It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  Clark won’t look at him.

  At eight minutes past eight Clark opens his left fist and stuffs the crumpled wanted poster into his back pocket behind his reporter’s notebook.

  XI

  A DeSoto woodie. In the heart abides the truth.

  Curly Ike tries to make a telephone call.

  Collision course.

  ●

  1

  “So they let you go, did they?”

  “Finally.”

  “Where’re your friends?”

  “Who?”

  “Those other men in the cell?”

  “Oh. They’re just guys I work with. They took the car and went home. But I thought I’d stick around, might be some good picture taking later. If anything happens.”

  Clark hasn’t bothered looking up from his typewriter since Willi Boring walked into the newspaper office two minutes ago and found him at his desk. Now he asks, “What are you doing here?”

  “Thought I might go buy a hamburger sandwich. Split it with you?”

  “No place you can buy a burger this time of night. Not in a dinky little hick town like this.”

  “What’s the matter, you mad or something?”

  “We’re putting out a special edition. So if you don’t mind … ?”

  Across the room Newell Timmins has stopped reading proofs and is looking this way.

  Willi says, “Okay, I just thought …”

  “So long, take care, sayonara.”

  “Hey, what’s with the cold shoulder?”

  Clark reaches and picks up his notebook, holds it in front of his face, and scowls at his miserable scrawl. A dozen years of doing Palmer exercises, all of those margin-to-margin loops, swirls, zigzags, and ellipses, and he still can’t read his own stupid handwriting half an hour after he wrote it. A ’31 or ’32 Dodge what? Dodge? Willi grabs the notebook from his hand, leans down close, and whispers in his ear, “What happened to that wanted poster?”

  Clark snatches back his notebook, plonks it down beside him. “What are you talking about?” He drops his left pinky on the A key, lets his other fingers automatically find their proper places along the keyboard, then types, “Police are searching for a 1931 or 1932 Dodge woody they belie—” But he breaks off to say, “You wanted to get out of jail, you got out of jail. So now don’t you think you should get out of town?”

  “You took it. Didn’t you?”

  “Took what?”

  “Hey! Clark, how’s it coming over there, son? I’ll need your copy in twenty minutes.”

  “You’ll have it, Mr. Timmins.” He turns to Willi. “You’d better leave.”

  “How’d you take it down?”

  “I just did.”

  “Why?”

  Clark shrugs: he doesn’t know.

  Willi leans over again, whispers, “I didn’t do any of that stuff, Clark.”

  “So how come you’re on a wanted poster?”

  “Clark! We have a paper to get out. I’m going to have to ask your friend to leave.”

  “Clark’s friend is leaving right now,” says Willi, speaking to Newell Timmins while looking at Clark. But now he looks past him at the copy paper rolled in the big Underwood typewriter and his eyes widen. “You sure it’s a Dodge woodie? Not a DeSoto?”

  For a moment Clark’s brain goes blank—what? He grabs up his notepad, squints at his chicken scratch, and Willi says, “By the way? You spelled woodie wrong.”

  2

  Ten minutes later.

  “So you’re just going to walk in there and tell them where to find that car? Then what? Just wait for them to come back and tell you what happened?”

  “I expect I’ll go with them.”

  “You expect that, do you? Think they’ll invite you along? Oh, and here’s a gun for you, Clark, just in case?”

  They are sitting in the cab of Clark’s truck, parked within sight of the police station. It is half past ten, street lamps are on, and a few people are still hanging around outside.

  “I’m wasting time, Willi.” Clark opens his door. “There’s a little boy’s been kidnapped.”

  “I know that. Just thought you might want to be a real honest-to-God reporter, that’s all.”

  “You’re a pain in the ass.”

  “Newsman worth his salt, he’d just phone in what he knows, then make for damn sure he was at that filling station with a front-row seat when the cops come charging up.”

  Clark slams the door behind him. “If you’re not coming in with me I’ll see you later.” He checks for traffic before starting across Central Street on a diagonal.

  “Clark!” Willi leans across the seat. “You can’t say how you found out.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Clark!”

  “What?”

  “I may be a pain in the ass but I never killed anybody.”

  Clark gives him a slight and placid nod but knows now—from Willi’s unchanging heart rhythm, its steady beat—that it’s true: Willi Boring … Berg … never killed anybody.

  And is that ever a big relief!

  He likes this smart aleck, a lot, although why he does …

  He digs out the crumpled wanted poster from his back pocket and lobs it underhand through the truck window. “I’d eat that,” he says, “if I were you.”

  Crossing the street, Clark tells Merle Laster, still manning the front door, that he has to see Chief Parker, it’s important. Really, really important. But the chief isn’t there, he’s still over at the Smallville Bank waiting on a telephone call. “Merle, listen up,” he says, but then, spotting Sheriff Dutcher on the telephone, he races past the deputy and halfway across the station house.

  Dutcher’s conversation abruptly ends when a spot along the telephone cord smokes suddenly and out pops a little flame.

  Clark just hates doing that thing with his eyes, it makes them feel so gummy.

  But this is an emergency.

  It is exactly ten minutes before eleven when Sheriff Dutcher jumps into his county car, giving Clark firm, clear instructions to run right back and tell Merle Laster what he has just told him about that filling station in Parris, the one near that little bridge over the Sin River.

  “But can’t I come with you?”

  “Clark—do as I say, boy.”

  It is not until the sheriff’s car has peeled off, spraying gravel behind, that Clark looks across the street and discovers that his father’s truck, and Willi Berg, are gone too.

  3

  A short-barrel defensive revolver is lying on the car seat next to Curly Ike, and he swears to God if he can’t find a telephone booth in the next ten minutes, the next five minutes, he is going to pick it up and shoot himself. See if he doesn’t.

  Flecked with bits of gravel, the palms of his hands sting like blue blazes, and his right shoulder where that bank guard in West Plains shot him last December is throbbing again—all thanks to a nasty spill taken earlier tonight from a chain-link fence. And his stomach feels like it’s full of cancer and broken glass. I shoulda stuck to banks.

  Since eight-thirty, Curly Ike has been prowling the countryside and one dark hick town after another in the gang’s big DeSoto. He expected to be gone no longer than an hour—he could trust Milt and Claude to watch the kid for that long, hoped he could, but here it is after ten! What kind of kidnapper can’t find a public telephone?

  In the late afternoon, Curly Ike had driven from Parris to Ozeana, seventeen miles, and used the phone in a drugstore there to call Donny Poore’s father at the Smallville Bank. (Oh sweet Jesus, it’s Saturday! He won’t be there! He was there.) The call took scarcely half a minute (we have your son, we’ll be in touch, don’t contact the police). After he hung up, his nickel dropped—providentially, Ike thought—back into the coin return. He scooped it up and put it in his shirt pocket, then used it again an hour later when he called F. H. Poore the second time, from a phone booth just inside the main gates of a cement factory in Wisdom. Your boy is fine—so far.
You want him back, it’ll cost you twenty-five grand, in fives, tens, and twenties. Old bills. No cops. No feds. No funny business. We’ll be in touch again tonight. Nine sharp. Have the money ready and a car gassed up to go. You’re driving, Dad. And no riders. Click.

  That time Curly Ike was on the wire for nearly a minute. Longer than he’d liked. And the damn phone kept his lucky nickel.

  Still, everything was hitting on all six.

  Kidnapping wasn’t so bad after all. He was beginning to see its beauty.

  Returning to the service station in Parris shortly after five with a few groceries (Lorna Doones, Goo Goo Clusters, Pepsi-Cola, and 7-Up), Curly Ike checked on the boy. Down in a mechanic’s grease pit, he was still gagged and trussed up and struggling like some wild animal. Claude and Milt were antsy, edgy, eager to get this all over with, pocket their heavy sugar and move on. So was Curly Ike. Canada, he kept thinking. By Tuesday. They sat around eating cookies and candy and drinking soda pop till it was time for Curly Ike to go back out and make his third and last telephone call.

  That’s when things got all balled up.

  He was almost to Ozeana when he realized he’d forgotten to take along the sheet of paper with the drop-off instructions. And he’d spent half the day yesterday motoring around the county, meticulously jotting down left-hand turns and right-hand turns, making sure that country road numbers were correct, checking the odometer, citing landmarks (“… nine-tenths of a mile past the Fisk Tires sign, you’ll come to the Green Bottle tourist court …”), and then what happens! He forgets the damn piece of paper! It was too late to turn around and go back, so Ike decided to dispense with the winding route he’d so cleverly mapped out for F. H. Poore and just tell the banker his final destination: Pampa Lake Reservoir. On the phone he’d just say drive to the Pampa Lake Reservoir and throw the bag over the fence at the gate nearest the pump house, then turn around and get back into your car and go home.

  Originally, the idea was to predetermine Poore’s route so that Ike and Milt and Claude could intercept him on the way, thereby removing any possibility the cops or the feds might get to the reservoir first and set a trap. But what the hell. Life was full of risks, no matter what you did.

  Damn, though!

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, when Ike got to the Rexall drugstore in Ozeana, it was closed for the night—he hadn’t thought about that! He stood at the front door shaking the knob, peering inside. Twenty paces to the pay phone, but it might just as well be on the moon! It was full dark by then, and Curly Ike didn’t see anyone on the street (the café directly opposite was also closed), so he balled a fist and gave a short chop to the glass. Even before he could reach inside to unlock the door, an alarm clanged. At first, Ike was stunned immobile. A burglar alarm—here? Who could afford a burglar alarm in a pissant place like this?

  Back in the DeSoto and leaving town, he heard a police siren and cut the wheel sharply, turning into what he expected would be an alley that passed straight across to a parallel street. Turned out, it ended twenty yards ahead at a broad-plank fence. Stupid, stupid, stupid! And if those cops had seen him hang that left it would be all over now for Ike Kelting and his criminal career. But they hadn’t—their car shot past the mouth of the alley and kept going.

  Ike’s stomach was clenching and spasming by the time he backed out the DeSoto and headed for Wisdom, ten, twelve miles cross-country.

  By the time he arrived at the cement factory it was five minutes past nine and already the caper was off schedule: he’d told Poore he would call at nine sharp.

  The cement factory was also closed, the fence gate wrapped with a chain secured by a padlock, but at least the telephone booth was outside. And if Curly Ike couldn’t climb a ten-foot fence—him, a guy who’d ridden steers for fun and clambered up and down oil rigs—then he should just pack it in. But he failed to remember his bad arm, and by the time he was halfway to the top, he was gritting his teeth, wincing in agony.

  Then came the watchdogs, a pack of mastiffs, running from around behind the factory, barking explosively, their legs kicking up puffs of the white cement powder that covered the ground. They leapt, hitting and bouncing off the chain link, working themselves into a murderous frothing rage. Ike hung on, but then one of the animals jumped high enough to snap at the toe of his shoe as it poked through one of the diamond chinks. Instinct hurled him away, and he landed hard on his coccyx, scraping his palms raw.

  On the other side of the fence, the dogs continued to hit and bounce, hit and bounce.

  He thought about shooting them, every single one of them, but finally just limped back to his car, threw himself in, and drove off.

  All he needed was a stupid public phone! That’s all! Why was this happening to him?

  It was twenty-five past nine when Curly Ike got to Somerset, due east of Temple and a place he’d never been before. He drove slowly around, looking for a pay phone. At the end of the shuttered business district, he spotted a lighted booth next to a stucco building occupied by a motor company selling Ford and Hudson-Essex cars. At the moment, the booth was enveloped by a group of high-school-aged boys horsing around while one of their friends talked on the phone. Ike parked at the curb and waited. They all noticed him, of course. He looked at his wristwatch. Nine-thirty-five. Nine-forty. He glared at the boy in overalls who was still inside the booth, still jabbering on the telephone. Ike decided to drive around and come back. How long could they stay? But if they were still there when he returned, he’d chase them. Even brandish his gun if he had to!

  Soon he found himself driving through residential neighborhoods, completely lost. He kept passing the same boxy little houses, or perhaps they all just looked the same. When he finally got back “downtown” and to the motor company, another half an hour had passed. But at least the kids were gone! He dug out a nickel and trotted to the phone booth, pulled open the bifold door—then froze. Not only had those damn delinquents pried open the money slot and looted the phone, they’d torn the earpiece off the box! There it was, down on the floor. He picked it up, held it like a club, and whacked the horizontal coin shelf till it was vertical.

  In the town of Reedville, four miles from Somerset, he found another booth, only to have it take his nickel, sound a gong, and go dead.

  That’s when Curly Ike gave himself five more minutes, five minutes and not a second more.

  Either he finds another phone, one that works, in five damn minutes or he is going to blow off his own head.

  He has turned the car around and is heading back in the direction of Tabor Lodge, Parris, Tillerton, and Smallville, driving on a two-lane concrete road past fields bristling with cornstalks. Clouds move away from the moon and—providentially, Ike thinks—silver a telephone pole about twenty yards ahead on the left. Now it dawns on him: why does it have to be a public telephone? Easing his foot off the gas, Ike lets the DeSoto come slowly to a stop. After setting the hand brake he climbs out.

  With his eyes, he follows the telephone wire from the pole to a farmhouse with lighted windows up a curving dirt access road. A single RFD mailbox sits atop a short pole, the only such mailbox in either direction as far as Ike can see.

  There is also a little wooden sign shaped like a parchment scroll that says in fancy script: “Clara’s Creations.”

  Ike drives up to the house.

  In the yard is a weird hodgepodge of functional pottery—bowls, cups, vases, and plates set out on planks straddling sawhorses—and dozens of three-and four-foot-high ceramic sculptures carelessly glazed. Dutch windmills. Log cabins. A fairy-tale castle. Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp. Felix the Cat on a Grecian pedestal. Will Rogers swinging a lariat. Underneath a lean-to at the far side of the front porch stands a potter’s kick wheel. Beyond that, a kiln.

  Curly Ike sits in the DeSoto, mesmerized. That Will Rogers is pretty good. Chaps and all. And he especially likes how the lariat is frozen midair in a big loop. Look at that! He can’t imagine how you’d make such a thing.

/>   A white-haired and bearded man, bearded like Santa Claus, comes out of the house and stands at the top of the steps with his hands in his dungaree pockets. Ike gets out of the car.

  “Why don’t you come back tomorrow when you can see better?” says the old man.

  See better? Ike doesn’t know what the guy’s talking about. “I see fine.”

  “I thought you were here to take a look at my wife’s pottery.”

  “Nah. I need to use your phone.”

  The old man removes his hands from his pockets. “You got some kind of emergency?”

  “Could say that, yeah.” Ike sticks his arm straight out so that Santa Claus can see the gun.

  The old man takes a few steps back from the edge of the porch. Ike comes rapidly up the steps. “Just show me where your phone is, grampy. And don’t tell me you don’t got one. I seen the wire.”

  “We got one, we got one.” He raises his hands like outlaws do in Harry Carey oaters. “It’s right in the parlor.”

  “Show me.”

  The telephone rests in a semicircular niche built into the wall, and Ike is surprised to find that it is one of those new-style models he’s seen only in Kansas City—a sleek and chunky metal body with a Bakelite receiver. It comes with a side crank and a rotary dial. Finally, some luck! He doesn’t have to go through Central. He can dial the bank himself.

  “Stand over there, where I can keep an eye on you,” says Ike. After he points to the upright piano and the old man does as he’s told, Ike sets his revolver down on the shelf next to the telephone.

  He’s memorized F. H. Poore’s number. Which is another lucky thing, since the number was written on the same piece of paper he left behind in Parris.

  But as soon as he lifts the receiver, Ike can hear voices on the wire, one saying, “… laugh to split a gut,” and the other saying back, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh, that Sapphire’s some battle-ax, uh-huh!”

  “Ladies,” says Curly Ike, “get off the line.”

  “Who’s that? Who’s talkin’? Where’s your manners?”

  “Why should we?”