but he was still facing Clark, saying that like he was saying it to him.


  A large bony hand clamped down on Clark’s right shoulder. Brusquely he was shunted aside as the man stepped forward. He was drunk, Clark realized. That was no big surprise. What was, and it was a big nasty surprise that registered itself as a fluttering sensation in Clark’s belly, was the man’s face.

  Clark knew it.

  Had just seen it.

  In a newsreel.

  “Only the mustache was new.”

  “Master of disguise, huh?”

  “Not really.”

  “So Alger mouthed off and Makley pushed you away to mix it up. That it?”

  “Alger didn’t mouth off. He just said he didn’t think the guy was talking to anybody in particular.”

  “Funny boy, huh?”

  Alger swallowed, but never blinked. Addressing Clark again, he said, “Your total’s forty cents. Sir.”

  “You think you’re a funny boy, that what you think? You come on out from behind there, hear me? And you, sonny”—the man Clark had recognized as Jiggs Makley was glaring at him now—“you go on back and take his damn place. I don’t want to be waited on by no woolly-head thinks he’s a funny nigger boy. Hey. What’re you looking at?”

  Clark said, “Nothing.” But automatically—you stupid sack, he thought even as he did it—he raised his left hand, running the side of his index finger across his upper lip.

  That’s when Jiggs Makley grinned.

  “Like he was flattered being recognized?” says Dutcher.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I bet so. Be right in character, son. Vain little booger. Always strutting like a movie star.”

  “No, sir, I don’t think … he wasn’t too happy that I knew who he was.”

  “He say that?”

  “He grabbed me. By the front of my shirt. And like he wasn’t about to let go.”

  “You tell him to?”

  “No.”

  “Curse him out?”

  “No!”

  “Well, something made him mad enough to want to shoot you, Clark.”

  “I guess I pushed him.”

  “You guess?”

  “I pushed him, but not hard. I just …” He nearly opens his left hand, to demonstrate. At the last moment, though, he lets it fall. “I just pushed him a little so he’d leave. And he, um, hit the wall.”

  “And broke one of those big old glass picture frames with a movie poster inside, is what I heard.”

  “Yes, sir. But he must’ve lost his balance ’cause I never pushed him hard!” Clark’s face turns red, and his eyes all of a sudden are shiny again. “It was only a little shove!”

  “Hey, you didn’t do anything wrong, son. Calm down. But do me a favor. Pretend where you’re sitting right now is where you were standing then, okay? Where’s the movie poster?”

  Clark draws a long breath, holds it, and swivels around on his chair. “I guess … where those deputies are.”

  Dutcher stares at Clark in disbelief.

  The two deputies, speaking in hushed voices by the muster desk, stand a good twenty feet away across the station house.

  “That was some little shove, Clark.”

  “He must’ve tripped. On the carpet.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m just telling you what happened!”

  “And I’m just telling you okay. He tripped and went flying and hit that frame hard enough to bust the glass—then what happened?”

  Makley’s lips separated, they kept separating, and it took forever. Then he was bellowing with rage, hurling curses, and his right hand reached behind him, and that took half an hour, a split second, no time at all. And then? He had a pistol, nickel-plated and long-barreled, and he straight-armed it, pointing, aiming, and the shot was the loudest sound Clark had ever heard, ever. It was a cannon, it was a plane crash, it was a planet blowing up.

  “But somehow he missed,” says Dutcher.

  Clark looks down, looks up. Looks down. And nods.

  “But then he fired again. Clark?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say anything to you first?”

  “No. He just—looked at me.”

  “Like he was madder at you ’cause he missed?”

  Clark says, “Yes,” but that’s a lie. Makley looked across the lobby at Clark like he was scared. Not mad at him, scared of him.

  “You told Chief Parker that Makley must’ve had the world’s stupidest—”

  “Gun. Yeah, I don’t know why I said that. That was stupid. I just—I thought maybe the gun, you know, blew up in his hand.”

  “That’s what you thought?”

  “Well. I heard it go off again and the next thing I knew he was lying on the floor. So I thought—maybe the gun blew up.”

  “But you could see it hadn’t?”

  In his mind’s eye now Clark watches himself clutch the right side of the heavy cigarette machine, be reflected in its mirror, discover that angry red welt between his eyes, see Makley’s body sprawled on the carpet, and notice the pistol, smoking but intact, lying a few feet away. “I saw the gun and it was—it looked all right to me. So it must’ve, the bullet must’ve ricocheted.”

  “Like they do off of them boulders in the cowboy pictures.” Dutcher smiles pleasantly, but when Clark makes no complementary expression, no expression at all, he says, “I guess that’s what must’ve happened. You got any ideas, though, what it might’ve ricocheted off?”

  “No,” says Clark with surprising vehemence, as though he’d been challenged. “None.”

  “Well, that’s our job to find out, not yours.”

  They both sit there silently.

  The front door opens, and three men dressed in suits and hats, all of them looking freshly shaved at half past eleven at night, file in. Dutcher groans. “Oh lord, my federal betters have arrived.” He laughs and stands up. “I think it’s time we cut you loose, Clark.” He waits a moment, even seems to measure it out, then says, “Clark? You’re a brave boy. You did good over there.”

  “I didn’t do anything but see a man get himself killed!”

  The sheriff looks down at him and nods. Then puts out his hand. Clark shakes it. Dutcher’s attention cuts suddenly to Clark’s other hand, still bouncing lightly on his thigh, still in a fist. And Clark is certain he’s going to say open it. But no, all he says is, “Cuff link or shirt button?”

  “What?”

  Laughing, Dutcher says, “Let me get you that ride home.”

  “I have my truck. Sir.”

  “All right, then. Hope you get around to seeing that wolfman movie one of these days.”

  After he leaves the police station, Clark avoids going past the Jewel Theater by cutting down an alley behind the newspaper office and a mercantile store and clambering over a fence that lands him on a wheel-rutted sandy lane that curves away toward the tow mill. He follows that for a while, kicking sulkily at pop bottles and wadded cigarette packages, then veers off diagonally through an overgrown lot where the livery barn used to sit till it burned.

  It is half past eleven and a light rain patters down, but at least the wind has quit so he can breathe without tasting dirt—topsoil—that’s been carried east hundreds of miles from those same farms, probably, that he saw earlier tonight in the newsreel. Which he wouldn’t have if they’d only showed the stupid Mickey Mouse cartoon when they were supposed to! And that’s not all he wouldn’t have seen.

  But since it’s a sad fool’s pastime—as his dad is forever pointing out—to compile a list of why-nots and if-onlys, Clark quits doing it, but right away finds himself doing the next worst thing, so far as his mood is concerned: toting up lies he told Sheriff Dutcher, starting with his pretense of having no idea, none, how he had gotten that small welt on his forehead, ending with the fiction that he drove himself to town and could drive himself home again. He didn’t take the family truck. He walked. Well, ran. It’s only seven miles. Ten minutes. Okay, eight. Seven or eight. It’s not like he ever clocked himself.

  He jumps anoth
er fence and begins to jog, running through vacant stony lots, putting on speed. A little more …

  Nearing the perimeter of the Kent farm, he slows from a blur to a sprint to a dogtrot. His heartbeat is unhurried, his breathing as measured as a yogi’s. His legs and calves feel springy. This year, and really for the first time, Clark has begun taking pleasure in his muscles and the ways that his body performs, in his changing relationship to the solid world and the so-called rules of gravity and physics. He’s getting stronger by the week. And faster. Clearly faster. He’s never had a scab. And he is pretty sure he never will.

  Bouncing his left fist against the side of his leg, he walks the rest of the way home.

  3

  With his shoes off but dressed otherwise, Clark Kent’s father is stretched out above the counterpane on his side of the bed, heavily asleep. Under the covers beside him, Mrs. Kent looks up from her poem book—the Sara Teasdale collection Clark gave her last Mother’s Day. In the doorway, Clark pantomimes that he’s going to bed, mouths Good night, Mom, I love you. But she squints in feigned rebuke and beckons him over. When he draws up a chair and sits down, she whispers, “Did you have a good time?”

  Clark shrugs.

  “You didn’t like the picture?”

  “It was okay, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “Clark?”

  “I’m fine, Mom, just tired.” He slides the book from her hands, lays the green silk ribbon diagonally across her page. “And you should be asleep yourself.” In the weak glow from the gasoline Aladdin lamp, her illness is not so evident as it is in the light of day. Even so, there is no mistaking her condition, how near she is to the end. She weighs scarcely eighty pounds. Six months ago, she weighed twice that.

  Clark puts the book on the table, in among brown-glass medicine bottles and a framed family photograph, the smiling Kents posed stiffly outside in front of the gabled house. It was early summer and Clark was seven, and down at the right-hand edge of the picture, you can glimpse just a bit of the county road that passed by the property. His dad used to tease Clark when he was small, saying they’d found him in that very road, the baby that must’ve fallen off a wagon. Naturally, we didn’t want you, he’d say, so we took you to the orphan asylum. But you were such a noisy fussbudget, they made us take you back. Oh, Jonathan, that’s enough. I’m only kidding, Martha, the boy knows that—don’t you, Clark?