It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  “Ladies, please, this is an emergency.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the police, that’s who,” says Ike. “And if you don’t want me taking down your names …”

  There are two clicks on the party line.

  As he is dialing at last, something, maybe God, causes him to glance over at the old man in time to see his eyes widen. Dropping the phone, Ike grabs up his gun, spins around, and she is almost on him—a gaunt gray-haired woman moving swiftly, both arms up, elbows bent and jutting, a footed urn that must weigh twenty pounds raised above her head.

  She lets it fly the same instant he shoots her in the cheek.

  The urn misses Ike, explodes against the papered wall. The woman staggers but doesn’t go down. She whips her head from side to side as if to clear it, then spits out blood, bits of teeth, a piece of her tongue, and the bullet. The sight of that fills Ike with such bright terror that his trigger finger instinctively flexes two, three, four more times. Her eye, her throat, her breast, her arm. Blue smoke churns in the parlor, especially above the lampshades. Ike is breathing hard. Then his feet lift off the floor and he’s choking.

  The old man’s arm, wrapped around Ike’s throat, squeezes his windpipe so tightly that his eyes pop. The air in front of him wriggles with sizzling threads of black and magenta.

  Like he’s trying to find a stud in a wall, Ike reaches behind him and pokes with the gun barrel till he’s sure it’s pressed up against the old man’s side in between ribs. Then he pulls the trigger.

  Nothing happens.

  Ike is about to lose consciousness.

  If the gun is empty he’s finished.

  But if it was a misfire, which isn’t out of the question, the revolver being a piece of junk made in France by frogs …

  The gun goes off, the flash bright, its report muffled. The old man shudders. His forearm drops away from Ike’s throat as he topples backward over a piecrust table.

  Collapsing onto the piano bench, Ike draws a long breath and exhales.

  Would you just look at this mess!

  Returning to the telephone, he picks up the receiver, jabs his index finger toward the rotary dial—and for the life of him can no longer remember the bank’s exchange. He’s just too rattled. So he uses the side crank to call Central, who asks, “Number, please?” and Ike says he doesn’t know the number but he wants the Smallville Bank.

  “I can’t understand you, sir. Could you repeat that?”

  The Smallville Bank, dammit, the Smallville Bank!

  “Sir, I’m very sorry but I still can’t understand you.”

  Of course she can’t: words are not coming out of Curly Ike’s mouth, croaks are.

  That old bastard damaged his larynx!

  The Smallville Bank. The Smallville Bank! The Smallville Bank!

  Central disconnects.

  Slumping against the wall, Ike tips his head back and gazes at the ceiling.

  Somewhere a clock chimes and he counts along: eleven.

  Out on the porch he leans over, places both hands flat on his thighs, and takes another deep breath. Another. By the time he straightens up he is sure of two things: that he isn’t going to get any part of twenty-five thousand dollars or ever make it to Canada.

  Beyond that he isn’t sure of anything.

  No. No, he is, he is sure of three things.

  He is sure that he has to have that ceramic Will Rogers, has to, it’s just too good to leave behind.

  So he hefts it off the grass, lugs it to the woodie, and loads it in, setting it right down on the front seat beside him.

  Nosing the big car down the dirt road, Curly Ike turns right on the two-lane and heads back to Parris …

  He wonders if Milt and Claude will shoot him.

  But how could they shoot him? He’s the boss. You can’t shoot the boss.

  They might.

  The drive back from the potter’s house to the failed Perfection Gasoline station seems to take no time whatsoever. When Curly Ike sees the sign announcing the Parris town limits he flinches as if surfacing from a dream, the kind that’s instantly and utterly gone. It spooks him for a second. He could have had an accident. But then looking over at Will Rogers propped on the seat, Ike laughs, feeling a bubble of joy burst in his chest. That is some beautiful piece of art, that is.

  But remembering he shot the woman who made it, shot her not just once but five times, his joy all but vanishes. She was going to brain me, what else could I do? Still. He’s not just an outlaw, he thinks, he’s not just a bad man, he’s a bad man. But how did that happen? Look at old Will Rogers there. Did you ever see such tears when the poor guy died? Everybody loved him. I loved him. But you know something? I could’ve been him! I could’ve. Me and him both were Oklahoma born, born the very same year, 1879. Both of us worked the longhorns, threw the lariat. But he turns out the hero and I turn out the bad man. Why do things happen like they do? How does it work? It’s like—it’s like that Bible story, it’s like Moses. No, listen. His old lady puts him in a basket, sends him floating down the Nile River, and then what? The Pharaoh’s daughter finds him in some reeds, plucks him out, and takes him home. Look what I found, Daddy! Great for Moses. Good for him. But what’d he do to deserve it? Another mother just as nice could’ve put her little baby boy in the same kind of basket, exact same day, gave it a little shove, let it drift, and twenty minutes later, what, he’s crocodile food. It doesn’t make sense. How can it? When it’s all just a matter of who does or who doesn’t find the little damn baby in the basket. I don’t feel like a bad man. I don’t. I don’t feel like a bad man at all.

  He slows down to cross the bridge over the Sin River, but even so every thumped plank sends vibrations pulsing up through his feet, his legs, his groin.

  Curly Ike is so preoccupied thinking his thoughts that he’s rolling into the filling station, coasting to a stop, before he realizes that the rollaway door is missing from the service bay—no, not missing: torn off and lying crumpled on the ground beyond the pump island.

  And there’s a big gaping hole in the tiled wall between the service bay and the office.

  The office window is shattered, glass strewn everywhere and—

  A red-haired kid is pointing a box camera at Ike’s car and—

  And—

  A craggy-faced man with a sheriff’s star pinned to his jacket is cradling a limp and bloody-faced Donny Poore in both of his arms.

  Ike shifts down, steps on the gas, and the woodie lurches forward and—

  From somewhere—left side? right side? above?—a dark-haired slender boy, white shirt and gray trousers torn and filthy, thrusts himself in between the sheriff and the plunging DeSoto.

  He sticks out his arms and splays his fingers and—

  In the last moment before the car’s teardrop-shaped front end crumples, the big straight-eight engine calves up through the hood, and Curly Ike (along with the Will Rogers statue) catapults through the windshield, he sees (and it will be the last thing Curly Ike ever sees) the expression in the boy’s wide-open blue eyes.

  It isn’t, as Ike would expect, a look of terror. It’s one of crushed and absolute hopelessness, the blackest of black despairs.

  XII

  Gene Autry at the Jewel. Sheriff Dutcher again.

  An expression of gratitude. Serious conversations in the

  barn. Samson, Goliath, and Paul Bunyan. Goodbye to

  Smallville.

  ●

  1

  Every Saturday, beginning at eleven in the morning and concluding around three-thirty, four o’clock in the afternoon, Smallville’s Jewel Theater presents a full-blown kiddie matinee: two B-pictures, a dozen cartoons, various short subjects, and a sixteen-minute installment of a Republic or Mascot chapter-play, all for a dime.

  Today the features are Mystery of the Wax Museum and Island of Lost Souls, both of which Clark has seen before. But that’s all right. He’s not here for the pictures. It doesn’t bother him the soundtrack i
s gargly, the focus blurred, and the projection misaligned, nor is he fazed by the candy boxes bleating like cornets, the fleets of paper airplanes crashing into the screen, the boys firing peashooters and the girls getting up in packs to change their seats fifty times. Clark has come here to think, and when he wants to, when he concentrates, he can block everything out.

  He knows he shouldn’t be here, though, not at a kiddie show, he’s too old, too tall. But where should he be? That’s one of the things he needs to think about. Where should he be? And what next? What comes next? That’s what he ought to be thinking about. But all throughout the Bosko and Farmer Al Falfa cartoons, the coming attractions, the first short subject (magic you can do at home with a milk bottle, a sewing needle, and a hard-boiled egg), the Popeye cartoons, and the inevitable Mickey Mouse (Mickey’s Man Friday), the only thing that Clark does think about, can think about, is the fixed stare in Donny Poore’s eyes. The fixed stare in Donny Poore’s dead eyes. The blood on his face and his crumpled-in skull. A week ago tonight.

  How could that have happened?

  Gene Autry, Radio’s Singing Cowboy, in The Phantom Empire.

  How could somebody just pick up a wrench and do that?

  Chapter 3: “The Lightning Chamber.”

  As the recap legend quivers beneath a fake-looking futuristic city (“Murania, located thousands of feet under the earth, is rich in radium deposits …”), Clark puts his fingertips to his temples, pressing hard. His eyes seem to burn.

  Five days ago, for the first time in his life, he vomited.

  Three days ago he discovered what a migraine feels like.

  On the movie screen, riders dressed like Roman legionnaires gallop across an American prairie, dodging tear-gas bombs dropped from an airplane. A rider topples from his horse and rolls. It’s Gene Autry, but he’s okay. Smiley Burnett comes along playing his harmonica. Meanwhile, down in her subterranean kingdom, Queen Tika orders an execution. Square-headed robots clank lugubriously around her. Back on the surface Gene’s young friends Betty and Frankie Baxter climb through an open window, searching for evidence that Professor Beetson killed their father. And there it is! A rifle hidden underneath Beetson’s mattress!

  But Betty and Frankie’s father wasn’t really murdered, it’s just a story, a dumb movie serial, and Donny Poore was buried Tuesday morning following a funeral Clark was still too heartsick and troubled to attend.

  He sits blank-faced through Robert Benchley’s How to Sleep, a comedy short he must have seen half a dozen times, then through the first reel of Island of Lost Souls. By now, his eyes throb like hearts, and the din around him has grown so loud and exclamatory it’s almost painful. It is painful: that’s never happened before. Enough, he thinks. This isn’t working. Nothing is.

  Clark gets up and leaves, with Good & Plentys, jawbreakers, and peanut shells raining down on his head and shoulders from the balcony as he trudges up the aisle to the exit.

  After zipping his jacket up (the weather broke on Monday and it’s been cold ever since), he extracts his cloth cap from a vent pocket, unwads it, and puts it on. He is tugging the brim low on his forehead when Sheriff Dutcher comes out of the auditorium behind him. He steps up alongside of Clark and touches him gently, almost gravely, in the small of his back. “Your dad told me where I might find you. But I wasn’t expecting you to leave for three more hours.”

  “You were going to wait for me?”

  “Well, you paid your dime, I didn’t think it’d be polite to interrupt your entertainment.” He pushes open a door, then follows Clark out into the open air. “And I was enjoying the Charles Laughton picture.”

  “I don’t mean any disrespect, sir, but I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “So your dad tells me. Tells me you’ve been in the bushes all week. And I can’t say I blame you.” Dutcher shrugs. “But how about we go someplace and sit down?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Clark, I drove all the way here. And it’s not official business.”

  The nearest place to eat is in the next block, Freundlich’s, with an electric signboard, café curtains, and the menu white-painted directly on the front window. They sit at a table. Most of the others are unoccupied but at the lunch counter every high stool is taken. Saturday lunch crowd, farmers mostly. They all look over at Clark and the sheriff, to nod or smile slightly, and then—encountering an awkwardness they couldn’t explain—turn immediately back to their franks and kraut, their hash, their oxtail goulash, coffee, and pie. And like it’s suddenly broadcast over a loudspeaker, Clark hears a confidential whisper from twenty feet away: “I thought he got hit by a car.”

  “That your favorite kind of picture?” says Dutcher, clipping a cigar.

  “What?”

  “That horror stuff. First time we met, I recall you were going to see a werewolf picture.”

  “Yeah, I like that kind, I guess.”

  Dutcher lights the cigar. “How come you left early?”

  “I have a headache.”

  “Sorry to hear it.” Dutcher smiles at Mrs. Freundlich as she appears with two glasses of cloudy water and sets them down. She is a large round woman, wide-hipped, wearing an out-of-date NRA blue eagle pinned to her apron. She says hello to Clark and, obviously not recognizing the sheriff (he isn’t wearing his uniform or even his star), greets him as “mister.” She asks if they’re ready to order, offering the information that the veal chops are especially good today. “Tasty,” she says. Well then, veal chops it is for Sheriff Dutcher. Clark asks for a hamburger sandwich, no onions.

  “I probably should’ve got that myself,” says Dutcher after Mrs. Freundlich has gone.

  “You can have mine. I’m not hungry.” Clark takes a sip of water. Puts down the glass. Picks it up and takes another sip.

  The sheriff puffs on his cigar.

  When their food comes, Mrs. Freundlich serves Dutcher first. As she is sliding the second plate down in front of Clark, she says, “I hope the paper intends to do another story this year about the Arkalalah Halloween Festival. It’s coming up fast, you know, and I’m on the committee.”

  “Well, I hope so too, Mrs. Freundlich, but you’d have to ask Mr. Timmins about that.” He purses his lips, nodding to himself. “I don’t work for the paper anymore.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Clark, you always wrote such nice stories.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  She asks if there’s anything else either of them needs. When they tell her there isn’t, she returns to her stool behind the cash register at the end of the lunch counter.

  Dutcher tamps out his cigar coal. “Clark. Look at me, son.”

  “I got a bad headache, I should go.”

  “You know why I came here today?”

  Clark shakes his head, but tentatively.

  “I came here to thank you for my life,” says Dutcher slowly and quietly. “I came here to thank you, son, from the very bottom of my heart.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I think you did. And it was the bravest damn thing I ever saw.”

  “If he hadn’t cut his wheel when he did …”

  “Clark …”

  “And thank God there was no gasoline in those pumps.” Clark is speaking in a numb monotone. “That would’ve been. That would’ve been … bad.”

  “Son, that car hit those pumps after it hit you. I don’t care what you wrote in the paper. I was there.”

  “That guy turned his wheel …”

  “Now, why would he do that?”

  “Maybe because he wasn’t …”

  “What? Wasn’t what?”

  “All bad? Maybe at the last second he had, I don’t know, a change of heart.”

  Dutcher sits back. “That car hit you.”

  Clark picks up his sandwich but then puts it down. And mumbles something.

  “Excuse me? I didn’t catch what—”

  “I said you’re welcome. You said thank
you and I said you’re welcome.” Clark shrugs.

  For the next two, three minutes they sit there and look at their food.

  “We’re not going to eat any of this, are we?” Taking out his wallet, Dutcher extracts a dollar bill and lays it down beside his water glass. “Let’s go.”

  Everybody watches them leave.

  “Why don’t you let me drive you home?”

  “That’s okay, I got my dad’s truck.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Clark turns and looks at Dutcher.

  “I was at your house, remember? And there was your truck sitting out in front. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

  Dutcher’s car—and it’s the sheriff’s own machine, not the county’s: a 1932 cream and blue Pontiac 6 coupe—is parked across the street from the Jewel. “Just throw all that stuff anywhere,” he tells Clark, pointing to folders and clip binders piled on the passenger’s side of the front seat. But Clark just gathers it all up and holds it on his lap.

  Leaving the center of town they pass by the Herald-Progress building, which causes Clark to frown and the sheriff to ask, “So why’d you quit?”

  “The farm keeps me busy enough.” Clark pats his shirt pocket, finds his Black Jack chewing gum. Takes out a stick, unwraps it, folds it into his mouth.

  They don’t speak again till they reach the farm.

  Dutcher turns the car into the gravel driveway, stops it halfway between the county road and the Kent house, and sets the hand brake. “What do you hear from your friend the photographer?”

  “Willi? Nothing,” says Clark, holding his voice steady and his gaze calm. “He took off with those guys he was traveling with. And he’s not my friend. I just met him.”

  Dutcher is shaking his head. “We caught up with those WPA boys yesterday in Neosho Falls, and your pal wasn’t with them. He went off to take some pictures in Aliceville Thursday afternoon, they told us, and never came back. Where do you think he went?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Dutcher reaches over suddenly and tugs a sheet of paper from under one of the clip binders on Clark’s lap. After unfolding it he holds it up. It’s another wanted poster bearing Willi Berg’s name, photos, felonies, and a caution that he may be armed and should be considered dangerous. “That federal man—Foley?—sent me this on Wednesday.”