Minion Page 6

“And these men, they were just going about their business, robbing this store, when this other individual flew in from nowhere and interrupted them?”

  This other individual. Who, like, just happened to drop in from a little glide through the neighborhood. “He’s not like a random passerby, Dad, he was a superhero. And he didn’t interrupt them. He totally vanquished them.”

  I can see him chewing it over, the little gears in his head spinning. It’s a lot to process, even for me. I can’t imagine what he must be thinking.

  “I see,” he says finally. “And what did you do?”

  “What?” I blink, maybe, fifty or sixty times, trying to comprehend how, with everything I just said, this is somehow about me.

  “Aside from not getting my circuit board, what did you do while these masked and tighted men clashed? Did you help the bystanders? Interfere with the cops? Did you sneak into the jewelry store while everyone was distracted and find a nice gold watch for my birthday? What?”

  I sit on the bottom stair, exhausted, shaking my head. “I didn’t do anything. I hid behind a bench with Zach and watched.”

  “That’s it?” he asks, one eyebrow arched. “Just watched?”

  “Yeah. That’s it,” I say. Some Super freak of nature shows up out of nowhere with a swath of blue panty hose across his face and makes mincemeat out of a posse of heavily armed goons, and all that matters is what I did about it. “I think you’re missing the point, Dad.” I’m not entirely sure what the point is, but I’m sure he’s missing it. It probably has something to do with the fact that there is now someone in town who can fly and deflect bullets and punch holes through freakin’ cement. Of course I didn’t actually see him punch holes in cement, but he certainly looked like he could. But Dad’s expression is blank, impossible to read. “I thought . . . I don’t know, that maybe you’d be a little concerned or something! I mean, this guy, he’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen. He put a hole through a van’s engine with his foot! He’s strong. He’s fast. He’s powerful. He really could be trouble.”

  He nods at this, at least. “And so . . . ,” my father prods, but I’m not sure what he’s looking for. It’s his teaching style. Fish for answers until he gets the one he wants. And so? And so what?

  “And so . . . we need to be careful?” I venture.

  “Yes,” he says. “‘A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies.’”

  He pauses, waiting for me to say something.

  “Oscar Wilde,” he finishes.

  “Right,” I say. “Oscar Wilde.”

  Dad turns back to his box. “I guess I could probably make do with one of the older boards for now. No sense going back out there. Not with all this excitement. Besides,” he adds, slapping his hands on his knees, “it’s taco night, isn’t it? I do love taco night.”

  Dad closes the lid on his box and makes for the stairs. He pauses next to me.

  “I’m glad you’re safe,” he says.

  While he boils the rice, I turn on the television and sit on the torn corduroy-covered loveseat. We don’t technically have cable, though the little black three-buttoned box by the wall can hijack over two thousand different channels from whatever satellites are pointing our way. I find the first news station I can and sit with a throw pillow clutched to my chest. I can hear Dad singing in the kitchen.

  The thwarted robbery is all over the local news, going viral. Reporters are swarming the scene. Five would-be burglars were found inside the van, tied together with electrical wire ripped out of the vehicle’s guts, their metal masks torn off and stacked in a neat pile beside them. Their identities are not being released to the public, but they are not believed to be affiliated with any of the known gangs or organizations currently operating in the city.

  Which means New Liberty has a new criminal element.

  But even these metal-faced goons with their machine guns and rocket launchers aren’t the headline. The banners running along the bottom of the screen read NEW LIBERTY’S NEWEST SAVIOR and BLUE HERO HALTS WOULD-BE ROBBERS. Fuzzy snapshots of the man in the blue tights flash every other second, and every person interviewed gushes like a squeezed grape, eyes wide as they describe him rocketing out of the sky.

  “. . . like a cannon. I had to cover my ears . . .”

  “. . . split the earth when he landed . . .”

  “. . . punched right through the door . . . with his bare fist!”

  “. . . couldn’t get a look at his face, but I’m almost positive he smiled at me. . . .”

  Wow. The guy makes one appearance, hangs around for five minutes, and he’s already a celebrity.

  I flip through stations, taking it all in, over and over again. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody has seen him before, at least not in New Liberty. Channel Six dubs him the Cobalt Comet, for the streak he left across the sky. The fact that he can fly has everyone’s undies in a bunch. Fliers are rare. Only one out of every ten Supers can do it, apparently. Even Captain Marvelous couldn’t fly. It’s clear the Cobalt Comet has super strength as well. There is wide speculation about what other powers he might have, where he came from, whether he is even human, that sort of thing. Can he shoot fire? Call down lightning? Is he a divine being? Does he gain his powers from celestial bodies? Is he a secret government weapon? Every news station in New Liberty seems to be scrambling to find out anything it can—and just making stuff up when it can’t—yet nobody asks why he’s here. Maybe I’m the only one wondering it, but I doubt it.

  One channel is devoted to playing the event over and over again. I sit and watch the footage pieced together from a dozen phones, hoping not to catch a glimpse of Zach and me camped out by the bus stop. If my face shows on the news and Dad finds out about it, I’ll be grounded for a year. Thankfully, all lenses were locked onto the action, just like Zach’s was. I’m somewhere in the background, impossible to recognize.

  Dad calls out from the kitchen that dinner’s ready and I should turn off the TV.

  “It’s on every station,” I say, taking the seat across from him at the table. He’s cramming a taco shell, layering it with the skill of a mason, topping it with a flourish of cheese. He enjoys the act of fitting things inside other things. Compartmentalizing, he calls it. I slop a taco together, though I know I’m not going to eat it. The jolt of the afternoon still has my stomach twisted. “They are calling him the Cobalt Comet,” I add as an afterthought. It feels funny, talking about a superhero the way you might talk about the neighbor’s new dog. But my father’s stony face keeps my own voice in check.

  “Kind of a stupid name,” he muses, picking lettuce out of his beard. “Why not the Azure Avenger? Or the Cerulean Crusader? Comets are just balls of dirty rock and ice. They’re really not that remarkable, if you think about it. We make a big deal out of them, go out and watch them, but I’ve never known one to do anything special.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, pushing a kernel of half-frozen corn around on my plate. “It was pretty . . .” I fish for the word. Amazing? Frightening? Awful? It was all of those. But even that doesn’t capture it, that feeling that everything around you has suddenly gone into motion, that you can actually feel the earth spinning on its axis. “. . . unsettling,” I decide.

  Dad shrugs. “It’s not the first hero New Liberty has ever seen.”

  No, but it’s the first one I’ve ever seen. In the flesh, at least—provided his skin is actually made of flesh and isn’t some strange mutant alien polymer or something.

  “Comets pass,” he says.

  “And the men in the metal masks?” I ask.

  My father pauses, half-eaten taco in hand, and finally it breaks, just a little, that marble facade of his. The corners of his mouth crack, and I can see the shift in his eyes, like a curtain pulled, revealing at least a hint of concern. I’ve never seen my father scared before, not even when we are robbing banks or sculpting plastic explosives in the lair, but it’s obvious that the thought of these silver-faced thugs spooks him a little, maybe even more th
an the superhuman freak who wears his underwear on the outside of his pants. He starts to say something, then backtracks into a wan smile.

  “We’ve seen their kind too,” he says. “Tony will look after us. And we will look after each other.” He reaches across the table and puts his hand on my shoulder. Then he glances over at my barely touched plate. “Ready for dessert?”

  Dad overnukes a couple slices of cherry pie and then launches into a lecture on how rice is the single most important food in the world and how the Spanish explorer Cortez was probably the first European to have taco night. Afterward, I finish clearing the table, thinking maybe I’ll call Zach, when Dad asks me over the plate he’s rinsing, “So, did you see anything you liked at the mall?”

  And suddenly I remember. Black sweater and short brown hair, chewed straw and piano laugh. Funny how a sonic boom and a hundred gunshots can make you forget. But now, thinking about her, I feel the warmth spread to my cheeks. I turn away so he won’t see me.

  “No. Not really,” I say.

  I’m not sure why I don’t mention her. Maybe because, here, in this neighborhood with its potholed streets and its hollowed-out cars, in this house with its flaking paint and this kitchen with its peeling linoleum, sitting above a secret lair full of black black-market boxes, something like her can’t exist.

  Dad nods, satisfied with my answer.

  “Of course,” he says. “We have everything we need right here.”

  I finish clearing the table, then excuse myself and go sit on the porch. The air is thick with the expectation of rain. Half the porch lights are burned out, up and down the street. You can hear a car alarm bleating like a lost sheep two blocks away. On the corner, three teenagers are grouped around a streetlamp, whispering to each other. I see one of them make a gesture with the flat of his hand, making it soar into the sky. Up and away. They sense it. So do I.

  So does Dad, but for some reason he doesn’t want to admit it. Or he just doesn’t want to talk about it. But it’s obvious. Something changed today. A shift. I can hear him putting the dishes back in the cabinets. Compartmentalized. I think maybe I missed something. An opportunity.

  Viola, Dad. Her name was Viola. The instrument. Not the cross-dresser. And she was beautiful.

  I look up at the stars, at the streak of blue light fading against the darkness, and wonder why she didn’t look back.

  And what I would have done if she had.

  GREAT CHAIN OF BEING

  When I was ten years old, I stepped on a spider. I noticed it skittering across the kitchen floor toward the table where my father and I were having breakfast. I watched it scurry to within striking distance. Then I casually lifted my slippered foot and smashed it before taking another bite of Cheerios.

  My father, sitting across from me, put down his copy of Popular Science and gave me a serious look. Not angry, exactly, but obviously displeased. The kind of look that lets you wish you had the last ten seconds of your life back to do over again.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked.

  “It was a spider,” I said, thinking that maybe he just saw me stomp and didn’t know why.

  “I know it was a spider,” he said. “What I want to know is why you killed it.”

  I looked at him, confused. Then gave the exact same answer.

  “So just because is a spider, it demands to be annihilated?” he pressed. He crossed his arms over the blue fronds of his shirt and leaned back in his chair.

  Annihilated. That seemed kind of extreme. I just stepped on it. “Well, no, but . . .”

  “Was it attacking you? Are you hurt?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Was it poisonous? A brown recluse, maybe? Your life was in danger, perhaps?” he pried.

  “No. I don’t think so.” I had no idea what a brown recluse spider looked like. Moreover, I had no idea what my father was freaking out about. It was just a spider. Now it was a splotch on the floor. I would clean it up, if that was the problem.

  “Perhaps you were bitten by spiders as a little boy back at St. Mary’s, so you’ve developed a phobia?”

  “Phobia?”

  “A deep-seated fear of spiders that you can’t control,” he explained. “Do you have arachnophobia, Michael?”

  I couldn’t remember ever being bitten by a spider before. This one hadn’t been any bigger than a nickel. I don’t think I was afraid of it. Maybe a little grossed out. The more questions he asked, the more confused I got. I shook my head.

  “What was it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just saw it and I stepped on it.”

  “Hmmph,” my father said. He buried his nose back in his magazine. I should have let it go, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I never can.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “I just think you should have a reason, that’s all.”

  “For squashing a spider?” I almost said killing, but that sounded almost as bad as annihilated. Squashing sounded innocent. Or at least accidental.

  “For everything,” he replied. He peered at me from over the top of his magazine, like a prying neighbor nosing over a fence. “I don’t care that you killed it, so long as you had a reason.”

  He stared at me for almost a minute more, waiting, I guess, for the right answer. But there was nothing I could tell him. I didn’t know why I did it. So I looked down at the smeared spot that had gotten me into this mess. Then I reached down with my napkin and wiped it up, wrapping it gently in the folds before tossing it in the trash can. I sat back down at the table and waited for my father to turn the page. I pushed away my bowl of cereal and thought about it some more.

  “Does it have to be a good reason?” I asked.

  My father put down his magazine again and took a sip of his coffee. Then he smiled at me.

  “That all depends on what you mean by good,” he said.

  That was the last spider I ever squashed.

  The day after his arrival, the news stations are still salivating over every little scrap of story they can peel off the streets regarding the Comet. Apparently the Cobalt was dropped in the middle of the night, to save ink and conserve headline space. Besides, the Comet sounded cooler by itself, and half of New Liberty had no idea that cobalt was even a color.

  They interviewed as many witnesses as they could find, even the mother of the little boy who dropped his bear. And of course everybody saw something a little different. One person swears that he saw flames coming from the Comet’s boot heels. Another claims that there was electricity wreathed around the hero’s eyes. Yet another insists that she had seen the Comet the night before at a bar and took him home to her apartment but wouldn’t tell the rest. “Not till I get a book deal,” she teases. No one says anything about two teenage kids taking it all in from a bus stop on the corner.

  On the morning news, experts in the area of vigilante justice and superhuman phenomena dissect the film footage from the crime scene, speculating on the nature of the Comet’s powers, trying to work backward to determine his origin. Is he a supernatural being from beyond the grave? Does he derive his powers from nuclear energy? Is he a genetic mutation? One expert postulates that the Comet is just an ordinary man like the rest of us, except he’s been augmented with a titanium endoskeleton to enhance his strength and a pair of kick-butt antigravity boots to help him fly. He is compared to others like him. Corefire. Sartorian. Archon. Another channel features an impassioned local preacher declaring the Comet the second coming of Christ, quoting, “And they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.” But I, for one, don’t buy it. I’ve seen plenty of pictures, and in none of them is Jesus wearing spandex.

  Still, I can’t say that I blame them. The innocent bystanders of New Liberty had lost their faith in capes. And now here it came, rocketing back to them on the Comet’s big blue tail.

  There is some speculation on the men in the metal masks as well. One channel dubs them the Silver Syndicate. Another claims th
at they might be the same group responsible for a rash of bombings along the West Coast a few years back. An expert in criminal psychology and organization insists that they are mindless soldiers—you can tell by their movements, their coordination—and that, as soldiers, they must naturally have a general. A leader. What follows is endless speculation on who that might be, with one expert going so far as to suggest it might be the Comet himself.

  My father calls for me from the basement. I can barely hear him over the TV.

  “Michael, come down here for a minute.”

  I reluctantly flip it off and shuffle to the door, pattering down the stairs to find him in his usual spot, one of his unfinished inventions sitting on his lap.

  “I need your help,” he says, motioning to an empty chair.

  I slump into it, nodding toward the box that he moves to the workbench. “What is it?”

  “Something I’ve been working on for a while now,” he says.

  He woke up this morning as if it were any other, grabbed his coffee, and retreated to his lair without a word on what happened yesterday, as if nothing remarkable did.

  “For a while? You mean like since this morning?”

  “I mean like since before I met you.”

  “Oh,” I say. The lair is full of half-finished projects. One shelf holds figures and blueprints for at least a dozen inventions not yet started. My father’s ideas come much faster than his hands, or our ever-fluctuating income, can keep up with. Still, it sometimes comes as a blow to think about how much life he lived without me, how much I still don’t know about his past. I look over to see that the missile is overflowing with crumpled paper. He takes the little black box and sticks it on top of what looks like a metal colander turned upside down, little blue and yellow wires crisscrossing over it.

  “Isn’t that the spaghetti strainer?”

  He nods and attaches a few more wires. The whole thing looks like a prop from a bad science-fiction movie, the kind with rocket ships on strings and flashlights for ray guns.

  “Here, put this on,” he says.