It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

In his left hand he is holding a Gladstone bag that his mother used as a young woman moving to Kansas from the Dakota Territory with her widowed father.

  Beaming at his new best friend, Willi Berg says, “If you’re ready, let’s go.”

  Open-mouthed, Alger watches them walk off together. Then he half turns back toward the house. And there’s Mr. Kent at the kitchen door. They look at each other with frail smiles—Alger’s frail and baffled, Mr. Kent’s frail and full of sorrow.

  “Al?” he calls after a minute. “Join me for some lunch?”

  With a nod Alger starts back across the dooryard. He is almost at the porch when he remembers Willi’s letter. He stops, pulls it from his dungarees, unfolds it, and reads: “Dear Clark, I burned those other prints this morning, along with the negatives. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. I burned them in the barrel over by that I don’t know what you call it, where you keep the chickens. You’re an amazing guy. Be careful or people will eat you for breakfast, if you know what I mean. Good luck. I’m glad I met you.” He signed it Willi Boring, but then struck that out and wrote: Willi Berg.

  Today is the twentieth of October 1935.

  PART TWO

  WAYFARING STRANGERS

  XIII

  Dear Father, how are you? Good, I hope. I am fine …

  ●

  1

  From Smallville, Clark and Willi tramp cross-country till they reach a railroad division point where freights stop to change engines and crews. There they jump into the first open and empty boxcar they find and catch out before long on a hotshot that takes them upstate, then across the Missouri River bridge into the Argentine yards.

  Between them they have seventy-five dollars, but they want to be frugal. Even so, the two nights they stay over in Kansas City (jazz, barbecue, the stockyards, the War Memorial) they splurge and stay at the YMCA. On the morning following the second night Clark wakes to find his wallet stolen. Suddenly their joint resources are less than thirty bucks.

  In the afternoon they catch out on a freight headed west, sitting in the side-door Pullman watching the scenery till the cinders and the steam blowback get to them both (yes, both) and they claim a corner of the boxcar. There are eight or nine other riders, a motley collection of old bindlestiffs.

  Clark is certain he made a mistake, leaving home. What did he think he was doing? Going off in search of his fortune, his fate, what? “We’re just going, Clark,” Willi tells him. “It’s an adventure. You’re not a farmer.”

  “How would you know?”

  During the footloose first days and weeks it is a great adventure. But there are moments of anxiety too, even terror. Fourth day out Willi loses his footing while they’re riding back-to-back on the ladders between boxcars, and if Clark didn’t snatch him he would have been crushed. Railroad bulls are on them sometimes before they even see the bastards, and always there are crazy raving hobos to watch out for.

  Days turn into weeks …

  They travel by rail and by thumb and by foot. Stay in hobo jungles and squatters’ camps, sleep on scraps of carpet in corrugated paper shacks, eat beans, fried dough, and oatmeal mush, and drink oceans of boiled coffee.

  In Shawnee they work briefly at the railroad yards, unloading soft coal from tenders, twenty-five cents a day, then motor around the Oklahoma panhandle in a pale-green Buick that belongs to a Frenchman (the first one of those Clark has ever met) named Paul Darcy who rents dilapidated theaters and taprooms to show a grind house film about venereal disease. For a dollar a day (show days only) Willi and Clark cover the towns with handbills and posters. They also run the projector.

  Clark can’t believe what that disease can do to your brain. Good thing to know.

  Weeks turn into months …

  The constant clackety-clack of train wheels, the creaks and groans of boxcars, the smell of steam mixed with hot oil. The loneliness of a concrete highway at two in the morning. They buy sacks of breakups for a nickel at the back doors of bakeries, elbow their way to the Free Food Dump, sit for hours on piles of switch ties in a drizzle. They trudge through dust blizzards, meet girls, go out dancing in a dozen different roadhouses. And naturally they talk. On slow freights moving west across the brown plains they stretch out on crushed gravel in gondola cars, and they talk. Sometimes eighteen hours a day.

  Saying, “So who’s better, Gary Cooper or James Cagney?”

  Saying, “Who do you like, Detroit or Chicago?”

  Willi saying, “Dracula!” Clark saying, “Get out of here—Frankenstein! You can’t beat Frankenstein.” Clark saying, “Do you believe in God? Me neither. What about an afterlife? Me neither. What about God, though? Do you think there could be one?”

  Willi saying, “Jews don’t believe in an afterlife. Well, they do and they don’t. It’s complicated.”

  Clark saying, “What, you never chopped off a chicken’s head?”

  Willi saying, “I bet if you squeezed this lump of coal, you’d end up with a diamond as big as a chicken egg.” Clark saying, “Yeah? I bet I’d end up with a handful of coal dust.”

  Willi saying, “Try it,” and Clark saying, “Can we talk about something else?”

  Dear Father, today we are riding courtesy of the Fort Worth-Pacific railroad company. I am fine. How are you?

  They are traveling in an empty Chicago Great Western box with a buzzard named Tiny Montgomery on his way to Texas to chop winter cotton. Tiny keeps warm, as warm as possible, with old newspapers stuck inside his jacket and down the legs and seat of his dungarees.

  Willi and Clark have blankets.

  It is around dawn when the Big Boy locomotive pulls its three dozen freight cars into Ardmore, Oklahoma. Willi wakes up freezing. And finds himself looking down the barrel of a Colt revolver. Tiny says, “You and your friend are dropping off here, get it? Wake him up.”

  Willi shakes Clark, who has also lost his blanket to Tiny Montgomery but hasn’t noticed the cold. “Clark, hey Kent, get up.”

  Just at this moment the train stops with a loud screech. Bumpers and couplings clash, their boxcar lurches, and Tiny’s revolver discharges. The slug bounces off Clark’s front teeth and puts a hole through the metal roof. Willi uses Tiny’s immobilizing awe to kick him in the nuts.

  Tiny crumples, his fingers splay, and the gun drops, clattering and skittering across the plank floor. Clark rolls open the door, picks Tiny up by the waist of his trousers (newspapers sluice out), and flings him down a gravel incline. Then he boots Tiny’s sack out after him, the open neck spewing a round mirror, a shaving brush, and a stamp collection bound in leather.

  Next day they quit the freight in Dahlgren, Texas. Hitchhiking, they catch a few rides past cotton fields that stretch forever on both sides of every road, pickers out there bent over, dragging long muslin sacks behind them—Negroes and Mexicans, Filipinos and East Indians, and either Japanese or Chinese or both. Neither Willi nor Clark know how you’re supposed to tell the difference.

  Now it’s late afternoon and they haven’t had a lift in several hours. An automobile is coming up the road behind them—really zooming, a sand-colored Plymouth going seventy. Because they do it for every passing vehicle, they stick out their thumbs. But that driver isn’t slowing down for anybody.

  After the Plymouth tears past they follow it with their eyes for the next two, three miles on the dead-straight road. It gets smaller and smaller, then disappears over a slight misted rise.

  Clark says, “I sure wouldn’t mind owning a car like that.”

  “Well, if you’d squeezed that damn lump of coal like I said, we could be riding in one this very minute.”

  This could easily be the start of yet another one of their regular quarrels (Willi implying that Clark has made no effort to develop his talents, Clark saying he doesn’t appreciate being made to feel like a performing seal, and besides, didn’t he start a cook fire with his eyes yesterday morning, wasn’t that enough for a while?). But the quarrel never develops. Instead they’re distracted by a
fleet of Ford A’s full of men in American Legion caps who roar up from behind and streak by.

  “Guy had a rifle,” says Clark. “In that last car.”

  A county black-and-white pulls off the road just ahead of them. A tall rangy lawman climbs out, halting them both with his glare and then reaching back inside the vehicle for his white John B. Stetson hat. He wears smoked glasses, a creaking leather gun belt, khakis with insignias on the shirtsleeves, and cowboy boots. “Afternoon, fellas,” he says, all twang. “You live around here?”

  Willi says, “We’re just walking to Fort Worth,” and Clark cringes: Why can’t he learn to call his elders and his betters “sir”? He could at least pretend some respect. He’s a fugitive, for crying out loud.

  “Uh-huh. And if I was to ask each of you boys to show me your wallets, would you have at least five dollars apiece? Because I tell you what, you’d be vagrants if you don’t, and vagrants serve thirty days on the county farm.”

  Willi says, “We got money, you need to see it?”

  “I most surely do.” He looks at Clark, back to Willi. “What business you boys have in Fort Worth?”

  Clark answers: “My uncle lives there, sir. He’s going to give us both work in his butcher shop.” So far they’ve used Clark’s imaginary uncle (who lives in a number of different cities) half a dozen times with cops, train firemen, yard bulls, even Holy Rollers at the Sally. Folks are more likely to say yes or leave you alone if you seem to have an ultimate destination.

  After examining each of their wallets, the county cop passes them back and says, “Whyn’t you fellas get in, I’ll give you a ride up through Garretson.”

  Clark and Willi exchange uneasy looks—do they have a choice? no—and climb reluctantly into the back of the radio car.

  A few miles on, the road is barricaded by two local police cruisers parked crosswise with their grilles touching. And there’s that nice tan Plymouth and all of those Model A’s. Three legionnaires take turns using sledgehammers on the Plymouth’s engine, slaughtering it. Others slash the tires, break the glass. While still others, over in that ditch, beat the devil out of a suit-wearing burly man.

  Clark winces at the steady thuds and the gasps that follow. He tries to muffle them, filter them out, but neither mental commands nor repeated swallowing does the job.

  Willi presses his face to the side window and watches intently.

  An old wrinkled man with a limp hobbles up to the county car, stoops beside the driver’s window. “Afternoon, Diebold. Told you he wuddent gonna serve no injunction.” Then he turns to look back at what’s still happening in the ditch. “Looks to me like that ACL-Jew lawyer won’t make it to the courthouse by four.”

  “Jim—just so long as I don’t have a corpse on my hands, is that understood?”

  There is a sudden crash, a jolting vibration, another crash, as the Plymouth is rolled onto its side, then rolled onto its roof. The legionnaires all laugh and hoot like it’s some big event at the state fair.

  When Diebold the county cop drives on, skirting the roadblock, nodding to the local cops who stand together smoking, Willi slaps the mesh that separates the front and back of the car. “You’re just gonna let them beat that guy up?”

  Diebold peers at him in the rearview mirror.

  He drives slowly through the town of Garretson, where people have assembled and are still assembling, Mexicans and whites, all men, and too many Texas Rangers. A loudspeaker truck blares warnings: do not, do not, do not. Congregate. Interfere. Obstruct traffic. Half a dozen scowling cops are lugging typewriters, bundled pamphlets, file folders, and a mimeograph machine from a square brick building. A crowd in the street jeers.

  “The county line is two miles out. I’m putting you boys over it. And of course I don’t want to see either one of you back here again.”

  Willi doesn’t say anything.

  Clark says, “Yes, sir.”

  And now they stand on the other side of the Leaving Garretson tin sign, watching Diebold’s cruiser execute a U-turn and drive back toward the town.

  Willi scrapes out his cigarette packet from his shirt pocket.

  “I wish you’d quit smoking.”

  “And I wish you’d quit acting like some farm boy swallowed Amy Vanderbilt. I don’t know what you are, Kent, but if I had what you have … ?”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “I’d’ve done something to help that guy back there.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Beat everybody up?”

  “For starters.”

  “You give me a headache,” says Clark.

  Dear Father, belated happy birthday to you! Hope you had a good one. I miss you and think of you all the time. I miss our farm, I miss my old bed, I miss …

  After the events on the road to Garretson, Clark seems different. Older. Changed. For the first time since going on the bum, he plucks yesterday’s papers from trash barrels and reads them all the way through. Reading about shoemakers striking in New Hampshire, watchmakers striking in Illinois, boatbuilders striking in Connecticut. Reading about Japs in China, Italians in Abyssinia, Reds in Spain. Reading about lovers who drank poison. He’ll say, “Listen to this!” and then read something out loud. Willi scarcely listens. He hates being read to, and besides, Clark always picks the most gruesome stories. He’ll put down a newspaper, shake his head, and ask Willi, “You have any relatives in Germany? I sure hope not.” He’s not the same guy. And now he walks with his hands clenched.

  In a town called Safford they hook up with a singing cowboy named Plato Beatty and travel with him farther into east Texas. The reason he’s called Plato, he tells his riders, is because he has a plate in his head. A piece of metal the size of a cake plate, holding things together. He fought in the Argonne Forest, which is how he got his skull blown off. But despite his injury Plato seems a happy enough soul.

  From time to time he lets Clark or Willi drive his old dusty Nash while he strums his guitar and sings. Clark likes the sad prairie songs, the hobo songs, the songs about wayfaring strangers and poor boys a long way from home, but Willi thinks he’ll go nuts if he has to listen to much more of that hillbilly guff.

  Foley Wells isn’t a town, it’s a landscape, a scrubland with oil derricks, the tall ones and the smaller kind that look like pecking chickens. The radio station there is a thirty-kilowatt shack-and-tower. Willi and Clark sit quietly in the studio while Plato puts on his cowboy hat, stands at the microphone, and does “Blue-Eyed Jane,” “Ragged but Right,” and “Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.” Afterward they drink liquor in the car parked next to the station. Well, Clark doesn’t. Hard stuff is just wasted on him, he’s decided. Willi takes a few swaps to be sociable, but Plato drinks one bottle and opens another, pints of Old Granddad. Finally he crawls off over a rock and sleeps in some weeds.

  In the morning they take to the road again, heading for another radio station. Plato hasn’t spoken a word since staggering back to the car after first light. The man looks miserable today, full of guilt and grief—like the mopes, Willi thinks, in all of his rambling gambler songs. Missing their old mothers and the girls they left behind.

  The sky turns dark, and a dust storm kicks up.

  After an hour or two of riding, Willi asks Plato to stop at a general store, he’s famished. Ten miles later Plato steers off the road at a filling station with a small grocery attached. But as soon as Willi and Clark go inside to buy a loaf of bread, Plato takes off and leaves them stranded. Did he get tired of their company? Or just need to be alone with his lonesome blues? Whatever his reason, they are footing it again. Walking down a two-lane county road and talking, talking, talking.

  Willi saying, “Not with any kind of stick, a broomstick. And a pink spaldeen.”

  Clark saying, “Gabby Hurnett.” Willi saying, “Hank Greenburg.”

  Willi saying, “Three cards of one rank and a pair of another—that’s a full house,” Clark saying, “Does a flush beat a straight? It does, right?”

  Willi sayi
ng, “There’s nobody around—do you see anybody? So would you please just pick up that boulder and throw it? Humor me.” Clark saying, “I don’t feel like picking up any boulders.”

  And now off to their left a ball of oily black smoke—penetrated by a column of flame—foams high into the air. Somebody screams.

  And Clark, who has been scuffling along next to Willi, suddenly isn’t there …

  In the days that follow, he obviously enjoys, even relishes, thinking about what he did at that oil field—put on a burst of speed to roll a boomer who’d caught fire and then grabbed up a well cap, tossed it over the wellhead, and sprawled across it till the flames all quit.

  Apropos of nothing, he says, “How much do you figure that cap weighed? More than a ton? It’s hard for me to gauge things like that.” Or he says, “Guess I’m fireproof, huh? My hair, too.” Or says, “We should’ve stuck around. I might’ve got some kind of reward.”

  Clark is definitely different. And Willi is not sure that he likes the change.

  Dear Father,

  As bad luck would have it, we found ourselves yesterday in a miserable place called Panterville where a murder trial was about to start. A colored man was supposed to have killed a white man, his boss, over the boss’s wife. Or something like that, I’m not sure. I’ve seen race troubles since I’ve been gone, and back in Smallville too (remember what they did to Bill Hammer’s face that time?), but it is most awful in Texas. Colored people keep they eyes down here and a great number of them stutter.

  Anyhow, when we showed up in Panterville a Negro was going on trial and it seemed like the whole town was gathered outside the district courthouse trying to get in.

  There were five Texas Rangers on the front steps. One of them was a captain and him he had a shotgun. The others had sidearms. We heard the captain say that he and his men were there at the order of the governor and their instructions were to see that the trial took place in a legal manner, so everybody should go home. But nobody would. They just pushed closer. I wanted to get moving, but Willi wanted to stay so he could take pictures, which he did till some big farmer threatened to break his head. Then a shotgun went off twice inside the courthouse. A minute later they carried out two men who’s whose chests were bloody from pellet wounds. The crowd turned rowdy and people started to throw rocks and then a fat old preacher threw an open can of gasoline through a broken window and suddenly the whole building was on fire.