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“Once you get in to see the man, how do you get him to talk? Many people are happy to talk forever about things they want to talk about, but creative journalism requires that he talk about the things you want . . . sometimes even things he’s done that will get him in trouble with the law, or his colleagues or friends. Often you have to carry his thinking on a problem further than he ever has before, by presenting it from an angle he has never considered.”
— The Art of Writing Nonfiction, André Fontaine
//
THE HERALD
248 Main, Smallville
Wayne Enterprises ℅ L. Fox
Gotham
To whom it may concern (likely Mr. Lucius Fox, hello) —
As any newspaper man worth his salt knows, it is a fool’s errand to ask after Mr. Wayne directly. I prefer to consider myself foolish only when it benefits the advancement of an agenda greater than my own, so I defer to the businessman’s origin of barter: I’m in need of a good story, and your visiting executive will be in need of a keen and well-informed driver in these parts.
The gas belt is not what one would consider a close place. If Mr. Wayne has any intention of showing the sort of face a man of his high degree ought to do in our fair county given his recently-vested interest in several less-than-modern facilities that once dredged up what we locals call satin spar, he will need a vehicle and a chauffeur who not only knows the way of the road, but even more importantly the way of the people who keep roots in this place, and must therefore be most urgently convinced of his intentions for Wayne Enterprises’ holdings.
Friendly doors don’t open easily in Smallville for those with outside intentions. I would write a profile of Mr. Wayne for The Herald — a trusted source here, imminently honest and, if my own integrity finds it so, bound to cast as favorable a light on him as his character warrants in helping prove his ideas to the people here in town.
Moving forward in opacity without at least performing the due diligence of understanding the environmental consequences of this venture would be clumsy, to say the least, and I’m sure if not your board, it is either yourself or Mr. Wayne who would agree with me directly. Despite what pettier tabloids may insist, and if I may be frank, the alleged prince seems to possess a fierce sense of justice. I would simply see it exercised in my own home.
Please reach me at the address above if these conditions may help smooth what is sure to be a tedious visit to a beautifully empty place, without some idea of the life still vibrantly afoot within its less obvious haunts.
Sincerely yours,
C. Kent
Reporter
//
The local airport has the small and outdated quality of a condominium unsure of how to step into the ensuing century. Bruce hunches into a car at the curb and peers sidelong out the window at the interminable flatness unspooling beyond the airfield.
“Easy journey sir?”
Bruce glances up with a dry smile through the partition. Passenger jets make him dizzy. “No problems at all.”
Not a single building taller than the shallow upward reach of the ribboning highway; hardly any trees, yet no part he would even charitably label metropolitan. The whole of Smallville seems to list, idle with the sloth of even progress outpacing what it once had to seriously offer as a place worth knowing.
October wind rips freely across the plainsland, buffeting the sides of the car. Bruce wishes he’d brought more than one scarf.
He disembarks for the month at the old farmhouse nestled into the first six furlongs of the new parcel along the edge of a large swatch of marshland. The trumpeting of migratory geese and their set decorates the lowering daylight as Bruce makes his way up the front drive carrying his own suitcases. A distant fluttering of wings on water and the metallic touch of wet bird shit chases the air.
Alfred greets him in a shaft of daylight spangled by recently kicked-up and beaten-out dust, easily lifting the luggage from his grip.
“Instead of supper here,” he calls down from the landing of the loudly-protesting staircase, its central turnabout looking back down over the foyer, “a young man from the local paper will be driving you into town after six.”
Bruce holds an irritated hum back on his teeth. He peers with cursory curiosity into several rooms on the first level. “I don’t suppose I could reschedule?”
“I think that would be taken as rude, sir, and you may as well get started on the right foot out here.”
“Fine.” Bruce mounts the stairs and tugs open his scarf, his collar, the clammy air a balm on restless skin.
He must be scowling; “Chin up, Master Bruce.” Alfred gives him an appraising look as they pass in the upstairs corridor—Bruce’s shoulders are still drawn up tight from the long agony of traveling by air when he isn’t the one in the cockpit. He forces them to relax.
“I was assured there would be food more substantial than a city rag’s cheap canapes. And he used the word ‘equanimity’ in his inquiry.”
Bruce snorts. “Correctly? There’s hope yet.” He shrugs off his jacket and scarf. Alfred relieves him of both. “Hopefully he can rub two sentences together and make more than puff-smoke.”
//
The reporter arrives while Bruce is still shaving. He makes the kid wait.
He doesn’t know why it suits to think of him as a kid. Perhaps it’s the image of a paper boy on a bicycle—yet it isn’t the one delivering the paper meeting him, but the one writing the articles. Bruce frowns through his reflection and drags the straight-razor steadily down the ridge of his jaw.
Opting for collarless, Bruce gives up on himself in the sporty bedroom mirror. He wishes for more time to iron anything as he fixes his watch back on his wrist before descending the stairs.
The stranger making small talk with Alfred in the foyer is an arresting sort, clean-cut and taller than Bruce would have expected. He has an easy posture and looks fixedly attentive to Alfred’s saga of opening the place back up the week prior—dark hair, sharp eyes, the vigorous mouth of one free from evident self-consciousness.
“Ah, Master Bruce—may I introduce Mr. Clark Kent of The Herald.”
At the foot of the stairs, they’re nearly of height. The stranger bows low to Bruce. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Wayne. This is a beautiful home.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kent. It’s exceedingly new, I regret there isn’t more in it to offer you as a guest.”
“If you please, sir, just Clark is fine. If I have to suffer ‘Mister Kent’ for too long, I think I may drive us off a bridge before the month is out. …A joke. My apologies. Poor taste.”
Bruce catches Alfred’s eye over the young man’s shoulder. “The evening’s drive is hardly a month, Mr. Kent, I—”
Alfred clears his throat and fusses aptly at the flower arrangement on a lacquered table beside the coat closet. “The profile, sir.”
Journalists are the same. All of them. Bruce sizes up this stranger, Kent, and wonders if he winces when he shoots his liquor.
“I know my way around this town in blind midnight, Mr. Wayne. I won’t disappoint you.”
“It’s not about disappointment, son, it’s about the principle.”
Kent bristles visibly, but smiles. “The principle. I would bet high I’m far from the first driver a man like you has had carting him around, certainly it can’t be due to optics?”
“Favors don’t sit well with me, you driving me is a favor. Mr. Pennyworth is my employee, he—”
“Exactly, it’s an exchange of service: My driving for your time. That’s all.” Kent glances over his shoulder to see Alfred still tarrying, and gestures with a hat held gamely by its crown in one hand. “Mr. Pennyworth and I have conferred at length already about the month’s schedule, and his mountain of clerical fallout in the wake of acquiring such an extensive parcel as yours. Congratulations, by the way.”
“It’s perfectly welcome help,” Alfred chirps, and offers Bruce a winsome smile. “You are able to hold your own amid the gentry, Master Bruce, of that I’m certain.”
Bruce grinds his teeth. “A matter of course.”
They step out to the car with Bruce leading—he stops short before a hatchback with an off-kilter rack fixed to its beetle shell roof.
Kent shoots Bruce an inscrutable look as he hurries ahead to open the passenger side. “If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Wayne, you look at me like I’m a child.”
“Am I wrong?”
“I’m twenty-six.”
Bruce steps smoothly into the open car and peers at Kent’s wrist partially bared, his sleeve riding up along the underside of his forearm where he holds the door at the ready. “And I won’t insult you by asking whether or not that means you have a driver’s license.”
Kent sniffs. “I even pay taxes, if you know what those are.”
He stoops to nudge at the floor mat, and shuts the latch just as Bruce realizes the edge of his wool coat has been neatly cleared from being crushed in the frame. Kent’s feet crunch soundly along the gravel drive as he rounds the nose of the car.
Bruce glares at the young man situating himself behind the wheel. “I’ll stop this dead if I get even a whiff of tabloid. Got it? I’m not a circus freak.”
Kent looks over with an amused light in his gaze and holds Bruce’s without flinching. Subtle veins of green chase the blue stalactite columns of his irises in the late afternoon light beginning to sprint long across endless wales of grassland. “And I’m not your son. Pardon my reach, sir.”
He leans across to reach the glovebox. Bruce presses his back into his seat; the old leather sighs. Kent retrieves from a stuffing of old parking tickets and parts manuals a tape recorder, roughly the shape and form of a large pack of cards, which he fixes in place on the bench seat between them under the middle lap strap. He presses the button labeled REC and keys the gurgling diesel engine.
//
Wayne profile — transcription FTR
[NEW TAPE STARTS: driving, the sound of an engine in the background.]
CK: So, if you could state your name, and what you’re up to here in Kansas?
BW: Wasting no time.
CK: Life is short, Mr. Wayne. And a month isn’t a very long time, all said.
[a pause.]
BW: . . . My name is Bruce Wayne, I’m the chief executive of Wayne Enterprises, and I’ve purchased a tract of land here outside of Smallville. We’re currently on our way to somewhere allegedly peddling food, and as for what I had for breakfast or did with the rest of my day, I’ve been stuck on an airplane and am sorely in need of a drink and a good night’s sleep.
CK: You’re well-versed in this game, huh.
BW: Well, Mr. Kent, it’s all about spinning your yarn, isn’t it? Media isn’t exactly an unfamiliar hydra for me to figure.
CK: How does one of your standing then — unshy of the media, holdings in places like Monaco and Luxembourg, London, allegedly — how do you find interest in a patch of marshland all the way out here?
BW: You know an awful lot about my real estate.
CK: I take care with my research. It’s just good journalism.
BW: Combing through my personal bank and flight records —
CK: Public record.
BW: — is good journalism?
CK: I look for the man behind the curtain, Mr. Wayne, can you blame me? No one has gods, hardly even kings anymore, the best we have for those who need someone telling them how to live are the sons of men with too much money. Most people need a thing more significant than them to root for, so they hanker for someone to present facts in ways that help them pick a side. One way, or another; it’s human nature.
[Silence, for nearly a full minute. Road noise.]
BW: Where are we headed, exactly?
CK: The local.
BW: Christ.
CK: Ah, careful with that, you could
[TAPE CUTS OUT.]
//
It’s loud, even at a corner table. Shitcan yard rock blares from a fuzzy-headed speaker mounted to the ceiling above a sagging bar by a chain graded for hoisting combine engines.
Bruce is immediately aware of the plasterers and builders and farm men imminently aware of him , hunched up and making himself as scarce as possible: An outsider by every metric, down to his goddamn watch.
He scowls up at Kent returning to the table with a tall pair of lagers like they’re in friendly territory, which one supposes Kent is.
“So,” he reopens with an objectively charming smile. “Why here?”
Kent sips easily from his cup held in one hand with both elbows on the table, which is sticky with the remnants of someone else’s prior good time. The noise, the hackles up, the travel weariness, the whole fucking stack of reasons Bruce wanted to come out here for a month to begin with, coalesce into a pathetic lack of will to hold the line against such inessential prodding. Bruce shrugs, and slugs a long mouthful of cold, bone-settling drink.
“I buy up places nobody pays any attention to,” he says to his hands, “and I look after them. Keep them from falling apart.”
“Do you flip them for tourism?”
Bruce’s lip twitches. He could kill it there—but the note in Kent’s inquiry isn’t barbed; there’s curiosity there, genuine and unexpected. He takes another sip, more measured.
“You mentioned Monaco.” Kent nods, and leans in slightly nearer with the vague shape of his lead flashing beneath the surface of his eyes. “That was a monastery. Its library holds the last of a language nearly dead except for those codices, and another bidder would have thrown it all in a heap to keep from having to call archeology out to a lakeside strip.”
“What was the sum of that sale, if I might ask?”
Bruce gives him a look. “An undisclosed amount.”
“Surely not a burden on your company’s coffers.”
“It isn’t part of the regular philanthropy.”
“Isn’t it?”
“My own liquidity is mine to do with as I see fit as a private citizen, within the full legal bounds in which that branch of capital flows.”
“Of course, but I’m wondering why none of this is publicized—that Monaco anecdote, about the language in the library, I had no idea about that. It doesn’t show up anywhere.”
“Have you considered that’s by design?”
Bruce finds himself more able to ignore the acid roar of the bar near capacity around them, here locked into a measured back-and-forth with Kent. It isn’t an unpleasant thought, but an inconvenient one.
“No,” Kent says, “I hadn’t.”
“These ventures aren’t part of the company’s mission. It’s not the point. The point is the preservation of a thing that might go away if I don’t intervene.”
It cuts too closely, accidentally, to the heart of something urgent and mean and hideously true about him as a person—Kent looks at him for a beat too long for propriety, but looks away before either of them can say or do anything about it.
“What about natural selection?” Kent swipes delicately at his next sip, overambitious and dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
Bruce gives him a haggling look. “Nothing about the amount of money I have to my name is ‘natural.’ I may as well help society help cling to whatever of our own beauty is left when the powers that be get ugly.” He sips the back half of his glass down gamely in one long go, not a drop unaccounted for. As he pushes aside his empty, he raises his eyebrows dryly. “Life is short, Mr. Kent.”
Impressed, perhaps lightly ego-wounded, Kent spins a condensation-stained paper coaster on the table. “Some would claim you’re buying up a place to hide manufacturing arrangements by which Gotham zoning laws wouldn’t necessarily abide.”
Bruce prods at the last of his shoestring fries. The left-aside crescent moon of his burger congeals sadly on its wax paper landing pad. “No more tape recorder?”
“You’re the one who stopped it in the car.”
“But not even a notebook?”
Kent taps his temple. “It’s good practice to go memory-only sometimes. Frees up the conversation.”
Bruce frowns at his streaked remnants of ketchup and pinches one last clutter of fries into his mouth. He takes his time chewing. “If I wanted to hide anything significant,” he mutters, “I’d put it offshore.”
Genuinely amused, Kent grins. “How gauche.”
“Sometimes, Clark, a man just wants a quiet place.”
//
He watches Kent win two games of billiards at the tables across the bar, and throw another one and a half before the old-hats taking up the cues decide they’ve had enough of drawing out the evening and head on home. Kent collects his hat and Bruce from their table, grouses about Bruce paying the tab without telling him, and leads the way back out to the car through the sparsened, dwindling parking lot.
Bruce doesn’t stop him when Kent loads a new tape into the recorder before starting the car again, even when he shoots a temperature-check glance across the seat between them.
“You know a lot of people here,” Bruce says to the edge of his reflection in the side mirror. The engine turns over. Kent thumbs the record button and fastens his seatbelt.
“Lived here almost my whole life,” Kent declares, peering into the incoming dusk at the t-bend leading back to the only main road out from town. “Either I know them, or they know me.”
He turns to check the other side of the road, and smiles at Bruce on the way.
“Why are they all still here?” Bruce angles his chin at the boarded-shut First Baptist passing along the shoulder. “Things have moved on. The world is more than all this now, it’s a dead town.”
“You said it yourself, there are things to hold onto despite the decay.”
“Old books written in Proto-Italic aren’t people.”
“Says you.” The turning signal chirps in the dark. No other vehicle crosses the two-lane road fore or aft. The sun sinks into its last terminal blaze against the horizon line, brilliantly orange beneath the galley sail abstraction of clouds streaking along the thermal winds. “The word ‘progress’ spooks them. Has for a long time.”
“You talk like an anthropologist,” says Bruce.
Kent chuckles. “I have a particular perspective. I chose this place, wasn’t born here.”
“Where are you from?”
“Nowhere anyone ought to know anymore, least of all your set. Long gone.”
He holds out the -ng , making his throat flex just so in Bruce’s periphery—Bruce shifts in his seat, and grunts with a note of sympathy. “Company town.”
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the practice,” Kent minces with wry self-awareness.
“Not directly, no. But I can think up a few who are.”
The service road turning from asphalt to gravel bumps along under the hatchback’s tires. Outside the farmhouse, Kent leaves the car idling and cranks the gear into part by the steering column. He leans into the center seat and stops the tape.
“Thank you for driving,” Bruce admits.
“Thank you for dinner.”
“Would you like to come inside for a drink?”
“Appreciate it, but I have other articles to get into fighting shape than this one. Maybe next time.”
Bruce opens his own door, and steps out before Kent can protest. He leans down to look across the front seat. “When should I expect you next?”
“Mr. Pennyworth has your schedule.” Pulling the car back into gear, Kent salutes him in the upturned glow of green dashboard lume beginning to glow with the retreating light. “Monday, I believe. Goodnight, sir.”
//
Night passes with a silence Bruce hasn’t even found in the countryside back home, so full with its roaring of trees in all seasons. Come morning, Bruce takes to the second tier of the wraparound porch with a stiffly-spiked coffee and listens to the alien mutter and squawk of autumn migration far down in the distance.
The flannel robe piled around his shoulders smells heavily of cedar and holds well against sunrise's chill. His breath steams and the cup leeches its heat more quickly than it would inside. The sky is so broad here Bruce can hardly keep himself from gawping up at it whenever there isn’t a roof above him—here from the ground, small and inconsequential, no other eyes can pin him down but the beady, Gruidae gaze of every third crane chattering away in the shallows.
//
Wayne profile — downtime B reel (OTR, BW unaware of tapings, use for context ONLY)
[TAPE CUTS IN: a loud background, chattering typewriters and the mutter of The Herald’s bullpen at full bore.]
BW: Look, stop. Be serious Clark. It’s all swamp.
CK: Marsh.
BW: [flatly] Whatever it is, I wouldn’t be able to build even if I wanted to. If I were planning to develop it, I’d have to —
CK: And the bird sanctuary?
BW: What about the bird sanctuary?
CK: The geese, the herons, there’s a facility —
BW: — that nearly closed for lack of funding, yes, which I can now keep open under my private jurisdiction. What about the bird sanctuary, Mr. Kent?
[A protracted silence; several phones trill from other desks.]
CK: Nothing. Just making sure you were aware of it. Here, I need a coffee. I’ll buy.
BW: Nonsense.
CK: I’m serious.
BW: So am I, where’s the nearest place? I’m dying for somewhere that brews it strong enough.
[TAPE CUTS OUT.]
[TAPE CUTS IN: a lunch counter, almost entirely unintelligible ; too low against the table where the cutlery knocks on each gesture — every third word lost to noise or otherwise.]
Fix those compression settings dammit Clark quit forgetting!
[Bruce laughs three or four times. Sounds at ease, if not happy / iirc he knew almost nothing about baseball & believed the names of several fake players made up on the fly; “I read about him in a magazine, I think.” Yeah right. Endearing??]
[TAPE CUTS OUT.]
[TAPE CUTS IN: the last of the autumn crickets whirr. A long silence; occasionally, a breeze moves through the grass or the sound of a sip from a bottle stands out.]
CK: . . . Could I ask about your parents?
BW: I’d rather you didn’t.
CK: Alright.
BW: . . . You can still ask about them.
CK: But you don’t want me to.
BW: No. I don’t.
CK: Would you give me answers?
BW: . . . I’m not sure.
CK: That’s alright.
BW: I know. You said just now.
[The wind passes. They continue sharing the flask.]
[TAPE RUNS OUT.]
//
Bruce shows Kent the marsh by its far side, nearer to where the cranes gather but not too close to their nests. The men go up to the very edge of the water, fists stuffed in their jacket pockets and shoes barely wet at the toes, while Kent prattles about all the different animals who stop over on their way south to the Delta marshes or beyond for the winter.
“...I went to bird camp,” Kent says into a bolt of quiet fallen between them.
“Like Eagle Scouts?”
“Sort of. Not really. It’s Kansas.”
Bruce squints as his hair flutters into his eyes. A veil of brown leaves flutters from a small bush to their left. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I.”
“For a reporter, you don’t do a whole lot of thinking before you speak.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Are you?”
Bruce can’t recall the last time he saw such boyishness in another man’s body and didn’t burn with joy instead of envy.
He’s leaving the next morning, and trying not to be precious about it. When Kent invites him to a bar he promises books good music, Bruce says yes before he can convince himself he needs to stay home and pack like he does any night before he goes out to get loaded enough that tomorrow’s ensuing travel won’t breach his careful cocktail of aloofness. Alfred has known how to pack his suitcase, down to the toothbrush, for decades.
The music isn’t bad. Bruce notices himself staring at the way the low red light of the bunker-ceiling bar catches Kent’s face, and works on stifling the impulse until he forgets amid the strains of a ballad he once knew by heart starts trickling from the stage.
He listens until it’s too obvious Kent has noticed him noticing to stomach it. “My mother loved this song,” Bruce says, as if it explains anything.
“This one, or the original?”
Kent starts singing along softly under his breath in, of all things, French—same rhythm, different words. Bruce is too tipsy not to stare at Kent’s mouth. His accent is far from impeccable, but sharply honed.
“Yeah. That one.”
Leaning closer to speak with their voices still held under the music, Kent smells of fig and walnut. “A stint in Paris after I finished high school taught me how to understand people; fall in love with Life; big-L.”
“Tu parles français?”
Bruce’s accent is a rusty wreck, but Kent still looks pleased. A pilot light in Bruce’s brain tries to kick on. He needs himself to rear back before it can spark.
“Seulement avec parcimonie, et comme un bâtard. I prefer English, and did even there.” Kent mocks a grimace with a complicit wince; he wiggles a flat hand in the air. “The locals didn’t exactly love me.”
“C'est pour ça que tu es resté dans un endroit comme celui-ci?” Bruce crosses his arms and leans back in his seat, tipping his head at Kent. “You prefer, comment dit-on, patchwork things?”
They aren’t playing chess, but it feels like Bruce just captured a piece. Kent shrugs, unbothered, and fishes the cherry from the bottom of his drink. “Haven’t found anywhere I like better yet.”
“Not even Paris.” Bruce whistles low. “Who set your standards?”
“Anywhere I go, I just end up missing it here. I’m maladjusted, probably. …There’s life all over, if you can believe it. Little-l, but it’s mine. It’s everything I know how to care about in one place.”
The crowd applauds; the song is over. Obediently, still looking at one another down the open chute of their conversation, Bruce and Kent both clap.
Bruce waits until the next song starts to lean closer, as Kent draws back to put the cherry in his mouth; “Going away doesn’t have to be a permanent thing, you know.”
“Oh, I know.” Kent stands, gathers their empties in one hand, and leans down to impart one last thought on the matter, his breath half-fragrant with maraschino, off to fetch another round: “But I feel like if I wander too far off even one more time, I’ll lose the nerve to keep turning back.”
//
Bruce holds himself bodily away from touching Kent’s leg only a foot across the seat beside him. Slippery with drink, he keeps losing his thoughts in the thicket of how it might feel to be strapped into the middle seat instead, hip to knee to ankle, crowded up in the footwell against Kent’s body.
“You can drop me off here,” Bruce says after a fairly unmalleable silence the whole way back, a confused cotton-pack of a drive, and Kent slows the brakes with a soft, metallic weal.
“Are you sure?”
“I’d like the walk. I need it, really; been cooped up.”
“Ha! City boy comes all the way out here, only to feel cooped up.”
Bruce pops the door handle, but as he steps from the passenger’s side, Kent stops him with a hand on his wrist. Bare-fingered, native against the ripping wind, his fingers catch the sliver of skin between Bruce’s glove and the start of his sleeve.
“Tomorrow night,” Kent says like he’s sick of holding it in, “there’s a council meeting. If you could rearrange your travel, it might mean a lot to some folks to see you there. Set some good precedent, if you have any intention of showing up here even every now and again. I dunno. Could be good, could be smart.”
His hand hasn’t left. Bruce isn’t the sort to blink first.
“Alright.”
“Yeah?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem, I don’t have any obligations back in town for a while yet. I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay. Great. Thank you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It feels right to say so.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’ll be here in the evening, no later than five. It’s at the edge of the county.”
“Sure. Goodnight, Clark.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Wayne.”
//
Addled with wanting, Bruce hoofs at a brisk clip toward the soft lights of the house left aglow for him by a handful of rooms like a sentinel hound watchful at the edge of a long-dead pasture.
He avoids Alfred, makes himself a disgustingly unbalanced nightcap in his room, smokes a handroll with too much tobacco in it, and resolves to let tomorrow be the morning’s problem to solve.
Pressed prone to the sheets after a scouring shower, cocooned in a sheath of linens that smell faintly of some other place’s dust, Bruce ignores the creaking of the iron bedframe as best he can and resolves also to oil its joints sooner rather than later as he works himself off against a pillow too flat to sleep on, folded just so with a channel, to relieve a need steeped so vibrant by the creeping encrustment of curling red neon.
//
He mixes a solvent made for door hinges carefully over the sink after breakfast with ingredients from the pantry while a travel agent from Wayne Air chirps at him through the kitchen telephone with an overeager pitch he wishes were less, if only for the mild hangover still clinging to the backs of his eyes.
“ Tomorrow morning. Yes. Midday, if you could manage; the airfield is a bit of a journey from here.” Bruce tightens the cap on his makeshift squeezebottle, switches the handset from one shoulder to the other, and shrugs the phone cord out of the way before he gives the concoction a few quick shakes with the top plugged up.
“...Thank you. I really appreciate it. I do, I mean it. …Of course. Send the survey to me directly. No, I’m not bullshitting you. Have a good day.”
He spends the afternoon in the farmhouse’s modest library, riffling through old books and absorbing none of the words, feeling miserably alike to the moments in his youth whenever killing time before an ill-fated date.
Come on.
You’re beyond all that.
He’s hardly through with school, for God’s sake.
He’s just good at his job.
//
Kent arrives before sundown with a camera around his neck, and snaps a photo of Bruce making his way down the front porch.
Bruce is frowning when he lowers the hand belatedly half-covering his face. “I said no tabloids.”
“Portraiture is a noble art.” Kent twists easily to set the camera on the floor mat behind his own seat. He starts the car, and turns up the volume on a bold shout of sound. “I got a tape for the drive.”
New and unnameable, music pours out through their windows open to the last of the warmth October has left to offer before turning over on its own hinge as they drive to the far end of the county. Kent tries to sing along, but doesn’t know any of the words.
The council house is the only lively building for miles. Kent parks in a less muddy patch of an area overlooking a spilling acreage over which the sun slips to the opposite horizon, and leads the way inside.
One of the farmers sucking quickly on the hour’s last cigarette outside the doors steps up as Kent finishes muttering something about playing cool. Bruce counts two, three others. Everyone else seems to be inside already—Kent maybe took a back road or two, to make a few songs last a little longer.
“The fuck’s that pig doing here?”
Kent steps between the advancing stranger and Bruce. “Leave it.”
“Leave it, my ass. He’s not from here, he doesn’t get go inside.”
“He won’t vote if they put anything to it, but anyone is allowed inside. It’s a public assembly.”
The stranger spits in the dirt. He eyes Bruce with the brand of loathing Bruce usually reserves for top administrators who have grown far too big for their boots.
“I’m just here to—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“You don’t talk to him,” Kent barks, “you talk to me.”
The stranger grinds his jaw and glares at Bruce like he’s imagining his face turning inside-out, before he jabs a finger at Kent. “Look, I don’t blame you. First chance you get to suck some gatecrasher dick, I see how it goes, but you—hey, hey!”
Kent is on him before even Bruce can move to hold the young man back.
By the time Bruce hauls Kent back by his shirt from the brief, ugly fray, the stranger’s face is an embarrassing purple omelette of parking lot asphalt in comparison to Kent’s single split lip and lazily bleeding nose.
“Fuck this,” Bruce huffs, and drags them back toward the car.
“Bitch motherfucker, stay off! Go home!” a bloodied voice bawls up in parting, all full of teeth and miserable defeat.
//
Bruce puts Kent in the passenger’s seat and peels out onto the nearest farm-to-market. He passes a silk kerchief across the seat, thoughtless of its price or origin, with one eye on the road signs while Kent directs him down lampless stretches with his head titled back, stanching his meager wounds.
Kent spits blood occasionally out the open window as the clotting slows up. He’s lost his jacket to the night behind them, somewhere; Bruce follows his heads-up turns, slowing and accelerating in patchy draws when, off and on, it isn’t the turn Kent thought it was.
Relenting to Kent’s insistence he knows this turn, if none of them before then only this one, Bruce steers out to the middle of a field where, once upon an adolescence, Kent snuck out and got drunk on the worst moonshine ever brewed in Kansas.
“Hick,” Bruce says through his teeth, just because he can, and because it makes him feel better and part of him knows Kent will grin at the blessing of it.
He’s right. Kent’s square toe jabs Bruce in the shin, making the engine gun briefly with his foot twitching on the pedal. “Fuck you, son of a bitch, I love this shit.”
Bruce rolls to a stop in an inconspicuous spot once Kent tells him they’ve gone far enough. The young man unbuckles his seatbelt and turns to and fro, double-checking his surety in each mirror. before settling back against the passenger door and letting out a theatrical huff of breath. The smatters of blood, unsettled hair, and overstretched collar of his cotton shirt haul easy mutiny over Bruce’s higher functions.
“Sorry,” Kent murmurs. “I’ll ignore all this in the writeup, it’s already done. Tomorrow’s paper.” He licks a bead of sluggish blood from his upper lip and chases it with Bruce’s kerchief. “I really wanted to get you in there, you know. Would have been good for them to see you.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I am. The shitheads are harmless. I’ve been waiting for a reason to hit that one in particular since I was in junior high, I should be thanking you for the excuse. Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t you worry about it either.”
“Alright.”
Bruce watches Kent tend carefully, ably to his own damage. Even battered, he looks proud with his elbows braced across the door’s edge as if it were the back post of a throne. The low, billowing hickory thatch in which Bruce parked whisks softly against the window glass, mottling the shape of the car to invisibility from outside it.
“I really appreciate you lending me your time, Bruce.”
He says it so softly Bruce almost imagines he’s heard it. “I appreciate you not having an M-O.”
“It’s just journalism.”
Bruce scoffs, and almost wishes he hadn’t except for the sharp flash it makes dart through Clark’s eyes in the dark.
“What? You could do better?”
“Everyone has an angle, but you don’t . . . seem to. You’re very upright.”
“ Upright.”
“Yes, very.”
“Did you think I’d be so easy to twist?” Clark nods his chin at Bruce, and the moon catches him in a silvery dye when he tips back to check his bleeding against Bruce’s kerchief once more in its light, smirking slightly to himself. He examines its evidence with sound intent, his brow drawn in concentration beneath the curling of his hair tossed loose from its combed order, before sitting up and passing the soiled silk back to Bruce.
He takes it back with all due reverence. “I didn’t think anything besides ‘Here comes another reporter with something to gain.’ You surprised me, that’s all.”
“Are they all the same, in Gotham? Drawn by the likes of you, deep pockets and good shoulders?”
Bruce looks up at him, by every small turn of the moment, right as Kent licks his own blood from the valley between two knuckles of his dominant hand. The air in Bruce’s chest turns to vapor.
“It’s not always the shoulders.”
“No?” Kent looks entertained, sharp and, perhaps if his sensation of embracing fight in lieu of flight is any mirror to Bruce’s experience of it, still quick with the adrenaline in his body and unable to feel regret for a shrinking, precious pocket of the present.
Thoughts stick on that: His body.
Bruce lets himself look for too long at the shape of Kent leaned up against the door—one knee drawn up, the cuff of his trousers up beyond the edge of his sock, baring the soft hair curling dark from his shin.
“Everyone seems to have their own reason to think I’m charming,” Bruce murmurs. “I’m serious, don’t look like that. Even when I’m trying to be a real bastard, someone always finds a way to want my head between their legs.”
Kent laughs freely, gentle and high. He lets his head laze to one side, ear to shoulder, as though grateful to have his strings cut. “Yeah, I could have done with some warning about that part. Oh, well.”
Bruce could play it stone-cold; What do you mean? Pretend at stupidity he has never possessed, always hyper-aware of how and why and when people have wanted him, knowledge he has despised since he had to call it his far too early, rarely ever wearing right on him and—
Stop. He takes his time smoothing the kerchief on his thigh, folding it neatly along the worked-in lines of each quarter, and squaring it back into his breast pocket before shrugging off the jacket to drape it across the dash. Kent, unflinching, watches him unbutton the cuffs at his wrist and roll each sleeve back to his elbow.
“I don’t often find myself returning it,” Bruce says with his voice still low, tugging his tie loose, looking directly at Kent across the bench seat. “That feeling.”
Kent tries and fails to speak like his air has gone from the car wholesale. Bruce twists to reach behind him and pushes open the door to the hollowed-out night; the stillness of the song out there of all the other things hidden in the tall, naked true grass.
“Sometimes, though” Kent murmurs to his silhouette in the open door, trailing off and letting that be all. The way the shadows find the young man’s face from there, the drying blood from his nose and the cupid swell of his lip blur into one dark smudge not unlike ruined red gloss.
Bruce slides out backward to crouch on the driven-down stalks outside the driver’s door. Small stones ping softly in the wheel wells still warm from the journey out. “Sometimes,” he agrees, and touches Kent’s knee to draw him forward.
He has to be physically coaxed to the very edge of the driver’s seat, his heels braced against the brittle weather seal and his knees spread by Bruce’s firm, questing hands. Kent fumbles his own fly open, neither of them speaking, his hands shaking even as Bruce runs his thumbs across the split knuckles bridging each fist.
The air meeting Kent’s skin makes him stifle a shiver. Bruce wanders his mouth along the plane of his bared stomach first, shirt pushed neatly aside, welling the saliva and the nerve it takes for him to aim downward, tend Kent’s waistband lower—and finally quiets the icepicking burn that has been hissing at him to drive this man to pieces, for how closely he watches and sees and knows Bruce to the very dirt which made him without even trying.
Kent tries to keep himself shut up with the seatbelt slack bitten between his teeth, but groans with his whole body in it regardless as Bruce swallows him down. It turns to instinct, wanting nothing but taste, and Bruce licks his way down and inward with the intent of one bent to proving a point so full of potential neither one of them hazarded asking the question of it with any syllable but this coward’s language of one body seeking another.
He clutches at Bruce’s hair, the peppering gray begun early along his crown, and arches eagerly into each hurried press of Bruce’s fingers into the hot sett around which his thighs met, warmer than blood, both of them breathing in jagged uneven jags yet in tandem—even when Bruce has to pant against the femoral swell of Kent’s quivering leg, let his mouth rest, petting Kent’s streaming cock with his left hand while the right seeks inward— “Jesus.”
“You religious?” Bruce rumbles, letting his tongue linger and stick to a freckle bending with Kent’s skin over the fulcrum of one hip bone.
Kent’s laugh is sharp, bitchy, a thing Bruce wants imminently more of. “Hardly.”
“Swear like you mean it, then.”
Bruce tries and fails to hold a growl back in his chest with the next unannounced sting of Kent’s grip tightening against his scalp.
He gets back to it, and Kent sounds like he’s near tears. He jackknives toward the only sure thing: Pleasure, wet heat, the promise of depth and friction. But rather than any other swearing, Kent begs.
He babbles please and more and admits every filthy exploit he’s imagined up right there in the driver’s seat when Bruce demands he narrate them, those brief pullovers often done on the shoulder not two miles from the farmhouse. “. . . And I have to,” Kent breathes, rolling to meet the next twist of Bruce’s wrist, and stills with a sob. “I have to have it here, I have to—! Bruce, I have to have it right here, I need to do it.” His knees go rigid against the sides of Bruce’s head. “Here—!”
Bruce coughs, and swallows, and coughs again. Kent quivers the whole way through.
A fat valley of leftovers dribbles belatedly from Kent’s slit, mixing with glossy saliva and overspillage matted through the hair framing the blushed slouch of his balls. Bruce tongues at it trailing down to where his fingers slide out, and goes up on his knees between Kent’s spread, spent thighs to neatly extract the same kerchief from his pocket on the dash and add to its grotty bouquet of stains.
“What about you?” Kent says, voice gone reedy, and though his hand flitting along Bruce’s right buttock is deft Bruce stills him by the raised band of his forearm.
“I prefer to give.”
Clark looks up at him with heavy eyes pale and unshuttered. A strident fire simmers far away in his pearl-large pupils, desperate to be more in the way of all stripling things.
//
They return to the farmhouse in a settled, wrung-out silence. Bruce directs him to the service driveway, and leans over to cut the headlights at four acres off from the house’s back sight line.
The far side of a tumbledown carriage house has a good place to park. Clark levers the seat back and wastes no time pulling Bruce down along the length of him.
“I can’t sleep here,” Bruce breathes into Clark’s neck before biting softly at the fine skin.
“Neither can I.”
Clark tightens his fist around the back of Bruce’s belt and tugs him close. Bruce shudders, breath hot in the dip of Clark’s throat, and arches into the next flow of his hips. Clark wilts artfully beneath him.
Bruce skates his nose down the path of one thumping artery. “Careful.”
Somehow, Clark still has the nerve and wherewithal to laugh. “We’re long past careful.”
He makes Clark taste himself on each slow push of his tongue into the young man’s mouth. Even just the fret of them together, the weltering jut of hip against hip, reduces Clark to another shaking, beg-ready mess—Bruce talks him through it, an urgent improvisation that burns his tongue as he speaks it: You wanted me here; you wanted me here just like this, you said so, right here on top of you, you have to have it right here —he looks down on Clark in repose beneath him with a feeling low in his belly that some unreachable knar amid his roots has just come irreversibly undone.
Clark sits up on his elbows and shakes the hair from his face, glittering in refraction and vital with it the way Bruce can only mistily remember it making him, nonplussed by even the state of his trousers. Clark hazards a shy, hesitant smile, as if his zipper isn’t undone between them. “I won’t be sentimental—”
“I will.” Bruce digs one of only several business cards in plain matte black from the back sleeve of his wallet and brandishes it at Clark. “That number dials to me directly, most hours of the day. Private voicemail box if I don’t pick up. You’ll call if you need a reason to wander off one more time.”
Clark turns the card over to its plain back, checking it over. Bruce looks at his own name and number from the reverse, strangely readable upside-down. BRUCE WAYNE, HEIR AND EXECUTOR.
Bruce crowds him without meaning to, bumping his nose against Clark’s wrist, and kisses him so soundly the seat creaks rasps under the dark, tousled curls pressed back against its fabric.
“Goodnight, Mr. Kent,” he says against Clark’s bruised lips.
Clark catches his breath in several slow, sawtooth gulps before he smiles through smearing one last sloppy thanks-for-stopping-by against his cheek. “Goodnight, Bruce.”
//
He finds Alfred in the study, balancing the books by lamplight with a radio serial buzzing on low from the wall unit by the bar cart.
The old man looks up and performs a tidy triage from across the room’s length of thick bottle green carpet, cataloging Bruce in the doorway; the traces of drying blood left behind on his cheeks and chin.
“I’m heading up for the night.”
Gesturing at his own face, Alfred looks curious. “Is that yours?”
Bruce swipes at the corner of his mouth with a thumb and feels at the rust-red crumbling between his fingers. “No.”
Alfred caps his pen and squares it along one edge of the blotter. “When you said somewhere to get away—”
“It wasn’t anything serious.”
“In what respect, if I may be so bold to ask?”
Bruce sets his jaw and makes himself stop before he speaks; one, two, three, four. He unclenches his fists and blinks at his feet. “I’m going to pack.”
“Already done, sir.”
“...Thank you.”
“Nothing to it.” Alfred rises from the desk chair and straightens the last of his papers before shutting the radio with a click. Above them, the eaves settle softly. “I take it the profile was a positive venture, at least?”
He comes over and straightens Bruce’s collar, its pressed crease crushed by evident and passionate clasping. Bruce nods stiffly. “If you could secure a copy of tomorrow’s paper, if not before the cab comes perhaps post it home—”
Alfred smiles with a distant touch of wistfulness having only half of itself to do with the present moment. “Already done.”
Bruce turns his blush-bright face to the floor. “What time should I be ready downstairs in the morning?”
“I’ll have a pot of coffee brewed by quarter to five, along with The Herald.”
“Alright.”
Alfred puts a flat hand to Bruce’s cheek and pats him once, neither bracing nor overly gentle. “Goodnight, sir. Good show.”
“Goodnight.”
He trudges steadily up the stairs, each creaking step one more seal on a night he can never live again, and shuts the bedroom door behind him without turning on the light.
His suitcase is neatly shut and ready to go on its foldout-rack by the door. He’ll bathe before breakfast.
Bruce steps out of his shoes and removes his belt before collapsing across the bed’s duvet. A long knife of moonlight cuts in through the half-drawn curtains across his bare side exposed to the tender skin with his shirt ridden up as he curls onto one side.
He sleeps immediately, deeply, and weathers sullen dreams of skyscrapers.
//
The airport taxi will be here at half-past six.
Phone when you’re home, when you can.
— A
ps. Who took this photograph of you?
Dashing — send to publicity, replace old one?
Wayne Holdings Settle an Uncertain Future for Smallville Wildlife Preserve
by Clark Kent
When Winnifred Davis was told the heron sanctuary east of Smallville where she had volunteered for over thirty years would no longer be shutting its doors in the wake of a funding rupture, she was sure she was dreaming.
“I got the phone call and about dropped dead,” she animated vibrantly over a plate of hot oats and rye from Ed’s on Sixth. Ms. Davis’s native Missouran chumble leaves her at an impressive speed even before she gets to talking about the morays of whooping cranes, and her winsome laugh is not unlike the calls of those birds she so openly loves.
“We’d been told the building was closing, would be fully shut off in thirty days — thirty days for all of it, to clear out the visitor’s center, get those poor hatchlings still on feeders taken somewhere, some vet, who knows. It was a whole mess.”
Ms. Davis and the other volunteers at the erstwhile Rice County Marsh Trail facilities were rocked by the news of budget allocation county officials had all but officially awarded the sanctuary in prior discussions, suddenly rescinded in the final hours of last month’s state-appointed deadline. Without the critical funding, Marsh Trail and the thousands of birds reliant on its land as a critical stop in several key migratory paths could easily have been reduced to a strip mall or a parking lot by the highest bidder — the preserve, once protected by municipal oversight but now left high and dry even given recent rains, went up for auction this summer.
“I was on phones that night of that sale, prepared for the worst, and I got a call from someone all the way in Gotham saying hello, Mr. Wayne is interested in giving a very large donation in his mother’s name, and I said Mr. Who? And they said Mr. Wayne, Bruce Wayne, you know who that is! And honestly I had to go to the library after everything got finalized and all and look him up but they were right, I knew who he was the second I saw his picture: Mr. Bruce Wayne.”
Mr. Wayne is the sole inheritor of the fortune and consolidated holdings of Wayne Enterprises, the multinational megacorporation based in Gotham City with roots in pharmaceutical technology and private sector investments throughout the world. At just shy of fifty years old, Mr. Wayne’s net worth could make even a seasoned banker’s eyes water. Wayne Enterprises is often featured in the media for the purpose of putting its only living heir’s lifestyle under the microscope — one of alleged excess and abdication, the petty work of a spoiled child dashing apart the last hope of a family’s once-untarnished legacy.
Bruce Wayne is not what one would consider salt of the earth. He carries all six-and-a-half feet of his height with the due confidence of man assured a place at any table he desires to sit, but surprisingly the table he chooses is often that of the common man instead of the feasts feted by his peers. Mr. Wayne is, under his cold corporate exterior, a staggeringly educated man with a deep respect for humankind’s noblest role: our stewardship of smaller things.
A property in Monaco purchased under the entity of Mr. Wayne’s personal limited licensing company is home to the site of a monastery housing precious historic records that would have been leveled to make way for a condominium compound by a shell company attached to Metropolis-based LexCorp if not for the overwhelmingly over-market bid by Mr. Wayne’s executor. Is the rampant freedom of the corporate dollar’s ability to point at land and see it purchased a uniquely modern cancer growing unchecked? Undoubtedly. But Mr. Wayne’s treatment of these places that would fade quietly into subsumption is evidence of humanity left in the bedrock of his choices which several of the glossier magazines would prefer to write off as eccentric or, in the most questionably-researched of cases, one man’s manic thrashing in an attempt to wrangle a life thrust on him too wholly, too suddenly, too soon.
Bruce Wayne is not his legacy, despite the romance of considering otherwise. He is his own man with a firm moral compass set to the preservation of priceless beauty — not only its artifacts, but now also the nature by which the making has been inspired.
“It just makes me happy,” says Winnie Davis, looking away from the breakfast platter with her eyes going wet. Through the window in which she neatens her striking reflection in its plate glass, the clouds over the high school make a pink thatch. “I think about those birds and I think about all their babies, all the hundreds of times they get to keep making that flight . . . it makes me happy.”
The nattering of the herons one can hear from the now permanently-protected marshes of the Martha Wayne Natural Sanctuary outside of Smallville reminds one of many things, but in this instance perhaps it is simply that sometimes, there isn’t an ulterior motive. Sometimes, all a man wants is a quiet place.
//
Two Months Later
//
His office isn’t a prison, but growing stale lately. Bruce hasn’t graduated yet to sleeping under his desk and showering in the basement gym, but he very well might unless several shareholders get their oversized heads out of their asses and relent to the practice of compromise, goddamn it. It’s nearly Christmas.
The careening of the holiday market is always forecastable, never predictable. Bruce sits back in his chair and scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands until he sees bright stars. Seventy floors below, the glittering lights strung through naked treetops make the nights feel colder instead of warmer.
He opens his desk drawer intent on pawing for one of several vices scattered therein, and stops with his hands on the silk handkerchief still faintly painted with Clark Kent’s blood from that once-upon-a-time fantasy month in Kansas. Bruce hadn’t tried very hard in scouring it out, leaving the faint outline of several broad splotches of blood ground in before the peroxide could lift it away in the penthouse sink.
Standing, he angles his face up against the chilly glass built into the full corner of his office, walls and all, to look for the stars: Meager pinpricks, barely there, the full bore of them that had looked down on him out there, majestic ceiling over the middle of a silent nowhere here drowned by the interminable persistence of light . . .
The phone on the desk rings.
Bruce stares at the handset.
//
NOT FOR INTERVIEW’S SAKE — names redacted.
[TAPE CUTS IN: a brief fumbling clamor, and then the atmosphere of a quiet room; windows open, the occasional breeze and the faraway sound of cranes. The creaking floor and uncareful bedsprings befitting an old Edwardian underscore most of the following.]
– : Say it.
| : No.
– : Say it again, I dare you.
| : No, not if it’s going in your diary.
– : My diary. What, don’t look so smug.
| : I’m not smug.
[A rustling, and some strained laughter; grappling sounds.]
– : You are, you’re terrible. Look, you kicked the poor tape recorder.
| : Sorry.
– : It can’t hear you. It can’t feel. It’s a machine.
| : One way or another, ____, can it feel or not?
– : In my endless wisdom, I grant both life and the inert imposession of –
| : You’re drunk.
– : No, I’m giddy.
| : Can you get up and walk?
– : Likely not.
| : Exactly. You’re drunk.
– : On ____. Ha! See? Whose fault is it, made me like this?
| : ‘That red light means it’s running.’
– : I don’t sound like that.
| : Yes, you do. ‘Speak up, _____, it won’t catch you clearly.’
[More rustling.]
– : You’re awful.
| : Put that in print, I dare you.
– : You dare me!
| : I’m not above double-standards –
– : Clearly not.
| : – nor am I above fighting dirty.
– : You fought me dirty just now, didn’t you.
| : Exactly.
[More rustling.]
– : Red light means it’s running – !
| : You’d do it. ____. Voyeuristic little –
– : I would, eagerly. But not with that tape.
| : . . . Fine. How do I – here, there it is
[TAPE CUTS OUT.]