Lois turned to look at Clark. “Who was that woman?”
Grimacing, Clark slowly lowered himself to the bed. “That was Rachel Harris. She’s the town sheriff.”
“She doesn’t seem to like you much.” Lois kept her expression carefully neutral.
Clark sighed. “There was a time that she thought we might get married.”
Talking about his relationship with Rachel Harris wasn’t something that Clark particularly wanted to do. He could see that Lois was aching to ask him a thousand questions, questions that he couldn’t begin to have an answer for.
To forestall her questions, he said, “I’ve gotten us an interview with Wayne Irig.”
**************
As he’d hoped, Lois’s attention was diverted instantly.
“I thought that Wayne Irig had left town to escape the publicity.” Lois’s voice held a note of suspicion. She knew a distraction when she saw one, but this was germane to the investigation.
“He did, but he came back when he realized that the people investigating the farm weren’t working for the agency they said they were. He’s in hiding at the moment.” Clark held his breath, hoping the Lois would take the bait.
She stared at him for a moment, before saying, “Just how did you find all of this out in the short time it took me to take a shower?”
“Friends, Lois. I have a few of them left here, and one of them is Irig’s son in law.”
Lois nodded shortly, then looked down at herself. “I’ll get dressed, and then we can go.”
Clark sighed in relief, but as Lois turned to go, she paused and said, “This isn’t over, you know.”
***************
Stepping around the small tricycle on the gravel path leading through overgrown weeds on either side, Clark felt himself flush as he carefully didn’t look at Lois. The house was old and faded, with peeling paint and warped wood showing signs of neglect.
Everywhere, there were signs of dilapidation, signs of the depression and despair that came with being poor in a small town where no one would let you forget it. The hallmarks were in the heavy growths of weeks, in the rusted carport that served as a garage, in the carelessly discarded toys left to lay where they’d fallen.
It wasn’t the life he’d been born to, but it was the life he’d come to know in Smallville. Apparently, it was a life that Pete had never left.
Clearing his throat uncomfortably, Clark stepped carefully onto the porch. The boards creaked loudly under his foot, and he shifted uncomfortably before knocking on the door.
The wait before the locks began clicking from behind the door was interminable. Clark risked a glance at Lois, and the pity he thought he saw in her eyes burned. Pity was the last thing he wanted from her. It was the last thing he’d wanted from anyone. He’d had enough of it in Smallville to last a lifetime.
When the door finally opened, Clark found himself staring. Pete had changed. When Clark had left town, Pete had been a slender, short, gawky young man, an innocent. He’d been a magnet for every bully in school until Clark had taken an interest in protecting him.
Now he towered over Clark, his long, stringy hair pulled back over his ears, and his protruding adam’s apple bobbing as he stared back at Clark. Though he was two years younger than Clark, he looked as though he was at least ten years older.
Clark could smell traces of marijuana on his clothes, mixed in with the reek of alcohol and other scents that Clark would have rather not noticed. Clark suspected that he might have noticed a few of them even had he been human. A glance at Lois confirmed that.
Turning back to Pete, he said, “Can we come in?”
Pete pushed the screen door open and gestured vaguely. Clark took this to be permission, and he stepped inside. He heard Lois following.
**************************
Lois wrinkled her nose at the smell of stale sweat and beer. She was reluctant to sit down; every available surface was covered in dirty clothing, old pizza boxes or toys. There was barely room on the floor to gingerly pick a pathway through to the kitchen.
There, at least, the general clutter seemed to have abated somewhat. Though a box of cereal lay open on the counter, half spilled, there was actually room to move.
Clark’s friend seemed unfocused, and it was clear to Lois that he’d been drinking. He swayed slightly, turning and said “Do you want something to drink?”
Given the general hygiene of the house, Lois doubted that she’d be consuming anything here. She’d been in alleys in Suicide slum that were cleaner than the living room, and though the kitchen wasn’t quite as bad, Lois wasn’t about to gamble with their health.
Clark shook his head curtly and said, “You said that you knew how to contact Wayne.”
The man lowered himself slowly into his chair, then looked up at Clark. “It’s been a long time...a lot of water under the bridge.”
Ignoring the question, Clark lowered his glasses and glanced around the room. Lois wondered if he was far sighted. After a moment, he sighed. “He’s not here, is he?”
“You wouldn’t have come if I’d told you the truth.”
Stepping forward, Lois spoke quickly. “Just what is the truth?”
“My wife left me, and Wayne took her and the kids on a trip with the money that the government gave him.”
“The government gave him money?” Lois asked, feeling a rising tide of excitement. She’d have someone in the research department check into the money trail. That might provide the link that they’d need to connect the appropriate agencies to the crash site.
Slowly, the man nodded. “They called it reparations for an accidental spill, but Wayne called it hush money...at least he did before he saw the check. After that...well, I guess he’s pretty much retired now.”
Clark nodded slowly. “I’m sorry about you and Peggy.”
“She was always ashamed of me. Just because the plant closed down, and work was a little hard to find....nobody here lets you forget where you came from. Nobody’s going to take a chance on a white trash kid with no education.”
Clark kneeled slightly, looking his former friend in the eye. “So why don’t you get out then? Reinvent yourself. You don’t have to live in a place that doesn’t want you.”
“You think I’m going to run like you did? You’re just as ashamed of where you came from as I am...you just hide it better.” Pete slowly pulled himself to his feet and headed for the refrigerator.
Clark winced, and Lois instinctively knew that Pete had hit a nerve.
“It’s not cowardice to find a place where you can be successful. What do you have to keep yourself here other than a few bad memories?”
“I had Peggy and the kids.” Pete glanced back at them. “I was lucky to get a woman like that, and a built in family. You don’t know what it’s like to have people who love you, to have roots.”
Lois saw Clark wince again, and she changed the subject. “Did you ever actually see the thing Wayne Irig had in the back of his pickup truck?”
Pete nodded. “The spaceship? I think everybody in town saw it. Wayne talked about it for days before the Feds came to the door. He showed it to just about everyone he knew. Of course, after the Feds finished talking to him, he changed his story, said it was all a hoax.”
“What did it look like?” Lois asked.
“I’ve got some pictures.” Pete took a sip of his beer and grimaced. “Can’t they make this stuff so that it doesn’t taste like something that’s passed through a kidney a couple of times?”
********************
Pictures. It hadn’t occurred to Clark that his friend would have pictures. He’d suspected that Wayne had taken government money from the moment that he’d learned that he’d gone out of town. He’d also thought that if Wayne was staying with his son in law that he’d be encouragable to say that it was all a hoax.
The pictures didn’t prove anything. Pictures were faked all the time, for the tabloids and the movies. He’d simply have to make the right kind of arguments and...
“This seems a little elaborate for a hoax, wouldn’t you say, Clark?” Lois was glancing through a series of photographs that Pete had pulled from a drawer. “ From what I’m given to understand, it wasn’t like Wayne Irig had a Hollywood special effects crew standing by.”
Clark glanced at the pictures and stifled a groan. They’d been taken from all angles , and they’d been taken in bright sunlight.
“It’s a little small for a spaceship, wouldn’t you say?” Clark said at last. “If I was going to make an interstellar journey, I’d do it in something that couldn’t be slipped into the back of a pickup truck. I’d imagine it’d get a little cramped after the first trillion miles.”
“The government men think it’s part of a bigger ship...an escape pod maybe.” Pete looked at them and belched slightly. “I overheard a couple of them talking on the night that they started searching the farm.”
“Did they find anything?” Lois asked.
“They seemed to get excited about some of the meteorite fragments that turned up all over Wayne’s southern field...you know, the one on the border between old man Schuster’s and Wayne’s property?”
“Meteor fragments?” Lois asked.
“Glowing green ones. Wayne found them scattered all over.” Pete shrugged, then walked to a cabinet. “We all kept a few, but Wayne made us keep them locked up, especially after the government got so interested.”
“You have some of them?” Lois asked, seemingly excited.
“Sure.” Pete belched again, then set his beer against the edge of the counter. It toppled and fell to the floor, it’s contents spreading rapidly across the tile. Pete didn’t bother to stop to clean it up.
Clark glanced behind him, seeing Lois step over the can gingerly and followed the other two men through a door and into a short hallway filled with dirty clothes and the pungent smell of body odor. Clark imagined that she was wishing that she hadn’t chosen to wear open toed shoes.
When they’d been young, his friend had been the cleanest of all the foster children that Clark had associated with. He’d been neat, fastidious even, and to see him in the state he was currently in was almost more than Clark could bear.
He’d thought that he’d suffered all the pain that Smallville had to offer, but he was obviously mistaken.
Pete’s bedroom was an even worse disaster area than the rest of the house, and Lois stopped at the door, finally refusing to move any further. Clark glanced back at her and shrugged. There wasn’t a whole lot that he could do about the situation, and his embarrassment for his friend wasn’t going to get her off the trail of the truth.
Clark followed Pete through a maze of clothes, beer cans and rotting food to a closet at the back of the room.
“You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get a place like this,” Pete said. “And after all this time I’m going to lose it. The bank is foreclosing at the end of the month.”
“You might look at this as an opportunity to start all over,” Clark said quietly.
“I’ve got five years of equity built up, and given the market, I couldn’t even try to sell for three quarters of what I paid for the place. I can’t even afford to pay the storage on the things.”
Pete shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
He stepped into a small closet and reached up to the top of it, pulling down a heavy antique box. “This used to belong to Tammy’s grandmother. Wayne said that it would probably shield us from most of the radiation...if the damn thing is even radioactive.”
Clark noticed Lois taking an involuntary step backward, and he felt a twinge of concern. While he doubted that he had anything to worry about from radioactivity, Lois was much more vulnerable. On the other hand, if the short-term effects had been fatal, he doubted that Pete would be standing there talking to either of them.
Still, in the interest of caution and of keeping Lois from picking up anything that she wouldn’t be able to get rid of, he was glad that she was staying outside the room.
Almost casually, Pete said, “Why didn’t you call, Clark? I can understand why you didn’t want anything to do with the others, but you could have at least tried to keep in touch.”
“You know why I didn’t want to do that, Pete. At first you were still living with the Ross’s, and after that...time just seemed to slip away.”
In truth, Clark had done everything he could to close ever piece of his life in Smallville away, the few good things as well as the many bad. His friendship with Pete had been one of the casualties.
Pete turned and opened the small chest, and in that single instant everything changed.
For the first time in twenty years, Clark felt pain.
