It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  “And you said this wasn’t official business.”

  “It’s not.”

  Clark levers open his door. “I have to go.”

  “One last thing. I can’t imagine how you’d ever need it”—Dutcher grins—“but if by some remote chance you ever do need my help, with anything, at any time, you call me. You call me, you write me, you send me a smoke signal, and I’ll drop what I’m doing. Promise.”

  Clark nods and climbs out of the car. Then he bends from the waist, looking back in at Dutcher through the open door.

  “Willi didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Know that for a fact, do you?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “Good enough for me,” says the sheriff. “But I’m just one cop—so if you do see your pal again? Tell him to grow a mustache or something, would you? That red hair wouldn’t fool a Boy Scout.” He picks the wanted poster off the seat and passes it out to Clark. “Souvenir?”

  After watching the sheriff back out his Pontiac and drive away, Clark skims the wanted poster again—Murder, Burglary, Interstate Flight—before crumpling it into a chunky ball and lobbing it straight up into the air.

  He watches it—more like glares at it—till the paper bursts into flame, dissolves into granular soot, and quickly disappears.

  Same as always, Clark’s eyes are left feeling syrupy, almost liquid, like the water glass that his mom would make in the summertime to preserve surplus eggs. But the sensation passes in less than a minute. And it’s a small price to pay for such a—

  Gift?

  For the first time in a week Clark feels the muscles flex up at both ends of his mouth. It’s not much of a smile but for now it will have to do.

  He needs to speak to his father.

  He needs to tell him goodbye.

  2

  Last night.

  When the knock came at the back door, Alger Lee was complaining again about how much time it took to play a game of Monopoly while simultaneously counting out scrip to purchase six houses for even distribution on his green properties—Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania avenues. Mr. Kent, still scowling for having been assessed for street repairs by a Chance card, looked at the clock on top of the dining-room bookcase. Ten minutes to ten.

  The knocking was repeated, more insistently. Alger started to rise from his chair, but Mr. Kent shook his head. “Clark! Somebody’s at the kitchen door.” Although Clark had finally dragged himself out of bed around half past five that afternoon and come downstairs to sit with his father and Alger while they ate supper, he’d gone directly back up to his room once the dishes were done and put away. “Clark! You want to go see who’s there?” While sympathetic, Mr. Kent felt he shouldn’t indulge his son’s melancholy. Martha, you could bet, never would have allowed him to lay in bed all day staring at the ceiling. “Clark!”

  Alger said, “Why don’t you let me go see who it is?”

  “Keep your seat, Al. Clark! The back door!”

  The first few times Mr. Kent called Alger “Al,” the boy had looked startled—nobody had ever called him that—but by now he’d gotten used to it, almost, and come to like it. Yeah, it wasn’t bad. Al.

  Alger carefully positioned two wooden houses on North Carolina Avenue, two more on Pacific. “Your roll.”

  “Excuse me, Al. Clark!”

  At last they heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  Clark shuffled into the dining room stifling a yawn. His shirttail dangled. His hair stuck out in fifty places. He looked sulky and irritated.

  “Somebody’s here,” said Mr. Kent. “Would you mind seeing who?”

  Clark nodded, went to answer, pulled open the door, and discovered Willi Berg finishing a cigarette on the short back porch. “Can I come in?”

  Clark opened the door wider, indicating the kitchen with a toss of his head. He wasn’t glad to see Willi but he wasn’t not glad either.

  Willi had a green duffel that he dragged in behind him. Like Clark he hadn’t shaved in days. The beard coming in was black, and it made his hair look redder, almost comic.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Hitched. Walked. You know.” Willi was looking around for an ashtray. Clark passed him a teacup to use. He took it and sat down at the table.

  “What happened to those guys you were with?”

  “I don’t know. I left.”

  “Why?”

  “Felt like it.” He rubbed knuckles up and down his bristly cheek.

  “You want something to eat?”

  “No, that’s okay.” Willi noticed them first: Mr. Kent and Alger Lee standing in the doorway, Alger tapping his lips with a light blue property deed.

  “Dad. Alger,” said Clark, “this is Willi.”

  “The photographer,” said Mr. Kent. He seemed untypically guarded. “Good to meet you.”

  “Likewise.” Willi moved scantly forward on his chair, then decided against standing; just waved hi and smiled instead. “Sorry to drop by so late. But I just, you know, hit town.” He gave a nervous giggle: he was tired, sagging tired.

  “Did Clark offer you something to eat?”

  “Yes, he did, sir. He surely did. But I’m not hungry. Thank you.”

  Alger leaned toward Mr. Kent, and using the property deed to cover his mouth, began to whisper something. Mr. Kent deflected him curtly. “How about some coffee?”

  “Sounds good, but a place to sleep sounds even better—if I can impose on you.”

  “Well, we’re a little short of beds in the house”—and that was because Alger Lee had moved in and was using the guest room—“but if you don’t mind sleeping on the couch …”

  “I was kind of hoping I could sleep in the barn.” A grin inched up one side of Willi’s mouth. “So I could say I done it.”

  “Did it,” said Mr. Kent. “And that’s completely up to you. But it’s a cool night.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Willi, slapping his duffel. “I got a blanket.” In fact he had two: each one stolen from a boardinghouse.

  “Then Clark’ll get you set up.”

  “I appreciate this, Mr. Kent. Well then,” he said, rising from the table. “Why don’t I go on out there now and let you all … get back to whatever you were doing.” He turned to Clark and their eyes met. “Walk me?”

  Clark struck a match and lighted the kerosene lantern hanging on a nail just inside the barn’s great door, then he carried it down the feed passage and up the ladder to the hayloft, which sloped hard toward the back wall. Willi clambered up behind him. He flung down his duffel. “Can you smoke in a barn?” he said, and Clark looked behind him and found an old milking pail that had been up there to catch leaks before he and his father repaired the roof and the weatherboarding.

  “Just don’t burn the place down, all right? And give me one of those.”

  As Clark was firing a cigarette, Willi dug through his duffel bag. He drew out a small, flat bottle of bootleg whiskey with a hand-lettered pasted-on label that read: “Aug. 2, 1928.” He offered the bottle to Clark.

  “No, thanks.”

  Willi unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow.

  “Tell me something. Why are you on a wanted poster?”

  So Willi took another long drink, then a short glug, twisted the cap back on the bottle, and told the story. Not the whole story, but nearly: he neglected to mention he’d used burglar’s tools to get into the pawnshop. In this version, the front door was unlocked and he had merely walked in.

  It took twenty minutes to tell, and when he was finished Clark said, “Could you be mistaken about the alderman? Maybe it just looked like him?”

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “It’s just hard for me to believe that a man like that—he’s a public servant, Willi!—could be a gangster.”

  Willi stared at Clark with dismay and near contempt. “What planet are you from, Clark? Politicians are always crooks. It’s their job.”

  “That’s just city talk.”
>
  “You need an education, my friend. A degree in what’s what.”

  “Is that right? You’re so smart, what are you doing with your picture on a wanted poster and that stupid red dye in your hair?”

  “I was framed!”

  “You and the Count of Monte Cristo.” Clark frowned. Then he stretched out his left arm, wiggling his fingers at the bottle. “Let me try some of that.”

  For half an hour they sat under the ventilator with their backs to the hay door, smoking cigarettes and drinking colorless whiskey but not speaking. At last Willi said, “I need to show you something.”

  “What?”

  But as soon as Willi had scrambled his hands through his bag and brought out a large mustard-yellow envelope, Clark knew exactly what he was going to be shown. He’d probably known it from the moment he opened the door and found Willi on his back porch.

  Photographs.

  One second Willi was holding the prints in his hand, the next they were gone and Clark had them.

  Going rapidly through all of them—a series of nine prints—Clark would glance at one, slide it to the bottom, glance at the next, slide it to the bottom, the next, the next, the next …

  When he came to the last one, though, he sucked in and held his breath and let them all drop from his hands. They swished down, glided and scythed, a few to scatter free on the plank floor, the rest to overlap near his feet.

  Willi said, “They’re kind of …”

  He said, “They’re pretty grainy but …”

  He said, “Still you can see …”

  Clark’s shoulders moved up and down.

  Willi said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

  He said, “I thought you’d want to …”

  He said, “I haven’t showed anybody else.”

  “Why not?” Clark’s eyes were red-rimmed but not wet.

  Willi said, “I didn’t think …”

  He said, “It didn’t seem …”

  He said, “I wish I knew.”

  Stooping, Clark picked up one of the prints. The image was grainy, as Willi had said, and poorly lit, but not so poorly you couldn’t see it was an image of Clark hoisting above his head a service bay door, the rollaway kind.

  Willi said, “Hey!” when Clark tore the print in half. As Clark tore it into quarters he said, “I still got the negative.”

  Clark looked at another print on the floor, the one that showed him twisting an iron jack around both wrists of a man lying facedown on the ground. A pencil notation on the back read: “CK & Claude Draper.”

  Willi stooped and picked up one of the prints. He held it in front of Clark’s face. “Those damn bricks almost hit me when you came busting through that wall.” Willi dropped the print, snatched up another. In pencil on the back it read: “CK & Milton George.”

  “When you hung that moron on the tree, did you fly up there or jump?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Jumped. I think. But maybe not. I haven’t had much practice.”

  “Then we should do something about that.”

  “We should?”

  Willi shrugged. “What do old Claude and Milt have to say about everything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “At all?”

  “They still don’t know what hit them.”

  “No kidding. But …”

  Clark hitched an eyebrow.

  “… you worked them both over pretty good.”

  “They deserved it.” Clark was staring down at a print that had slid to the front edge of the hayloft.

  Willi walked over there and looked to see which one it was. Oh. That one. “The kid was how old?”

  “Nine.”

  Clark kept staring until a pinprick-size hole, faintly smoking and brown-edged, appeared in the photographic paper. Yellow points of flame struggled up, followed by a heavier scribble of smoke.

  The hole widened out, chewing at the picture.

  Willi moved to stamp out the fire. Clark pushed him away. When there was nothing left of the photograph but wafers of delicate ash, he ground those to soot and scraped it over the edge of the loft with the side and the heel of one shoe. Then he sat down with his legs dangling in space.

  His eyeballs felt gummy.

  Then they didn’t.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” Willi dropped into a squat. “Why don’t you?” He’d thought he was going to ask: How’d you do that? “Come on, Clark: haven’t you ever thought about hitting the road? Seeing what’s going on?”

  Clark turned his head. “You make me tired, you know that?”

  “What else are friends for?” He laughed. “At least think about it, would you? We could have some fun and you could, you know—practice.”

  “Good night, Willi.”

  “Night, pal.”

  The moment Alger saw Clark leave the barn he said to Mr. Kent, “Here he comes.” They were in the kitchen, Alger standing at the back door with his arms wrapped around himself, Mr. Kent seated at the table cleaning his eyeglasses. They’d put away the Monopoly game half an hour ago, neither of them much interested in playing after Willi’s arrival.

  “Why don’t you go on up to bed?”

  “You want to talk to him alone?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Okay. Then I’ll be saying good night to you.”

  “Good night, Al, sleep well.”

  Clark came in a few moments later.

  “Well?” said Mr. Kent. He smelled cigarette smoke and liquor. But that was the least of his worries.

  “He’s leaving tomorrow.”

  “And?”

  Clark opened his mouth, then shut it. “Nothing. He’s just … leaving tomorrow.”

  After his son went to bed, Mr. Kent remained in the kitchen, eventually getting up and opening the cutlery drawer, gently touching some of the forks and spoons with the coarse pads of his fingertips. He opened the stove door and took out the saucepan and the iron skillet, looking at those and then putting them back, opening the cupboard door and reaching down for a particular coffee cup with a chipped handle, turning it, blowing out the dust, replacing it on its shelf, then picking up from the windowsill a five-and-dime-store ceramic shepherdess-and-lamb. Something’s happened, Martha. Something’s different. Something’s changing.

  Something’s changed.

  Opening the sink tap, he rinsed grit and house dust from Martha’s little figurine, dried it with a flour sack he’d been using as a dish cloth. At last, he trudged upstairs and got ready for bed, the worst part of his day. He read a few pages in Spoon River Anthology. The last poem he read (and he didn’t actually finish it) before he closed the valve on his Aladdin lamp was the one titled “Ernest Hyde,” the one that begins, “My mind was a mirror: It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.”

  That all happened last night.

  3

  Today. Twenty past one in the afternoon. The hayloft. Neither Willi Berg nor Alger Lee meant to go flapping their jaws about Clark, about what he could do, what he might be: it just happened. They’re both feeling vaguely guilty about it, too, but still. It’s been an interesting conversation.

  “I figure he’s a hoodoo man.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Alger. “But don’t you be smirking at me. I suppose you know what he is?”

  “A freak of nature, my friend. Merely a freak of nature.”

  “Oh yeah, that explains everything! You’re full of hops, you know it?”

  “Didn’t you ever read the Bible? Never heard about Goliath? What about Samson? You ever hear of Paul Bunyan?”

  “Paul Bunyan’s not in the Bible!”

  “I know that. I was just giving you some examples. Every so often, like maybe every hundred years or every million people, there’s somebody that’s born a freak of nature. You can’t explain it. But that’s all there is to it.”

  “Paul Bunyan was
a giant—Clark is three inches shorter than I am!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Willi. Then he says, “Excuse me,” and shakes out one of his blankets, beats off some clinging bits of straw with his hand, then folds it quickly and squats down to stuff it into his duffel bag.

  “I never heard about bullets bouncing off Samson’s head.” Alger taps his index fingertip against his forehead, then flings it off, way off, to pantomime a ricochet. “Seen it myself.”

  “In your hat.”

  “I seen it!”

  Willi looks down at his feet. “You ever see him … fly?”

  “Fly?” Alger laughs. “Naw, he can’t do that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you mean: yeah?”

  “Nothing.” Willi jams in his blankets and cinches the duffel. Then he takes a tab of paper—it’s been folded again and again till it’s the size of a matchbox—and hands it to Alger. “Don’t forget to give this to him.”

  “I won’t forget. But why do you got to leave before he comes home? I think you should wait.”

  The thing is: so does Willi. So then why is he rushing to leave?

  He wishes he knew. Baloney. He knows.

  All it would take would be a few hours more with this Boy Scout, this Cub Scout, and he could have himself a new best friend. His first best friend. Not that Willi wants one, necessarily. Acquaintances have always been more than enough. Friends, he feels pretty certain, are nothing but a nuisance. But this kid, this freak of nature, this Clark: well.

  He could be Willi’s Get Out of Jail Free card.

  It was the scheme he was hatching all week long, the hope he’s been flush with and the reason he walked to the highway in Aliceville, stuck out his thumb, and hitched an erratic series of short rides back here to Smallville.

  But overnight he changed his mind.

  It sounds stupid, it seems gloppy, but he really likes the kid.

  “Well, let me get out of here if I’m going.”

  When Alger pushes open the great door, Clark has to jump back from the apron onto the service court so it doesn’t strike him in the chest.