every panel with all your little bats and puddles and stained-glass windows, and drew in every muscle and every little tooth and based it on Michelangelo and cut your own ear off over it, that would be bad. The main thing is, you use pictures to tell a good story.”
“The stories are good?”
“Sometimes the stories are good. Our story is really fucking good, if I do say so myself.”
“Fucking,” Joe said, letting it out slowly like a satisfying drag.
“Fucking what?”
Joe shrugged. “I was just saying it.”
Sammy’s real talents, it developed, lay elsewhere than in the pencil or brush. This became clear to everyone after Davy O’Dowd returned to the Pit from a brief conference with Frank over ideas for Davy’s character. Frank was already wrapped up in his own idea, or lack thereof, working at the kitchen table and, in spite of his promise to Davy, could not be bothered. Davy came in from the kitchen scratching his head.
“My guy flies,” said Davy O’Dowd. “That I know.”
Joe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.
“Oy,” he said.
“What?”
“He flies, huh?”
“Something wrong with that? Frank says this is all about wishful figments.”
“Huh?”
“Wishful figments. You know, like it’s all what some little kid wishes he could do. Like for you, hey, you don’t want to have a gimpy leg no more. So, boom, you give your guy a magic key and he can walk.”
“Huh.” Sammy had not chosen to look at the process of character creation in quite so stark a manner. He wondered what other wishes he might have subsumed unknowingly into the character of lame Tom Mayflower.
“I always wished I could fly,” Davy said. “I guess a lot of guys must have wished that.”
“It’s a common fantasy, yeah.”
“It seems to me that makes it something you can’t have too many of,” Jerry Glovsky put in.
“All right, then, so he can fly.” Sammy looked at Joe. “Joe?”
Joe glanced up briefly from his work. “Why.”
“Why?”
Sammy nodded. “Why can he fly? Why does he want to? And how come he uses his power of flight to fight crime? Why doesn’t he just become the world’s best second-story man?”
Davy rolled his eyes. “What is this, comic book catechism? I don’t know.”
“Take one thing at a time. How does he do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop saying you don’t know.”
“He has big wings.”
“Think of something else. A rocket pack? Antigravity boots? An autogyro hat? Mythological powers of the winds? Interstellar dust? Blood transfusion from a bee? Hydrogen in his veins?”
“Slow down, slow down,” Davy said. “Jesus, Sam.”
“I’m good at this shit. Are you scared?”
“Just embarrassed for you.”
“Take a number. Okay, it’s a fluid. An antigravity fluid in his veins, he has this little machine he wears on his chest that pumps the stuff into him.”
“He does.”
“Yeah, he needs the stuff to stay alive, see? The flying part is just a, like an unexpected side benefit. He’s a scientist. A doctor. He was working on some kind of, say, artificial blood. For the battlefield, you know. Synth-O-Blood, it’s called. Maybe it’s, shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s made out of ground-up iron meteorites from outer space. Because blood is iron-based. Whatever. But then some criminal types, no, some enemy spies, they break into his laboratory and try to steal it. When he won’t let them, they shoot him and his girl and leave them for dead. It’s too late for the girl, okay, how sad, but our guy manages to get himself hooked up to this pump thing just before he dies. I mean, he does die, medically speaking, but this stuff, this liquid meteorite, it brings him back from the very brink. And when he comes to—”
“He can fly!” Davy looked happily around the room.
“He can fly, and he goes after the spies that killed his girl, and now he can really do what he always wanted to, which was help the forces of democracy and peace. But he can never forget that he has a weakness, that without his Synth-O-Blood pump, he’s a dead man. He can never stop being … being …” Sammy snapped his fingers, searching for a name.
“Almost Dead Flying Guy,” suggested Jerry.
“Blood Man,” said Julie.
“The Swift,” Marty Gold said. “Fastest bird in the world.”
“I draw really nice wings,” said Davy O’Dowd. “Nice and feathery.”
“Oh, all right, damn it,” Sammy said. “They can just be there for show. We’ll call him the Swift.”
“I like it.”
“He can never stop being the Swift,” Sammy said. “Not for one goddamned minute of the day.” He stopped and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. His throat was sore and his lips were dry and he felt as if he had been talking for a week. Jerry, Marty, and Davy all looked at one another, and then Jerry got down from his stool and went into his bedroom. When he came out, he was carrying an old Remington typewriter.
“When you’re done with Davy’s, do mine,” he said.
Jerry did manage to slip out for an hour, late Saturday, to return Rosa Saks’s purse to her, and then again on Sunday afternoon, for two hours, returning with the crooked mark on his neck of the teeth of a girl named Mae. As for Frank Pantaleone, he disappeared sometime around midnight on Friday and eventually turned up fully dressed in the empty bathtub, behind the shower curtain, drawing board against his knees. When he finished a page, he would bellow out, “Boy!” and Sammy would run it upstairs to Joe, who did not look up from the shining trail of his brush until just before two o’clock on Monday morning.
“Beauteeful,” said Sammy. He had been finished with his scripts for several hours but had stayed awake, drinking coffee until his eyeballs quivered, so that Joe would have company while he finished the cover he had designed. This was the first word either had said for at least an hour. “Let’s go see if there’s anything left to eat.”
Joe climbed down from his stool and carried the cover over to the foot-high pile of illustration board and tracing paper that would be the first issue of their comic book. He hitched up his trousers, worked his head around a few times on the creaky pivot of his neck, and followed Sammy over to the kitchen. Here they found and proceeded to devour a light supper consisting of the thrice-picked-over demi-carcass of a by now quite hoary chicken, nine soda crackers, one sardine, some milk, as well as a yellow doorstop of adamantine cheese they found wedged, under the milk bottle, between the slats of the shelf outside the window. Frank Pantaleone and Julie Glovsky had long since gone home to Brooklyn; Jerry, Davy, and Marty were asleep in their rooms. The cousins chewed their snack in silence. Joe stared out the window onto the blasted backyard, black with ice. His heavy-lidded eyes were ringed with deep shadows. He pressed his high forehead against the cold glass of the window.
“Where am I?” he said.
“In New York City,” said Sammy.
“New York City.” He thought it over. “New York City, U.S.A.” He closed his eyes. “That is not possible.”
“You all right?” Sammy put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Joe Kavalier.”
“Sam Clay.”