Страница 144 из 154
"Weighs a ton," he said, flexing his fingers as if they were sore. "What's he got in there, bricks?"
"It's probably iron chains," Tommy explained in an authoritative tone. "And, like, padlocks and junk."
The man nodded. "A box of iron chains," he said. "Figures. Pleased to meetcha." He wiped his right hand down the front of his coverall and offered it to Rosa. "Al Button."
"Are you in fact a bachelor?" said Rosa.
"The name of the firm," Al Button said with an air of genuine regret, "is a little out-of-date." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a sheaf of waybills and carbons, then took a pen from another breast pocket and uncapped it. "I'm going to need your John Hancock on this."
"Don't I need to sort of check everything off as you bring it in?" Rosa said. "That's how it worked when we moved out here from Brooklyn."
"You can go right ahead and check that off, if you want to," he said, with a nod to the crate as he handed the packet to Rosa. "That's all I have for you today."
Rosa checked the bill and found that it did itemize a single article, described pithily as Wood box. She paged through the other sheets of paper, but they were just carbon copies of the first.
"Where's the rest of it?"
"That's the only thing that I'm aware of," Button said. "Maybe you know better than me."
"There are supposed to be more than a hundred boxes coming out from the city. From the Empire State Building. Joe-Mr. Kavalier- arranged for the shipment yesterday afternoon."
"This didn't come from the Empire State Building, lady. I picked it up this morning at Pe
"Pe
"Nova Scotia," she said. "Who does Joe know in Nova Scotia?"
"And how did they know he was here?" Tommy said.
It was a very good question. Only the police and a few people at Pharaoh knew that Joe was staying with the Clays.
Rosa signed for the crate, and then Al Button jostled and cajoled it into the living room, where Rosa and Tommy helped him to walk it off of the dolly and onto the low-pile wall-to-wall.
"A box full of chains," Button repeated, his hand rough and dry against Rosa's. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."
After he left, closing up his truck and winding his funereal way back to the city, Rosa and Tommy stood there in the living room, studying the wood box. It was a good two feet taller than Rosa, and nearly twice as broad. It was made of solid pine, knotty and unvarnished except by the abrading rasp of its travels, dark yellow and stained like an animal's tooth. You could tell somehow, looking at it, that it had come a long way, suffered ill handling and exposure, had ignoble things spilled on it. It had been used as a table, perhaps, a bed, a barricade. There were black scuffs, and the corners and edges were tufted with splinters. If these were not suggestive enough of wide journeying, there was the incredible profusion of its labels: customs stamps and shipping-line decals, quarantine stickers and claim checks and certificates of weight. In places they were layered a few deep, bits of place-name and colorand handwriting all jumbled together. It reminded Rosa of a Cubist collage, a Kurt Schwitters. Clearly, Halifax was not the crate's point of origin. Rosa and Tommy tried to trace its history, peeling away at the layers of seal and sticker, timidly at first, then more carelessly as they were led backward from Halifax to Helsinki, to Murmansk, to Memel, to Leningrad, to Memel once more, to Vilnius, in Lithuania, and finally, scraping away now with the point of a kitchen knife at a particularly recalcitrant carbuncle of adhesive paper near the center of what appeared to be the crate's lid, to
"Prague," said Rosa. "What do you know."
"He's home," Tommy said, and Rosa didn't understand what he meant until she heard the sound of the Studebaker in the drive.
16
Joe had left the house very early that morning. For hours after saying good night to Rosa and Sammy, and long after they went to bed, Joe had lain awake on the couch in the living room, tormented by his thoughts and by the occasional brief giggle from the tank of the toilet down the hall. He had arranged for monthly withdrawals to pay the rent on the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., and had not permitted himself to consider the total sum of the money he had on deposit in a very long time. The variety of the grandiose and homely schemes it had once been intended to fund was extravagant-he had at one time lavishly overspent in his imagination-and after the war, the money always felt to him like a debt owed, and unrepayable. He had bankrupted himself on plans: a house for his family in Riverdale or Westchester, a flat for his old teacher Bernard Kornblum in a nice building on the Upper West Side. He saw to it, in his fantasies, that his mother obtained the services of a cook, a fur coat, the leisure to write and to see patients as little as she chose. Her study in the big Tudor house had a bay window and heavy timbering, which she painted white because she dreaded gloomy rooms. It was bright and uncluttered, with Navajo rugs and cacti in pots. For his grandfather, there were an entire wardrobe of suits, a dog, a Panamuse record player like Sammy's. His grandfather sat in the conservatory with three elderly friends and sang Weber songs to the accompaniment of their flutes. For Thomas, there were riding lessons, fencing lessons, trips to the Grand Canyon, a bicycle, a set of encylopedias, and-that most-coveted item for sale in the pages of comic books-an air rifle, so that Thomas could shoot at crows or woodchucks or (more likely given his tender feelings) tin cans, when they went out, at weekends, to the country house up in Putnam County that Joe was going to buy.
These designs of his embarrassed him almost as much as they saddened him. But the truth was that, as he lay there smoking, in his underpants, Joe was tormented, even more than by the ruins of his fatuous dreams, by the knowledge that even now, down in the mysterious manufactory of foolishness that was synonymous in some way with his heart, they were tooling up to bring out an entire new line of moonshine. He could not stop coming up with ideas-costume designs and backdrops, character names, narrative lines-for a series of comic books based on Jewish aggadah and folklore; it was as if they had been there all along, wanting only a nudge from Sammy to come tumbling out in a thrilling disorder. The notion of spending the $974,000 that was steadily compounding at the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union to float the recommissioned Kavalier & Clay agitated him so much that his stomach hurt. No, agitation was not the honest word for it. What he felt was excited.
Sammy had been right about long-underwear heroes in 1939; Joe had a feeling that he was right in 1954. William Gaines and his E.C. Comics had taken all but one of the standard comic book genres- romance, Western, war stories, crime, the supernatural, et cetera-and invested them with darker emotions, less childish plots, stylish pencils, and moody inks. The only genre they had ignored or avoided (except to ridicule it in the pages of Mad) was that of the costumed superhero. What if-he was not sure if this was what Sammy had in mind, but after all, it would be his money-the same kind of transformation were attempted on the superhero? If they tried to do stories about costumed heroes who were more complicated, less childish, as fallible as angels.