Note: I'm planning on posting this on an EOD schedule, which means that technically, this part is a day early. But after I started posting, I realized I needed to shift my schedule by a day. Sorry for any confusion. Thanks! L.
Chapter 2
~§~
After winding her way down the main road and up a side street, Gillian stopped when she reached a path leading to a small wooden shack. It leaned visibly to the left, and Clark wondered if its skewed orientation was a result of the earthquake. But as they neared the ramshackle building, he suspected that, if anything, the severe shaking had probably tipped it closer to plumb.
Shifting Luke from her right arm to her left, she dug deep into the pocket of her olive green cargo pants and pulled out a clutch of keys strung on a braid of colored string. The bright keyring contrasted with the filmy layer of dust that seemed to coat every surface, a rainbow against the drabness of devastation.
“I can’t offer you a hot shower, but I can at least get you some clean...cleaner...clothes,” she said as she tried to fit one of three keys she’d isolated into the rusted padlock holding the door closed.
“I’m fine,” he insisted immediately, crossing his arms over his chest. He might be dusty, maybe even downright grimy, but so was everyone else. There was no reason that he could see for someone to sacrifice what might be his only spare change of clothes just so that Clark could freshen up.
Gillian stopped her struggle with the recalcitrant lock, turning to give him a hard glare. “OK, look. In that flashy outfit, you stand out like some sort of ‘shoot me’ target just begging for the FARC to use for practice. I’d hate to get hit with a bullet that was meant for you just because you wouldn’t change into something a tad less garish...”
Her mention of the FARC, Colombia’s largest and most deadly guerilla force, sent a shudder down his spine. Racking his brain, he tried to recall what he knew of Colombia and its political geography from reports in the Planet. Was this an area frequented by the vicious rebels? He glanced into the thick tangle of vegetation only a few hundred feet beyond the shack, almost expecting to see scores of automatic weapons pointed in his direction.
Self-consciously, he looked down at himself, repeating her evaluation. She was right. The red cape and blue suit were oddly surreal against the deep greens of the surrounding forests and the browns and tans and dusty whites of everything else. In this environment, he was wholly inorganic, a target that could be spotted from miles away.
If an innocent bystander died from a guerilla soldier’s wayward bullet simply because he refused to change, he’d never be able to forgive himself. It was one thing to place himself in danger and completely another to risk innocent lives.
“All right,” he agreed, tempted to spin into his own clothes right there so he wouldn’t spend another second endangering her. But he stopped, remembering. His own clothes were…Clark’s clothes. And Clark hadn’t arrived in San Pablo. Superman had.
If he changed into his own clothes, he’d have to explain why he even had other clothes. Which would lead to explanations about Clark. About dual identities and secrets and a whole lot of other stuff. All of that seemed very complicated, and right now he was very much appreciating the simpleness of the situation. Superman, not Clark, had agreed to stick around, so he would. In borrowed clothes.
Satisfied with his agreement to change, Gillian had returned her attention to the lock, going so far as to secure Luke between clamped calves so she could employ both hands toward the operation. Clark resisted the urge to reach across her and snap the lock in two, guessing that she wouldn’t appreciate his interference.
Just as the lock finally succumbed, the young boy whom she’d spoken to earlier approached, lugging a battered plastic gallon jug. His thin arm strained with the weight, and he shifted the container from hand to hand.
“Gracias, Antonio.” Gillian offered him a warm smile and accepted the jug.
Antonio spared a sideways glance at Clark, taking in the suit. His dark eyes widened when the large man gave him a friendly grin. Olive skin reddening with embarrassment at being caught staring, he took off back down the road, his small legs pumping furiously.
The door scraped the cement floor as Gillian swung it open, and releasing her pressure against the puppy’s ribs, she allowed Luke to scamper into the shack. She followed, leaving Clark standing outside.
Realizing he would receive no formal invitation, he stepped into the dim space, his eyes adjusting to the low light.
Not much more than fifteen feet square, there were no interior walls at all save a low knee wall stretching a few feet out from the farthest end. The single room’s framework was exposed, studs placed at uneven intervals and planked vertically with weathered boards also of varying widths. Every so often the dingy gray walls were broken by a lighter board, an obvious replacement for a slab whose time had come and gone.
The corrugated tin roof made up the shack’s ceiling, checkerboard lines of orange rust delineating where one sheet overlapped another and water found an easy path underneath. The room’s five windows had no glass, only screens which were in need of repair, several large holes and tears thoroughly defeating their intended purpose. A closed door led somewhere out the back of the whole structure.
Here and there a crack between the warped lumber allowed a thin sliver of light to slip into the room, and several open knots provided fist-sized peep holes. A few of the holes located at the lower levels had been stuffed with rags, and Clark thought of Antonio’s fascination with the gringo loco.
A dozen faded posters were hung in an eye-height ring around the room, for decoration or additional privacy he couldn’t be sure. From where he stood, he could make out the logos of several popular rock groups, time and environment altering them in a way that most bands would have probably found offensive. The Rolling Stones’ deep scarlet lips and tongue now a girlish bubble-gum pink, and certainly Pink Floyd had never intended for their prism to rest against a splotchy gray background. Even The Boss had not been spared, his classic Levis even more faded as he stood against the unfurled pink, white, and baby blue.
“Here. These should fit you. Brian was a pretty big guy, too.” Gillian’s comment interrupted his inspection of the posters. “And they’re as clean as anything else around here.”
He turned to see her standing next to an opened trunk and holding a stack of neatly folded clothes, which she thrust unceremoniously in his direction.
“Thank you.” He accepted the tan pants and a shirt that might once have been dark blue but had faded to something closer to denim. Who was Brian, he wondered, and wouldn’t he miss his clothes?
“You can change over there.” She jerked her head toward the knee wall, which offered privacy from only mid-thigh down. He lifted his eyebrows warily, and underneath the dirt smudges, he thought he detected her faint blush. “I promise, I won’t look.”
As if to make good on her claim, she bent her head back into the trunk as if inspecting its remaining contents, continuing over her shoulder, “We’ll have to find you some sturdy boots. Maybe Jeff can get a pair in Silvia...Wow, that was really fast.”
He stood in the same exact spot, completely clothed except for his bare feet. Thankfully the pants fit although the shirt’s arms hung about two inches past his fingers. He avoided her gaze by focusing on rolling up his sleeves, shrugging off his spin. “Yeah, it’s just a thing I can do.”
She nodded slowly. “Like I was saying, Jeff can get you a pair of shoes when he goes in to Silvia. He’s usually there every other week, but he’ll go back sooner considering we’re going to need to replace a lot of stuff. In the meantime, I’m sure he has spare pair of Tevas.”
Before he could ask her what exactly Tevas were and if he really wanted someone’s spare pair, she reached into the trunk and extracted a scrap of cloth. “If you want to wash your face, you can use the water in the jug. It’s already been purified. Don’t use any other water until you boil it first. I’ll get you some Halazone tablets. You’re in luck. Here’s some soap.”
“I don’t think I need to worry about it, the water I mean. My system’s pretty...resistant to stuff like that.” He took the cloth which appeared to be some sort of towel, holding out his other hand to receive a yellowed bit of soap. It seemed that this Brian person must have left in a hurry, leaving behind his toiletries and all.
“Suit yourself. Just don’t come crying to me if you pick up a nasty case of tumbo worms.”
She shut the trunk with a firm bang and started to right the shack’s few furnishings.
While the walls and ceiling remained unaffected by the earthquake, the room’s contents had not faired so well. A narrow pallet had been tipped to its side, a ticking-stripe mattress flopped beside it. The table and one of its two chairs had been toppled, the other stalwart chair still upright, defiant against the force of the earth beneath it. Mounted on the wall over the trunk, a narrow shelf dangled from only one bracket, several ancient paperbacks allowed to slide down its newly formed slope to land in a heap beneath it.
Clark set himself to stacking the paperbacks, noting the titles absently. War and Peace, Don Quixote, and The Unabridged Works of Charles Dickens lay next to more modern classics such as Michener’s Hawaii and Keillor’s Lake Woebegon Days. The books were yellowed and well-worn, pages dogeared and covers creased to fabric-like suppleness. And all of them were in English.
“So, you got a name?” Gillian had righted the pallet to its correct horizontal position and replaced the mattress. She was rummaging inside the trunk once again, and she issued her question without looking up.
“Cl…” he started, then caught himself. Dressed in the suit, it had been simple. Now, he was going to have to remember. Clark wasn’t there.
Worried that she might have heard his near-miss, he straightened up, infusing his posture with Superman confidence and his voice with an authoritative casualness. “Superman.”
“No, I mean a real name.” She pulled a brightly stripe blanket out of the trunk and snapped it smartly to unfold it, sending a cloud of dust swirling through the air. “I can’t have a conversation with someone called ‘super’ anything.”
He paused only a second, considering his options, which numbered none. “Nope. Just Superman.”
With that declaration, something inside him was liberated. Clark and all of his problems were abandoned. At least for a little while, he could live in the skin of his simpler persona. No glasses or unconfessed secrets. No destroyed Daily Planet. No upcoming wedding tragedy. Just Superman and his super abilities sticking around to help out those in need.
“Hmmm.” She stopped smoothing the blanket over the pallet to study him for a minute, her gray eyes narrowing.
Under her scrutiny, he felt a deep flush creep over his skin. Could she tell he was hiding something? Without the suit, he kind of felt like an imposter. A man claiming to be Superman but with no real proof. He suddenly had the ridiculous urge to prove himself, maybe lift the pallet with his pinky finger of float about the room. He resisted it, and when she returned to her chore, he let out the deep breath he’d been holding.
“So, what else can you do? I mean besides move entire towns and change your clothes faster than Luke there is gonna eat his dinner.”
Clark thought a minute. He was Superman, even dressed in the borrowed pants and shirt. There was no reason to downplay any of his abilities. Again, another surge of liberation raced through him. Not since he’d left Smallville and his parents’ home had he felt so free to just be himself.
“I have really good hearing. And I can...heat things. With my eyes,” he clarified. At her bland look, he squirmed, suddenly feeling silly. “Plus there’s the flying…” he trailed of helplessly.
“I see. Bet that comes in handy,” she said, clearly unimpressed. “And that’s what you do all day? You just fly around lifting stuff and waiting for people to need you to heat up things?”
“No. I have another job.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he wished he could draw them out of the air and put them back inside. She just painted such a ridiculous picture, an image of him sitting by the phone or something, waiting to be needed. Besides, maintaining his Superman front when he wasn’t wearing that damn suit didn’t come naturally. He needed the costume to maintain character.
Already he’d fallen into Clark’s more relaxed speech patterns, the casualness slipping over him like the comfortable clothes. But since she had no comparisons to make, no nagging question about why Superman’s voice sounded vaguely familiar, he pushed that worry aside. After all, how often did Superman hang around to make extended small talk? His conversations had been pretty limited to “What’s the problem, here?” and “I’ve got things under control.” How did one infuse unwavering confidence into discussions about the weather and where home was?
“Really?” she asked, looking slightly intrigued, and he started to feel a little less stupid. But then she ruined it. “Do you wear your cape to work?”
“I don’t...I’m not...nothing,” he stammered, flustered by both her teasing and his sudden realization that this whole living as Superman might prove to be as difficult as living as Clark. For once his very normalcy made him the outsider rather than his superpowers. How odd it was to hide his identity in reverse.
What he needed to do was avoid talking about himself. Ever. Starting now by changing the subject. Quickly. “So, what is this place?”
Gillian took mercy on him and didn’t press, instead answering him. “Abandoned PCV shack. We use it to house visitors, those couple we get.”
“PCV?” he echoed.
“Peace Corps volunteer,” she translated. She’d moved behind the knee wall which concealed a cupboard and a two-burner electric hotplate. “They hauled it out of here when the guerillas took over the region. Government deemed it too dangerous. Of course, some of them refused to go. Jeff, for one. And Brian stuck around for a while until he got a job in Bogotá.”
“How about you? Did you come in with the Peace Corps?” Clark asked, wondering why anyone would stay in an area that the government had rejected as too dangerous.
“Nope. Doctors Without Borders.”
“You’re a doctor?” Jeff had mentioned that she ran the clinic. It made sense, that she would be a doctor. But she seemed far too young. Surely she couldn’t be even as old than he was.
“Nurse. Almost a nurse practitioner, which for these desperate folks is close enough. They don’t waste doctors on towns this small.” When he gave her a puzzled look, she explained. “My father’s a doctor. He came down here two years ago as a Doctors Without Borders volunteer, and I came with him.”
Clark blinked, wondering at a father who would bring his daughter into such a hostile environment. “Is your father still – ”
She shook her head. “After his tour was up, he headed back home. I decided to hang around for a while even though he tried to drag me back to the states kicking and screaming.”
His opinion of her father softened immediately. “So if you’re not an ex-Peace Corps volunteer and not here with Doctors Without Borders, who are you with?”
“Technically, I’m a member of the ICRC.” She reached inside the neck of her shirt and extracted a leather lanyard with a laminated rectangle affixed to its end. Flipping it from the faded identification side where he could make out a picture of what he supposed was her, she exposed the bright red cross on a solid white background. “I came to San Pablo about sixteen months ago with a Red Cross inoculation team and decided to stay on and help with the new clinic that was being built. Of course, I guess now I’m kind of unnecessary since there isn’t a clinic any more.”
The puzzle started to fit together. Still, he wondered why anyone would choose to stay in a country so riddled with problems and violence. Perhaps there was some connection between her and Jeff that kept her in San Pablo. Or it could just be that she was stubborn, digging in to stay in a place others had told her to abandon. From what he’d seen in just that single day, Gillian didn’t seem to be a girl who took kindly to being told what to do.
Much like another woman he knew.
Before his mind could edge too close to dangerous territory and the overwhelming melancholy it would bring down upon him, he forced his thoughts to stay in the present.
“Why almost?” he asked.
“Huh?” Gillian grunted as she stacked a battered skillet and dented pan before shoving them back into the cupboard.
“Why ‘almost’ a nurse practitioner? Why not all the way?”
She shrugged as she stood up and brushed her hands together. “I left the masters program with one year left to go.”
“Why’d you do that?” he asked. “Seems kind of crazy to stop after all of that if you only had a year left.”
She stared at him, frozen. Like storm clouds rising out of nowhere to block the sun, her gray eyes darkened and her face became rigid. Even her tone had hardened, her voice wooden. “It’s really none of your business.”
“No, I guess not,” he said, a bit taken aback by her abrupt change in demeanor. “Sorry.”
An uneasy tension settled over the room, and for the next fifteen minutes, Clark avoided looking in Gillian’s direction. If he’d had another place to go, he would have left the shack all together.
Instead he searched the wall for the nails needed to reattach the fallen shelf’s bracket. With a firm press of his thumb, he straightened them and then tapped them into place. While he replaced the paperbacks, Gillian turned on the single lamp whose lightbulb had miraculously survived the quake, chasing the oncoming dusk away with a harsh, glaring light.
Finally she broke the silence. “Listen, I think we’ve gotten you settled here, so I’m going to take off. Bathroom’s out that way, but don’t expect too much.” She indicated the closed door leading out the back
He recalled that she had said this shack was used to house visitors, and it now became clear that she meant for him to sleep in it. But her own bed had been buried, and it wouldn’t do for her to remain homeless when this room could be used.
“I think maybe you should stay here, since your house was destroyed by the quake – “
She shook her head. “Nah, my house is fine. It’s wood like this one, so it’s pretty tossed up on the inside but at least it’s still standing.”
“You said your bed was buried under ten feet of dust.”
“I tend to exaggerate sometimes,” she admitted wryly. “So, you still going to be here in the morning?”
At first he thought she was joking, but the serious expression on her face said otherwise.
“I said I was staying,” he said, a bit offended that she doubted his intentions. Didn’t she know that Superman was all about truth and justice and all of that responsibility stuff?
“What about that other job?” she asked, her arms crossing over her chest. She still wasn’t convinced. “Aren’t they going to miss you after a while if you just don’t show up?”
He thought a minute, this time remembering to give as little detail as possible. “Let’s just say I’m on sabbatical.”
It was sort of true. And it sounded a heck of a lot better than being between jobs. Or that a ruthless homicidal madman had blown up the building for some twisted reason that Clark hadn’t been able to prove but suspected had something to do with the fact that he was about to marry the woman that Clark loved.
“Oh, a sabbatical,” she repeated with a chuckle. “Well, then we are lucky. Instead of studying the mating habits of daytime TV soap stars and consuming copious amounts of fine wine and cheese, you’re going to grace us with your precious time.”
“You don’t really have a very high opinion of people who just want to help out, do you? Or is it just me?”
“No offense,” she said without rancor. “I’ve just seen it happen before. Some glory hound swoops in for all of the initial drama and photo ops, then leaves with the media while the rest of us stick around and get our hands dirty.”
He supposed he should take exception to her subtle dig. In truth, he found her skepticism far more curious than offensive. She obviously had no idea who Superman was. “Are you implying that I do this kind of stuff just for media attention?”
“Of course not. But when was the last time you stuck around after the last interview was finished?”
“If I stayed after every disaster, I wouldn’t be able to help very many people,” he stated pointedly.
She nodded slowly, as if accepting his rationale for hit-and-run rescues. “That sounds reasonable. I’m just wondering, how many of those people you help would you be able to pick out of a crowd today? Sometimes it’s more about quality than quantity.”
He’d never thought of his efforts to help people in quite that way. True, he did appear for the immediate rescue, but he’d never stuck around long enough to face what came after the catastrophe. The rebuilding of destroyed homes and schools and clinics. Destroyed lives.
The same obstinate pride that had offered up the “I’m staying” poked him in the ribs, pushing him to accept her implied challenge.
“All right, I’ll stick around this time. As long as you need me. Or at least until we get things up and running again,” he qualified. Her definition of need and his were probably two entirely different things.
“Yeah, well it’s easy to make that kind of promise when you can just fly out of here any time you want. Slip home to take a shower. Catch a ballgame on TV. Maybe you ought to hold off on any kind of long term commitments.”
He laughed at her cynicism. “What if I promised not to leave? Not to fly anywhere unless I had to handle some kind of an emergency?”
She shrugged. “I give you two days. Week at the outset.”
“Is that a challenge?” he asked, arms crossed over his chest in his most responsible Superman pose.
“No, it’s reality,” she answered pragmatically. “Listen, flyboy, around here, you learn pretty quick what it’s all about. People don’t just drop out of the sky and solve all of our problems. I’m not counting on anything.”
He wasn’t sure what to say. In his year of being Superman, he’d never met anyone so immune to his presence, so unimpressed with his abilities or unassuming in their expectations of him. Just by arriving on the scene, he’d always commanded respect and admiration; he’d never had to prove his good intentions. Maybe as Clark he had, especially to one certain person. But never as Superman. Even she – he let himself think her name, steeling himself against the twinge it would inflict inside his chest – even Lois had instantly admired the superhero. He’d had to earn nothing, his mere existence inspiring her love and devotion. The irony was almost laughable.
But that’s what this woman needed. He was going to have to earn Gillian’s respect the hard way. Her way.
Before she walked out the door, Luke scrambling around her heels, she turned to give him a wry smile. “Welcome to Colombia, Sam.”
“Sam?” Clark glanced around the room, confused. Who the heck was Sam?
“Yeah. You didn’t really expect me to call you Superman?” And with that explanation, she was gone.
Now alone, Clark sat down at the table, taking in the small space that had just become his temporary home. The light from the single lamp cast his shadow long on the walls. Outside, the chirp and whine of insects was almost deafening, far louder even than he remembered ever hearing in Kansas.
Still, there was an over presence of peace. The calm was strange after the chaos of the past two days. He rubbed the back of his neck. How had he managed to get himself into this mess?
He’d stay a week. Get some homes built so the people in San Pablo would be safe from the elements and the guerilla factions. Then he’d go back to Metropolis. Where he belonged.
to be continued…
