Superman's Cape

by Brian Spangler

  36

  The cold wind and rain filled the cab of the WJL-TV van. It pushed errant locks of hair in front of Jill’s eyes as she watched her friend struggle to live. But Steve died. Blood dripped from his neck and the driver’s side door. “So much blood,” she mumbled as her eyes glanced around the cab. She jumped when the van’s windshield wipers tracked back and forth. They followed a mechanical demand with no sense of knowing the glass was gone. The scratchy voice of the blades made an odd thud sound when one of them hit the tree branches. The wipers stopped, they seemed to think a moment, but then returned to where they came from.

  Jill was vaguely aware that she was crying. She was in pain from the accident. She was in pain from a broken knee. Images of Steve struggling to live played back in her mind. She couldn’t shake them. She’d never seen anyone die before. She wondered if he had a family. She wondered if he had someone to love or who loved him? “I am so sorry,” she told him.

  “But I’m not dead, Steve. I’m sorry – but I have to go,” she exclaimed and after another minute, Jill concentrated on helping the living. She eased herself back from his seat. He was dead after all, and there was nothing more she could do. She settled into her own seat and hugged the jacket she wore. In that moment, she tried to capture any of Jacob’s smell or sense of him that might be left over. Adolescent, she thought, and blurted a small hysterical giggle. Lifting her chin from the jacket, her eyes fell past the mosaic of fractured glass left in place of the windshield. The gravel road they were on ended where she saw the Connely’s trailer. Next to it she saw the small search party tent. Relief settled in her a little when she saw a few people heading in her direction.

  They must’ve heard the accident. Or maybe they saw it -- they saw the tree fall and kill Steve, she thought. Jill pinched her eyes past the distorted view to see if any of the volunteers in the tent looked like Jacob. She squeezed her eyes searching past the curtain of rain and wind that was standing between her and the tented group. As if a switch were flipped, a torrential rain emptied everywhere. The colors of which were thick and masked the faces and shapes of the volunteers. Frustration settled as stretches of minutes had the storm continuing at a fast pace, leaving her to see almost nothing at all. When it did slow, Jill saw the volunteers moving their vehicles – grouping them together as though building something. A few of the volunteers fought the winds and rain and were nearing her van.

  Umbrellas were useless, she thought. Jill saw the nylon parkas they wore. Some were red and others were green, but most of them were yellow. To her, the parkas seemed to trot around like pieces on a game-board where God-fingers directed their next move. With each turn, a piece was moved to a new position on the board of play. Come move me, she thought and waited for some miraculous motion of the van from beneath the tree. But nothing happened.

  The volunteers fought the weather as they approached. Raising their arms up to shield their faces, Jill wished she had a parka of her own. She watched three men, their parkas a convenient Red, Green and Yellow make their way through the heavy weather. When they reached her, they climbed over the remains of the large tree until their feet were square with the van. From there they could see inside to where she sat. They saw her clutching Jacob’s jacket. They saw her batting away tears and mouthing a thank you for coming. Hurry, she wanted to yell out to them. Please hurry. Please. I can’t stay in here anymore. Green came around the passenger side where she sat. Red and Yellow worked their way along the driver’s side. They struggled with their footing as they stepped around the larger pieces of broken tree.

  “Are you alright --” Green shouted to Jill through the passenger-side window, “-- can you move, or maybe try and open the door?”

  “I … I think I’m alright,” she yelled back and then looked over to Red and Yellow before continuing, “Steve’s dead.”

  “They’ve got your friend over there – let me help you get out of the van,” Green yelled over the storm as he pulled and pushed on the door handle. A crack in the tempered glass of the window stretched from the bottom corner to the middle. From there, it spidered in different directions, like lightning across an August sky. The collection of fine cracks broke Green up into jagged puzzle pieces. When Jill looked at the puzzle pieces, she saw that Green was a young man, about her age, whose thick square glasses with wide black frame looked oddly heavy on his narrow face. They looked uncomfortable and rain beaded up a mess of spots on the lenses. She wondered how he could see; she thought it must look too carnival to recognize anything. He also wore an out-to-save-the-world expression that told her the boy, Kyle, was still missing. She was certain of it. This lifted her hopes that Jacob was in the trailer, safe from the storm, waiting for them or as the case me be, waiting for her.

  The door was heavy and might have been caught on something. When she pushed, she heard the sounds of metal crunching against metal. The anxiety of being stuck in the van was building as she struggled to push from the inside. She pushed and lifted on the handle some more. Urgency welled up like a warm blanket. It edged up and then wrapped around her chest and neck until exploding from each hand. She felt sick and desperately needed to be out of the van. She had to get away from the dead body that was her friend and whose chaw and blood smell remained fresh in her nose as his last garbled words echoed in her ringing ears. Teardrop strings of blood continued their trek from the cuts in her head and face. She thought the bleeding stopped, but warm streams flowed across her cheek and down her nose. I’m going to need stitches, she thought as blood drops became heavy and fell from her face. She wondered if Green could sense her urgency. He began to pull on the door handle only to hear the same crunching metal in protest. The fresh blood added to the graveness of her being trapped and she thought in a moment she’d start screaming if the van’s door didn’t open. She could feel her heart thumping and before she realized it, she was slapping at the fractured glass and screaming to Green to help her. The door stayed closed. It was stuck.

  Green looked back at her through the glassy spider veins and then took a step behind him and turned his head from side to side. Briefly she thought he was going to leave her. And she thought it was a crazy punishment for letting Steve die. She realized she was in shock and her senses and thinking might be failing. She turned to the window and motioned to Green. He raised his hand as he sized up the mess of tree and metal in front of him. After a pause that seemed to last longer than it should, he looked back to Jill and then over to Red and to Yellow who had also stepped away from the van.

  “The frame is bent up. Bent bad – doors are jammed, they’re not going anywhere,” he hollered over the sound of rain before blowing water from his upper lip. He turned and stepped toward Jill and yelled through the glass, “I’m going to have to break that window and pull you out, okay?”

  Jill saw Red and Yellow begin to climb across the front and step over the gnarled remains of the tree. The God-fingers moved them to new positions on the game-board. But Jill had no move of her own to make, other than the one Green suggested. She nodded to Green who nodded back.

  “Wait!” Jill yelled as Green looked for something to break the glass with. She tapped the glass and said, “Let me try to break it from in here. The glass is already cracked.”

  Green nodded and stepped back out of the way. Red and Yellow joined him at his side and the three together looked like some kind of expressionist art gallery photograph. “You gotta be kidding,” she smirked as she looked at the lineup of game-board pieces in front of her. She wondered if the God-fingers were watching and ready to make another move. Three men in parkas of Red, Yellow and Green. Standing on a gravel road, with heavy woods of autumn orange and brown behind them. A hazy downpour bouncing up from the gravel and filtering all but just enough light to see the image.

  She waved at the three game-board pieces then started to search around the cab of the van for anything heavy and strong enough to break through the fractured glass. Between the center console and Steve’s body, a small
thermos sat at attention as though waiting for Jill. It was all metal. No glass. No plastic. It was perfect. She pulled the cold metal cylinder up and over her head then swung it hard against the window. Jill ended her swing with a confident expectation of seeing the glass release in completion. She expected to hear a burst of glass fireworks and then see the remains spill over the lip of the door, before deserting the van in an escape to the gravel road below. But the window only spidered new veins and bulged through the other side.

  “You’re going to have to hit it a few times!” Green yelled. “Hit it as hard as you can!” Yellow joined in.

  Yeah, no shit, she thought but decided to holler back, “I’m trying!” After two more throws of her arms, the missile of metal shattered the passenger-window. It scattered glass fragments to the ground and destroyed the web of puzzle pieces. A welcome gust of cold wet air met the half dozen razor cuts on her face. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth in an awww expression as if eating up her freedom. She wasted no time. Extending her arms through the steel portal, Red, Yellow and Green raised their hands in return to meet hers.

  What came next was both painful and relieving as the men helped to thread Jill’s body through the window. They took care with their hands, holding her above the ground. And to her surprise their touch was even mannerly in where and how they placed their supporting fingers along her waist and sides. When hands reached her injured knee, she screamed and beckoned them with waving arms to stop, please stop, as an uncontrollable pain rifled up her leg.

  “My knee – please, careful … I broke my knee,” she pleaded.

  Green looked down at his hands and pulled them away. He was quick to reposition them so that he could help lower her body to the ground. Once Jill was on the ground she could see the completeness of what had stopped the van and taken Steve’s life. The tree wasn’t just big, it was mammoth. It looked as if it could have been left over from a primitive time. An area of roots and earth, three or four times the size of the van, had given way around the trunk of the ancient tree. The earth let the tree’s life go, sending it to the ground after what might have been centuries of support. We never had a chance, she thought and then realized how easily her own life might have been extinguished.

  “Just a little faster,” she mumbled, and cast her eyes back and forth, “if we were moving just a little faster, I’d’ve have been squished.”

  Green knelt down and put his hand on Jill’s back in an effort to console her, “It’s a big tree,” he stated, and then turned to face her, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

  Jill looked once more to Steve, his frozen expression staring blankly ahead. Chaw vomit drizzled from his lower lip and chin. I should have cleaned that off for him, she thought with regret and then looked back to Green whose eyes spoke compassion, but also an eagerness, as he turned his face up towards Yellow and Red.

  “You’re right. I am lucky, but Steve wasn’t,” and then Jill began to cry again as the adrenaline that helped her break the passenger-window faded. The magic strength serum left her limbs and her body and she was cold and shaky and in pain.

  The men helped Jill get to her feet. Standing, she paused a second to catch her breath and then decided to try and take a step. The creak in her knee began to loosen. Maybe the break isn’t that bad, she wondered. But the small gravel of the road teased the heels of her shoes. One wrong step and she’d roll an ankle for sure. Or worse yet, fall back down onto her swollen knee.

  “I need to ditch the shoes. I can’t walk in them out here,” she said to Green whose shoulder she kept her hand on in an effort to remain upright.

  “When it comes to gravel, I can’t walk in heels either,” he answered back, and offered her a smile. She appreciated the humor and smiled back at him. With her shoes gone, she could move more freely. Walking became easier, albeit still painful.

  The Connely’s trailer was closer and so was the tent full of volunteers. She hugged Jacob’s station jacket. Most of her was drenched. The jacket was helping keep a part of her from getting completely rained through. She watched the God-fingers moving the game-board pieces around as they got in and out of their cars. She watched them park then get out and move to another car. Jill watched how the game-board pieces worked to line up the vehicles, parallel to one another and close. Almost touching.

  “What are they doing with the cars?”

  “We can’t evacuate on account of the road being blocked,” Green answered over the pouring rain. He tilted his head first behind them toward the news van and then forward. She understood. They blocked the exit. Guilt surfaced but then faded as her knee revolted.

  Green began to move his hand in the air as though counting items on a shelf. “We’re lining up the vehicles to make it secure by butting them up against one another. We’ve got ten vehicles but only need nine. We’re moving the operations as much as we can into the vehicles. When the storm gets stronger and the tent starts to give, we can sit in them and we should be okay.”

  “What about the trailer?” She asked the question hoping to hear Jacob’s name.

  “Not big enough for all of us!” Red yelled over the rain, “I think the cars might even be safer than the trailer – less drag from the wind,” he continued, and pointed to the height of the trailer.

  When Jill turned to the Connely’s, she saw a man appear at the open door. The man struggled to step forward. He struggled to stand at the landing where Sara Connely stood earlier that morning. He placed his hands on the railing and seemed to absorb the front of the storm as it pelted his chest and face. The rains and wind coated his hair so that it lay flat in a wet matte against his head.

  It was Jacob. Sara’s heart dropped and her eyes grew wide when she saw him. He was Jacob, but he wasn’t. His face was distorted and twisted as though someone were turning screws inside him and rearranging things on a whim as if with sick pleasure or tortured fun. “Oh my God – what happened to him,” she said past Green who turned to look at the trailer.

  “Jacob!” she yelled, and let go of Green’s shoulder and turned further. She felt the brief touch of Green’s fingers to her own as he raised his hand in an effort to grab hers.

  “Jacob! Over here!” she yelled again, and then shock and fear stopped her as the man on the landing turned his neck in a manner that was unnatural. He turned his body in the same way and it scared her some more. She stopped and was frightened by what she saw – it was as if there really was a God-hand with God-fingers that pulled and pushed Jacob’s body against his will. The God-fingers jerked his arms and legs in an attempt to mimic someone walking.

  Jill looked into Jacob’s face. And for a moment she saw what she thought were his eyes. But she was suddenly afraid for him. Afraid of what was happening to him. His eyes were begging her. Pleading with her to help him. They were tortured and sorrowful as his body moved in an artificial and freakish way across the landing and then down the steps before stopping and turning towards the woods. Jill’s emotions fell out of her. They spilled like Steve’s blood as she cried for him and begged the God-fingers to stop what she was seeing.

  “What’s happening here?” Jill screamed as Sara Connely appeared in the dark rectangle of the trailer’s door.

  “He’s going to find Kyle – he knows where my son is, don’t you touch him, don’t you dare stop him!” Sara yelled to all who could hear her.

  Jill was confused, she was in pain and growing terrified for Jacob. His body continued to move towards the woods. He moved in a tortured walk as his legs lurched up then down in piston-like steps that were puppet and forced.

  “Jacob. Oh Jacob, please stop, don’t go in there!” Jill screamed to him once more, her hands cupped together in front of her, shaking at the air. She gasped when Jacob’s head turned around more than she thought was possible. He looked at her and started to speak.

  “I need to get my son,” he answered in a menagerie of voices. He then spun his head back so that it was straight again before he continued forward. Jill lo
wered her hands and then dropped herself past the pain in her knee. She landed so that she sat on the ground, and then turned to Sara’s voice. Sara was screaming for Jacob to save her boy, to find her boy, don’t let her boy die. She was yelling and her voice sounded as though it were consuming madness and spewing hysteria that Jill couldn’t understand. And when Jill listened to what Sara was screaming, she heard her say: “You save Kyle, you go and you save him. You save our boy, our son – don’t you let him die!”

  37

  Jacob shuffled his feet on the carpeted floor and wondered how it was he could find himself a prisoner in his mind. He thought about Jill and whether or not she was just outside the trailer waiting for him. He thought about Andy who was surely pacing back and forth across the miles of studio cabling. And he thought about Kyle and how he would help if he could, but that this wasn’t the way -- trapped in a void was not the way to help anyone. This must be what a coma feels like – you’re there but you’re not there. What a terrible place to be.

  The door in front of him stayed closed. He could hear the little boy Jonnie and Sara on the other side, but their voices were muffled. He thought he heard enough to understand what they were saying. Chris knew where Kyle was. He also knew Kyle was dying and he was here to save him.

  Jacob pressed his hand against the door. It felt smooth. It felt warm. The door breathed. Alive. Frustration crawled through him. But this was him. Confusion remained. It surrounded him as he tried to understand what was happening. Jacob wanted to break through the door and run out of the trailer. He didn’t care what pulled him to the Connely place. But he didn’t move. Nothing moved. His ability to control any part of him lie just on the other side of the door. Jacob swung his fisted hand against smooth face. The door changed and inhaled his arm. Loud sucking sounds echoed though the room, through him, and he thought the door might eat him. Panic gripped him as he struggled to pull his arm free of the door. Frustration grew into anger and then turned to resentment.