The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ a little surprised,” he continued, unruffled. “I’m surprised Jack Ashkenazy is paying seven-fifty a page. Are you sure that’s what he said?”

      “Sure, I’m sure. Plus, oh, yeah, how could I forget. We’re putting Adolf Hitler on the cover. That’s the other gimmick. And Joe here,” he said, nodding at his cousin but looking at Frank, “is going to draw that one all by himself.”

      “I?” said Joe. “You want me to draw Hitler on the cover of the magazine?”

      “Getting punched in the jaw, Joe.” Sammy threw a big, slow punch at Marty Gold, stopping an inch shy of his chin. “Wham!”

      “Let me see this,” said Jerry. He took a page from Frank and lifted the tracing-paper flap. “He looks just like Superman.”

      “He does not.”

      “Hitler. Your villain is going to be Adolf Hitler.” Jerry looked at Sammy, eyebrows lifted high, his amazement not entirely respectful.

      “Just on the cover.”

      “No way are they going to go for that.”

      “Not Jack Ashkenazy,” Frank agreed.

      “What’s so bad about Hitler?” said Davy. “Just kidding.”

      “Maybe you ought to call it Racy Dictator,” said Marty.

      “They’ll go for it! Get out of here,” Sammy cried, kicking them out of their own studio. “Give me those.” Sammy grabbed the pages away from Jerry, clutched them to his chest, and climbed back onto his stool. “Fine, listen, all of you, do me a favor, all right? You don’t want to be in on this, good, then stay out of it. It’s all the same to me.” He made a disdainful survey of the Rathole: John Garfield, living high in a big silk suit, taking a look around the cold-water flat where his goody-goody boyhood friend has ended up. “You probably already have more work than you can handle.”

      Jerry turned to Marty. “He’s employing sarcasm.”

      “I noticed that.”

      “I’m not sure I could take being bossed around by this wiseass. I’ve been having problems with this wiseass for years.”

      “I can see how you might.”

      “If Tokyo Joe, here, will ink me,” said Frank Pantaleone, “I’m in.” Joe nodded his assent. “Then I’m in. Fra—To tell you the truth, I’ve been having a few ideas in this direction, anyway.”

      “Will you lend one to me?” said Davy. Frank shrugged. “Then I’m in, too.”

      “All right, all right,” said Jerry at last, waving his hands in surrender. “You already took over the whole damned Pit anyway.” He started back down the stairs. “I’ll make us some coffee.” He turned back and pointed a finger at Joe. “But stay away from my food. That’s my chicken.”

      “And they can’t sleep here, either,” said Marty Gold.

      “And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said.

      “We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.”

      “Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him.

      “Good point,” said Davy O’Dowd.

       11

      FOR TWO DAYS, none of them slept. They drank Jerry’s coffee until it was gone, then brought up cardboard trays of sour black stuff from the all-night Greek on Eighth Avenue, in blue-and-white paper cups. As promised, Jerry was cruel in his administration of the chicken, but another half was fetched, along with bags of sandwiches, hot dogs, apples, and doughnuts; they cleared the hospital-pantry of three cans of sardines, a can of spinach, a box of Wheaties, four bouillon cubes, and some old prunes. Joe’s appetite was still stranded somewhere east of Kobe, but Sammy bought a loaf of bread that Joe spread with butter and devoured over the course of the weekend. They went through four cartons of cigarettes. They blared the radio, when the stations signed off they played records, and in the quiet moments between they drove one another mad with their humming. Those who had girlfriends broke dates.

      It became clear fairly quickly that Sammy, deprived of his bible of clipped panels and swiped poses, was the least talented artist in the group. Within twelve hours of commencing his career as a comic book artist, he retired. He told Joe to go ahead and lay out the rest of the artwork for the Escapist story by himself, guided, if he needed a guide, by some of the issues of Action and Detective and Wonder that littered the floor of the Pit. Joe picked up a copy of Detective and began to leaf through it.

      “So the idea for me is to draw very badly like these fellows.”

      “These guys aren’t trying to draw bad, Joe. Some of what they do is okay. There’s a guy, Craig Flessel, he’s really pretty good. Try to keep an open mind. Look at this.” Sammy grabbed a copy of Action and opened it to a page where Joe Shuster showed Superman freeing Lois Lane from the grasp of some big-shouldered crooks—war profiteers, as Sammy recalled. The backgrounds were reduced to their essence, hieroglyphs signifying laboratory, log cabin, craggy mountaintop. The chins were jutting, the musculature conventionalized, Lois’s eyes plumed slits. “It’s simple. It’s stripped down. If you sat there and filled every panel with all your little bats and puddles and stained-glass windows, and drew in every muscle and every little tooth and based it on Michelangelo and cut your own ear off over it, that would be bad. The main thing is, you use pictures to tell a good story.”

      “The stories are good?”

      “Sometimes the stories are good. Our story is really fucking good, if I do say so myself.”

      “Fucking,” Joe said, letting it out slowly like a satisfying drag.

      “Fucking what?”

      Joe shrugged. “I was just saying it.”

      Sammy’s real talents, it developed, lay elsewhere than in the pencil or brush. This became clear to everyone after Davy O’Dowd returned to the Pit from a brief conference with Frank over ideas for Davy’s character. Frank was already wrapped up in his own idea, or lack thereof, working at the kitchen table and, in spite of his promise to Davy, could not be bothered. Davy came in from the kitchen scratching his head.

      “My guy flies,” said Davy O’Dowd. “That I know.”

      Joe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.

      “Oy,” he said.

      “What?”

      “He flies, huh?”

      “Something wrong with that? Frank says this is all about wishful figments.”

      “Huh?”

      “Wishful figments. You know, like it’s all what some little kid wishes he could do. Like for you, hey, you don’t want to have a gimpy leg no more. СКАЧАТЬ