It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  “John.”

  “And he’s a really good photographer, John. It’s not like I’m asking you to give a job to someone who’s not qualified.”

  “Of course not. Lois, are you lying to me?”

  “I swear, no.” She tries to laugh, but it sounds breathy.

  “You came all the way down to Washington just to ask me to find some work for this old schoolmate of yours. You could have phoned.”

  “Well. I thought it would be nice to see you again.”

  He sits back in his chair. “Well, it’s nice to see you, too.”

  “So can you do this?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “I remembered that night you were joking with me, remember? And you said you could send my boyfriend to North Dakota? So I thought …”

  “Uh-huh. Whatever happened to your boyfriend, by the way? Wasn’t he a photographer, too?”

  “No, he wasn’t. I wonder where you got that idea.”

  “I must’ve mixed you up with some other beautiful ex-student of mine. Though how I could’ve done that …”

  Lois says, “Would you excuse me for just a minute, Professor?”

  “No.”

  She looks startled.

  “Not till you call me John.”

  With a weak smile she rises to her feet. “I’ll be right back.”

  Her legs are rubbery as she crosses the floor of the hotel bar. Everything here is mahogany or brass, the banquettes are sumptuous leather, the tablecloths starched linen, the people middle-aged, successful-looking, assured of themselves, and Lois feels thoroughly, hideously conspicuous. Like the brainy wallflower she’d been at her first boy-girl dance.

  The bartender nods to her politely as she goes out into the lobby.

  A bellboy walks by with a straining Pekinese on a leash.

  Lois spots the powder room door.

  On her way there, she passes a sign framed under glass and propped on a painter’s easel standing outside the entrance to the hotel’s Café George Washington. The sign is pink, the size of a theatrical three-sheeter, and the lettering is in flamboyant script glued thickly with silver and red glitter. APPEARING NOW: HARRY SELTZER’S CARBONATED RHYTHM ORCHESTRA. FEATURING SIGNE GREENE ON VOCALS. COMING IN SEPTEMBER: LEO REISMAN … LITTLE JACK LITTLE … DOLLY DAWN!

  Lois goes into the powder room, finds a stall, sits down, and closes her eyes. She lets her shoulders sag. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  This is so ridiculous! She’s a grown woman—well, nineteen—on a desperate mission, and she’s behaving like some nervous Nellie, some kid.

  Lois told Willi Berg she knew how to get him away from New York, far away, where he could be safe till they found some way out of the mess he’s gotten himself in.

  She didn’t promise Willi anything, but she owes him her best shot.

  She does? Oh, does she? Why does she owe him anything?

  Breathe in …

  Breathe out …

  Reentering the cocktail room, Lois sees John Gurney’s head snap up, which causes her knees to become gelatin-like. Instead of returning immediately to the table, she veers to her left, excusing herself as she squeezes between the backs of two occupied chairs at two different tables, and sits down at the long polished bar. The young barman appears with a clean rag and a fresh coaster. He is perhaps five years older than Lois, thickening around his middle, dressed in a vested white shirt and black trousers. She asks him if by some chance he has a cigarette she can borrow.

  “You going to pay it back?” He smiles, already fishing into his vest pocket.

  “Very next chance I get.” He smokes Raleighs, and after Lois selects one he snaps open a flat gold lighter. “Thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome. Get you anything else?”

  Lois turns and holds up a hand, twiddling her fingers at John Gurney: be right there. “Let me ask you a question, do you mind?”

  “Is it personal?” says the barman.

  “I guess you could say it was. I’m sorry, forget it.”

  “No. No, go ahead.”

  “Okay. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  Going playfully big-eyed, he leans back and grins.

  “That’s not really the question,” says Lois. “That’s just the start of the question.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m not trying to pick you up.”

  “Ach, I knew those things only happened in books.”

  “So, do you?”

  “Yes. Say, why didn’t you ask me first if I was married?”

  “No ring.”

  “Sure. Right.”

  “I’m an eagle-eyed reporter.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes,” she says. Then: “Okay, though, here’s my real question. If your girlfriend got in really big trouble, and I mean really big, would you do anything you could to save her? That’s stupid. Let’s forget I ever said anything.” She tamps out her cigarette. “I should go.”

  “Hold on, let me answer. What do you mean by ‘anything’ I could do to save her? Including … kill somebody?”

  “No. Everything up to that.”

  “You mean things that could get me into trouble.”

  “Yeah, or that you’d be ashamed of if anybody found out later.”

  “Okay. I got it. And no. For this girlfriend I got now, probably not. But we haven’t been seeing each other that long. But for my last one, the one that got away? Oh definitely, I’d’ve done anything. Including kill somebody.”

  They laugh together, Lois nodding, nodding.

  “Thank you. Thanks a lot,” she says sliding off the bar chair.

  “How about you? Would you do anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bet you would. My name’s Lenny, by the way.” He puts out his hand. “Lenny Boring. But I’m really not.”

  “Lois.” No last name.

  “Nice to meet you, Lois.” Lenny winks, then notices that a solitary drinker at the far end of the bar is gesturing for his attention. “Hope to see you in here again sometime.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” she says. “Bye, Lenny.”

  The perfect gentleman, John Gurney stands up as Lois returns to their table. But he’s glowering.

  Breathe in, she thinks, taking a breath. Breathe out …

  “I thought you were ditching me for the bartender,” Gurney says once she takes her seat. Then he sits.

  “I was just asking him for directions.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back to the highway.”

  “You drove down here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone.”

  He picks up his glass—it is nearly full and the ice cubes are large, so that’s another one, a fresh one; his third? “Why do I feel that nothing is quite kosher about all of this? Can you tell me?”

  Lois chooses to ignore that by asking a question of her own. “Can you help out my friend?”

  “You want me to find a job for this old chum of yours who’s got himself into a fix at home and needs to get away. That’s it in a nutshell?”

  “He’s a good photographer.”

  Gurney smiles. “Okay. All right. Cards on the table. For a dear friend … a dear friend, mind you, not a former student … for a dear friend like you, yes, I might be able to find something. Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “ ‘Oh’? And what does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Should I be?”

  “You haven’t touched your drink.”

  “And I don’t intend to. Regardless of what happens.”

  His face is suddenly harsh. “I probably should run.”

  “I’m sorry—does your wife have dinner waiting?”

  Gurney seems amazed, expressions of annoyance and amusement clashing on his face. Amusement stays. “You’re quite a different person from the smart little girly I used to know.”
He removes a long billfold from inside his jacket and lays a ten on the tablecloth beside his glass. “I really have to run. It was good seeing you.”

  She nods, feeling on the verge of tears, on the verge of apologizing, of begging. Obliging.

  Breathe in …

  As he stands up, Gurney hands her a small white embossed card. “Tell your friend to call this gentleman here. But give me time to write a short memo first.”

  “Are you serious? John, I don’t know what to say …”

  He touches her fondly on the cheek, sighs, and moves off, lurching once but then catching himself and squaring his shoulders.

  “Lois?”

  She turns on her chair.

  “I’ll need your friend’s name.”

  “What?” Her entire body from the crown of her head down to her insteps turns cold.

  “His name. What’s your friend’s name?”

  She opens her mouth.

  “William.”

  “William … what?”

  “Boring,” says Lois. “William Boring.”

  4

  Clark knocks. You don’t just barge in on people. “Miss Colman?” Opening the front door about a foot, he calls her again. Finally he goes inside. Keeps calling but gets no reply. He thinks he might find Miss Colman still on the telephone, so he tiptoes into the high Victorian front parlor.

  The room makes Clark feel claustrophobic. It contains two brocaded divans, a half dozen overstuffed chairs, intricately carved side tables, a piecrust table, a threadbare Persian rug, an embroidered fire screen, and a green-and-white-tiled fireplace mantel with porcelain figurines ranged along the top. An electrified chandelier descends from a medallion in the ceiling. And by the window there is a moth-eaten stuffed owl on its own pedestal. Through that window, closed and hung with sheer curtains that need laundering, you can see the Poore mansion. “Miss Colman? Miss Colman?” No Miss Colman.

  He finds her at last in the kitchen, filling a glass from a brown bottle whose label is bordered with mysterious pictographs.

  At first, she looks over at him, then sets down the bottle and drains her glass. For half a minute she winces and blinks. “Is that insolent monster still in my tree?”

  “No, ma’am, he’s gone. Did you call his father?”

  “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.

  X

  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 photographe
r 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.