It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  So maybe it hadn’t been stupid.

  At the hard slam of a car door, Lois looked up. The gunman (Ben had called him Paul; Paulie) had slid under the wheel of his two-door—what? What make was it? A Hudson, a Gen? DeSoto? Her glance shifted to the cowl of the automobile where the chromium hood ornament—an Art Deco winged locomotive—identified it as a Nash-Lafayette. (Only last month a police-beat reporter had told her to be a “smart girly” and memorize grilles, bumpers, hubcaps, and hood ornaments; it might come in handy, you never know. She’d done just that.) A Nash-Lafayette 3-window coupe, 1936. Okay, but what color? Too dark to tell. It looked black but could’ve been green, it could’ve been maroon, could’ve—

  She met Paulie’s eyes in the outside mirror.

  Lois scuttled crablike around behind Ben, tried dragging him toward the curb. She hadn’t gotten far when the continental heel on her left pump wobbled and snapped off. She sat down hard in the street, legs splayed. Ben toppled against her chest and into her arms.

  The Nash made a wide, careless U-turn, slammed hard into a parked Cadillac, stalled, started again, then backed up and roared straight at them.

  Lois flung an arm across her eyes.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  But it was.

  Then it wasn’t.

  The engine sound changed from a brash throb to a high-pitched caterwaul. Tires screeched and the air thickened with oily smoke, the fetor of heated rubber. When she lowered her arm Lois was pelted with stinging chunks and morsels of tire tread, and the Nash’s fender-mounted headlamps glanced off the street surface and beamed obliquely over her head.

  And now …

  Motor howling, overdrive in clear distress, the street coupe not only has come to a dead stop, it’s raked like a seesaw, the rear section elevated, the front end and waterfall grille sloped acutely down.

  Lois checks on Ben, who has lapsed into unconsciousness, and then looks back toward the Nash. The glare-and-dark is disorienting, her eyes water, everything shimmers, refracts, but still—her vision registers something red behind the car, something pennantlike, flaglike billowing up, snapping and swirling above the roof.

  The back end of the Nash crashes down, the undercarriage kindling sparks and the shock coils twanging. The motor falters before growling back into full power.

  Inside the car Paulie-in-silhouette twists around.

  Then: more gunfire (three shots, Lois notes for later, now that “later” seems at least a possibility).

  Glass pelts the street like drenching rain.

  Bracing a hand on the ground, Lois secures her balance. As she stands her skull throbs and her legs tremble with the aftershocks of panic. Her focus narrows till she is certain this is no dirty trick of poor light and heavy shadow, no stress-created illusion …

  (An eyewitness at the scene reported seeing … )

  (This reporter personally observed … )

  Half clouded by exhaust smoke, a man in a weightlifter’s squat is crouched in back of the Nash, holding onto the narrow bumper. Chips of window glass wink in his dark hair, cling to his shoulders, and spangle his—cape; it’s a cape, not a pennant or a flag, a red cape. Billowing out behind him, lifting, floating down, lifting …

  The long sloping lid to the luggage compartment springs up, blocking her view.

  What are those sounds?

  Before she can isolate them with nouns and adjectives (piercing whistle? hissing whine?), the luggage lid tears violently from its hinges and somersaults high into the air. Instantly there is a loud sizzling noise and all of the house fronts and grillwork and wrought-iron fences, the leafless trees and parked cars, the garbage cans set out for Monday-morning pickup, are illuminated by an arc of red and yellow-green fireworks that spume from the Nash’s boot.

  And the cape-man is gone.

  Behind Lois the luggage lid strikes paving with a metallic clatter, bounces, bounces, and hits a curb, spins up, wheels serenely, and crashes through someone’s front window.

  Flames lick an ornamental pear tree before they envelop it.

  Canted to her right, her weight on the foot in the broken shoe, Lois just stares.

  A hand clamps firmly down on her shoulder, spins her.

  Willi Berg thrusts a press camera at her. “Here,” he says, “take this.”

  She already has it.

  “Now run for it, kid—run!”

  He shoves her away from the Nash, toward the curb.

  Then he scoops up Ben Jaeger in a fireman’s carry.

  Farther down the block, another tree, this time an English oak, bursts into flame. The front stoop and enormous bay of a Gilded Age house explode into chunks of brownstone, glass, sash, sills, weatherboard, and jamb.

  Suddenly Ronald Colman’s mellifluous voice recites the first sentence of Lois Lane’s favorite childhood novel: “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name being Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.”

  Lois turns her head and what she sees now spinning around and around in the street looks like the bastard child of an Electrolux and a knight in shining armor.

  “So I called myself Pip,” booms Ronald Colman’s voice from a round mesh loudspeaker in its chest, “and came to be called Pip.”

  A low brick wall explodes, a lawn fountain, a post lantern, a wall lantern, a Ford cabriolet.

  The Nash-Lafayette.

  “Lois!”

  Finally she runs for it.

  2

  While Carl Krusada was in the seminary he knew he was nothing but a phonus-balonus, an imposter-postulant whose professed piety and religious “vocation” were just means to an end, the end being safety in a world gone smash: a roof over his head, three squares a day, and clean clothes on his back (although the clothing, God knows, left something to be desired).

  When the Depression really hit, back in 1930, and there were no jobs and scant prospects of any turning up soon, Carl panicked and seized the first opportunity that came to mind (actually it first came to his mother’s mind, and she relayed the thought).

  He did well enough at the seminary, primarily because he was a good dissembler, but also because he was talented at memorization. That’s a chasuble, that’s an alb, that’s a cruet, that’s a Pastoral candle. Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. Nothing to it.

  Following his ordination and his surprise posting to the same parish in Carrolton, Brooklyn, where he’d been baptized, confirmed, and educated through high school, Carl discovered that he didn’t hate what he was doing, despite doing it under false pretenses. Although he disobeyed as many rules as he followed (fish on Friday? Every Friday?), he liked being told what to do, enjoyed being a servant of a kind. He didn’t really believe in God but he completely believed in serving the Lord. It was hard to explain, not that he tried explaining it to anyone, but it made sense to him.

  Being a parish priest was okay: he played a lot of basketball with the boys at St. Rocco’s, always had time for an afternoon nap, and he got to hear confession. Hands down it was the most interesting of the sacraments, although it quickly destroyed any lingering illusions that Carl still held regarding human beings.

  As he chauffeurs Lex Luthor this evening, Carl regales him with tales from the confessional box (the beloved old barber who sold pornography, the Cub Scout den mother who laced her husband’s eggs each morning with atropine), and Mr. Luthor nods and smiles at everything. (Naturally Lex initiated the conversation; Carl wouldn’t have dreamed of initiating anything when it came to the boss.)

  For almost three hours they’ve been motoring around with no destination. Midtown. Uptown. Harlem. Inwood. Now on the drive back down Broadway, Carl is saying, “This guy used to come in every few months, local committeeman that everybody liked ’cause he was always taking baskets of food and stuff to the poor. He’d come in, kneel down and go, ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned, it’s been ten weeks since my last confession. I had impure thoughts fifteen
times, I lost my temper five times, and I strangled another prostitute last Thursday.’ You know how the Daily News would print all those scare stories about the White Glove Killer? I talked to the guy.”

  “Human beings,” says Lex.

  “Oh, yeah, we’re something else, we are.”

  “Yes, you are,” says Lex.

  He asks Carl for the name of the White Glove Killer, and Carl gives it to him, watching as Lex jots it down in a small notebook.

  After being “dismissed from the clerical state,” Carl briefly considered soldiering, almost joined the French Foreign Legion. He checked and you really could do such a thing! But he never got around to filling out the paperwork. And how lucky was that? Otherwise he wouldn’t have ended up with Mr. Luthor.

  Once Paulie Scaffa helped him land this job, Carl realized that abiding service was his one true and legitimate vocation. Previously he’d pledged his allegiance to the wrong god.

  Now Carl has it straight, and Lex seems to recognize his devotion, his reverence toward him, his worship of him.

  Well, sure: now it’s Carl Krusada, not Paulie Scaffa, driving Lex around in the big Lincoln. Carl, not Paulie, that Lex had orchestrate that little elevator-shaft accident back at the Chrysler Building. And it’s Carl, not Paulie, whose tales of human perfidy amuse Lex so much, cause him to smile, chuckle even, and crinkle his eyes.

  At twenty-two minutes past nine—Carl checks the dashboard clock—Lex decides he’s ready to head back to the Waldorf. “I’ve thought my thoughts,” he says, “and now I could use a little dinner. It’s been a most satisfactory day.”

  “I’m glad, sir.”

  “The Lexbot.”

  “Perfect name.”

  “By this time next year there’ll be one in every household. Probably several.”

  “Won’t that be something.”

  “And I’ll be announcing a no-interest guaranteed loan program this winter so that even the most unfortunate among us will have at least one of his own.”

  “I can’t wait to get mine.”

  “Don’t be naïve. Believe me, Carl, you don’t want one. I wouldn’t let you have one.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re too valuable.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Carl is thrilled that Lex thinks he’s so “valuable,” but … Why won’t he let him own a Lexbot? And why is it “naïve” for Carl to want one? He wishes he could ask.

  Lex sits back against the plush upholstery. “Do you know what I was doing while we took our nice cruise around the city?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I was making a list. Of who’s to get the first hundred Lexbots that come off the assembly line. They’ll all be gifts. To prime the pump.”

  “And did you finish your list, sir? All hundred names?”

  Carl can almost feel a drop in the air temperature. He shouldn’t have asked such a direct question; is he crazy? Know your place, Krusada, he tells himself. Know your place.

  When Lex speaks again, nearly a minute later, he seems to have forgiven Carl’s impudence. “All hundred names, yes. And Number One goes to the president of the United States. Number Two I’ll give to his ugly wife. Every Lexbot will have its own serial number, of course.”

  “Is that right?”

  “La Guardia, I’ve decided, will have Number Nine.”

  “Even if he loses the election on Tuesday?”

  “He won’t, Carl. Number Nine goes to Fatty. Shirley Temple gets Number 48. Clark Gable, 32. Deanna Durbin, 46.”

  “Deanna Durbin!” says Carl. “I have a little crush on her!”

  As the limousine progresses downtown, Lex rattles off several more famous names from Hollywood and politics (Louie B. Mayer, Robert A. Taft, Earl Browder) as well as from the worlds of business and high finance, athletics, education, fashion, literature, the arts, publishing, broadcasting, and the sciences, both abstract and applied—among them Henry Ford and Carl Hubbell, John Dewey, Coco Chanel, Margaret Mitchell, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Luce, Westbrook Pegler, and George Washington Carver.

  “George Washington Carver, sir? But he’s a Negro.”

  “I don’t discriminate, Carl. All human beings are the same to me.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask a question?”

  “You may.”

  “If the president and the first lady get numbers one and two—who gets Number Three?”

  “Adolf Hitler.”

  Carl hadn’t expected that. He’d been thinking maybe Ernest Hemingway or Bing Crosby.

  “The Lexbot will be an international phenomenon, Carl.”

  “Yes, sir, of course.”

  “And Number Four will go with my compliments to Signore Mussolini, Number Five to Comrade Stalin, Number Six to General Franco, and Number Seven to King George. Or maybe I’ll reverse that, Six to the Sixth, eh?”

  “That’s a lot of free merchandise you’ll be handing out. Sir.”

  “You have to spend money to make it, Carl.”

  “I can just see it now, sir—ten, fifteen pages in Life magazine. Everybody showing off their brand-new Lexbots. At lawn parties and so on.”

  While the limousine is stopped for a red light, Lex reaches into his topcoat and takes out a small black socketed cube. He bounces it lightly in the palm of his hand.

  3

  Clark’s impact with the granite bluff not only rendered him senseless and blank but also left him wedged in a crevice of his own making. New pebbles and pulverized rock steadily pepper his head and sieve down on his face and shoulders.

  The south-facing windows of the Tudor City buildings are all lighted now, moon faces in nearly every one. Traffic on First Avenue has come to a complete stop, with drivers peering through windshields and riders jumping out to point at Clark. It’s like that terrible morning in third grade when Clark dozed off, a cheek pressed to his arithmetic workbook, then woke amid a babble of silvery laughter to find his classmates gleefully surrounding him. He burst into tears. Later, when he informed his mother that he could never, ever go back to school, she told him, “Clark, you just can’t be so sensitive.”

  After disengaging himself, Clark slides down the face of the rock, lands flat-footed, finds his balance, and starts to walk. Is he limping? He’s limping! Although it doesn’t persist very long (ten steps and the favoring vanishes), it’s nonetheless unnerving.

  People call to him. Shout. He ignores them and crosses First Avenue, squeezing between the front fenders and rear bumpers of two or three automobiles, his breathing labored, his head woozy.

  On Thirty-ninth Street he steps around metal scraps, hunks of tire, and a car bonnet. He stumbles over a massive piece of a brick wall, crunches more glass with every step, tearing his athletic socks to ribbons.

  He fixes his gaze on that whirling dervish twenty feet away and doesn’t know what to do.

  But coming closer to it, at least the fog in his head grows fainter, his breathing becomes less shallow.

  Clark can feel it all returning, his vitality, his talents.

  Then his legs cave and he falls to his knees.

  When he lifts his eyes the robot is right there.

  Then he’s hurtling backward again, smashing through a bay window, tumbling through an interior space, a living room, passing upside down beyond an archway and into a foyer—smacking the wall hard enough to both explode plaster and splinter lathing.

  He drops to the floor, whacking his rib cage on a radiator valve.

  Propping a hand on its warm coils, Clark uses the radiator to give him leverage and get him back on his feet.

  He totters through the archway into the well-appointed living room. It glitters with broken glass. Going lightheaded again, he puts out a hand and clamps his fingers over the back of a Morris chair.

  Slumped in the chair is a dead woman with a small hole in one temple. A wide ribbon of blood runs from it down past her ear and underneath her jaw, where it breaks into two separate thinner ribbons that disappear finally behind the sopping collar o
f her white-and-rose housedress.

  Another dead woman is splayed out bloody on the floor.

  In the street something else blows up. Across the street rooftops are in flames. A fire truck clangs. There’s gunfire. Another explosion.

  Clark looks from one corpse to the other.

  Taking his time, he walks carefully across the living room and sits in an upholstered chair. Leans forward and looks at his hands.

  They’re shaking.

  He clasps them, pins them between his knees.

  He thinks about Donny Poore and that Negro prisoner cooked to death inside a vault.

  He remembers the General Slocum and feels sure he would’ve dropped the water tank before he’d flown it to the excursion boat.

  They’d all have drowned anyway.

  For two years he’s been trying to grow up, pay attention, make himself ready … and do you know what?

  It was a joke.

  He wonders if there is a back door he can use.

  Getting up, he looks around (but not at the dead women), then walks through a doorway into the kitchen.

  A parrot is squawking in its cage.

  He smells burnt coffee.

  There are dishes drying in a rack and a plate of Toll House cookies on the table.

  No back door.

  Clark pulls out a chair, sits at the table, and glances mechanically at the glow-in-the-dark clock in the back panel of the electric range. It reads nine-twenty-three.

  “Herman says hello, Herman says hello!”

  Picking up a Toll House cookie, Clark regards it closely as though inspecting it for imperfections. His mom used to make these: butter, sifted flour, baking soda, salt, chocolate morsels—anything else?

  “Herman says hello, Herman says hello!”

  He puts the cookie back on the pile.

  Folding his hands in his lap, he stares at the new-looking white Kelvinator with the basket-shaped motor on top.

  Diana Dewey had a new refrigerator, too. He doesn’t think hers was a Kelvinator though. But maybe.

  He remembers Diana’s raspy voice, her crooked smile, the silky texture of her skin.

  “Your mother says hello, your mother says hello.”