The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (86 page)

Joe had gathered as much from Sammy. The age of the costumed superhero
had long passed. The Angel, the Arrow, the Comet and the Fin, the Snowman and the Sandman and Hydroman, Captain Courageous, Captain Flag, Captain Freedom, Captain Midnight, Captain Venture and Major Victory, the Flame and the Flash and the Ray, the Monitor, the Guardian, the Shield and the Defender, the Green Lantern, the Red Bee, the Crimson Avenger, the Black Hat and the White Streak, Cat-Man and the Kitten, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, Mr. Machine Gun, Mr. Scarlet and Miss Victory, Doll Man, the Atom and Minimidget, all had fallen beneath the whirling thresher blades of changing tastes, an aging readership, the coming of television, a glutted marketplace, and the unbeatable foe that had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the great heroes of the forties, only the stalwarts at National—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and a few of their cohorts—soldiered on with any regularity or commercial clout, and even they had been forced to suffer the indignity of seeing their wartime sales cut in half or more, of receiving second billing in titles where formerly they headlined, or of having forced upon them by increasingly desperate writers various attention-getting novelties and gimmicks, from fifteen different shades and flavors of Kryptonite to Bat-Hounds, Bat-Monkeys, and a magical-powered little elf-eared nudnick known as the Bat-Mite.

“He’s dead,” Sammy said wonderingly. “I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Anapol said. “This whole industry is dead after these hearings. You heard it here first, boys.” He stood up. “That’s why I’m getting out.”

“Getting out? You mean you’re selling Empire?”

Anapol nodded. “After I called Louis Nizer, I called
my
lawyer and told him to start working on the papers now. I want to get some sucker in there before the roof falls in.” He looked around at the stacks of crates. “Look at this place,” he said. “You always were a slob, Kavalier.”

“True,” Joe said.

Anapol started to walk out, then turned back. “You remember that day?” he said. “You two came in with that picture of the Golem and told me you were going to make me a million bucks.”

“And we did,” Sammy said. “A lot more than a million.”

Anapol nodded. “Good night, boys,” he said. “Good luck.”

When he had gone, Sammy said, “I wish
I
had a million dollars.” He said it tenderly, watching something lovely and invisible before him.

“Why?” Joe said.

“I’d buy Empire.”

“You would? But I thought you hate comic books. You are embarrassed by them. If you had a million dollars, you could do anything else you wanted.”

“Yeah,” Sammy said. “You’re right. What am I saying? Only you got me all stirred up with this Golem thing of yours. You always did have a way of confusing my priorities like that.”

“Did I? Do I?”

“You always used to make it seem okay to
believe
in all this baloney.”

“I think it
was
okay,” Joe said. “I don’t think maybe neither of us should have stopped.”

“You were frustrated,” Sammy said. “You wanted to get your hands on some real Germans.”

Joe didn’t say anything for so long that he could feel his silence beginning to speak to Sammy.

“Huh,” he said finally.

“You killed Germans?”

“One,” Joe said. “It was an accident.”

“Did you—did it make you feel—”

“It made me feel like the worst man in the world.”

“Hmm,” Sammy said. He had gone back over to the final chapter of
The Golem
and stood staring down at a panel in which the clapper in the porter’s bell on the doorpost of Heaven’s gate was revealed to be a grinning human skull.

“Funny about the Escapist,” Joe said, feeling that he wanted to get a hug from Sammy but checked somehow by the thought that it was something he had never done before. “I mean, not funny, but.”

“Isn’t it, though.”

“Do you feel sad?”

“A little.” Sammy looked up from the last page of
The Golem
and pursed his lips. He seemed to be shining a light on some dark corner of his feelings, to see if there was anything in it. “Not as much as I would
have thought. It’s been such a, you know. A long time.” He shrugged. “What about you?”

“Like you.” He took a step toward Sammy. “It was a long time.”

He laid an arm, awkwardly, around Sammy’s shoulders, and Sammy hung his head, and they rocked back and forth a little, remembering aloud that morning in 1939 when they had borne the Escapist and his company of fellow adventurers into Sheldon Anapol’s office in the Kramler Building, Sammy whistling “Frenesi,” Joe filled with the rapture and rage of the imaginary punch he had just landed on the jaw of Adolf Hitler.

“That was a good day,” Joe said.

“One of the best,” said Sammy.

“How much money
do
you have?”

“Not a million, that’s for sure.” Sammy stepped out from under Joe’s arm. His eyes narrowed, and he looked suddenly shrewd and Anapolian. “Why? How much do
you
have, Joe?”

“It isn’t quite a million,” Joe said.

“It isn’t quite—you mean to say that you—oh. That money.”

Every week for two years, starting in 1939, Joe had socked money into the fund that he intended for the support of his family when they reached America. He anticipated that their health might have suffered, and that it might be difficult for them to get work. Most of all, he wanted to buy them a house, a detached house on its own patch of grass somewhere in the Bronx or New Jersey. He wanted them never to have to share a roof with anyone again. By the end of 1941, he was putting in more than a thousand dollars at a time. Since then—apart from the ten thousand dollars he had spent to doom fifteen children to lie forever among the sediments of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—he had barely touched it; in fact, the account had been swelled, even in his absence, by royalties from the Escapist radio program, which had aired well into 1944, and by the two largish lump payments he had received as his share of the Parnassus serial deal.

“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.”

T
HE DAY AFTER THE
E
SCAPIST
, 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?”