by Tom De Haven
It is a funny, complex moment for Alger Lee: he expected his mother and stepfather to arrive here like—normal people. Expected them to ride the cushions from Michigan to Missouri, not the blinds! And now he feels embarrassed going down off the platform and meeting them alongside of the tracks. In some nonverbal part of his mind Alger realizes that he’s different now than he was the last time he saw his mother, that he’s changed in significant ways.
He hugs his mother and shakes hands with Claude Clemments and leads them to where he parked Mr. Kent’s truck. Their trousers and flannel shirts are peppered with tiny burn holes, their faces are smudged with soot. They keep flexing their hands, trying to get some feeling back into their fingers after so many hours holding on to bars of slippery metal. They have only one hobo sack between them, which Alger’s mother carries slung on a shoulder by its loop cord.
The moment Mr. Clemments sees the truck he kicks a rear tire, curses the name of Henry Ford (he still has scars from strikes at both the Dearborn and Rouge plants), but declares the machine a thing of beauty. “That model’s a ’32 closed-cab on a double-T chassis,” he tells Alger, Then Mr. Clemments pulls open the driver’s door.
Alger expected this. What he didn’t expect is his instinctive response. “I’ll be driving us back to Smallville, Mr. Clemments.”
“I don’t ride in any vehicle when I’m the only man. I drive it.”
“But see there, Mr. Clemments? You’re not the only man,” Alger says with a toothy smile.
As he motors across the bridge into Kansas, his mother keeps tapping his right knee, keeps saying how good it is to see him again. Is she clenching her eyes so they won’t start to leak? Alger decides that she is.
“I can’t tell you how happy I was to get your letter, son.”
“I would’ve wrote you more but I didn’t have an address.”
“I know that and I’m sorry. But we did a lot of moving. Mr. Clemments has not had an easy time of it—have you, Mr. Clemments?”
Mr. Clemments, thin as a rake and with a long columnar neck raddled with veins, does not reply. He continues to watch the scenery as it flows past, the billboards for toothpaste, for Sunday worship, for Burma Shave.
“Mr. Clemments can’t work in a car factory anymore, not since that last time he got hit in the head. He has a ringing in his ears now, you see, and it’s just too much.”
“He’ll enjoy working on the farm then,” says Alger, uncomfortable talking about Mr. Clemments as though he’s not in the truck.
“I used to know the Kents,” says Alger’s mother after a while. “Your dad worked for them. But I don’t remember Mr. Kent too well.”
“Even if you did, Ma, you wouldn’t recognize him now. His heart’s giving out bit by bit. Every day it’s a little weaker. He can’t use the stairs anymore so I brought down his bed and put it in the parlor.”
“They had a boy as I recall.”
“Clark.”
“And where is he?”
“Hollywood, California. Clark’s in Hollywood.”
“What’s he doing there? He in pictures?” She isn’t serious; she means it as a joke.
“As a matter of fact, he is. But you don’t notice him. He’s doing what they call stunt work, jumping off roofs and cliffs and like that. For cowboy pictures mostly. That’s what he said in his last letter.”
“Why ain’t he home helping out with the farm?”
“He’s just … not. But it’s all right, he’s been gone almost two years now, and Jon and me have managed just fine. Till recently.”
“Jon?” Mr. Clemments is suddenly interested in the conversation. “You call the man Jon? To his face?”
“Sure I do, Mr. Clemments. We work together every day. I live in his house.”
“Till the first time he forgets where he left his damn billfold and says you took it.” Mr. Clemments snorts.
“I’m sure Alger knows what he’s doing,” says his mother.
They ride the rest of the way in silence.
As they are approaching the Kent farm, Mr. Clemments mutters, “He just better not expect me to call him Jon!”
“Oh, Mr. Clemments,” says his wife, “don’t be like that.”
Alger stops the truck and cuts the engine. Gets out and runs across the county road, scoops mail from the RFD box. Returning to the truck, he flicks through it hoping to find an envelope addressed with Clark’s handwriting. But no. He dreads seeing Jon Kent’s face cloud and close when he has to tell him there’s nothing from Clark, no letter again today.
Alger releases the brake and steers the truck into the driveway.
5
As soon as Skinny reads in the Wednesday papers that it was a time bomb—
“Hiya, Nappy, hey, Gil, either of you seen my hubby?”
—she knew Charlie did it. The son of a bitch!
“Hi, Bob. Dean. Matty, you seen Charlie? ’Kay, thanks.”
She hadn’t known about the explosion at Willi Berg’s apartment till she saw a picture of the damage in the L.A. Times. At first it didn’t register. It took her several seconds before the page-one photo turned suddenly into a place she knew well, had been inside of once a week for the past half a dozen … Tuesdays.
The article said the bomb exploded at roughly one-fifteen in the afternoon.
Tuesday afternoon.
And all the while she thought Charlie didn’t know!
She took a cab to the rehearsal studio downtown.
“Eddie? Charlie in there?”
“Sure is, sweetheart. How you been, we haven’t seen you in—hey! You can’t go in there!”
Skinny does, though, and finds her husband sitting on a toilet reading the Times himself.
Withdrawing the little silver derringer from her coat pocket, she sticks out her arm and touches the barrel to Charlie Brunner’s forehead.
“You tried to kill me!” she says.
Brunner says, “Don’t!”
His pathetic plea doesn’t keep Skinny from squeezing the trigger.
XVI
Jail time. An interview with Captain Gould.
The seamstress of Poverty Row.
Clark’s talents are discussed.
●
1
It’s going on five P.M. and the felony block is as quiet as an opium den. Willi isn’t even sure how many of the other cells are occupied. Three or four would be his guess, but since he was processed in here yesterday none of his neighbors have shown the smallest inclination to communicate with him or with anyone else. Which is good—he was afraid the place would be a Bedlam, like in the movies. He was terrified he’d have to share a cell with some maniac.
As he pokes another Camel between his lips the iron door at the end of the tier swings open and a jail deputy—a freckle-faced blond who looks like he ought to be jerking sodas at Currie’s ice cream parlor—comes in and walks directly to Willi’s cell. “Stand up, turn around, and put your hands behind your back.”
“What for?”
“I have to cuff you.”
“Oh, for the love of Mike,” says Willi, ditching his smoke.
On the way down the block, their heeltaps echo loudly. Willi glances into all of the other cells. He guessed wrong: just two other prisoners. Neither of them look at him when he passes.
“Where we going?”
“Captain Gould wants to see you.”
After riding an elevator down several flights and going through two more locked iron doors, Willi is delivered to an office in the basement.
Captain Gould is the spit-and-polish type, deeply tanned and thick-bodied, his waist going to flab. His uniform looks just off the hanger. Hands in his trouser pockets, he stands behind a conference table situated lengthwise down the room. On the table: a lidded gray cardboard box and a zipper-style briefcase with peeling varnish. “Sit.”
Willi toes a chair away from the table and then awkwardly perches on the edge of its seat. His upper arms threaten to cramp, but he’ll grind his back te
eth to a fine powder before he’ll complain about the handcuffs.
Gould stares at him for thirty seconds, then withdraws his hands from his pockets. They’re huge, and the backs are covered with thick monkey hair. Picking up the lidded box, he comes and stands behind Willi’s chair. Willi’s whole body tenses.
“Collins!” says Gould, and the deputy appears like a genie. “Unlock the prisoner’s handcuffs.”
“Yes, sir.”
As soon as they’re off and the deputy has departed, Willi rubs at the grooves in his wrists. Gould takes the lid off the cardbox box. Flinging it aside, he tips the box forward, spilling on the table hunks of charred metal, part of the blackened face and radium dial of an alarm clock, scorched paper, bits of wire, bits of twine. “See this? It’s what’s left of the guinea football that blew up your apartment.”
Deliberately going for the socko effect, he then scoops out a palm’s worth of ash. “And this is probably all that’s left of your roommate.”
Willi suddenly has a vicious headache and it’s hard to think above and between its steady pulse. The apartment? Guinea football? Clark? Wait a second. Hold on.
“… what I think, Willi? I think somebody tried to blow you up. Either that or your roommate blew himself up building a bomb.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Clark doesn’t know anything about bombs. Are you sure he was there?”
“That’s what the neighbors tell us.”
“Well, he’s not dead. I can tell you that.”
Gould shakes his head. After a tiny hesitation he moves on: “Who blew up your place, Willi?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
“You ever hear of a guy in New York named Lex Luthor?”
“No.”
“He’s a politician. And a crook. And the guy that framed me. He coulda sent the bomb. To get rid of me. He coulda found out where I was living and …” Willi trails off, his scenario sounding implausible even to him.
Captain Gould returns to the far end of the table and unzips his briefcase. What now? Brass knuckles?
Instead, he takes out a carton of Camel cigarettes, which he slides down the table to Willi. “A little gift from Meyer Lansky.”
“What?”
“He read about you in the papers. And thought you might be needing a little pick-me-up. Just make ’em last, Willi—you could be here for a couple of weeks.”
For a moment Willi thinks he might take the high ground and refuse the gift. But to hell with the high ground. He isn’t about to pass up two hundred smokes for a principle. Besides, he sort of liked Meyer Lansky.
And he has the impression that Captain Gould sort of likes him, too. Otherwise Willi might be leaving here right now with a few busted ribs, a hamburger face, and a mouthful of blood.
Clark, he thinks. For crying out loud. Come get me!
2
On her way back from Republic Pictures, Diana is in a black mood: the producer she expected to be working for throughout the autumn, perhaps till the end of the year, was fired yesterday (an ill-advised practical joke, with injuries, at the studio canteen), and now his latest chapter-play, Saucer-Man from Saturn, is officially scratched from the production schedule. Instead, Herbert Yates is going to crank out another Zorro serial, and they already have costumes on hand from the first one.
Ever since she washed out as a picture actress, Diana has been designing and sewing, fitting and altering costumes for the Poverty Row studios and conglomerates in North Hollywood. It’s not what she ever wanted to do, God knows, but you get what you get and you do what you can. And she takes pride in being damn good with a Singer machine.
But she’d been counting on that Saucer-Man job! Now what?
After she gets off the bus on Vine Street, Diana stops into a grocery store and picks up two cans of pork and beans and one can of corned-beef hash, canned beets, and a package of saltine crackers. Earlier she planned on preparing something special this evening for dinner—mushroom steak or pork chops—but hash and beans are just about all she has the spirit for now.
Coming through the door she flings her green felted beret on the wall peg and tosses the Saucer-Man costume, still in its plastic bag, over an arm of the bigger loveseat. She walks into the kitchen and puts down the grocery sack. “Clark!”
“Up here.”
When she comes back out into the living room and peers up, there’s Clark on the narrow balcony leaning over the banister. “How’d it go?”
“It didn’t. They scrubbed the picture. What do you have on?”
He looks down at himself and grins: pathfinder moccasins, the jodhpurs from an African-safari shoot, a mailed shirt worn by a merman from an undersea kingdom, a domino mask, and a cowboy hat. He found everything crammed in with dozens of other wardrobe costumes on a push-boy in Diana’s sewing room. “What, you don’t like it?” He unties the mask, pulls it off his face, and drapes it over the railing. He’s trying to be cute.
“Come down and keep me company in the kitchen.”
He does immediately, sitting at the table and watching as Diana nimbly shapes the hash into little nests and then warms those in the oven. After ten minutes she removes them and fills them with pork and beans and puts them back in. She sets the table, fans the crackers out on a plate, and dumps the beets into a bowl. She finds an opened bottle of Italian Swiss Colony wine in the Frigidaire and pours two glasses. Wryly she clinks hers to his. Even in the harsh overhead kitchen light Diana looks beautiful. Gloomy today but still so beautiful.
“Maybe you can sell the same costumes to some other picture,” says Clark as they wait for the pork and beans to warm through in the hash nests.
“I’ll be all right, honey, don’t worry about me. What about you? You feeling better?”
“Yeah.” He touches his stomach, the wound area, even presses it. “Much.”
She nods slowly, thoughtfully, then getting up, she grabs a pot holder and opens the oven door. Using a spatula, she slides a nest onto Clark’s plate. Another onto her own. “Help yourself to beets,” she said. “Bon appétit.”
Before starting to eat she removes her eyeglasses and puts them aside. “What?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You just frowned.”
Clark shrugs. “Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“I like you with your glasses on.”
“You’re crazy. They make me look like a sweatshop girl.”
“No! They make you look even more beautiful than you—” He can’t believe he just said that! Color floods his face.
“Thank you, Clark, that’s very sweet.” She puts her glasses back on. “Better?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Thank you, I said. Now let’s eat.”
They do.
“Clark … ?”
“Uh-huh?”
“It’s Friday.”
“Yes … ?”
“You got blown up on Tuesday. That’s just three days ago.”
“The bungalow got blown up, not me.”
Diana’s expression—almost-but-not-quite afraid, the fear mitigated by confusion and awe—is the same one he’s been seeing again and again over the past two years. He saw it only last week at the Prudential lot after he’d fallen off the back of a galloping horse and slid under the left rear wheel of a stagecoach. Rolling over Clark’s abdomen, the wheel shattered into great wooden chunks. The wagon pitched over, dragging the team of horses with it, injuring two of them. But Clark just got up apologizing—apologizing!—even before the production crew reached him.
“Clark?”
He starts clearing plates from the table.
“Clark, we have to talk.”
He runs hot water in the sink, shakes in a little detergent. “What about?”
“ ‘What about.’ About you. About how—”
“I think I might be from another planet.”
He loo
ks timorously over a shoulder.
Diana laughs. “You too? What’s the name of your planet? Mine’s Tennessee.”
XVII
Stormy night. Skinny in transition. Meyer Lansky
again. The problem with capes. Bronson Canyon.
●
1
Diana and Clark listen to the rain crash against the bungalow roof. They are lying together fully dressed on her bed. Impulsively, he reaches over with two hands and removes her eyeglasses. She smiles … until he fits the side wires around his own ears. Then she bursts into laughter. Again.
“What do you think?”
“They make you look very … intelligent.”
“You think?” He rolls off the bed to go and stand in front of the bureau mirror. “Really?”
“Yes,” she says. “Really. Now come back to bed, superman.”
“Because if there’s one thing that I wish I was it’s—what did you call me?”
Later, after Diana falls asleep no longer in her clothes, Clark watches her for hours. He wants to wake her up and do it again. Do it all over again. But what if she gets mad? He doesn’t want her to think he’s a guy with no self-control. He wants to touch her breasts. He doesn’t. Wants to kiss her mouth. Doesn’t. Instead he picks her glasses up from the table and puts them on in the dark.
Intelligent?
Really?
2
Skinny Simon sits at the open window of her hotel room looking out at the rain, relishing the breeze, smoking Chesterfield Kings, wondering what next. After Nevada, what next? Take the Super Chief back to New York or stick around here, become a lingerie model? A model! She’s a nurse, for God’s sake. Yeah, but is that inborn, is that innate, like eye color? When you come right down to it, nursing is a job, you do it for pay, same as modeling brassieres. And it’s much harder work. Draining work. Every time Skinny returns to that migrant clinic in Kernville she discovers that another little girl or boy she saw the previous week has since died from a ruptured appendix or diphtheria. That takes its toll. At least when you’re a model nobody dies.