In the Land of the Living (27 page)

JERRY SIEGEL WAS
from Cleveland. You know who he was? He and another Jewish nerd from Cleveland named Joe Shuster made up a story together in 1933, when they were teenagers, a story that soon afterward became very well known. The idea for the story came from a real incident: Siegel's father was robbed at gunpoint at his place of business, had a heart attack, collapsed, and died there on the floor of his secondhand clothing store. Afterward, Siegel dreamed up a story with a very profound wish in it, a wish for a small alteration in the universe such that people's fathers would be saved from robbers by a hero, someone who knew what it was to lose. The story was about Kal-El, a baby born on planet Krypton. Kal-El's father, Jor-El, was certain that the entire planet of Krypton was going to blow up and kill everyone on it. Jor-El decided to send his infant son in a spaceship to planet Earth. And after that, guess what: Krypton blew up. And do you know who besides the baby Kal-El survived the explosion of planet Krypton, which Jor-El predicted would kill everybody? Nobody did! Jor-El was right! The destruction of the planet incinerated Kal-El's entire family! And all the inhabitants of Krypton! Just as Siegel's aunts and uncles and all the other Jews of Europe would soon be burned up in Nazi ovens! (But nobody, presumably, used the body parts of Kryptonians to make soap!) End of paragraph!

So…Kal-El's spaceship landed on a farm, where he was taken in by the Kent family and raised with the identity Clark Kent. As Kal-El/Clark Kent grew up, he discovered something that set him apart from others: he had superpowers. Eg, he was faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Ultimately, he became an invincible flying vigilante with X-ray vision and a cape and he used his powers to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. (Except he wasn't completely invincible because if you confronted him with kryptonite, being a remnant of the home planet that had crumbled and killed his parents, he crumbled too and lost his powers.) Shuster, who was a talented artist, illustrated the story for his friend, depicting “Superman” in his now-familiar attire. In 1938 they sold thirteen pages to the corporate forerunner of DC Comics for $130. These thirteen pages became the first-ever “superhero comic,”
Action Comics #1
. And guess what: it was a hit! But DC Comics, stirred to sudden contemplation by the success of
Action Comics #1,
a single copy of which is now worth millions, concluded that Superman was, in legal terms, “mine hands off.” Under the law DC was not obligated to pay Siegel and Shuster anything, and guess what: instead of anything, they paid them nothing. What they did do aside from paying them nothing was, in colloquial terms, “jack shit.” And Siegel became a mail clerk and Shuster went blind and died of congestive heart failure. The End.

Burn on, big river, burn on.

They drove east on the Indiana East-West Toll Road, through Gary and South Bend, to the Ohio Turnpike, where they saw
KISS KISS COKE WHORE
painted on a bridge. It had been there for years.

Leo said, “Didn't we just leave this party?” which was his favorite
Star Wars
quote. It was perfect for the occasion of returning and it was his favorite quote because it was one of two movie quotes he could remember. The other was Danny Glover in
Lethal Weapon
saying with slurred speech, “Put—it—in—your—mouth.”

But Mack could cite
Forrest Gump, Ferris Buehler's Day Off, A Few Good Men, Weird Science, Rocky,
and
Star Wars
like the Talmud, and if anyone was listening they would have thought the two brothers were insane because they sounded like this:

Leo: “So, beetolay.” (Greedo to Han Solo.)

Mack: “Uh, what country do you think this ee-is?” (Garage attendant to Ferris Buehler.)

And then Leo said in the voice of Paulie from
Rocky V,
“Tommy, you're a piece a garbage, you know that?” which cracked him up by itself but was mainly a setup for Mack to say in a severely brain-damaged Rocky Balboa voice, “You knock him down. Now you got knock
me
down!”

And Mack did say that. And he also said, “Yo, Mondrian!”

And Leo said in a high, tearful Australian accent like Meryl Streep in
A Cry in the Dark,
“A dingo ate my baby.” That was the other movie quote he knew.

And Mack said in the same high, tearful Australian accent, “A dingo ate my pussy.”

And Leo laughed about that all the way to Toledo, when he thought of how he had extorted the letter opener. He had been at his grammy's house when he was seven or eight and they looked at old pictures and he cried about some pictures of his dead father. And then in the little study with the bullfighter painting he had seen a golden dagger with a red hilt and when you pulled it from its gold-tipped leather scabbard you saw that the dagger base was filigreed with runic symbols in red and blue. (It was a letter opener from Toledo, Spain.) And he had coveted the gold dagger from Toledo, Spain. And he couldn't help it and asked his grandpa (not the dead one, obviously, but his grammy's second husband) if he could have the letter opener. His grammy felt sorry for him and guilty perhaps, because of the pictures, and with her eyes had told his grandpa to give up the letter opener and he could tell from his grandpa's eyes that he didn't want to, but he did, and the letter opener still leaned precariously in a mug full of pens in Leo's bedroom in Cleveland and Leo felt guilty every time he looked at it. He had even tried to give it back.

And at last they got off the turnpike, which Leo had driven a hundred times on his way to and from the University of Michigan, and they passed Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and drove on. They took the banked, curving underpass that Leo always thought of as Dead Man's Curve, even though the real Dead Man's Curve was on I-90. Leo thought of getting lost looking for the exit to the zoo with a girl in his car who wouldn't kiss, not even a peck on the mouth, and a very beautiful girl who worked in a bookstore and had practically no tits and had surprised him with a yes. He thought of the highway trips to see the Cavs, all the time he'd wasted rooting for those Cleveland sports teams who hadn't won anything since 1964 when the Terminal Tower ceased to be the tallest building in the world outside of New York. Now that Albert Belle was gone to the White Sox he saw the utter futility of caring anymore, even when the Indians were in first place and Manny Ramirez was hitting like Jimmie Foxx. Manny would leave them too, no doubt about it.

The brothers were too tired to joke anymore by the time they took exit 25B around to soul-whipping Warrensville Center Road and the Heinen's that once stood for fried chicken, but now just stood, recalcitrantly ugly and refusing still to have any windows. And they passed the checkered flag of Conrad's Total Car Care, which was forever a symbol of saying good-bye (since it was on the departure side of the road) and they crossed great cracked seas of saturnine gray pavement in their saturnine green Saturn and rolled farther north into the elegiac Lake Erie twilight.

“This street looks like a Samuel Beckett play with skid marks,” Leo said.

Then came the nerve assault of that treeless corner with Valvoline Instant Oil Change on the left and on the right the desert of concrete and dirt, the hell-mounds and the tiny dull and distant windows of the Thistledown Racetrack, and there were almost no trees until Warrensville Heights Middle School, where it started to get green and the happy Midwestern feeling of home wavered into being. Places along the way cast dagger shadows, though, even in Shaker Heights—like the Thornton public pool with that spongy gray caulking in the seams of the concrete that squished under your naked toes, and some nice memory of a babysitter there, or a girl, the wind blowing the tall grass behind the fence, and the doom smell of chlorine. Joe Sgro's Barbershop, where his father, Philip, went (Leo used to go to the other Joe, at Fratantonio's), and then the old trees, the curving streets and Van Sweringen mansions of Shaker Heights, like the Cotswolds, especially around those lakes where the ducks flew low in the morning mist and the willow tree branches bowed to their reflections. Except that the houses of Shaker Heights had central air, and were not meant for little seventeenth-century English hobbits but for big twentieth-century Americans with big dreams. Even the small houses of Shaker Heights had garages that didn't face the street, by city ordinance, and they sat on streets that looked so benign and tranquil it was hard to think of anybody dying there.

When they entered the kitchen with all the
New Yorker
death cartoons on the refrigerator door, their mother hugged Mack first and then hugged Leo, and Leo watched his brother watching him. Mack had that half-averted gaze and that waiting look of his that combined judgment and condescending sympathy—like he was watching someone litter or inject drugs or get into a public argument and he was too polite to comment on the ugly behavior and anyway considered himself powerless to intervene.
What the hell did I do, after all?
Leo thought, and he tried to shake off an inexplicable feeling of guilt and an urge, which came after the guilt and not before, to turn on the stove and put his brother's head to the flame.

Mack went out onto the porch.

“How are you?” his mother said.

“I'm fine,” Leo said. “You don't need to worry about me.”

“And you don't need to worry about me,” she said.

“I know.”

“You do know that, right?”

“I know, I know.”

Leo went out onto the porch where his father, Philip, was on the phone.

“All right, Morris,” Philip said, “the kids are here.” He repeatedly called his brother Morris, even though his brother's name was Peter.

Philip had two other brothers in addition to Morris, named Don and William. William he called Bowser, and Don he also called Morris. Their father, an immigrant from Bialystok, Poland, who had founded a lumber company, was dead now, but his four sons were like him, hairy and indestructible forces of nature, captains of industry. They built cities, they had senators in their Rolodexes, they gave to charity such sums as affixed the Zajac name to many a wall, they bought Israel bonds, and rented entire houses in St. Maarten. They were not Bialystokers, they were genuine Americans, impervious to fire as Bialystokers had not been. From the beginning, they had treated Leo and Mack as if they were born into the family and not puppies rescued from a shelter.

Bowser, the youngest, had a huge mustache like Teddy Roosevelt, and as a wrestler in college, he'd accidentally crushed a man's ribs. Now he had a problem in his spine for which he took medicine, but it didn't keep him from the wilds of Maine, where Leo had seen him shove a canoe across a river. He was the only brother to survive forty years with a full head of hair. He told Maine stories in a believable Maine accent, and Leo had seen him like Paul Bunyan pull a dead tree out of the earth with his bare hands. On the same canoe trip, he'd cut his foot badly on the edge of the dry box, then rummaged in the box for a tube of epoxy he used to seal holes in tents—then glued his foot closed and resumed chopping a red onion. He was the chef de cuisine of those trips, the in-house outfitter and map reader. He made blueberry crepes at your request on a dented old green Coleman stove and he found Leo's movie opinions very annoying.

Philip was the next oldest, Philip who had sacrificed his own potential progeny for the sake of another man's, who had taught Leo to love Broadway and the beaches of Long Island. Philip had done a thesis in medieval history at Columbia and he was a man who knew exactly who Poggio Bracciolini was. He showed up dutifully, especially where his own mother was concerned. Though he complained of an indentured servitude, he'd made himself very, very good at the real estate business. And though he complained of his hair loss, he was very, very bald. He consumed every newspaper and periodical and took no man's opinion for his own. Sometimes he disappeared on sudden errands, sometimes he disappeared without going anywhere, as though he were hiding behind a life-size poster of himself. He had no mustache and in fact shaved scrupulously without ever missing a hair, though there would, sometimes, be a dollop of shaving cream on his ear at breakfast. He shaved even on canoe trips—crouched in the morning at the river's edge with a small mirror. He crouched there at the river's edge also late at night, to wash all the pots and the forks in cold water, as he had appointed himself the Martyr of the Dirty Dishes. Leo went down there in the dark to wash dishes with him at the river's edge, where it hurt his knees, as he had appointed himself Martyr of All Father-Martyrs.

“All right, Morris,” Philip said. “Say hello to your lovely wife.”

The Morris on the phone call, who was two years older than Philip, was also bald and had a huge mustache like an English inspector and did not build buildings but had gone to Harvard, spoke Danish and German, was a theoretical chemist, and had helped lay the groundwork for the field of molecular electronics. He called Philip Bise, pronounced like
bees,
after a restaurant in the south of France, and he and Philip could laugh and laugh for many minutes with only one or two private jokes passing between them now and then to stoke the fires. For example, he would say, “Mexican hairless, Bise,” with his eyes full of tears and they would laugh on and on. And Philip would say, “Firewater, Morris,” and he'd practically choke. And Morris would say, “Can you imagine, Bise? Firewater!” Morris despised D. H. Lawrence and
The Sound of Music,
ejaculated bits of high literature such as “Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!” and the final line of
Finnegans Wake,
and he embraced you with a frontal bear hug to shock the wind from your lungs. He was unafraid to cry when he looked up at the stars and remembered the uncle who had taught him their names.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the