Pandemonium

The Boy Marvel appears above them, his white cape fluttering in the breeze, feet planted wide on the cement wall of the bridge. The summer sun makes a halo behind his head.

The girl on the bank, the innocent hostage, says nothing. The two Jap spies disguise their fear with laughter. “I dare you to come down here and say that,” the taller one says. “I double dare you!” says his partner. The Johnson brothers are waist-deep in the creek, leaning against the big rock that pokes out of the water like the back of a hippo. Their sister, a six-yearold with pigtails, waits with wide eyes.

“Just watch me,” says the Boy Marvel. He adjusts the knot at his neck, straightens his cape. The sheet was stolen from his grandmother’s linen closet and cut down with his pocket knife—a crime, perhaps, but one the Boy Marvel deemed necessary.

He crouches and stretches out his arms. After a moment, he straightens, readjusts the cape.

“Ha!” the taller Johnson boy says. “You’re a damn coward!” He’s thirteen, a year older than the Boy Marvel, and he curses whenever adults are out of earshot. His younger brother and fellow spy is only eight, but he’s too scared of his brother to ever tell on him. Their sister is allowed to watch as long as she doesn’t talk or get in the way.

The rock is eight feet from the bridge, give or take. They’ve all seen the high school boys jump from the bridge and land in the deep water on the other side of the rock, but none of the trio have ever attempted it. It’s a daredevil stunt. You can’t even get a running start; you have to do it right from the wall.

“Don’t call me that,” Bobby Noon says.

The Johnson brothers crack up again. “Coward!” they shout. Bobby’s been called a lot of names. Crybaby, scaredy-cat, liar-liar-pants-on-fire. He’s missed a lot of school for what the teacher called “emotional problems.” Bobby used to hear voices, see people who weren’t there. Bobby acted so crazy, the kids said, that even his momma couldn’t take it, and that’s why she ran off with that Kansas City man. But ever since his dad’s ship went down somewhere in the Pacific, he won’t stand for being called a coward. You can get him to do almost anything if you call him that. Bobby knows this about himself but can’t help it. He crouches again, summoning mysterious energies. The spies step away from the rock—they don’t want Bobby to land on them. Their sister covers her eyes.

The Boy Marvel leaps. Arms straight, toes pointed, head up. His capewidened shadow stretches over the awestruck spies. This is a moment they’ll remember forever, he thinks.

He’s falling now. The rock’s shining back rushes toward him, too fast, too close. He ducks his head into his arms, pulls his legs up to his chest—

Ker-Wop!

He hits the deep water with his knees—perfect cannonball—and his shins smack the rocks at the bottom of the creek. He lays there curled in the cold water, savoring the victory, not caring that his legs are probably bleeding. Finally he pushes to the surface, beaming. The brothers can’t believe it—your cape hit the rock you were so close! The older boy slaps him on the back. The younger boy and girl are looking at him like he’s a hero.

. . .

They fool around in the water for a couple more hours, but no else tries the jump. Not Bobby—he’s proven his point—and not even the older Johnson boy. Maybe he’s too scared by Bobby’s close call. They reread Bobby’s funny books, and Bobby even reads one aloud to the little Johnson girl. The brothers think she has a crush on Bobby.

When the brothers get bored with reading they make Bobby come up with another game—Bobby’s the one with all the ideas. The other kids think he reads too much, and think he’s being a show-off when he uses words like annihilated and electrodynamics. But he’s real good at made-up games.

Billy instructs them on how to set up a barricade by the end of the bridge and arms them with Tommy-gun sticks, on alert for strange cars driven by foreign agents. The Johnson girl, being a girl, is supposed to hide. But only two cars and one tractor go by, and they’re all people they’ve seen a thousand times before, so Bobby tells them that the agents are disguised as their friends and neighbors. So informed, they shoot out the tires of the next car that comes by.

At suppertime the Johnson boys walk home, their kid sister trailing after them. Bobby stays on the bridge with his copies of Captain Marvel and The Shield and Action Comics. From his perch on the wall he can look south toward the roofs of town, or north to the hospital on the hill, or across the fields to where the red silo pokes up like a rocket. His grandmother’s voice is too weak to call him from this far. He’s twelve, and he’s the man of the house now. He can go home when he damn well wants to. He bunches the damp cape into a pillow, lies down on his back upon the wall, and holds the Captain Marvel over his head to block the sun. He doesn’t have to read the words anymore; he’s got them all memorized. Gram hates that he spends his money on the books, even buying the used ones from the other boys, but she doesn’t try to stop him. His dad liked comics. In one of his letters he said they passed them around the ship until they were all taped up like wounded soldiers. Nobody’s told Bobby what happened to his father, but he knows. For the millionth time, he pictures his dad on the deck of the destroyer, blue sleeves pushed up his forearms, a copy of Captain America rolled into his back pocket. He’s hammering away with his antiaircraft gun at the Japanese Zero diving straight for him out of a cloudless blue sky. The airplane grows huge, a thousand pounds of metal already breaking up under the hail of bullets, trailing oily black smoke and fire. And now his father can see the face of the pilot, a madly grinning man with a white bandanna wrapped around his head, the red circle in the middle of his forehead like a third eye. For the millionth time Bobby pushes the picture out of his head, stares hard at the pictures in his book. He makes himself consider again who’d win in a fight, Captain Marvel or Superman.

“Hey,” a voice says.

Bobby looks over, and it’s the little Johnson girl walking on the road, barefoot and in her white nightgown. “Did you sneak out?” he says.

“Read me another,” she says.

A wind ruffles the comics lying on the wall behind his head. He reaches up to hold them down, but one of them takes off, fluttering in the air over the water. He twists and grabs it, crumpling it in his fingers—it’s Action Comics #32—and then he’s slipping off the wall. His left hand scrabbles for the edge, but his fingernails scrape uselessly off the cement surface, and he drops.

He’s rolling as he falls, and strikes the water on his back. The creek is shallower here, only three feet deep, and choked with rocks. He doesn’t feel anything when he strikes bottom and the stones jam against his spine. He lies there for a moment, stunned. He’s almost reclining on the rocks, his face only six inches from the surface. His vision is blurred, but he can see the wavering gray rectangle of the bridge, the bright sky, and between bridge and sky a dark blot. It’s the silhouette of the girl’s head. She’s staring down at him. His breath’s been knocked out of him. He should sit up now. He tries to lift his head, but nothing happens. He can’t move his legs or his arms either —it’s as if he’s become buried up to his ears in quicksand. The one thing he can feel is a burning at the top of his lungs. He tries to open his mouth, but not even that’s working.

He stares up at the bridge, and the girl is still looking down at him. Stupid girl. She was too small to help him anyway. He thinks, if only one of the

Johnson brothers would run out of their house right now they’d be able to save me.

The burning in his chest goes away, and he stops feeling anything at all. He’s not thinking of anything either except the hole that’s appeared in the sky. It’s a black blot, growing larger, like the mouth of a tunnel rushing toward him. He’s seen that blackness before. He’s heard the voices that come out of it. He’s always been careful to look away, to run from it when he could.

But not this time. He can’t run from it, but now he knows he doesn’t have to. Now he knows what it is.