Joey had seen it happen. “How’d you do that?” he said, astonished. Until that moment, even Tommy hadn’t realized that he was the reason his turtles could fly.
It became their shared secret, the glue that held their odd friendship together. Tommy helped Joey with his homework and quizzed him for tests. Joey became Tommy’s protector against the random brutality of playground and schoolyard. Tommy read comic books to Joey, until Joey’s own reading got so much better that he didn’t need Tommy. Dom, a grizzled man with salt-and-pepper hair, a beer belly, and a gentle heart, was proud of that; he couldn’t read himself, not even Italian. The friendship lasted through grammar school and high school and Joey’s dropping out. It survived their discovery of girls, weathered the death of Dom DiAngelis, and Tom’s family moving off to Perth Amboy. Joey DiAngelis was still the only one who knew what Tom was.
Joey popped the cap on another Rheingold with the church key that hung around his neck. Under his sleeveless white undershirt a beer belly like his father’s was growing. “You’re too fucking smart to be doing shitwork in a TV repair shop,” he was saying.
“It’s a job,” Tom said. “I did it last summer, I can do it full time. It’s not important what kind of job I have. What’s important is what I do with my, uh, talent.”
“Talent?” Joey mocked.
“You know what I mean, you dumb wop.” Tom set his empty bottle down on the top of the orange crate next to the armchair. Most of Joey’s furnishings weren’t what you’d call lavish; he scavenged them from the junkyard. “I been thinking about what Jetboy said at the end, trying to think what it meant. I figure he was saying that there were things he hadn’t done yet. Well, shit, I haven’t done anything. All the way back I asked what I could do for the country, y’know? Well, fuck, we both know the answer to that one.”
Joey rocked back in his chair, sucking on his Rheingold and shaking his head. Behind him, the wall was lined with the bookshelves that Dom had built for the kids almost ten years ago. The bottom row was all men’s magazines. The rest were comic books. Their comic books. Supermans and Batmans, Action Comics and Detective, the Classics Illustrateds that Joey had mined for all his book reports, horror comics and crime comics and air-war comics, and best of all, their treasure—an almost complete run of Jetboy Comics.
Joey saw what he was looking at. “Don’t even think it,” he said, “you’re no fuckin’ Jetboy, Tuds.”
“No,” said Tom, “I’m more than he was. I’m—”
“A dork,” Joey suggested.
“An ace,” he said gravely. “Like the Four Aces.”
“They were a colored doo-wop group, weren’t they?”
Tom flushed. “You dumb wop, they weren’t singers, they—”
Joey cut him off with a sharp gesture. “I know who the fuck they were, Tuds. Gimme a break. They were dumb shits, like you. They all went to jail or got shot or something, didn’t they? Except for the fuckin’ snitch, whatsisname.” He snapped his fingers. “You know, the guy in Tarzan!’
“Jack Braun,” Tom said. He’d done a term paper on the Four Aces once. “And I bet there are others, hiding out there. Like me. I’ve been hiding. But no more.”
“So you figure you’re going to go to the Bayonne Times and give a fucking show? You asshole. You might as well tell ’em you’re a commie. They’ll make you move to Jokertown and they’ll break all the goddamned windows in your dad’s house. They might even draft you, asswipe.”
“No,” said Tom. “I’ve got it scoped out. The Four Aces were easy targets. I’m not going to let them know who I am or where I live.” He used the beer bottle in his hand to gesture vaguely at the bookshelves. “I’m going to keep my name secret. Like in the comics.”
Joey laughed out loud. “Fuckin’ A. You gonna wear long Johns too, you dumb shit?”
“Goddamn it,” Tom said. He was getting pissed off. “Shut the fuck up.” Joey just sat there, rocking and laughing. “Come on, big mouth,” Tom snapped, rising. “Get off your fat ass and come outside, and I’ll show you just how dumb I am. C’mon, you know so damned much.” Joey DiAngelis got to his feet. “This I gotta see.”
Outside, Tom waited impatiently, shifting his weight from foot to foot, breath steaming in the cold November air, while Joey went to the big metal box on the side of the house and threw a switch. High atop their poles, the junkyard lights blazed to life. The dogs gathered around, sniffing, and followed them when they began to walk. Joey had a beer bottle poking out of a pocket of his black leather jacket.
It was only a junkyard, full of garbage and scrap metal and wrecked cars, but tonight it seemed as magical as when Tommy was ten. On a rise overlooking the black waters of New York Bay, an ancient white Packard loomed like a ghostly fort. That was just what it had been, when Joey and he had been kids; their sanctum, their stronghold, their cavalry outpost and space station and castle rolled all in one. It shone in the moonlight, and the waters beyond were full of promise as they lapped against the shore. Darkness and shadows lay heavy in the yard, changing the piles of trash and metal into mysterious black hills, with a maze of gray alleys between them. Tom led them into that labyrinth, past the big trash heap where they’d played king-of-the-mountain and dueled with scrap-iron swords, past the treasure troves where they’d found so many busted toys and hunks of colored glass and deposit bottles, and once even a whole cardboard carton full of comic books.
They walked between rows of twisted, rusty cars stacked one on another; Fords and Chevys, Hudsons and DeSotos, a Corvette with a shattered accordion hood, a litter of dead Beetles, a dignified black hearse as dead as the passengers it had carried. Tom looked at them all carefully. Finally he stopped. “That one,” he said, pointing to the remains of a gutted old Studebaker Hawk. Its engine was gone, as were its tires; the windshield was a spiderweb of broken glass, and even in the darkness they could see where rust had chewed away at the fenders and side panels. “Not worth anything, right?”
Joey opened his beer. “Go ahead, it’s all yours.”
Tom took a deep breath and faced the car. His hands became fists at his sides. He stared hard, concentrating. The car rocked slightly. Its front grille lifted an unsteady couple of inches from the ground.
“Whooo-eeee,” Joey said derisively, punching Tom lightly in the shoulder. The Studebaker dropped with a clang, and a bumper fell off. “Shit, I’m impressed,” Joey said.
“Damn it, keep quiet and leave me alone,” Tom said. “I can do it, I’ll show you, just shut your fuckin’ mouth for a minute. I’ve been practicing. You don’t know the things I can do.”
“Won’t say a fuckin’ word,” Joey promised, grinning. He took a swig of his beer.