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.This was a service he provided at no charge and, so far as he knew, unbeknownst to Mr.Spiegelman.The week's new comics arrived on Monday, and by Thursday, particularly toward the end of the month, the long rows of wire racks along the wall at the back of the store were often a jumble of disordered and dog-eared titles.Every week, Tommy sorted and alphabetized, putting the Nationals with the Nationals, the E.C.s with the E.C.s, the Timelys with the Timelys, reuniting the estranged members of the Marvel Family, isolating the romance titles, which, though he tried to conceal this fact from his mother, he despised, in a bottom corner.Of course he reserved the centermost racks for the nineteen Pharaoh titles.He kept careful count over these, rejoicing when Spiegelman's sold out its order of Brass Knuckle in a week, feeling a mysterious pity and shame for his father when, for an entire month, all six copies of Sea Yarns, a personal favorite of Tommy's, languished unpurchased on Spiegelman's rack.He did all of his rearranging surreptitiously, under the guise of browsing.Whenever another kid came in, or Mr.Spiegelman walked by, Tommy quickly stuffed back whatever errant stack he was holding, any old way, and engaged in a transparent bit of innocent whistling.He further concealed his covert librarianship—which arose chiefly out of loyalty to his father but was also due to an innate dislike of messes—by spending a precious weekly dime on a comic book.This even though his father regularly brought him home big stacks of "the competition," including many titles that Spiegelman's didn't even carry.Logically, if Tommy were throwing his money away, it ought to have been on one of the lesser-read Pharaohs, such as Farm Stories or the aforementioned nautical book.But when Tommy walked out of Spiegelman's every Thursday, it was with an Empire comic book in his hand.This was his small, dark act of disloyalty to his father: Tommy loved the Escapist.He admired his golden mane, his strict, at times obsessive, adherence to the rules of fair play, and the good-natured grin he wore at all times, even when taking it on the chin from Kommandant X (who had quite easily made the transition from Nazi to Commie), or from one of the giant henchmen of Poison Rose.The Escapist's murky origins, in the minds of his father and their lost cousin Joe, chimed obscurely in his imagination with his own.He would read the entire book on the way home from Spiegelman's, going slow, savoring it, aware of the scrape of his sneakers against the fresh-laid sidewalk, the bobbing progress of his body through the darkness that gathered around the outer margins of the pages as he turned them.Just before he turned the corner onto Lavoisier Drive, he would toss the comic book into the D'Abruzzios' trash can.Those portions of his walk to and from school that were not taken up with his reading—in addition to comics, he devoured science fiction, sea stories H.Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Buchan, and novels dealing with American or British history—or with detailed menta1 rehearsals of the full-evening magic shows by which he one day planned to dazzle the world, Tommy passed as scrappy Tommy Clay, All-American schoolboy, known to none as the Bug.The Bug was the name of his costumed crime-fighting alter ego, who had appeared one morning when Tommy was in the first grade, and whose adventures and increasingly involuted mythology he had privately been chronicling in his mind ever since.He had drawn several thick volumes' worth of Bug stories, although his artistic ability was incommensurate with the vivid scope of his mental imagery, and the resultant mess of graphite smudges and eraser crumbs always discouraged him.The Bug was a bug, an actual insect—a scarab beetle, in his current version— who had been caught, along with a human baby, in the blast from an atomic explosion.Somehow—Tommy was vague on this point—their natures had been mingled, and now the beetle's mind and spirit, armed with his beetle hardness and proportionate beetle strength, inhabited the four-foot-high body of a human boy who sat in the third row of Mr.Landauer's class, under a bust of Franklin D.Roosevelt.Sometimes he could avail himself, again rather vaguely, of the characteristic abilities—flight, stinging, silk-spinning—of other varieties of bug.It was always wrapped in the imaginary mantle, as it were, of the Bug that he performed his clandestine work at the Spiegelman's racks, feelers extended and tensed to detect the slightest tremor of the approach of Mr.Spiegelman, whom Tommy generally cast in this situation as the nefarious Steel Clamp, a charter member of the Bug's Rogue's Gallery.That afternoon, as he was smoothing back the flagged corner of a copy of Weird Date, something surprising occurred.For the first time that he could remember, he felt an actual twinge in the Bug's keen antennae.Someone was watching him.He looked around.A man was standing there, half-hidden behind a rotating drum spangled with the lenses of fifty-cent reading glasses.The man snapped his face away and Pretended that, all along, he had been looking at a tremble of pink and blue light on the back wall of the store.Tommy recognized him at once as the sad-eyed magician from Tannen's back room.He was not at all surprised to see the man there, in Spiegelman's Drugs in Bloomtown, Long Island; this was something he always remembered afterward.He even felt—maybe this was a little surprising—glad to see the man.At Tannen's, the magician's appearance had struck Tommy as somehow pleasing.He had felt an inexplicable affection for the unruly mane of black curls, the lanky frame in a stained white suit, the large sympathetic eyes.Now Tommy perceived that this displaced sense of fondness had been merely the first stirring of recognition.When the man realized that Tommy was staring at him, he gave up his pretense.For one instant he hung there, shoulders hunched, red-faced.He looked as if he were planning to flee; that was another thing Tommy remembered afterward.Then the man smiled."Hello there," he said.His voice was soft and faintly accented."Hello," said Tommy."I've always wondered what they keep in those jars." The man pointed to the front window of the store, where two glass vessels, baroque beakers with onion-dome lids, contained their perpetual gallons of clear fluid, tinted respectively pink and blue.The late-afternoon sun cut through them, casting the rippling pair of pastel shadows on the back wall [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]