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

his head, yes, no, and holding his eyes down, chewing steadily on the side of his thumb or snapping his teeth around his thumbnail. Mr. Kent secretly feared that his son might be slow or dull, “not right.” He was afraid people in town might be saying just that, quietly among themselves, pitying Clark the way they pitied children with stutters or club feet or faces cratered from the smallpox; pitying Clark the way they pitied, yet felt repugnance for, the mongoloid children or the polio children, or those children who would scream as though possessed and fling themselves about and cut themselves and had to be kept indoors, locked away, always. Even in a town like Smallville there were many such children, and in those first years Mr. Kent sat awake all hours worrying that Clark was afflicted in his own way, then feeling black waves of shame for caring what other people might think or say about his son, despising himself for holding such vanity.
    Eventually Clark outgrew what Martha always called “just a shyness” and in time managed to hold his own with others outside the family, to look people in the eye and speak for himself, always speaking politely, finding the right smiles and small talk for most occasions. But the boy never seemed fully comfortable in the world. But why was that any surprise? The unnatural things he could do! And the natural things that never happened to him, but should have.
    Every town or region has its strongman, and for a long time Mr. Kent could, and did, tell himself that Clark was just one of those rare and lucky specimens. Extraordinary but not impossible, that effortless strength of his. What he could lift, shove aside, knock over. Once, when Clark was about seven, Mr. Kent saw the boy drive a nail into a fence post with just his fist!
    The other parts of it, though: those parts were harder to deal with. Never a scrape, never a bruise or a cut, never blood.
    There were several occasions over the last dozen years when Mr. Kent had dropped what he was doing and run, expecting—and God forgive him, almost hoping —to find Clark with his leg twisted under him, a white bone showing, from a bad spill he’d taken off the binder, or with one arm cradling the other after he’d been kicked by a horse, or with his face and neck and hands erupting in twenty different places from hornet stings. But every time he would discover, with a pang of fear and confusion, that his boy, his son, was not only unhurt, but unshaken.
    Outwardly, at least.
    What must’ve gone through Clark’s mind on those occasions Mr. Kent can’t imagine, and because he can’t, and because he can’t bring himself to ask, he’s afraid that he’s failed the boy, miserably. Failed him as his father.
    With broken bones or hornet stings, with sprained ankles, pulled muscles, measles or the mumps, the damn chicken pox, poison sumac, the croup, a splinter he would’ve known what to do. And done it.
    Our son, Jonny! At last! God is good, God is great. God has blessed us!
    Yes and no. Yes and no. Maybe and no.
    He hasn’t been a good father. Tried, but he just hasn’t been a good father to Clark. He doesn’t know how to be. Still doesn’t. Not to the son he was given.
    He never knows what to say.
    It’s a bullet, Dad. That somebody fired from a gun.
    I caught it. I put out my hand and I caught it.
    He just never knows what to say.
    “Did you talk to him?” Martha’s hand, dry and thin and nearly without substance, finds his.
    “I’m sorry,” says Mr. Kent, “did I wake you?”
    “Not really. I was just resting my eyes. You spoke with Clark?”
    “Yes.”
    “And?” When half a minute passes and there is no reply, she says, “Jonny, did you find out what’s bothering him?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re not going to make me drag this out of you, are you? In my condition?”
    In the dark he turns to her and smiles, knows she is smiling back.
    He loves this woman so very much.
    “Jonny.”
    “Yes, Clark told me