It's Superman! A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

newel post and looks past the lilac hedge to the picket fence he and his mother painted last summer, then to the county road that just recently, and to his father’s dismay, was macadamized.
    “Surprised to find you still up, Clark.” Mr. Kent catches the screen door with his hip and lets it close gently behind him and latch. “Can’t sleep?”
    “I ain’t sleepy.”
    “I’m not sleepy.”
    “You neither?” says Clark, and they both laugh.
    “Your mother thinks something’s bothering you.”
    “She wake you up to say so?”
    Mr. Kent smiles, steps closer. “Look, son, you shouldn’t feel guilty about going out and having a little bit of fun. Your mother doesn’t want you to stop doing things just because she’s—”
    “That what she thinks is the matter?”
    “Well. Yes.” He rubs his jaw. “It’s not?”
    Clark looks into his father’s face—one cheek a tracery of red creases where it was pressed against the pillowcase—then glances away, back to the road.
    “Son, what’s the matter?”
    Clark lifts his left arm, holds his tight fist in the air between himself and his father, then slowly opens his fingers. “This.”
    It glints on his palm.
    “I don’t understand,” says Mr. Kent.
    “It’s a bullet, Dad. That somebody fired from a gun.”
    “I can see it’s a bullet.”
    “I caught it. I put out my hand and I caught it.”
    4
    Although technically part of Smallville, the place where Alger Lee lives is a good ways out Highway 75, three-quarters of a mile past the grain elevators that everyone generally considers the north edge of town. In the newspaper and in polite conversation, the community of forty or so board shacks facing each other across a dirt midway is referred to as “Smallerville,” but otherwise it’s called “Smellville.” It is the “Negro Section,” although several Mexican families have settled here too in recent years, migrants whose automobiles or spirits finally quit on them. Children outnumber adults, three to one. Dogs, stray dogs—nobody owns a pet—outnumber children. There is just one long-handled well pump that everyone uses, and normally you have to stand in line. But at ten minutes before three in the morning, Alger Lee has it all to himself.
    Seated on an upended milk crate, he primes the pump, catches a burst of water in his cupped hands, drinks it quickly, wipes his palms dry on his pants. Then he reaches back into his candy sack, helping himself to some more chocolate-covered raisins, Mary Janes, and sugar dots, courtesy of the Jewel Theater.
    How did Clark Kent do that? he thinks. What’s he made of?
    A scruffy yellow dog sidles over and pushes its nose into the candy sack on the ground between Alger’s feet. “Go on, get outta here, you,” says Alger, and the dog shies away, but only a short distance.
    The dog sits, cocks its head, and watches Alger pick white and yellow sugar dots off a long strip of waxed paper.
    I didn’t see that no-account donkey shoot the first time, thinks Alger, but I sure as hell seen him shoot the second time. And he couldn’t’ve missed. Well, he didn’t.
    I seen what I seen.
    The dog whimpers now and Alger takes pity—throws a sugar dot that the dog snaps from the air. Alger throws a second one. Same thing. Great catch. But the dog isn’t expecting the third piece of candy to come so quickly, he isn’t looking, and it hits him between the eyes, then bounces back at Alger.
    There you go! See that? Same thing, Alger thinks, same damn principle.
    I seen what I seen.
    But how’d that happen? How could it?
    I don’t know, thinks Alger, but I’ll find out. One way or the other, I’ll find out.
    The dog trots over, sits on its hind legs, and greedily eats the rest of the sugar dots right off the paper.
    5
    Mr. Kent creeps back into the bedroom, but then his heart seems to freeze in his chest. Martha’s breathing is so . . . quiet. He is not a believer in the way that his wife is, but still he finds it hard not