Heck Superhero Read online

Superheroes probably got fired all the time for having to take extra-long coffee breaks to save people. They probably threatened their superiors with their super-competence. He wasn’t meant to clean toilets anyway. He was meant for higher things.

  “Shut up, shut up,” he told himself. He had to get a grip. Think.

  He had to find the shelter. For sure his mom would be there, getting deeper and deeper into hypertime. He had to have some good news to bring to her. Think.

  He still had the money from working yesterday …

  The apartment building from which they’d been evicted had never seemed like much before, kind of run-down and saggy. Now he’d give a lot to see the kitchen picnic table that his mom had found in a park and that he’d painted like a picnic feast, complete with sandwiches and watermelon on the tabletop and ants crawling up the legs. He missed the color TV that they’d got secondhand and that was only a green-and-white TV. He even missed his mom’s room, full of porcelain dolls and stuffed animals and pictures of kittens. Most of all he missed his own room that he’d converted into a sort of studio. If the Forces for Good were at work in the world, his paints would still be in that studio.

  Heck thought back. When they’d first started getting notices from the landlord, Heck had tried staving off the inevitable with the power of the Good Deed. Without anyone knowing, he cleaned up the building sometimes. He swept the entranceway, or picked up bottles and garbage that people left in the halls or threw out the windows. Three nights before they’d been evicted, someone had vomited in the front entranceway. Heck had just stepped over it, probably at that moment sealing their Apartment Doom.

  Heck stood before Apartment 1, where his landlord, Mr. Grenhold, lived. He could smell the cigarette smoke through the door. He could hear him coughing inside, a horrible cough, like he must be coughing up blood and tissue or giving birth to lung aliens through his mouth.

  Heck breathed deeply a few times, willing his hand to lift up and knock on the apartment door, just lift up and knock … Heck Superhero, afraid of nothing, knocked on the landlord’s door.

  When the landlord opened the door his bald head was dripping with sweat.

  “What.”

  “Hey, Mr. Grenhold,” Heck said cheerfully. “You may not remember me, but my mom was evicted last Saturday. I wondered if I could talk business with you, man to man. This twenty is a token of my good faith.”

  He held out the twenty. Mr. Grenhold took the money and scrunched it in his fist.

  Mr. Grenhold had probably once been a mild-mannered retiree, living quietly in his apartment, until some intergalactic life form, perhaps inhabiting his refrigerator magnets, turned him into the boy-hating undead.

  Heck cleared his throat. Heck Superhero, afraid of nothing … “I promise I will repay you all the rent we owe, over time, if you’ll just let me have my art supplies.”

  Mr. Grenhold started closing the door.

  “Sir? Sir, have you noticed that the halls and stairways have been dirtier lately?”

  The landlord opened the door again. “How’d you know that? You comin’ in here at night and dropping garbage?”

  “No, sir. It was me cleaning it up for you before, when I lived here. Of course I did it as a part of my own personal philosophy of life, but now I was wondering if … if we could work out some kind of arrangement.”

  “Crazy kid.” Mr. Grenhold shut the door.

  Heck knocked again, and then again a little while later. He could hear the landlord coughing, but he wasn’t coming to the door. Heck decided to wait outside. He might have pushed it a bit far, telling him about the Good Deed. That had been the inspiration of the moment. When he came out, Heck would flash the other twenty and try to get just his paints.

  He waited. He sat on a bench, a perfect place. Every so often he’d stand up and walk up and down the block, avoiding cracks in sidewalks and gratings. Then he’d sit on the bench again. Inertia: the slow but inexorable process by which boy and bench exchange electrons and become one. He wondered if Mr. Grenhold would know where the shelter was. In another microverse his mom would have called Spence by now and would know he wasn’t staying there. In an alternate reality she was probably worried sick about him.

  Heck settled into the bench. A hero didn’t feel hunger, and he sure didn’t complain about a toothache. A superhero didn’t ask his friends to put him up for a couple of days. He roamed the streets at night without need of sleep, impervious to rain and cold. A hero didn’t wait for his mom to find him. He took charge, made a plan.

  He figured he’d been waiting about three hours, real time. It was getting on in the afternoon. He’d wait until he turned to bones if he had to. There wasn’t anything else to do anyway.

  —

  He must have been in deep REM daydream, because when the landlord did come, Heck didn’t see him approach until he was right in front of him. Heck made himself look reasonable, rational.

  “You gonna sit here all day?” the landlord asked. His voice sounded as if his vocal cords had been burnt to a crisp. He pointed three fingers at Heck. “You gonna sit here on this bench all day like some kind of ghoul just to make me feel bad?”

  “No,” Heck said.

  He shoved the three fingers in Heck’s direction. “Don’t smart-mouth me.”

  Just tell the truth, Heck thought. “I need my paints, Mr. Grenhold. That’s all I want, and my portfolio. I need it for school. It’s got all my semester work in it.” He pulled out the other twenty. It trembled like a leaf in his hand. “This is all I have—for the portfolio, and the paints. And maybe my good brushes.” I’ll even wash your refrigerator magnets for you, he thought but refrained from saying.

  Mr. Grenhold snatched the twenty out of his hand. “I’ll take that toward rent owed. It’s not my fault you’ve got a lazy, irresponsible mother who doesn’t pay the rent. Just stay away. I got a paying tenant asking questions about you sitting here.”

  “She paid the rent. She was just late.”

  “Late eight months in a row makes her three months in breach of contract. Where’s your father? Isn’t anybody married anymore? In my day we had a word for women who had kids without a husband.”

  Heck stood up. He swallowed, but the spit wouldn’t go down. It was sealing his throat shut. “Okay, we owe you money, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about my mom like that.”

  The landlord took a step closer to him. “I’ll talk about her all right. Who’s going to stop me?”

  I, Heck Superhero, avenger of single moms everywhere, will stop you!

  Heck swallowed the words.

  The landlord grinned.

  Heck turned and walked away.

  The landlord called after him, “If your mother left when I gave her notice, I wouldn’t have had to get civil enforcement to change the locks. Bunch o’ junk in there anyway.”

  As Heck walked to the mall, he thought about every possible plan.

  One of his plans was to call his father.

  This plan had a flaw. He had no idea where his father lived. All he knew about his father was his name. Once his mom had sketched his father’s face. “That’s your father,” she said casually.

  His mom was good at drawing. She taught him how as soon as he could hold a pencil. Heck had stared at the picture a long time, trying to see beyond the edges of the page, turning the paper to try and see his profile. For a long time Heck begged for other information, but his mom wouldn’t say anything more. Finally, when he put up a big bawl, she said, “Honey, it’s like this: talking about your father, it’s living in the past. If I get to live in the past for anything good, then I have to live in it for the bad, too. I learned a long time ago I had to live in today if I was going to be happy, and today that’s all there is of your father.”

  She could only be now. She couldn’t imagine the future or remember the past. She was his mom now or not at all. His mom could only be here now, or not.

  That was better than his dad, who was just the “not” part.
His father would forever be an image on paper: flat dad, flat line. Genetic. Flat meant squashed, slottable, stackable, and if you turned sideways people didn’t see you anymore. Flat meant you could sit on a bench for hours and not get your paints back.

  What was he doing wrong?

  Why wasn’t it working?

  Hadn’t he given popcorn to the poor? Hadn’t he folded laundry for the tired and dirty? Hadn’t he played with the deeply neurotic?

  He thought of the twenties that Mr. Grenhold had taken for rent. One of those really belonged to Spence.

  Was that it? The stolen twenty? That probably canceled everything out. That explained why everything was going wrong: Spence’s stolen twenty—which he had just now given away for the second time.

  He had to come up with the Ultimate Good Deed, something that made up for an ultimate bad deed. The Good Deed was the Theory of Everything.

  He could choose not to believe. If he chose evil he would have to step out of his own microverse and into an evil one. By doing that, he would condemn himself to the bottomworld, of course, but the bottomworld had super beings, too—evil nemeses of the topworld. He could be the best of the worst, the top of the bottom, the most powerful of the powerless. There was a certain logic in this course: abandoned kid becomes thief, drug user. It all went together in a way.

  Or.

  The Theory of Everything.

  Heck walked, lost in thought, not really knowing where he was going. Even his thoughts weren’t going anywhere. He couldn’t think without drawing. He picked an only slightly crumpled piece of paper out of a nearby trash can, whipped out his sketching pencil, and began drawing a superhero.

  Portfolio due Friday.

  Today was … Wednesday.

  Self-portrait, due yesterday.

  Heck drew his best superhero in a kneeling pose, his huge iron knuckles crushed against his broad, intelligent forehead, twenty-three chromosomes human, twenty-three chromosomes god.

  Mr. B. would rap his knuckles for drawing superheroes. Avoidance behavior, he’d say. He drew a word bubble for the superhero and wrote in it: “And what of this kindly fanboy artist who stood between his mother and destruction …”

  Heck crumpled the drawing. Maybe she’d called. Maybe Spence knew where she was by now.

  He had to call Spence. Good thing he hadn’t used all his change for a chocolate bar.

  Spence’s mom picked up the phone. Heck hung up.

  A few minutes later he dialed again. This time Spence picked it up. “Hi, Heck.”

  “How did you know it was me?” Heck asked.

  “Mom recognized your breathing. She wants to know if you’re okay.”

  “She can tell something is wrong by my breathing?”

  “Well, you haven’t been here in a couple of days, and then you hang up on her. She wonders if you’re mad at her or something.”

  That was how she got to know you, Spence’s mom, by asking if everything was okay. The FBI should turn over their most tight-lipped cases to her. She’d have them blubbering their whole lives in minutes.

  “I’m not mad at her,” Heck said. “Tell her everything’s okay.”

  Spence lowered his voice. That was a good sign. It meant hypertime was still their secret. “Look, I’m sorry I hung up on you last time, Heck. What I really wanted to say was, you should come here and stay. Please.”

  “No.”

  “Just one night.”

  “Your mom would be able to tell something was wrong. She has this psychic ability.”

  Dead air hung between them for a moment. Heck was afraid to ask the question. Spence was afraid to answer.

  “Heck, your mom hasn’t called,” Spence said at last. More dead air. “You have to come live with me, Heck. I’ll tell my parents your house flooded or something.”

  “We live—lived—on the third floor,” Heck said.

  “I’ll tell them something.”

  “I almost had a job in an art gallery, sort of an entry-level position.”

  “So, if you just keep missing school and sleeping in a car and doing Good Deeds, your mom’s going to show up with an apartment and no one will get into trouble?”

  “Yes. No. I mean—”

  Spence made a drippingly scornful sound that was a cross between a snort and a laugh. “You are making no sense. You have to come here, or tell someone and get some help.”

  “You don’t understand about the kind of help they give you,” Heck said. “If they get to help you, they get to punish you, too. You just don’t know. I have to figure out what I did wrong and reverse it.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Heck. Well, maybe Velocity Nine.”

  “And the twenty,” Heck said.

  “What?”

  “The twenty—that I borrowed.”

  “Twenty … ?”

  “Okay, okay, I stole it. But I’ll pay it back. I promise.” Heck felt a hundred percent better already. “I’m sorry.”

  “No one even noticed,” Spence said glumly. Heck could tell he was mad about having to be nice about this when he was already mad about something else. “I’ll cancel the debt if you’ll come and stay here tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No thanks needed. Just come.”

  “Listen, Spence, I want to try one more thing first. If it doesn’t work out, then … but it will. Can you look something up for me? I need to know where the shelter is. I’m thinking maybe Mom made her way there. Can you look in the phonebook under, I don’t know, ‘Shelters,’ I guess.”

  He could hear Spence flip through the phonebook. “Sharpening Service, Sheet Metal Work, Shelving … No, nothing under Shelters.”

  “Try Social Services.”

  “Okay, there’s something here called the Women’s Drop-In Center. It’s on the corner of 26th and McLeod. So are you coming to school tomorrow? If you don’t, Mr. Bandras is going to blow a blood vessel. He’s asking questions.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll—I’ll go.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ve missed so much,” Heck said, sighing. “A math test and a social studies presentation that I know of. Everyone will be on my case.”

  “Yeah, well, stay away longer, then. That should fix everything.” All the fight had gone out of Spence’s voice.

  “All my books and notes and stuff are gone. Mr. Grenhold had everything hauled away.”

  “Good reason to flush your life,” Spence said.

  Heck could feel his teeth vibrating at high frequency. He didn’t know why he didn’t attract every dog in town. “Okay. Well, I’m going to hang up now,” he said.

  “Don’t hang up, Heck! Tell me where you are.”

  “I can’t. You’ll tell.”

  “Freaking right I’ll tell!” Spence stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “Look, Heck, I think I understand. If you tell … If people find out and your mom gets in trouble, then you won’t be her hero anymore.”

  Heck nodded, forgetting that he was on the phone.

  “But maybe if we just tried to explain …”

  “Topworld people don’t understand bottomworld language,” Heck said. “Mutant–human relations have never been good.”

  He thought, just before he hung up, that he could hear Spence practicing his swearing.

  When he opened the phone booth, Marion stood there. Heck screamed.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked when he got his breath again.

  “The pocket creatures told me to watch out for you. I know what it feels like to have no friends,” Marion said.

  “Then you met the pocket creatures and they’ve been your friends ever since.” Heck started walking and Marion trailed behind him. He stopped. “Marion, why are you following me?”

  “When you do your superhero thing, I want to be there to see it.”

  “Look, I’m not a superhero, I told you.”

  “What’s your mission tonight?”

  Heck shoved his hands into his pockets. “I hav
e to go to the Drop-In Center, corner of 26th and McLeod.”

  “Do you know where that is?”

  “No.”

  “I do,” Marion said, beaming. “I’ll take you there.”

  Heck sighed, and followed Marion.

  “How did you find out you were a superhero, anyway?” Marion asked.

  “I told you, I’m not really a—” He stopped. It was hopeless. “Okay. Okay, I’ll tell you, Marion. This is the absolute truth: a social worker told me I was a superkid.”

  Marion’s eyes were on high beam. “Wow.”

  “And before that, my mom always called me her hero.” Two true things.

  “Are you the only one? Are there others?”

  “Lots,” Heck said. He couldn’t stop himself now. “There are superheroes all over the place. They just lay low about it, but it usually comes out anyway. Like Mother Teresa. Tried to hide herself in a convent and look what happened. Some cash in on it, like Michael Jordan. They just make sure they don’t, you know, overdo it. There might be questions. Tiger Woods, the same—loses a game every so often so there won’t be any suspicions.”

  Marion was nodding like a bobble-head toy.

  He just wanted to play.

  Heck wanted to play, too. He could see right before his eyes what could happen to you if you played so hard and long you ceased to interface with microversal reality. But Heck was pretty hungry in this reality. Marion was just a kid, older than Heck, but younger, too. He felt bad for how he’d treated him.

  “So, Marion, uh, tell me about these pet aliens of yours,” Heck said. “How big do they get?”

  “They’re fully grown, but most naked eyes can’t see them. They came here on an asteroid that swings by sometimes, but they belong on the fifth planet. The one they think isn’t there anymore.” He looked down protectively at his jacket. “On May 5 I’ll have to give them back.”

  “How old are you, Marion?”

  “Seven thousand four hundred and three,” he said.

  “What’s that in earth years?”

  “Eighteen.”

  They walked in silence. Heck kicked a small piece of broken cement, and then Marion kicked it, and then Heck. They took turns like that for three blocks until the cement fell into a sewer grating.