“Snowman.”
Right, Jane! That was it. Snowman. I still think he had the best idea for a costume; he just had a blue business suit and a fedora with a white cape, and he pulled a white nylon stocking over his face. Pretty easy to do, and he was always coming up with new ways to use cold stuff. Problem was he hadda spend almost as much time breaking into labs as robbing the banks, since he hadda steal his stuff to make his ‘snowballs,’ those little bombs that’d freeze cars, locks, and all that? Remember him? Gawd, did he have the hots for you, Jane. It got annoying, almost, how his eyes were glued to you whenever you walked in the room.
The six of us. All screwed up in one way or another. All of us living underground. Remember when a job’d go well? How we’d dress to nines, and go out on the town? Off to places like the Stork Club, or the Brown Derby? We’d get a table, flash the green, and they’d treat us like we really belonged there. I could forget for a while that I was a small town reject, Jake could forget he was a gypsy and everyone suspicious of him and all, Miguel could forget that he was Hispanic and that normally he’d have to either be a waiter to get in the door or dress all in his Black Tiger getup to scare a little respect out’ve the guys who were serving him. The usual. It all went away, every way.
‘Course, we’d be doing that on Saturday night, and then we’d be back to eating Cheerios and peanut butter for dinner by Wednesday, eh? Leave it to the Swami to think up that we should hit the Stork Club and rob the place a week after we ate there! You shoulda seen him, Jane! It was beautiful.
Of course you were in on the job! But you were doing the distraction, weren’t ya? Shooting down the chandelier and taking everyone’s pocketbooks on the main floor while the Swami and me went in through the top floor window. I swooped in, carrying the damn phoney cripple on my back, and when we got in he did his little magic-whoosis pretty good. He’d conned his way into the life of club owner’s chief lunkhead a while before, and he’d put a number of little ‘suggestions’ into his head in preparation for the swipe. In, out, before anyone knew what we were doing or what was really happening. That was the way I liked it. Remember?
Well, of course things couldn’t go good like that forever. The Airman got wind of what we were doing, but he was too chickenshit to try and take all of us on at once. So, what does he do? Gets a bunch of them together and forms his own gang! I swear, no wonder the cops can’t stop the drugs in this country. I heard that one fellow- who was the guy in Las Vegas? The guy who was the cop and then turned all cape? Yeah, BlackJack. He said that heroes really got their start because of the criminals. Some group of bank robbers had the idea of all dressing the same so they couldn’t get pulled out of a lineup so easy. So you had the Pirate gang, the Soldier gang, the Ghost gang…and then the cops got in on the act when they wanted to bust these guys in their off duty hours.
Anyways, we get together because we’re tired of getting all beat-up by guys like the Airman, and so they copied us! Oh, now you have the Airman, that fast guy, who was he? Yes! The Streak, BlackJack with his fancy playing cards, Lady Liberty, and that guy who got your attention- the cowboy guy…yeah, Aces and Eights. If that wasn’t the stupidest name for a hero I ever heard! But I guess he liked the poker thing about the Wild West, and the name BlackJack was taken. Ah, well!
So they got together after we got together. Suddenly, while we’re barely eking it out in a smelly, cold abandoned subway station while the Airman and the rest of his little toadies were up on the penthouse of a downtown skyscraper. I heard they whored themselves out to the government, but someone else said BlackJack patented some of his gadget playing cards and got even more money for him and his team that way.
Well, we did what we could, didn’t we? Me, I was done after a couple of years of that. After the Airman wrecked my fourth or fifth set of wings, I got tired of building ‘em. And when I heard BlackJack was making money hand over fist by selling his ideas? Well, yeah. Snowman said I sold out, but dammit, I was tired of getting punched out and waking up handcuffed to a hospital bed.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
So, I went to some guys I knew who got stuff to and from the military. Yeah, after I patented the design of my wings- the Airman may have broken them over and over again, but I still had my drawings and specs- I took the designs over to the military. They bought ‘em up for a good chunk of change and I invested it. No more robbing banks, and now I get to see young men who look like the comic book versions of the Airman wearing my wings as they fly into battle against the commies. ‘Least that's what it looks like on the posters.
So, Jane, that’s most of the story. I stayed single- never quite found the gal who was ready to settle down with me. And I guess that’s okay. When most guys I knew were hating Monday morning and trying to pay for their kids’ braces or college, I was sleeping in every day and tinkering and making more gadgets with all the extra money I had.
Until…we got to here, today. I’ve got a minor case of MS which is gonna kill me one day, but for now I’m doing okay. Better than the Airman, like I said, who’s never gonna shit right again after he tried his Jack Dempsey act with that bad guy with the steel fists. Forget his name, but that guy could actually fight and wasn’t just play acting with the crazy bit, and finally the Airman found out what it was like to feel like his innards got all ripped up. My investments pay the rent on this place, and they feed me and change my undies throughout the day.
#
“So, Jane,” I said, “you asked to hear a story and you got it. What do you think? I don’t think I’ve ever told the whole thing to anyone before; never had a reason to, and when we were the team in the subway, we were always too focused on the next job to be doing the whole hold-hands-and-sing-kum-by-yah thing.”
She just smiled. Still did that- it always put off guys who tried to go on the make with her. Her smile, that particular smile, just let you know that she was smarter, tougher and cooler that you, and she was only putting up with you because a) she was too tired to beat the crap out of you or b) you were either too naive or too stupid or both to know you were trying to fuck someone who’d turned down propositions from honest-to-goddamn supermen.
But there was just a little something behind that smile. Something I hadn’t seen before or expected.
“I think,” she said, still smiling, “that you’ve got a good reason to be mad at the world. Most folks our age do. But you, Icarus, you’ve got a bigger reason’n most.”
She stood up, put both hands on the small of her back, arched and stretched herself. Gawd, have mercy, as Luther next door to me used to say before he died last month. I don’t wanna come off as a perv, but noticing and wanting a lady don’t stop for a guy, no matter how old he gets. And Jane, well, she always did have a good figure and a good profile, knowhatImean? She just looked so good for a second or two there! For a moment I was back in my twenties, remembering how the Queen Bee had to wear a ton of makeup and skintight yellow and black outfits to get the kind of looks Calamity Jane got just from a set of cowboy boots, bluejeans, no makeup and a plain flannel shirt.
And I noticed something else for the fourth or fifth time: she was a few years older than me, but she looked young enough to be my daughter.
“Russ,” she says when she was done, and every other dirty old man in the room pretended to go back to doing what they were doing, “I wanted to see if you still remember, really remember those days. And remember them the way they were. I wanted to see if you had anything still sparking in your head about those times, back when folks like you, me, Queen Bee and the Airman and all the rest were the big bulls in the corral. And I think you do. I saw your face when you began talkin’ about it- you remember it, and you’d love to go back to it, if you could get out’ve the chair. Right?”
“Hell yeah, Jane. But what difference does it make at this point? I’m not gonna get to fly again, even if you could get me a set of wings. Not unless they come in a model that lets your wheelchair fly, too.”
“Not a problem, Honey,” she said. She’d been standing over me, but now she went down on one knee and got her face close to mine, closer than any woman had who hadn’t been paid for it since I literally couldn’t remember when. She took my hands in hers- they still felt calloused. They were rancher’s hands, not a pampered city girl’s- and smiled. She slipped me something, something small, like a pill bottle.
“Don’t say anything,” she whispered. “Put it in your applesauce tonight and see what happens. I’ll be back in a week”
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TO BE CONTINUED...