The Indestructible Man Page 2

  One night, a few weeks after high school graduation, Bobby could not sleep. It was damp outside, and a nagging ache crept up his legs and hips. He reached for the bottle of aspirin on his bedside table—his doctors had cut him off from the really good pain relievers long ago—and found only a few bleached crumbs inside. “Dammit,” he said, pulling himself out of bed to get the refill bottle from the bathroom. He could have called for his mother to get it, but retrieving it himself was a matter of pride.

  On his way back to bed he saw a shadow cut across the blinds: someone running down the street, silhouetted in the orange-gold glow of the streetlight. He lifted the blinds to peek out. In the coppery light he spotted Romulus Wayne—though it had been a few years, Bobby was sure it was him—running past the house, an overstuffed duffel bag over his shoulder. As he passed, Romulus stopped and looked into his window, as if he knew Bobby was watching, and mouthed, I’m sorry. Bobby dropped the blinds and backed away. The silhouette disappeared, and when he lifted the blinds again Romulus was gone.

  A few days later Aunt Mavis filled in the details: Romulus’ father intended for him to go to a big university downstate. But Abigail was headed for a women’s college in Iowa, and Romulus could not stand to be so far from her. “So romantic,” Aunt Mavis mused, and Bobby urged her to continue. That evening Romulus and his father had a long, intense fight, so loud people heard them all the way down the block, and in the morning Romulus was gone. Since then Jackson Wayne had hardly moved from his back porch, spending most of his day sitting in his cabana, staring at the treeline above the houses.

  Once he was convinced Romulus was gone for good, Bobby wheeled himself down the ramp to the end of the driveway. He looked up at the cloudless sky, felt the warm sun on his chalky face, and drew in a deep, sweet breath.

  4

  Bobby was twenty-three the next time Romulus Wayne intruded upon his world. He lived on his own in the Villa, a disabled-only apartment complex two blocks from the auto parts store where he set up product displays with the aid of a claw-handle grip. He did not care for the compulsory orange smock, but the place had an automatic door and the work was tolerable, as were his two managers, who on his twenty-first birthday bought him a twelve-pack of his favorite microbrew.

  He spent most evenings in a bar called Roscoe’s, splitting pitchers with his friend Brooks, a thin, hairy rat of a man nearly twice his age; they had worked together in a Waffle House for a week until Bobby tired of the early-morning hours and quit. Brooks was a true paranoid, convinced the police were hunting him for blowing up his high school principal’s car twenty years earlier. He monitored the police frequencies with a portable scanner, and kept several hunting knioves and shotguns, including an old double barrel, in his warehouse apartment in preparation for a final stand which Bobby suspected would never come. But he seemed to understand when Bobby complained about his parents’ nagging him to go to college, or a bad day at work, or having to ride the Self-Help van everywhere. Brooks even ripped out the back seat of his old minibus, welded a half-rusted rail to the interior, and installed a castoff aluminum ramp so he could chauffeur Bobby around town. The ride was technically illegal and occasionally terrifying—he had to cling to the rail to avoid tipping over whenever the minibus made a sharp turn—but Brooks’ intentions were good.

  The night began well enough. Brooks had to get some sleep before his early shift, and left Bobby alone in Roscoe’s. Somehow—he neither knew nor cared how—he was on his way to picking up a short blonde with purplish lipstick, in a white tank-top he could almost see through. Her name was Cindy, and for half an hour she complained to the bartender that her boyfriend was sleeping with her best friend. She downed three margaritas at the bar, and when she noticed him eavesdropping, she stumbled over to his table and slammed her half-finished glass of green slush in front of him.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Cindy, and my boyfriend’s an asshole. I’m tired of drinking alone and I don’t want to go home, so if you don’t mind I’ll just sit here and talk to you for a while. ’Kay?”

  She started to repeat the story about her ex-boyfriend, and stopped suddenly, looked at Bobby, his wheelchair, then stroked his armrest with her index finger. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to ask. Can you still…be with a woman in that thing?”

  His face reddened; he still recoiled whenever anyone asked about his injury. But she seemed sincere.

  “I have to get out of it,” he said. “But yeah.” Though he had not yet done so, all the necessary parts worked, so it was possible.

  Cindy leaned forward and raised an eyebrow. “So does the woman have to be on top? You know—to do the honors?”

  Bobby nodded, smiling.

  “That’s really interesting,” she said, sucking up the last of her melted margarita. “So what happened? Car accident?”

  “Fell off a roof,” he said. “Long story.” She seemed to want details, but he rarely discussed the fall anymore.

  “Oh,” she said. “Don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Not right now, anyway.”

  She shrugged. “Must’ve been pretty tough going at first.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I bet you get by okay. You don’t look like you let it bring you down. I like that.”

  When Roscoe’s closed she wheeled him to his place a few blocks down. Sober, Cindy would probably never have gone home with him. But his conscience did not trouble him much; his last chance had come two years earlier, when Brooks set him up with a teenage waitress from the Waffle House. The girl made up an excuse to leave after she saw his naked, twisted legs splayed on the sheets. At worst, after Cindy sobered up, she would have a good story for her friends.

  Cindy helped him into bed and peeled him from head to toe, taking extra care as she eased the jeans from his legs. He could not bring himself to look at her; any minute she was bound to grimace and leave. She examined his right leg, feeling every scar and bow and indentation, then tenderly ran her thumb and forefinger over his thigh, giggling as his upper body quivered. She undressed slowly, twirling her tank top and bra over her head before collapsing next to him with a snorty laugh. She draped her arm over his chest, brushing against the faint hairs. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows for a better view of her body, but accidentally pressed the power button on the TV remote. “Dammit,” he said. He was about to turn it off—he wanted no distractions—when he fumbled it and the remote fell to the floor, just beyond his reach.

  On-screen was a late-night talk show, just going to commercial. A used-car dealership ad flashed by, replaced by a smiling young man in a black turtleneck, standing against a white backdrop. At first Bobby thought he was dreaming. For a moment he saw the grass rushing up at him, felt the crunch of ruined hip sockets and crumbled bone.

  Romulus Wayne’s thin gawky face had fleshed out, his chest and arms thicker and more defined, but it was him. Romulus grinned smugly into the camera. I just graduated from college, he said, and I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. But I know that could change in a heartbeat. The camera pulled back and a lead safe dropped onto his head, squashing him like a foam-rubber dummy. One hand emerged from beneath the safe, then the other, and he slowly pushed it off. Dusting off his trousers, he continued his pitch as if nothing had happened. That’s why it’s never too early to invest in life insurance. Something creaked just above camera range, like a wooden beam about to crack, and a heavy oak desk descended, smashing into splintery chunks around him. After a few still seconds the top of the pile fell away and Romulus dragged himself from beneath the ruined desktop, hacking up tiny clouds of sawdust.

  He cracked his neck and cleared his throat, faced the camera once more: I checked around for a long time, and nobody beats All-American’s flexible plans and low monthly premiums. A rubber tire landed a few feet from him, then a rear-view mirror; he looked up and his face lost all color. Oh no, he said as an Army Jeep crashed down from the ceiling, compressing his body as it landed; the windshield shattered on
impact and the doors came unhinged, clanging dully on the white floor. Finally, when the dust had cleared, Romulus scratched and heaved his way out of the wreckage, smiled, and said, Remember, you’re never too young for All-American.

  Bobby felt cold all over and his flesh began to tremble against Cindy’s warm skin. For years he’d dreamt of wheeling up to Romulus, shaking his hand, then pulling out a stick of dynamite and blowing him into tiny squirming pieces, still alive but hopelessly fragmented; or luring him into a condemned building, setting off a cave-in and burying him under tons of rubble, so deep he could never dig his way out. His hands shook violently as he recalled the possibilities. He had worked hard to exile that face from his thoughts. But there it was.

  “Turn it off,” Bobby said, breathing in shallow gasps.

  “Are you okay?” Cindy asked. “Are you having a seizure or something?”

  “No,” he said. “Just turn it off.”

  She clicked off the TV. “Have a bad experience with All-American?” When he did not answer she walked her purple fingernails through his sparse chest hair. “Wanna mess around now?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just a commercial.”

  “I said no.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right? You seem awfully upset.” He did not answer.

  “Bad memories? Okay by me.” She rested her head on his shoulder and rubbed his chest. “It can’t be that bad.” Her breath smelled like tequila and limes, her body warm and soft. His hands had stopped shaking, but his eyes were still hot and moist. The last thing he wanted was to blubber in front of her.

  “I think you should go,” he said.

  She raised her head. “What? Are you kidding?”

  “Please,” he said. “Just go.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Have it your way.” She rolled off him and stumbled into her clothes. He lay motionless, staring at the ceiling until the door slammed. When he finally realized what he’d done he let out a howl that rattled the windows, and pounded the mattress until his arms were tired.

  At work he was irritable and frustrated, the claw-grip refusing to cooperate as he set up a pyramid of discounted headlight casings. When the top few boxes fell to the floor for the third time, he swung the long wooden handle like a baseball bat and brought the whole thing down, the thin cardboard clattering all around him. As he sat in the middle of the pile, Mike, one of his supervisors, poked his head out from the storeroom. “Jesus, Bob,” he said, as Bobby began to re-stack. “Next time ask for help.”

  There were other commercials, too, almost every time Bobby turned on the TV. In one Romulus jumped out of a plane without a parachute, landing with a fleshy smack on a well-manicured lawn; in yet another he delivered his monologue in the living room of a burning house, repeating the slogan, “You’re never too young for All-American” just before the flaming roof caved in on him. For a week Bobby was loath to turn on the TV at all, or even to go to Roscoe’s, where he was sure to see one of those ads on the set above the bar. Or worse, he might run into Cindy.

  The next weekend Brooks came over unannounced; though Bobby insisted he was not yet up to it, Brooks refused to leave until Bobby joined him for a beer. “I ain’t arguing any more,” Brooks said, grabbing Bobby’s wheelchair handles and pushing him out the door. “What’re you afraid of? You been cooped up too long.”

  Just as he feared, Cindy was at Roscoe’s, talking with two girlfriends at the bar. Bobby turned fast and tried to wheel himself out before she saw him.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” she said, running after him. “Wait a sec, will you?”

  He closed his eyes, expecting Cindy to tell the whole bar he’d had a last-minute case of limp-dick, but instead she smiled and touched the back of his hand.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said, head bowed.

  “Last weekend was pretty strange, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Brooks glanced at Cindy, then at Bobby, raising a greasy black eyebrow. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “I’ll leave you two alone.” He looked Cindy up and down, flashed Bobby a thumbs-up, and headed for the bar.

  “Feeling better now?”

  “I guess so,” Bobby said, beads of sweat gathering on his brow. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay,” Cindy said. “I figured you had your reasons.”

  “It’d take too long to explain.”

  She hugged his thick neck. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “Thanks,” Bobby said, too surprised to say more. He smiled nervously and began to wheel himself toward the door. “G’night.”

  “Not so fast,” she said. “You came for a beer, so stay and have one with me.”

  They drank all night, and after Brooks and Cindy’s friends left she wheeled him back to his apartment, where they talked until well past two. He liked the sound of her voice, and kept her talking about herself. She worked as a receptionist in a podiatrist’s office; was obsessed with blueberry pancakes; her favorite color was purple; she had a cat but wanted a basset hound once she had a house; she’d once had sex in an old mausoleum. When she tired of talking, she leaned over and kissed him, then helped him into bed and took off his clothes. After a bit of fumbling she straddled him and took control, and it was better than Bobby had ever imagined.

  When they finished he was sweaty and tired and his hips ached, but he barely noticed. For the moment, at least, Romulus Wayne’s hollow grin had stopped haunting him, and as the sleepy numbness washed over him he could not shake the suspicion that his life had just changed for the better.

  In the morning Cindy had to work, so she threw on her clothes without showering and ran out after a quick peck on the lips. After she left he was bored, and wheeled himself down to the corner newsstand for a paper, which he bought only for the TV listings. As he flipped through the pages an insert fell out onto the sidewalk. He left it to the breeze; those glossy ads were wastebasket filler at best.

  “Hey,” a man’s voice called out. “Pick that up.”

  He was about to tell the man to piss off when he noticed the police car alongside the curb, the driver glaring sternly at him.

  “Better get that before I have to cite you,” the officer said.

  “Fine,” Bobby said. The glossy paper was blowing away in the breeze, and he barely trapped it with his right wheel before it blew off the curb.

  “That’s more like it,” the officer said, and drove away.

  “Asshole,” Bobby said when the policeman was out of earshot. As he was about to rip it up he glanced at the ad: a glossy two-page still of Romulus in free-fall from a plane, smiling like a game show host, the All-American slogan in white block letters across the bottom. Romulus seemed to stare directly at him. “Leave me the hell alone, will you?” Bobby said, then crumpled the ad and tossed it in a waste bin.

  Bobby might have been satisfied crumpling Romulus in effigy if he hadn’t become so inescapable. One night, “The Indestructible Man” Romulus Wayne was a featured guest on the Late, Late, Late Show. Bobby cringed at the super-heroic name; any competent mugger or bank robber would simply toss Romulus aside and get on with his business.

  He needed to turn off the TV, call Cindy, go for a beer with Brooks. Instead he turned up the volume and leaned toward the TV in his wheelchair, his face no more than a foot from the screen.

  When the host announced him, Romulus emerged from behind the curtain, clad in a black turtleneck and olive corduroys. He stood still, staring nervously at the audience, who began to laugh. A few seconds later a huge wooden crate dropped from the rafters onto his head, knocking him to the ground with a thud so sickening that some audience members screamed and several stagehands ran to his aid.

  After the stage crew helped him to his feet and he showed the audience he was unhurt, he walked across a bed of small explosives, fire and sparks erupting around him. As he brushed the dust from his singed clothes, an old baby grand dropped on his head, disintegrating int
o a splintery mess. Romulus slowly dug himself out of the wreckage, smiled politely and waved as the audience applauded, and sat down beside the host’s desk.

  He answered the host’s questions politely: he headlined a touring stage act; he used no stuntmen; it was not a good idea for anyone to attempt to copy him; no, he would not reveal the secret of his invincibility; yes, he was married; they had just bought a place in New York; yes, she traveled with him. Bobby waited for Romulus to say her name. He never did.

  Romulus rattled off his tour dates for the next couple of weeks; none were within driving distance. When the show went to commercial, Bobby switched off the TV. It might not be her, he thought; there were millions of women in New York; Romulus and Abigail must have parted years ago. But the more he tried to convince himself otherwise, the more he suspected it was her.

  He finally shook the thought; that business had been over for ten years. He had a job and a life. He had Cindy. Still, he decided not to watch Romulus on TV again; the power button was his best weapon, and as long as he was willing to use it, Romulus Wayne could never touch him.