The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (81 page)

"Yes," he said. "I still have it."

"It's just."

"Sitting there," Joe said. "In the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Since ... well, since the
Ark of Miriam
sank. On December 6, 1941."

"Twelve years and four months."

"Sitting there."

"That's a long time, too," Sammy said.

Joe agreed with this.

"I guess there really isn't any reason to leave it there," he said. The thought of working with Sammy again was very appealing. He had just spent five years drawing a comic book; all day, every day, taking a break every now and then, just long enough to read a comic book or two. He considered himself, at this point, to be the greatest comic book artist in the history of the world. He could dilate a crucial episode in the life of a character over ten pages, slicing his panels ever thinner until they stopped time completely and yet tumbled past with the irreversible momentum of life itself. Or he could spread a single instant across two pages in a single giant panel crammed with dancers, laboratory equipment, horses, trees and shadows, soldiers, drunken revelers at a wedding. When the mood called for it, he could do panels that were more than half shadow; pure black; and yet have everything visible and clear, the action unmistakable, the characters' expressions plain. With his un-English ear, he had made a study of, and understood, as the great comic artists always have, the power of written sound-effect words—of invented words like
snik
and
plish
and
doit
—appropriately lettered, for lending vividness to a jackknife, a rain puddle, a half-crown against the bottom of a blind man's empty tin cup. And yet he had run out of things to draw. His
Golem
was finished, or nearly so, and for the first time in years he found himself—as on every level of his life and emotions— wondering what he was going to do next.

"You'd think I would," he began. "You would think I'd be able to."

More than anything else, he wanted to be able to do something for Sammy. It shocked him to see just how beaten, how unhappy Sam had become. What a feat it would be, to reach into the dark sleeve of his past and pull out something that completely altered Sammy's condition; something that saved him, freed him, returned him to life. With a stroke of the pen, he would be able to hand Sammy, according to the ancient mysteries of the League, a golden key, to pass along the gift of liberation that he had received and that had, until now, gone unpaid.

"I know that I should," Joe continued. His voice thickened as he spoke, and his cheeks burned. He was crying; he had no idea why. "Oh, I should just get rid of it all."

"No, Joe." Now it was Sammy's turn to put his arm around Joe. "I understand you don't want to touch that money. I mean, I think I understand. I get that it... well, that it represents something to you that you don't want to ever forget."

"I forget every day," Joe said. He tried to smile. "You know? Days go by, and I don't remember not to forget."

"You just keep your money," Sammy said gently. "I don't need to own Empire Comics. That's the last thing I need."

"I... I couldn't. Sammy, I wish that I could, but I couldn't."

"I get it, Joe," Sammy said. "You just hold on to your money."

15

The day after the Escapist, Master of Elusion, whom no chains could hold nor walls imprison, was ruled out of existence by the New York State Court of Appeals, a white delivery van of modest dimensions pulled up in front of 127 Lavoisier Drive. On its panels, blue script like the writing on a beer bottle said bachelor button drayage inc. new york , arched over a painted nosegay of petite blue flowers. It was getting on toward five o'clock of a dull April afternoon, and though there was still plenty of daylight, the van's lights were turned on, as if for a funeral procession. It had been raining in fits all day, and with the approach of dusk, the heavy sky itself seemed to be settling, like a blanket, over Bloomtown, in gray folds and plaits among the houses. The slender trunks of the young maples, sycamores, and pin oaks on the neighbors' lawns looked white, almost phosphorescent, against the darker gray stuff of the afternoon.

The driver cut his engine, switched off the lights, and climbed down from the cab. He cranked the heavy latch at the back of the van, slid the bar to one side, and threw open the doors with a steely creak of hinges. He was an improbably diminutive man for his trade, thickset and bowlegged, in a bright blue coverall. As Rosa watched him through the front windows of the house, she saw him stare in at his payload with what appeared to be a puzzled expression. She supposed, given Sammy's description, that the hundred and two boxes of comic books and other junk that Joe had accumulated must make a strong impression even on a veteran mover. But perhaps the guy was only trying to decide how in the hell he was going to get all those boxes into the house by himself.

"What's he doing?" Tommy said. He stood beside her at the living-room window. He had just eaten three bowls of rice pudding, and he had a milky baby smell.

"Probably wondering how we're ever going to fit all of that crap into this shoe box," Rosa said. "I can't believe Joe contrived not to be here for this."

"You said 'crap.' "

"Sorry."

"Can I say 'crap'?"

"No." Rosa was wearing a sauce-spattered apron, and held a wooden spoon bloodied in the same red sauce. "I can't believe it all fits inside that one little truck."

"Ma, when is Joe coming back?"

"I'm sure he'll be back any minute." This was probably the fourth time she had said this since Tommy had come home from school. "I'm making chile con carne and rice pudding. He won't want to miss that."

"He really likes your cooking."

"He always did."

"He said if he never sees another pork chop again, it will be too soon."

"I would never cook a pork chop."

"Bacon is pork, and we eat bacon."

"Bacon is not actually pork. There are words in the Talmud to that effect."

They went out onto the front step.

"Kavalier?" the man called, trying to rhyme the name with its French cognate.

"As in Maurice," Rosa said.

"Got a package."

"That's kind of an understatement, isn't it?"

The man didn't reply. He climbed up inside his truck and disappeared for a while. First a wooden ramp emerged from the back, like a tongue, reaching toward the neighbors' Buick, then lolling on the ground. After that, there was a lot of banging and clamor, as though the man were in there rolling around a keg of beer. Presently he emerged, wrestling a hand truck down the ramp, under the weight of a large oblong wooden box.

"What is that?" Rosa said.

"I never saw that at Joe's," Tommy said. "Wow, it must be part of his equipment! It looks like a—oh my gosh—
it's a packing crate escape!
Oh, my gosh. Do you think he's going to teach me how to do it?"

I don't even know if he's ever coming back. "I don't know what he's going to do, honey," she said.

When Joe and Sammy had returned from the city last night with news of the Escapist's passing, they both seemed pensive, and said little before they each went to bed. Sammy seemed diffident, even apologetic, around Joe, scrambling up some eggs for him, asking him were they too runny, were they too dry, offering to fry some potatoes. Joe was monosyllabic, almost curt, Rosa would have said; he went to lie down on the couch without having exchanged more than a few dozen words with either Rosa or Sam. She saw that something had passed between the two men, but since neither of them said anything about it, she assumed it must have simply concerned the demise of their brainchild; perhaps they had engaged in recriminations over lost opportunities.

The news had certainly come as a shock to Rosa. Though she had not been a regular reader since the days of Kavalier Clay—Sammy wouldn't have Empire books in the house—she still checked in with
Radio
and
Escapist Adventures
from time to time, killing a half hour at a Grand Central newsstand, or while waiting for a prescription at Spiegelman's. The character had long since slipped into cultural inconsequence, but the titles in which he starred had continued, as far as she knew, to sell. She'd assumed, more or less unconsciously, that the heroic puss of the Escapist would always be there, on lunch boxes, beach towels, on cereal boxes and belt buckles and the faces of alarm clocks, even on the Mutual Television Network,
[19]
^[19]
taunting her with the wealth and the unimaginable contentment that, though she knew better, she could never help feeling would have been Sammy's had he been able to reap the fruits of the one irrefutable moment of inspiration vouchsafed him in his scattershot career. Rosa had stayed up very late trying to work, worrying about them both, and then slept in even later than usual. By the time she had woken up, both Joe and the Studebaker were gone. All his clothes were in his valise, and there was no note. Sammy seemed to feel these were good signs.

"He would leave a note," he said when she phoned him at the office. "If he were. Going to leave, I mean."

"There wasn't any note the last time," Rosa said.

"I really don't think he would steal our car."

Now here were all his things, and Joe was not. It was as if he had pulled a substitution trick on them, the old switcheroo.

"I guess we'll have to just cram it all into the garage," she said.

The stout little mover wheeled the crate up the walk to the front door, puffing and grimacing and nearly running off into the pansies. When he reached Rosa and Tommy, he tipped the hand truck forward onto its bracket. The crate tottered and seemed to consider pitching over before it settled, with a shiver, on its end.

"Weighs a ton," he said, flexing his fingers as if they were sore. "What's he got in there, bricks?"

"It's probably iron chains," Tommy explained in an authoritative tone. "And, like, padlocks and junk."

The man nodded. "A box of iron chains," he said. "Figures. Pleased to meetcha." He wiped his right hand down the front of his coverall and offered it to Rosa. "Al Button."

"Are you in fact a bachelor?" said Rosa.

"The name of the firm," Al Button said with an air of genuine regret, "is a little out-of-date." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a sheaf of waybills and carbons, then took a pen from another breast pocket and uncapped it. "I'm going to need your John Hancock on this."

"Don't I need to sort of check everything off as you bring it in?" Rosa said. "That's how it worked when we moved out here from Brooklyn."

"You can go right ahead and check that off, if you want to," he said, with a nod to the crate as he handed the packet to Rosa. "That's all I have for you today."

Rosa checked the bill and found that it did itemize a single article, described pithily as
Wood box.
She paged through the other sheets of paper, but they were just carbon copies of the first.

"Where's the rest of it?"

"That's the only thing that I'm aware of," Button said. "Maybe you know better than me."

"There are supposed to be more than a hundred boxes coming out from the city. From the Empire State Building. Joe—Mr. Kavalier— arranged for the shipment yesterday afternoon."

"This didn't come from the Empire State Building, lady. I picked it up this morning at Penn Station."

"Penn Station? Wait a minute." She started to shuffle through the papers and carbons again. "Who is this from?" While the shipper's name was not quite legible, it did seem to begin with a R. The address, however, was a post-office box in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Rosa wondered if Joe had made it that far during his period of wandering, just after the war, and had left this box of whatever was in it behind.

"Nova Scotia," she said. "Who does Joe know in Nova Scotia?"

"And how did they know he was here?" Tommy said.

It was a very good question. Only the police and a few people at Pharaoh knew that Joe was staying with the Clays.

Rosa signed for the crate, and then Al Button jostled and cajoled it into the living room, where Rosa and Tommy helped him to walk it off of the dolly and onto the low-pile wall-to-wall.

"A box full of chains," Button repeated, his hand rough and dry against Rosa's. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

After he left, closing up his truck and winding his funereal way back to the city, Rosa and Tommy stood there in the living room, studying the wood box. It was a good two feet taller than Rosa, and nearly twice as broad. It was made of solid pine, knotty and unvarnished except by the abrading rasp of its travels, dark yellow and stained like an animal's tooth. You could tell somehow, looking at it, that it had come a long way, suffered ill handling and exposure, had ignoble things spilled on it. It had been used as a table, perhaps, a bed, a barricade. There were black scuffs, and the corners and edges were tufted with splinters. If these were not suggestive enough of wide journeying, there was the incredible profusion of its labels: customs stamps and shipping-line decals, quarantine stickers and claim checks and certificates of weight. In places they were layered a few deep, bits of place-name and color and handwriting all jumbled together. It reminded Rosa of a Cubist collage, a Kurt Schwitters. Clearly, Halifax was not the crate's point of origin. Rosa and Tommy tried to trace its history, peeling away at the layers of seal and sticker, timidly at first, then more carelessly as they were led backward from Halifax to Helsinki, to Murmansk, to Memel, to Leningrad, to Memel once more, to Vilnius, in Lithuania, and finally, scraping away now with the point of a kitchen knife at a particularly recalcitrant carbuncle of adhesive paper near the center of what appeared to be the crate's lid, to