Max Collins: Fly Paper

“Honey!”

His wife. Carol. He covered the suitcase with some newspapers and went upstairs to her, before she could come down.

She was in the kitchen, sitting at the yellow formica top table, stirring cream and sugar into a cup of coffee. She’d been crying again. Crying made most girls less attractive; ran their mascara and everything. His wife was different. Crying didn’t spoil her looks at all: she was a natural beauty, wore practically no makeup, just a touch of pale pink lip gloss. She had long, cascading blonde hair. Natural. Her eyes were cornflower blue. While her nose was a trifle large, it was nicely formed, and she had a nice white smile, too, though she wasn’t showing it now. Only on the occasional times when he stopped and studied her like this did he realize how really beautiful she was, and how good it was to have her around.

Like her hair, the kitchen was yellow, except for the white appliances that Carol kept so highly polished that when morning sun came in the window and reflected off them, it was almost blinding. Right now, however, the kitchen was dark, gloomy dark. It was the middle of the evening, and the window next to the table, curtain drawn back, let in nothing but moonless night. She’d left windows open all around the house, and though it was late October, the breeze was just cool, nothing more. No sounds came from outside: the night sounds in Canker, Missouri, population 12,000, ran to little more than the sporadic squealing of a teenager’s tires. What little light there was in the kitchen came from the living room where the TV was going, unattended; a comedy show was on, volume low, but every now and then a rumble of canned laughter would break the stillness. Carol’s face was pale. Expressionless.

“What’s wrong, Carol?”

“I don’t want you to do it.”

“Carol.”

“Ken. Honey. I don’t want you to go through with it.”

“And I don’t want to discuss that anymore. I already made up my mind. This is one project I’m going to finish.”

“Sit down, will you? And talk to me?”

He sat down, but he didn’t say anything.

“What are you working on downstairs?”

“You know. What I told you.”

“Why’s it taking so long to put together? I mean, if it’s a fake bomb, why’s it taking so long?”

“I explained that. It has to look realistic. It’ll help me if they have to waste a lot of hours defusing what they think is a bomb.” That didn’t really make much sense, but fortunately, she hadn’t questioned the logic of it.

“Ken?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Sure you do.”

“I don’t. I don’t understand any of this. It seems so unnecessary...”

“Carol. Look at my face. It’s got lines in it. I’m a kid and I got lines in my face.” It was something that was bothering him lately. Not that he was vain, but he did like to think of himself as young, and damn it, he was young. But his features, while boyish as ever and always would be, had grown tight these few years past; crow’s feet at the eyes, deep lines in his face from frowning too much and from smiling too much, too. He’d been a salesman these last three years, and excessive frowning (to himself, in private) and smiling (at prospective buyers, in public) were inescapable hazards of the trade. It came, as they said, with the territory.

“Still, honey,” Carol was saying, “you’re not old. Really. Would it be so hard to start over?”

“It sure would. You want me to die of a heart attack by thirty? I mean, look at my face, the lines. Jeez.”

Tears were welling up in her eyes. Even in the dark he could see that. Out in the living room, the TV was laughing.

“Come on, Carol. Knock it off. It’s going to work out okay.”

“Ken?”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t hurt anybody, would you, honey?”

“You know me better than that, don’t you? Jeez, Carol. How can you even say that.”

She touched his hand, stroked it. “You want some coffee?”

“Okay. Then I got to get back downstairs and finish up.”

Somebody was banging at the side door. Jon ignored it for a while, focusing his attention on the late movie he was watching — the original 1933 King Kong . But the banging was insistent and finally, reluctantly, Jon pulled away from the TV and headed downstairs to see what inconsiderate S.O.B. had the crazy idea something was important enough to go around bothering people in the middle of King Kong. Better be pretty damn earth-shaking, Jon thought, pisses me off, and yanked open the door and saw a heavy-set man leaning against the side of the building, his shirt and hands covered with blood. The guy had blood on his face, too, and looked at Jon and rasped, “Who... who the hell are you?”

Which took the words right out of Jon’s mouth.

Up until then, it had been a normal day. He’d risen around noon, showered, got dressed, thrown some juice down, and gone out front to the box to see if he’d gotten any comic books in the mail. Jon was a comics freak, a dedicated collector of comic art in all its forms, and did a lot of mail-order buying and trading with other buffs around the country.

He was also an aspiring comics artist himself (as yet unpublished), and while he was disappointed to find no letters of acceptance for any of the artwork he’d sent off, so too was he relieved to find no rejections.

Jon was twenty-one years old, a short but powerfully built kid (he was such a comics nut that he’d actually sent in for that Charles Atlas course advertised on the back of the books) with a full head of curly brown hair and intense blue eyes. He also had a turned-up nose that he despised and that girls, thankfully, found cute. His dress ran to worn jeans, and T-shirts picturing various comic strip heroes, everything from Wonder Warthog of the underground comics to Captain Marvel (Shazam!) of the forties “Golden Age” of comics. Today he had a Flash Gordon short-sleeve sweatshirt; the artwork (a full-figure shot of Flash with cape) was by Alex Raymond, the late creator of Flash. Jon would accept no substitutes.

You see, comics were Jon’s life.

Take his room, for example. When his uncle had first given it to him, this room was a dreary storeroom in the back of the antique shop, a cement-floored, gray-wood-walled cubicle about as cheerful as a Death Row cell. Now it was a bright reflection of Jon’s love for comic art. The walls were literally papered with colorful posters depicting such heroes as Dick Tracy, Batman, Buck Rogers, and the aforementioned Flash Gordon, all drawn by Jon himself in pen and ink and watercolored, and were uncanny recreations of the characters, drawn in their original style. (That was both a skill and a problem of Jon’s: while his eye for copying technique was first-rate, he had no real style of his own. “Give me time,” Jon would say to the invisible critics, “give me time.”) Shag throw rugs covered the floors in splashes of cartoon color, and the walls were lined three deep with the boxes containing his voluminous collection of plastic-bagged and filed comic books, a file cabinet in one corner the keeper of the more precious of his pop artifacts. A drawing easel with swivel chair was against the wall, a brimming wastebasket next to it, and sheets of drawing paper and Zip-a-Tone backing lay at the easel’s feet like oversize dandruff. And the two pieces of antique walnut furniture his uncle had given him were not exempt from comics influence, either: the chest of drawers had bright underground comics decals stuck all over its rich wood surface (Zippy, the Freak Brothers, Mr. Natural), and on top Jon’s pencils, pens, brushes, and bottles of ink were scattered among the cans of deodorant and shave cream and other necessities. Even the finely carved headboard of his bed was spotted with taped-on scraps of Jon’s artwork, cartoonish sketches of this and that, mostly character studies of his girl, Karen, and Nolan, and his Uncle Planner.