Heck Superhero Read online

  Heck sat up slowly. The kid had stuffed a five-dollar bill into his pocket.

  Heck saw a police car parked on the side of the street opposite the parking lot. From a hole in a landscaped lawn of an office building a man in overalls pulled a small furry body while the officer looked on. They talked together a moment.

  Heck studied the five-dollar bill. It looked real enough. Then he saw the sign he’d written.

  He jumped out of the car, ripped up the sign, and stuffed the pieces into his pocket with the fiver. He shut the door and pulled his hood over his head. His head felt so flat it was a miracle he had anything to hook his hood onto. He remembered the girl at the popcorn machine. It wasn’t a bad dream. He made a mental note to give her the buck he owed her. He remembered the woman in the laundromat, too. What had he been thinking?

  The pill. Velocity Nine. So that was what this stuff was all about. He was a thief and a garbage-eater and now a druggie, and for sure one crayon short of a full box.

  Only a week ago he’d been an almost ordinary student in grade eight, so almost ordinary he could fool most people into thinking he was normal. Now he was waking up in a car with a dry mouth and glue for spit and his teeth sprouting fur.

  Suddenly the officer shouted and took off across the street after the boy who’d stuffed the fiver into Heck’s pocket.

  The boy stopped when he saw the officer coming. He rounded his shoulders and waited, hunched and braced and clutching at his coat. The officer said something to him, took the boy’s arm, and led him toward his car.

  The boy was taller than the officer, but he had a babylike body, roundish and topped by that big ball of a head with its smooth cheeks. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself and glanced at Heck with a pained expression.

  “It’s not like you to damage property,” the officer said to the boy. “Have you been taking your pills?”

  “I didn’t do it,” the boy said.

  “Who did, then? Your little pocket buddies? We’re going to have to wash that coat for sure this time, Marion.”

  The boy’s bottom lip pushed out, but he didn’t answer. He looked as if he might cry. Heck couldn’t stand to see a kid cry, even a kid that big. The kid cast a long, sad look at him, and Heck realized he’d been paid five dollars for a Good Deed. He sure did need that five dollars. He sure was hungry.

  He cleared his throat. He could keep the cash and walk away, but that wasn’t what superheroes did, even flat ones.

  “Excuse me,” Heck called.

  The officer glanced at him and away.

  “Um, did you consider the possibility that you’ve got the wrong guy there?” Heck called.

  The officer stopped. His expression was stony, while the boy’s face was slack with surprise and relief.

  “Yeah?” the officer said, squinting at Heck.

  What was he doing? His tooth throbbed. A toothache was something that could drag you back to the microverse where you were just a stupid kid who made a stupid sign when he was high on a birth control pill. He cleared his throat again. “What are the charges?” he asked.

  The officer peered at him as though he had x-ray vision and could see Heck’s guilty heart. “I hadn’t thought of charges,” he said slowly, “but let’s see—digging a hole in private property, that would be a good start. And of course the SPCA will definitely have something to say about that dead animal. “

  “It was dead when I found it … I just wanted to give the squirrel a decent—” The kid slapped his hand over his mouth.

  The officer smirked and Heck rolled his eyes. “The real crime is the squirrel, right? Sir?”

  The officer said to the big kid, “I didn’t know you had any friends.”

  The kid said nothing. He looked down at his shoes and then stole a grateful glance at Heck.

  Heck tried to look at the officer in a respectful way without being too challenging. It was obvious the birth control pill hadn’t quite worn off yet, because here was proof: he was being a complete billiard ball brain.

  On the other hand, who owned reality? Maybe if he helped this kid he’d get more than five bucks out of it. Maybe something good would happen, like finding his mom.

  “I know who did it. I heard his friends call him Beemer.”

  The officer looked at him and nodded. “Oh? You a friend of Beemer’s?”

  “No, but I heard them. They—they took my jacket.”

  The officer hesitated, then let go of the boy. With a look of disgust at Heck, he jerked his thumb toward his car. “Okay. You seem to know so much. Come on.”

  The boy walked away fast, whispering to himself.

  Heck was hungry and dizzy and cold. Maybe they’d have doughnuts at the cop shop, he thought. Didn’t they always have doughnuts? He’d always wanted to ride in a cop car. Once he was in, though, he was nervous. What would Spence say when he found out that his molecularly joined best friend had become an outlaw, a public enemy, a wrongdoer of the bottomworld? And what about his mom? If he were in prison, she’d go into hypertime and never come back.

  The police joked with Heck. They wrote down his name and address—he gave them the old one—and fingerprinted just his thumb. Then they put him in a room alone.

  “Is this an interrogation room?” Heck asked.

  “An interview room,” the officer said.

  Heck sat there a long time, but no one came to interview him. Nothing was in the room but a table, a chair, and a clock. Maybe they called it an interview room, but Heck knew a jail cell when he saw one. There were no windows, and nothing to read and nothing to look at. The only sound was the clock. It didn’t tick. It hummed, pleased with itself, until the eleven. The hum turned into a moan as the minute hand went from the eleven to the twelve, as if it couldn’t bear to begin again.

  Heck wondered who had decided how long a second was, and who decided how many seconds made a minute. Who thought up how long an hour was so there were twenty-four of them in a day? Why not twenty hours in a day, or seventeen, or thirty-three? Why not just three—a day hour, an evening hour, and a night hour? His mom would probably be able to handle that.

  You couldn’t sit in a room with a clock like that and not want to go into hypertime. Reality time was thick in that room. It was speaking to him. Heck? Oh, He-eck, are you there? It’s not working. You tried the Good Deed and look where it got you.

  “It works,” Heck said out loud. It was the Theory of Everything. The day he stuck up for Jasper Hillman against school villain Chris Vander was the same day he found his best friend, Spence. Spence said no, they’d been working up to it a long time, but Heck knew what he knew. Just last week he got the top grade in math class. Why? Because he helped Jenny Mellancamp with her math homework that day at lunch. The Good Deed was the only way to change the reality you were in right now, the only way to make everything okay.

  When he thought about it, though, the clock had a valid argument. He found a lost little girl, and a security guard memorized his face for future criminal identification. He gave a girl a twenty, and she started him on a lifetime of addiction. He tried to be a hero, and he ended up here on death row. Still, there was a certain cool factor in becoming a villain …

  It’s not working, the clock said. You have to stop playing.

  Heck’s dreams floated in his head flat as photographs: him graduating, going to art college, eating tortillas every Sunday, his pockets full of freshly ironed money. None of them would happen now that he was an official young offender, a wrongfully convicted evildoer, an accused villain spoiler of perfectly landscaped private property. The photograph dreams floated sideways and Heck couldn’t see them anymore.

  He took out his trusty pencil and a piece of the torn paper in his pocket. He sketched a superhero, powered up, ready to spring. It was a small piece of paper, so it didn’t take long. He drew another one. If pretending he was a superhero who went about doing Good Deeds was his favorite game, drawing superheroes was a close second. As he drew, he remembered that Einst
ein’s theory of relativity proved that there is no such thing as a universal clock, no absolute time.

  After a few more minutes, his teeth didn’t hurt as much. Probably they were starving to death, and he hoped they would die before he did.

  When he’d sketched both sides of all the pieces of paper, he began to pace. He had to get out of here and call Dierdre. He had to tell his mom all the reasons why she was the best mom in the world. He had to get a job and tell her he could take care of her, before she killed all her hopes and went through hypertime into who knows what microverse.

  He called, “Is anybody out there? Can I have a doughnut?”

  A few minutes later the handle rattled and a man came in. He was wearing gray pants and a beige shirt and his eyes were gray and his face was beige and his hair was no particular color at all. Heck could barely perceive his outline against the cinderblock walls and the gray tiled floor. His face was settled into a bland, benign expression. He slipped a manila file onto the small table.

  “Hello, Hector,” he said.

  “Heck,” said Heck.

  “I’m Mr. Holland.” He took in the scrap-paper sketches. “You’re pretty good, Hector,” he said.

  The man was wearing a plain, dull silver wedding band on his ring finger. Heck imagined the man had been married for a long time. Maybe he and his wife had tried for years to have children and then for years tried to adopt, and one day they began thinking how they were too old to start with babies …

  “They say you gave yourself up concerning the buried squirrel.”

  Heck nodded. Gave himself up. That had a noble ring to it. “I didn’t do it. Beemer did. It was me in the Underwear Incident, though,” he said.

  The man looked puzzled. “Underwear incident?”

  “The woman who called from the laundromat last night about someone folding her laundry for her?” Heck sat back in his chair and pointed at his chest. “That was me.”

  The man opened the file. His face did not change, did not register shock, anger. He would probably be a very patient father. Too bad about his wife, who had tragically died two years ago, and only now Mr. Holland was beginning to think about remarrying … someone small … with a single older child … a son … the son he’d always dreamed of having …

  “That’s very honest of you, Hector—”

  “Heck.”

  “—and so for your honesty we’ve decided to let you go this time.” He didn’t look at Heck when he said it. He was leafing through the file, reading it.

  “You mean you’re not going to arrest me?” Heck’s head swam with relief.

  “Not this time, Hector.” Mr. Holland smiled. “We think you’re just covering for your friend anyway.”

  “That kid?”

  The man nodded. “We’ve had … dealings with him.”

  Heck was pretty sure he could smell a toasted Western sandwich somewhere.

  The man found something in the file. He read in silence for a moment. All his movements were measured, controlled, his voice perfectly modulated. He probably made good money at this job. He’d give Heck’s mom a good home, and Heck would get his own room.

  “It says here your mother dropped you off at a crisis daycare when you were four and didn’t come back for a few weeks. You spent a little time in a foster home.”

  They had a file on him! “Does the FBI have access to that file?” Heck asked.

  Mr. Holland continued speaking, more to himself than to Heck. “In a follow-up interview, a social worker found that at seven years of age you could cook oatmeal, macaroni, pancakes, and scrambled eggs. At nine, you did the laundry, cleaned the house, signed your own permission forms, and got yourself off to school every day. It seems you excelled in all subjects.” He closed the file. “Still doing well?”

  Heck nodded shyly. Of course, a man who blended in with cinderblock would want a son who got good marks in school.

  “We’ll have to call your mom to come and get you. It appears that the number we have here is an old one, out of service. What’s the new number?”

  “Well, it’s just that …” Heck’s throat flattened then and nothing came out. He was a thief, a druggie, an almost-convicted vandal. Was he going to be a rat now, a kid who would rat on his own mom? “She’s not home right now.” Even while he said it he thought he should tell. Knew he should tell.

  “Do you know her work number?”

  Heck shook his head and stared at his sketches. Mr. Holland was a good guy. Tell him. Tell him …

  The man picked up a scrap-paper sketch, examined it, and put it back down again. “You know, Hector—”

  “Heck.”

  “—there are some kids who, even in the worst kind of circumstances—”

  “My mom is cool, it’s just that—”

  “—seem to thrive and channel their experience into their talents. You’re one of them. In the social-work biz we call them ‘superkids.’ That’s another reason why I’m going to make this as simple as possible.”

  Heck held on to his chair so he wouldn’t fall off. Superkid?

  The man kept talking, but Heck didn’t hear a word he said.

  “Did you say ‘superkid’?” Heck interrupted. The man nodded.

  Once in a while in the world, didn’t everything fall into place?

  Once in a while, didn’t the whole world make sense?

  “Hector, it comes down to this: we have big problems around here, so I’m just going to send you home and recommend you be grounded for a year or two, okay? So, what’s your number?”

  Well, if he was only dreaming, well, then. If he was living in his comic book dream he could do anything. He could leap over tall buildings in a single bound, he could tell time in all realities, and he could find his mom and take care of her.

  “Number, Hector?”

  A superhero was always honest.

  Heck told him the number.

  “You playing straight with me, Hector? That number’s been disconnected.”

  “She hasn’t paid the bill in a while.”

  “Oh.” Mr. Holland leaned back in his chair. “Are you sure everything’s okay at home?”

  “Sure,” Heck said. “Uh, you could call Mr. Bandras. He’s my art teacher at school.”

  Mr. Holland left the room to make the call. Heck got down and did twenty pushups. Cons had to stay fit while they were in solitary confinement. Of course he knew Mr. Bandras would come. Mr. Bandras was always willing to get into Heck’s business, always trying to get into his mind.

  “What does this mean to you, Heck?” he would ask when Heck was done with an art piece. “What were you thinking here? What feeling were you trying to portray here?” Those were the worst questions. It wasn’t quite as bad when he asked Heck what he’d eaten for breakfast, or what he was having for lunch. Once or twice a week, when Heck “forgot” his lunch, Mr. Bandras would say, “Thank the Fates. Mrs. Bandras packed me bologna (or peanut butter or ham and cheese) sandwiches again and she knows I hate bologna (or peanut butter or ham and cheese).” Then he would toss his lunch at Heck. It embarrassed Heck, the way Mr. Bandras made a point of buying his art supplies for him when he couldn’t come up with them himself.

  Once Heck complained about it to Spence, but Spence said Mr. Bandras was only like that with Heck, and he should be grateful.

  It was true that everything he knew about art he’d learned from Mr. Bandras. Especially the one thing. After a few classes with Mr. Bandras, Heck had been trying to copy something exactly, drawing it just right. People always admired him for the way he could draw things exactly. Mr. Bandras, however, had come up behind him and grabbed the pencil out of his hand.

  “You are a talented boy,” he said, “but we have cameras for that. Besides, you will try all your life to draw things exactly as they are, and discover you can’t draw anything the way it really is. You can only draw it the way you really are.”

  When he said that, Heck felt like someone had just added an extra room to the house
of his brain. That’s when he knew that reality was just clay, something you could mold, or paint, or change by doing Good Deeds.

  He could hear voices through the cinderblock walls but not what the voices were saying. After a long time a girl in a uniform brought Heck a sandwich and a juice cup.

  “Do you like tuna?” she asked.

  A long time ago, like last Sunday, he hated tuna. “Love it,” he said.

  He lifted the top piece of bread and examined the tuna. She frowned. “Just looking for truth serum,” he said to her.

  It was almost four o’clock by the time he heard Mr. Bandras’s voice talking to the beige and gray man. They talked a long time, and then the door opened.

  Mr. Bandras was not beige and gray. He was not mild-mannered. He had red hair and a red face that got redder when he talked about great artists. He wore a garish tie every day to remind his students, he said, of the “assault on the eye that constitutes bad art.” His jeans and shirt were always smeared and splattered with bright paint. Heck thought he had never seen a more beautiful sight in his life than that ugly tie.

  He stood up and swayed on his feet.

  Mr. Bandras glanced at the sketches and then at Heck and then at the sketches again.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  As they walked out, the beige and gray man said, “Bye, Hector. Be good now, okay?”

  Heck nodded and then stopped. “I’m sorry about your wife and, you know, about you not being able to have kids and all.”

  “My wife is fine, and I have kids,” Mr. Holland said.

  “Oh,” Heck said. “Sorry. I must have you confused with some other CIA agent.”

  “Come on, Heck,” Mr. Bandras said.

  For a long time Mr. Bandras said nothing to Heck as he drove him to the apartment building. He’d driven Heck home before when he had artwork that was too big to take on the bus.

  The teacher listened to classical music and drummed on the steering wheel as if it were rock music. Heck was pretty sure he was trying to torture him. Mr. Bandras had probably once been your average run-of-the-mill art teacher, until one day he was visited by parasitic robots from a distant and hostile world. It had been his desire, since then, to bring sorrow and suffering to all junior high art students of the mortal world. Still, it felt good to be freed from prison.