I waited for Ricardo to answer, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to, because as he turned the corner…

Wow.

I’d heard she was still around.

Jane Cobb was my age, I was sure of that. I’d always be sure of it. But she looked a good thirty or more years younger than me. She looked fifty years old, at most. Could pass for even younger if she dyed her hair back to the same Jet Black it’d used to be back in the 30’s, when we were a bunch of stupid teenagers trying to get a fast buck. Or, in her case, pay the rent on the family farm.

“Russ,” she said smiling, and stood up. She was wearing a red-checkered blouse and blue jeans, and I half –expected to see her gunbelt hanging from her hips that she’d always wore when she was sticking up a place, or doing tricks at a carnival, shooting dimes out of the air for not much more than food and a bed in a trailer.

She walked over to me. A lot of women her age tried to hide the sags, bags, and rags that their bodies slowly became with the march of time. But good old Calamity Jane had kept her figure better than any woman her age I knew or’d seen. She still had her cowgirl boots on, though. A Texas girl, through and through.

“Jane,” I said, cursing my withered, broken body for being unable to stand out of the metal-framed chair that might as well have been a prison cell right now.

I thought again of my old suit. The one I’d worked a year on. More, really. It’d been a metal frame too, with wings that let me fly and soar like an eagle on a sunny day. And I soared…until American Airman decided he’d had enough of catching me and seeing me make bail. Then go out and try to steal again, getting ready for the next time when I’d need bail money again. Then the bad day had hit, and Airman had . . .

I couldn’t believe I’d gone into a reverie like that. And so easily. A beautiful woman standing up and walking towards me, and I had to think about the bitter past? Phooey.

She kissed my cheek- that, I paid attention to! Jane was always a smart cookie- knew how to play the men like a cowboy’s harmonica around a desert campfire. At least, when they started putting her into the comic books as a regular villain, that's what one of the writers said about her.

“Hello, Jane,” I whispered, looking into her eyes. Her face was a bit older. Just a few lines. But those eyes- they were always, always the same shade of sky-blue. A man could look too long into those eyes, and lose himself thinking of wide open prairies and dusky mountains at sunset.

The writers didn’t say that about her. I did. We all had our own kinds of crushes on Calamity Jane in the day, just like a later generation fell in love with that cat-lady in the skintight suit on the 60s TV show.

“How are you, Russ? You’re looking good.”

“Not half so good as you, Jane. It’s good to see you again, that’s for sure. What brings you here, honey?”

“Well, a couple of things, Russ. But first, I wanted to hear you tell me a story.”

I snorted. “Jane, I’m an old man. I ain’t got nothin’ but stories left to give. Which ones you want? How I got pasted by Eddie Finklestien for making fun of his name? Or maybe you wanna hear about how I walked in on my seventh-grade school teacher doing the hokey-pokey with the principal in her classroom?”

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She sat back down in a chair that looked like it had stood in the same place in the dusty old excuse for a visiting room for at least a decade or two.

“I’ve got something, Russ. I got something I think you’ll be good in. But I gotta know if you’re right for it. So, tell me your story.” She looked at me steadily for a few seconds. “You never told me or anyone else where you came from, or what you did before you made the suit.”

I’d never sat for a real job interview in my life, not for the kind of job guys with suits and ties had, anyway. But I felt like this is what it would’ve been like: on the spot, with a window of time about a minute wide to prove myself or go back to life the way it was before.

No way. Life wasn’t bad here, but Calamity Jane was the best-lookin’ doll in maybe thirty years to look me eye-to-eye that didn’t have a staple in her navel. I wasn’t going to blow it.

“How much time you got?” I asked.

“All morning,” she said.

#

Me, I was born out here in Indiana back in the late 30’s. The Depression wasn’t quite over, but it’d run the worst of it. I still grew up hearing stories of how Pop had to do all kinds’ve odd and dangerous work to live and survive and bring home food and keep a little roof over our heads.

But by the time I was born, a lot of good things were happening. I dunno if it was the New Deal or what, but Pop got a good government job building roads that he didn’t like much, but it was steady and he could do it well enough that he never got canned from it. He was a steady guy- not too mean, not too nice, either. Guys who were either usually got the shit kicked out of them when they ran into someone meaner (and there was always someone meaner, and you near always found them), or you lost your shirt when someone figured out you were so nice you wouldn’t put up a fuss or were an easy mark.

My folks named me after a story in Greek mythology. Huh. The kids in my neighborhood were such a bunch of lunkheads they didn’t even know what ‘mythology’ was, and they all thought ‘Greek’ just meant a guy who took it in the tailpipe. Sorry, but that was the way it was in my neck o’ the woods.

But I’ll never forget when Momma took me to the library as a kid, and the librarian was so happy to meet a boy with an unusual name like mine (I never knew it was unusual- normal to a kid is whatever you grow up with, after all), she took my right to the fiction section and found me a book with my name in it! Of course, yeah, it was the story of Icarus getting too close to the sun. But Jane, when she turned the page in the book and I saw the illustration of this good-lookin’ guy with wings, flyin’ up to the sun, with a great, big, toothy, aw-shucks smile on his face, and then the title of the story in great, big letters below that- ‘Icarus and Daedalus,’ well Jane just seeing my name someplace, when every comic book and story in Boy’s Life had guys named Bill, Joe or Tommy for their heroes, and here was a kid named Icarus, just like me? Hell, I tried shortening it when I was older to Carus and then to Russ so’s I wouldn’t stand out, but up until then even the immigrant kids made fun of my name. Hell, I was so happy to see my name someplace I didn’t care if the stupid shmoe died at the end, you know? All I knew was here, at last, here’s someone who has a name like mine!

And that someone had wings. Real wings. Wings that let him fly. Yeah, that part, whoever they had writing the comic books either got it right on their own or they just guessed that me having the funny name led to me wanting to make a pair of wings. Who knows which caused the other, nuh?

Pop was a fairly smart man, but he hadn’t gone to school past third grade. He figured out laying concrete well enough that he moved high as you could as a road-crew man, which wasn’t that high, really. But he did all right. Better than a lot of fathers, really. I knew a lot of kids on my block who lived in shacks instead of a small house like I had. Shacks that had been cobbled together from leftovers at construction sites where employed dads like mine worked. Those kids’ dads had worked as day-laborers, when they worked at all. Or maybe they took a walk to go get a pack of cigarettes and never came home.

Momma was a pretty woman, and was always good to me. When I started school and the kids started making fun of me for being short and smart, she was always there to tell me they were the ones who were wrong, and they weren’t gonna amount to anything, but I was.

I believed her. I was a little kid, and she was naive.