• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you’ll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It’ll be just as boring for you.”

“Don’t care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a long time before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, sometimes inadvertently. It wasn’t even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M. C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy poontang sissy,” he said.

Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

Chapter 3

BIRTH OF A SUPERHERO

EAST HAMPTON, CONN. (AP)—A search of Lake Pocotopaug for a reported drowning victim was called off here Tuesday when it was realized that one of the volunteers helping the search, Robert Hausman, 23, of East Hampton, was the person being sought.

—The Des Moines Register, September 20, 1957

AT EVERY MEAL SHE EVER PREPARED throughout my upbringing (and no doubt far beyond), my mother placed a large dollop of cottage cheese on each plate. It appeared to be important to her to serve something coagulated and slightly runny at every meal. It would be understating things to say I disliked cottage cheese. To me cottage cheese looks like something you bring up, not take in. Indeed, that was the crux of my problem with it.

I had a distant uncle named Dee (who, now that I think of it, may not have actually been an uncle at all, but just a strange man who showed up at all large family gatherings) who had lost his voice box and had a permanent hole in his throat as a result of some youthful injury or surgical trauma or something. Actually, I don’t know why he had a hole in his throat. It was just a fact of life. A lot of rural people in Iowa in the fifties had arresting physical features—wooden legs, stumpy arms, outstandingly dented heads, hands without fingers, mouths without tongues, sockets without eyes, scars that ran on for feet, sometimes going in one sleeve and out the other. Goodness knows what people got up to back then, but they suffered some mishaps, that’s for sure.

Anyway, Uncle Dee had a throat hole, which he kept lightly covered with a square of cotton gauze. The gauze often came unstuck, particularly when Dee was in an impassioned mood, which was usually, and either hung open or fell off altogether. In either case, you could see the hole, which was jet-black and transfixing and about the size of a quarter. Dee talked through the hole in his neck—actually, belched a form of speech through it. Everyone agreed that he was very good at it—in terms of volume and steadiness of output, he was a wonder; many were reminded of an outboard motor running at full throttle—though in fact no one had the faintest idea what he was talking about, which was unfortunate