“Hey! You can’t be in here!”
Clark woke suddenly to the sound of Rufus growling. Two men in paramedic uniforms were standing by the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He felt groggy and wondered how long he had slept. “The nurse said I could stay.”
“Well, we just had shift change, and we aren’t running a shelter,” the first paramedic said. He was a tall dark haired man. “And even if we were, you couldn’t keep a dog here.”
“This isn’t my dog,” Clark said. At the skeptical expressions on their faces, he forced himself to stand up. He grabbed his backpack and he said “Ok. I’m out of here.”
He stepped past the two men and stopped. At the end of the hall he could see the nurse talking quietly with two men. He didn’t have to use his special hearing abilities; he knew what the men were at a glance. He’d seen too many truant officers and social workers over the last five years not to know.
He ducked around to the side as the woman looked up, and Rufus followed him. Clark scowled; he’d be able to escape notice much more easily on his own without a two hundred pound dog following everywhere he went.
Nevertheless, he didn’t have much choice. Being caught by social services would result in questions he didn’t want to answer. Metropolis was far enough away from Kansas that the interstate agencies might not cooperate, but Clark couldn’t take that chance.
He slipped through the sliding doors and out into the night.
**********
It was getting harder to feel clean; Clark had done his best to wash himself using a sink in a McDonald’s restroom, but it wasn’t the same as having a real shower. He’d changed clothes as well, getting rid of the multiple layers. That was fine for being out in the cold, but it was a dead giveaway that he was homeless.
Nonetheless, he walked through the lobby entrance with his head held high. The sun was shining outside and he knew the hospital had been through shift change. No one would know him, and if he was careful he wouldn’t reveal his homelessness to anyone.
“Ahem,” he said as he approached the information desk. It was important to look confident, as though you belonged where you were.
“Can I help you?”
“I brought a man in last night to the emergency room,” Clark said. “And I was wondering if you could help me find out what happened to him.”
“Do you have a name?” the woman asked.
Clark shook his head. “I brought him in around ten last night; I found him by the side of the road."
“If you don’t have a name, I can’t help you,” the woman said, looking down.
“The thing is,” Clark said, “he left his dog with me. I’ve got it tied out in the front. It’s a big dog and I can’t take it, but I don’t want to send it to a pound either.”
The woman smiled sympathetically. “I wish I could help you, but I don’t have enough information to be able to help me. Maybe you could speak to someone on the night staff.”
Clark scowled. He’d been hoping to get in line at the shelter in time for a meal and a shower. It was the thought of being clean more than anything that made him want to go. Whatever he did, he barely had enough money to feed himself. He’d bought some meat and bread with his dwindling money, and the dog had eaten most of it before he could stop it.
He suspected that he could survive cold weather better than the dog also, despite it being a cold weather breed. It had huddled against him the previous night as they’d slept in a storm drain, and it was big enough to have kept him reasonably warm, although he doubted he’d been as much consolation to it.
However, to a homeless man, a source of warmth, companionship and protection would be a horrible loss.
The woman looked at him for a moment and her expression softened. “I could make a call to the Emergency room. I can’t promise anything, but if the patient is awake and agrees to see you I can send you up.”
Clark smiled and leaned forward. “That would be great.”
Over the past year or so, since he’d grown four inches and filled out, he’d noticed that women seemed to respond better when he smiled, even if it was only to give him grandmotherly pats on the cheek.
She spoke quietly on the telephone; Clark didn’t listen; instead he looked back toward the entrance, worried that Rufus would get free of the bush he’d been tied to. Clark had left him with a bone he’d found in the trash behind a steakhouse.
His vision blurred and a moment later he found himself looking through the wall. This was another of his abilities that had been an unwelcome reminder he was a freak. It had taken him months to control, and his grades had plummeted. It was difficult to finish a test when you were looking through the page, the desk and even the floor.
He was glad of it now. Rufus was contentedly gnawing on the bone, although some passer’s by were looking at him. He couldn’t leave him there for long; even if Rufus hadn’t managed to gnaw his way free, someone would call animal control.
“He’s being released,” the woman said after a moment. “If you’d like to wait, they’ll be coming through the lobby in about forty five minutes.”
Clark stared at the woman. The man had been lying unconscious in the snow the night before and he was already being released? Maybe it hadn’t been anything serious.
Of course, the man didn’t look like the kind of person who had insurance. Hospital beds were expensive; he’d heard enough foster parents complaining in his time to know.
He nodded and smiled at the woman, despite not feeling like smiling. He should feel a sense of relief; Rufus was a responsibility that would have been hard enough when he was in a foster home. Now that he was on his own, he didn’t know how he was going to manage to feed himself, much less a dog that doubtless ate three times as much as he did.
Still, he couldn’t help but remember how comforting it had been having someone else there with him in the storm drain, even if it was just a dog to keep him warm.
It surprised him to realize that he’d miss the big dog when he was gone.
**************
“You’ve been a good boy,” Clark said. He was squatted down beside Rufus, who’d chewed through the rope Clark had found and tied around his neck. He stroked the fur on the dog’s head. Rufus had finished his bone thirty minutes before and had gotten restless.
Petting the dog didn’t just calm Rufus; it helped Clark try not to think about what was going to happen in the evening and the evenings to come.
“Rufus!” The cry came from the entrance to the hospital where an elderly African-American man was struggling to stand up from a wheelchair.
The big dog jerked under Clark’s hand and a moment later he was running across the expanse of pavement leading toward the entrance. Clark took a quick look across the road to make sure the dog wasn’t about to get hit; he’d worked hard to get the dog back to his owner and he wasn’t about to let it die now.
The dog almost knocked the man over even as he managed to get to his feet. It barked frantically at him and the man cursed at the dog in an affectionate tone of voice.
Clark approached them, even as the man managed to get the dog settled. The orderlies were already reentering the building without a backward glance.
The man was leaning over the dog, but he looked up and smiled. He was missing three teeth, but his smile was infectious, and his expression was open.
Growing up in the foster system, Clark couldn’t remember seeing anyone smiling in that open of a manner. He hadn’t seen smiles like that since before his parents had died.
“I hear you just about saved my life,” the man said.
Clark said “You can thank Rufus. If he hadn’t covered you up and kept you warm…”
“I thank Rufus every day that he’s in my life,” the man said. “But Rufus didn’t carry me more than a mile to the hospital.”
“I just got you in my car,” Clark said, uncomfortably. Asking how someone of his size could have carried someone of this man’s size would bring up questions he wasn’t prepared to answer.
“Most people wouldn’t have stopped,” the man said, but there was something in his expression, a narrowing of his eyes, the way he was tilting his head that said he knew more than he was letting on.
“I’d like to think they would,” Clark said. “If they’d seen you.”
“People don’t see people like me,” the man said. “In any case, I owe you.”
Clark nodded, unsure how to respond. The man held out his hand and Clark forced himself not to flinch. The man smelled somewhat better than he had the night before, but Clark’s senses were better than human.
He shook the man’s hand.
“Charles King,” the man said. “But everybody calls me Charlie.”
“Clark Kent,” Clark said without thinking. He winced as he realized that he should have thought up another name. Some forms of lying had become second nature to him, while others would never be comfortable.
“What happened?” Clark asked.
“There’s this thing with my heart,” the man said. “It flares up from time to time. It’s not too serious unless you pass out in a snowstorm. Course, it meant I couldn’t drive a taxi anymore either…the law doesn’t take kindly to driver’s passing out in the middle of the rush hour.”
“I wasn’t asking…” Clark said quickly, although he’d wondered.
Surely there had been other things the man could do that didn’t involve driving. Clark had never had a job, but he couldn’t imagine that getting a job would be that hard, even if it was in a completely new field.
On the other hand, he’d had one foster father who’d been out of work for a year. He’d taken to drinking and had gotten mean. As soon as social services had found out, that had been the end of his time there. Clark hadn’t minded leaving that house.
The man said, “Well, I’d like to sit and chat, but I’ve got a bus to catch.”
Clark looked down at the big dog and said, “You can take Rufus on the bus?”
“Not legally,” the old man admitted, “but I’ve made friends with a lot of the drivers and they look the other way as long as there aren’t any problems.”
He glanced down at the dog and in a sterner voice said, “And there’s not going to be any more problems, are there? Not even if the lady is carrying a cooked chicken in a shopping bag.”
The dog glanced up with a guilty look, although Clark suspected that the look wasn’t sincere.
“Are you going to be all right?” Clark asked. “It’s pretty cold out still.”
“I’ve got a place,” the man said. “I’ll be fine as long as I can stay on my feet.”
Clark wished he could ask the man exactly where he was staying, but he didn’t know how to ask without making the man suspicious of his motives. If he had a place to stay, he wouldn’t want anyone to know where it was either.
“A shelter?” he asked. It would be embarrassing to end up in the same line as the man.
“You don’t want to go to those places,” the man said. Again, the look he gave Clark was knowing, as though he’d taken one look at Clark and realized he was just as homeless as the man was, even if only recently.
With the sound of the bus coming down the street, the man started walking quickly toward the bus stop.
A few moments later, he boarded the bus with his dog and he was gone.
Clark scowled. Whatever the man said, he needed a hot meal and a shower. He didn’t have a bus pass, and he didn’t know where to get one, and it was a long walk if he was to get back to the shelter in time to line up at four thirty.
As he started walking, he found his shoulders drooping a little.
He missed the dog.
