Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  It might be helpful to tell you about Plastic Girl. She wasn’t really a girl anymore when I came to know her. After I was stolen from my parents as a little kid, she kind of became a surrogate mom for me and the adopted brothers and sisters in my age group. She wasn’t very touchy-feely (actually, she was pretty moody), but she did her best to keep us clean and healthy. When we were younger and cruel, as kids can be, prodded by my friend Ant Boy’s somewhat twisted sense of humor, we started calling her “Lumpy,” behind her back and sometimes even to her face, because she was always somewhat misshapen, although the specifics changed over time.

  Plastic Girl’s special talent was her malleability. If you touched her, she felt a little like Silly Putty. And if you poked her in the side the indent would stay visible for a while. Her whole body was like this. And she could fit herself through incredibly small spaces.

  One event has stayed vividly with me over the years. Shade had accidentally locked herself in one of the dungeon rooms in the basement. She started screaming and crying, terrified, and I started screaming too as I stood outside, feeling her terror as if it were mine. But no one could find the key. So, with a great sigh of distaste, Plastic Girl knelt down and began to feed herself through the inch-high space at the bottom of the heavy door, flattening her head into a manhole shape, and then the rest of her body, one part at a time, slithering through like a monstrous, misshapen eel. Inside, she held Shade close, soothing both of us until they were finally able to open the door.

  It was only then that I realized how terrible a price Plastic Girl paid for her powers. She told all of us to leave the basement before she would come out, but I snuck into a side hallway and spied on her as she tottered unsteadily to her room. She looked like a cartoon Picasso of a person. Her face was the most horrible—eyes and nose in the wrong place, her mouth a ragged split with teeth splayed out in all directions. At the same time, I could feel the despair that she, unlike most people, somehow managed to keep from me. Afterwards she was even more asymmetrical than before. And sometimes, when I caught a stab of despair, I would spy on her through a crack in the bathroom door, watching as she stood before the mirror, tears falling down her misshapen cheeks, trying, somehow, to mold herself into the beautiful girl she was sure she would have been. Yet, despite her pain, she was a loyal member of the League, responding to whatever call came from our scouts out in the world that required her special services for dangerous missions only she could complete, always coming back just a little more out of kilter than before.

  Bad Coffee

  The bus finally stopped for lunch in Bend, a pitiful excuse for a city. A dusty, aesthetically challenged collection of cheap blocky buildings and tired clapboard houses, it huddled forlorn in the beautiful armpit of the towering white Cascade Mountains. The driver gave us forty-five minutes, which I was sure would stretch to an hour. Bleary-eyed and unsteady, we emerged into the truck-and bus-clogged parking lot of a McDonald’s, shading our eyes from the incandescent inferno of summer in the high desert. For just a moment, I paused to gaze at the crescent of rocky crags rising in the east in a sudden slanting wall of stone, the rising land obscured by a verdant carpet of pine trees. I craved, then, the coolness of the peaks, little rivulets of water falling into spray from sheer cliffs, and the quiet crunch of pine needles strewn across shaded paths. I had spent much happy time since I left home in the mountains. But it was the wrong direction for me. The vampire and I and Teflon Boy and the old lady were headed across the desert together on the barren track of Highway 20.

  I hung back, waiting till the vampire and his shuffling, frail charge passed by, and then followed them inside the McDonald’s. From the back of the restaurant, I watched him park her at a table on the side before joining the line to order food. Then I seated myself at a carefully chosen spot across from them—close enough that I could reach their table quickly, but not so close that they would notice me amidst the press of scruffy customers. I checked to make sure the cone of powder and the tablets I had extricated from my valise were still in my pocket before settling back to wait for the right moment to act.

  For the first time, I really looked at the huddled forms of my fellow travelers who I had explored inside but had not, until then, really seen. A buzz-cut army kid in carefully creased olive drab was talking up a homely girl with stringy hair but extraordinarily large breasts, sexual tension almost literally shimmering between them. A tall bearded Amish man in immaculate black clothes watched his daughter licking carefully at an ice-cream cone. A couple of teenage white kids in ghetto gear silently mouthed the explicit lyrics of the hip-hop coming through their earbuds while their parents argued about something. A kid of about twelve with a smudged card hanging from a string around his neck, his name, a phone number, and “I’m going to see Grandma in Omaha☺” written on it, sat with the driver eating a happy meal, furtively glancing around, more excited than scared. A chubby guy with a black-leather-fringed and silver studded vest was talking too loudly about politics with a nice-looking woman who had a large red birthmark like a splash of ink across one side of her face. The guy was trying too hard, I thought, and she’s not interested. In one corner a sullen teenager in a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and an “I’m with Jesus” baseball cap was buzzing like crazy on crystal meth.

  At moments like that my special sensitivity feels like an invisible membrane holding everyone around me in a secret embrace, not of love but of compassion. I was bathed in the sensations that lay beneath secret desires and fears and hopes that no one ever fully reveals to others or even to themselves. What if I could share, just for a moment, this experience with the bustling crowd around me? Would it change anything?

  The earthquake-like arrival of Teflon Boy beside me on my yellow plastic bench jolted me out of my reverie. “Hey, Mister,” he said, pulling a couple of cheeseburgers and a box of chicken tenders out of his bag. He looked curiously at the empty space before me on the table and asked, “Aren’t ya hungry?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, tearing open one of the cheeseburgers. “Shit,” I thought, pulled painfully back to the task at hand. Teflon Boy started regaling me between surprisingly dainty bites with a convoluted story about his last visit to a Six-Flags America with Grandma. Any hope of invisibility was lost. Through the corner of my eye, I could see the vampire looking curiously at us before going back to his salad. Furtively, I glanced over and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw a little cup of coffee at the old lady’s elbow. Oh, well, I thought, invisibility is overrated. I turned toward Teflon Boy and acted like I was paying attention to the slightly garbled words tumbling out of his mouth with the odor of ketchup and greasy beef. Being seen and disregarded, I have learned, is sometimes just as good as not being seen at all.

  I sat there with Teflon Boy, trying to watch the old lady and the vampire without seeming to, and trying not to be distracted by Teflon Boy’s increasingly convoluted tale about the time he and his grandma got trapped upside down in the Raptor ride, and how the fire trucks had come and sent a basket up on a crane and began cutting them out with a circular saw. “Man,” Teflon Boy said with reverence, “those firemen sure were brave. Except one was a girl, actually, which was weird. I didn’t know you could cut metal like that, with all those sparks flying all over the place. It was better than sparklers at Fourth of July. You like sparklers, Mister? … ” and so on.

  The vampire just sat there, calmly, not talking to the old lady, occasionally glancing out the window at the parking lot or gazing around the restaurant, taking bites of his salad and sipping his soda. The old lady was hunched over her food. Even through the fog of Teflon Boy, I could feel her chewing mechanically or taking sips of her coffee, so lost in her own universe of pain that she barely noticed the bustle around her.

  My anxiety level rose as the minutes ticked by. Move! I thought. Move!

  Finally, the vampire slid his food aside, dotted his mouth with a napkin, stood up, and headed toward the bathrooms. My body tensed as he walked aw
ay, and the moment he pushed his way into the men’s room I slipped out from behind my table, ignoring Teflon Boy’s “Where ya going, Mister?”

  I waited a moment until the old lady put her coffee cup down—I couldn’t afford to have it spilled—and then I strode casually forward, angling over toward her. Passing close by, I contrived to stumble and steadied myself with a hand on her shoulder, pushing her lightly sideways against the window.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, crouching down beside her, at the same time slipping a couple of tablets into the pocket of her shawl. Disoriented, the old lady looked up and said “Oh … ” Then she shook her head, glancing up at me and said, in a sweet friendly voice that almost belied the storms roiling through her body, “I’m perfectly fine, young man.”

  “Well, I’m very sorry,” I said again, and leaning over her as if to check and make sure nothing was broken, I patted her on the back with one hand while the other emptied the cone of crushed tablets into her coffee. Then I turned away, feeling a bit smug, and headed toward the order counter again.

  But when I glanced casually around to check the reactions of the other patrons, I started with an electric shiver of fear as I caught the curious eyes of the vampire watching me from across the room. Fuck, I thought. No one can piss that fast. What the hell had happened? And I realized that he might have only gone to wash his hands. That fastidious bastard. As I entered a line to order, I forced myself not to glance at him again. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, that he’d forget all about me. But I knew he wouldn’t have missed my startled response. Vampires are sophisticated hunters: natural experts in the subtle language of body movements, quivers in the voice, facial tics, and the like. He knew something. He knew I’d recognized him—for one reason or another. And in an hour or so he’d know what I’d done.

  I tried to seem nonchalant as I ordered a chicken sandwich without mayo and a diet coke (Teflon Boy had made me a little weight-conscious), and then I headed back for the door. As I turned to go, I couldn’t help myself and snuck a glance at the vampire’s table, but he and the old lady were sitting just as they had before he’d gone to the bathroom. With relief, I saw her taking another sip of her coffee.

  Then I stepped out into oppressive heat and diesel fumes. Behind the restaurant, in a cramped oven-like space between the grease tank and a recycling dumpster, I made a call on one of my pay-as-you-go cell phones. Just my luck that Shade was manning the emergency line. “You?” she said, and she hung up on me. Old romance is a bitch. I rang again. “Don’t hang up,” I pleaded.

  “Make it quick.”

  “Nosferatu,” I said. “I think I’ve got a really nasty one here.”

  “Why don’t we just let him suck you dry?” she asked.

  “Look, you little bitch,” I said, losing my temper, “this isn’t about us. It isn’t about me. I’m on the bus with this viper, and he’s got a civilian with him. Do you get it? He’s going somewhere. I don’t think he’s a solo. I think he’s taking her somewhere.”

  Shade was silent for a while. “Where are you?” she asked flatly.

  “I’m in Bend, Oregon. A shithole, if you want to know. We’re heading out in a few minutes toward Idaho on US 20.”

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll send a team. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Well,” I said, sighing, trying and failing to see some humor in the situation, “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”

  She hung up on me again.

  The Old Lady Dies So we left the mountains behind and entered a hummocked hard-dirt land almost devoid of habitation. The shudder and rattle of the coach became almost soothing as we put empty miles behind us. Teflon Boy’s voice, mumbling the words of his novel to himself, was hypnotic. Outside, the scenery changed hardly at all. We could have been watching a short loop-repeat movie of the same sprawling region of land, with its jagged extrusions and its seemingly endless gray-green encrustation of spiky sage. To my relief, the loud Hispanic lady who had been sitting behind us seemed to have departed in Bend. In fact, our party of desert travelers was significantly reduced.

  Absently, I scanned slowly back and forth across the cabin, dipping for a few moments in the unique universes of intricate sensation that were the separated planets of individuals scattered across our tiny space. Most people were drowsy after lunch, subdued, although the girl with the big breasts was slowly stroking off army boy underneath the cover of his jacket in the last row of seats. Even the meth addict had managed to nod off for a while. I kept coming back to the old lady, waiting for the telltale signs. And I tried not to worry about the vampire.

  To kill with elegance is an art that few learn. Most murders are quite crude affairs, with jabbing knives or ricocheting bullets making a total mess of things. Even those with the sophistication to use poison rarely take the time for a close study of the available options. Look, stupid, if your wife dies of rat poison, the first place they’re going to look is to her husband. Most people, I have decided, are idiots.

  It’s not as much of a challenge to kill someone in a hospital or a nursing home. People die off in these places all the time, and nobody really takes much notice if there are a couple more here or there. It doesn’t take much finesse. Regular folk who need to die, however, are a more difficult proposition. The direct approach is just asking for trouble. Death needs to come with no connection to you, and by some mechanism that is not suspicious to the authorities.

  There are two basic ways to approach stealthy murder in these cases. The first is to find something deadly that is really difficult to detect or so rare that there’s little chance that anyone would test for it. The problem with this is that there isn’t much out there that fits the bill. Tests have just become too sophisticated. Of course, chances are that no one is going to bother investigating carefully enough to detect the agent of death, even if it’s a person someone actually cares about. That whole CSI thing on TV, with their mass spectrometers and PDR DNA tests and endless time to perseverate about a single case is really just a fantasy, even in more advanced police organizations. But why take the risk? If they do find the cause, then they know for certain that it’s murder. (One doesn’t, for example, generally run across rare sea-snail neurotoxins in the local supermarket.) I prefer the second approach, which is to kill with something that they could, conceivably, have taken themselves without any assistance. Overdoses of prescribed medication are probably the best examples of this, although a little contaminated fish or poultry often does the job quite well. After much (often unsuccessful) experimentation, a combination of digoxin and verapamil has become one of my blends of choice. That’s what I used on the old lady.

  When pathologists don’t know why someone died, they often just chalk it up to a heart attack. So a heart attack is usually the least suspicious kind of death. And that’s what this little concoction produces, quite reliably. Digoxin, when used correctly, helps the heart pump better and reduces irregular heartbeats. At higher doses, however, it does just the opposite, throwing someone into severe arrhythmia and, pretty quickly, complete heart shut-down. The problem with digoxin, however, is that the toxic dose is high—more than I could have slipped easily into her coffee cup, for example. What you need, then, is a potentiator: something to magnify the effect. This is why I add verapamil to the mix. Its uses are quite similar to digoxin, but when put together, they’re like a hammer blow to the heart. And it’s a cocktail that a doctor could have conceivably prescribed, especially if the two medications were prescribed by different doctors (and old people go to a lot of doctors). In this case, when they looked through her pockets they would find a couple of tablets of both drugs. And why look farther than the obvious? Case closed. Doctor Death evades capture yet again (cue final credits).

  About twenty minutes after we left McDonald’s, I began to sense the first indications that my overdose was doing its work, a slight speeding up of her heart rate. I wondered how long it would take the vampire to notice, since he
was probably also linked to her sensational state. Then the nausea began. I felt her vomit, and smiled as the vampire cursed. “Oh, bus driver,” the dapper man called out. “This lady here, she seems to be in some distress.”

  “What’s going on?” the driver shouted back.

  “Well, she just started vomiting.”

  “Crap,” the driver said. Nervous chattering started up around me, and people began asking what was going on. One of the little kids startled awake and started crying in a high-pitched voice. I heard the driver calling in on his radio, and I glanced back to where the vampire stood, disgustedly wiping at the spreading stains on his pants.

  “Hey, I’m a medic,” the army kid called out, extricating himself from the embrace of the homely girl. “Let me take a look.” Zipping up his pants, he moved down the aisle. Pushing the vampire out of the way, he slid in next to the old woman. “Her pulse is pretty fast,” he reported. Then, “Make that really fast. This old girl’s definitely in trouble.”

  The driver got on the intercom. “Okay, people,” he said, “we seem to have a medical emergency on the coach. Central tells me that there’s an emergency drop-in clinic about thirty miles up ahead in Haney. So I want to ask that everyone just stay calm and stay seated.”

  Teflon Boy craned his head around to look and then he turned to me and started asking a rapid-fire series of questions. Not out of fear, of course. Just basic curiosity. “Is she gonna die? What’s the matter with her? You know I’ve seen dead people. They buried my other grandma. Will they bury this lady? You know, the newspaper said cremation was a ’creasingly popular option. What do you think? … ”

  I ignored him. Closing my eyes, I let myself enter the old lady’s body. As if from a distance, I heard the dispassionate voice of the medic, “I think her heart’s stopped. Help me get her into the aisle.” Through her nausea and dizziness and confusion, I felt her body being roughly lifted and then laid flat on the floor. I felt the medic wipe her mouth and then begin CPR, felt a rib cracking under the compressions. At the same time, her body began to fill with peace, with a calmness that I’m sure she hadn’t felt for years. Her body seemed to relax in a wave, from top to bottom. I could not see what she saw, but everyone’s heard of the light that dying people see. She was probably seeing it too. And then there was the moment of release, almost like the popping of a balloon, although it’s really indescribable. And she was gone. Blessedly gone.