Like a Father

The noise didn’t sound like a gunshot, or the backfire from a passing truck. It was a sizzle, a science fiction ray gun sound, combined with a small explosion. It was so unlike anything that Charlotte expected to hear in her quiet neighborhood that she stood in the living room, frozen and uncertain, wondering if it might happen again.

It was Mrs. Johnson’s scream that convinced Charlotte that something was happening right in the house.

She raced upstairs, thinking all the worst things that could have happened to Dad. Maybe he had fallen out of bed. Maybe he was having trouble breathing. Maybe it was over.

The last thought occurred to her several times a day. It hovered over her and descended on her at odd moments, sometimes bringing her close to tears. Every time she put Dad to bed she stood in the doorway and watched for a while to make sure he was still breathing. Even then, every new morning held the possibility that she would find him gone, leaving behind an inanimate lump of matter in the shape of man. When he was sitting up in his chair, often sleeping, sometimes she did not hear his breath for a moment and turned to watch him until he stirred a bit.

Far behind the worry about her father, and the hope that he was all right, was a thought that Charlotte never acknowledged to herself. When the end did come, the thought whispered, when the arrangements had all been made, when the relatives had come and gone and all the tears had been shed, she would be free.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Charlotte turned right into the master bedroom. Something about the room seemed wrong. It was cool and there was a slight breeze, but that didn’t really register. Her thoughts were with Dad. Mrs. Johnson stood by the bed, in some kind of shock. Charlotte knew that Mrs. Johnson had been a nurse for almost thirty years. What could have surprised her so?

Dad seemed all right. He was asleep, but strangely, his blankets were gone. He was skeletal, with skin falling in folds and wrinkles. His chest rose and fell slowly.

Only after seeing that her father was all right did Charlotte turn to see why the room felt so strange. She followed the still frozen stare of the nurse and saw why the room was too light and too cool.

The south wall of the bedroom was gone. Part of the roof also. At first she was sure that it was an illusion, something she was imagining. Walls of suburban homes don’t just vanish. Then she started to see more detail and realized that there was something wrong with the tree outside the window, that is, the tree outside the window that was no longer there. Many of the branches were sheared off, as if a crazed tree surgeon had taken the world’s largest chain saw to the branches. The wood at the end of the branches glistened with sap. This had happened in an instant.

Charlotte stepped a little closer to the gap that had appeared in her house. A sparrow settled on a branch near its newly raw end and chattered, perhaps admonishing her for letting this awful thing happen.

A hand fell on Charlotte’s shoulder, making her jump. She turned to see the face of the nurse, the woman who had been the most loyal and hard working of her Dad’s helpers, who had sat and listened to Charlotte talk about how hard it was to take care of an elderly parent, and had nodded in sympathy when Charlotte talked about her difficult relationship with her father, and how hard it was to see the tall, capable man reduced to a shrunken figure who could barely walk.

“I quit,” Mrs. Johnson said.

The police and the fire department arrived in force a few minutes later. Some neighbor had called them. Charlotte had no answers for them. Paramedics busily looked over her father with all their instruments but couldn’t find anything wrong with him other than his advanced age. The police asked a lot of questions, and since there were no answers, they asked them again and again.

Mrs. Johnson had the only story to tell, and the usually level headed nurse kept repeating something that made no sense. That Mr. Green was agitated, and kept talking about the war, and someone or something called the Grey Spectre. Then Mr. Green had seemed to see this Spectre, to be afraid for his life. He held his hands out and a shot of blue tinted energy had come out of them and made the wall vanish in an instant.

Mrs. Johnson was certain that if she had been in the way of the blue energy she, too, would be gone.

The more the officials of civic order investigated, the less sense the situation made. A police detective speculated that a small bomb had been planted on the outside of the house. There was no debris in the yard, though. The wood, insulation, and vinyl siding of the house, along with the missing tree branches, had not exploded and fallen onto the neatly trimmed lawn. They had disappeared as neatly as a tiger in a Las Vegas magic show.

The paramedics insisted on transporting Charlotte’s father to the hospital. Charlotte couldn’t think of a good argument against it, though she didn’t want them to do it. The police pointed out that the house wasn’t safe with a gaping hole in its side, and perhaps should be examined to see if it was structurally sound before anyone stayed in it again. They put yellow tape up all over the yard to show that they had been there, then declared there was nothing more they could do that night.

It was pretty late when Charlotte followed the ambulance to the hospital in her Volvo. She sat in a waiting room and watched the other people who had come in due to some emergency. Two little girls ran around the room while their father sat, looking stunned, waiting for word on his wife’s condition. A man in a wheelchair with a cast on his leg read a mystery novel.

After a while, she was allowed into her father’s room. She walked quietly to the side of his bed. She looked at the shriveled man who had once been her father. She remembered him as tall and handsome. When he came home from one of his long business trips she would race to greet him. He would come in the door and shrug off his overcoat, hang it in the closet, and turn to welcome his daughter.

This memory of Dad coming home was strong in her mind, but she realized as an adult that she had not been remembering events as they really happened. She had mixed up reality with TV images of a father coming home and hugging his children, tossing them in the air and catching them, showing an affectionate interest in what had happened at school that day.

This was not an accurate portrait of Horace Green. He was a disciplined man, and he expected discipline in his wife and daughter. He had used that discipline to work his way to a college degree in the middle of the Great Depression. He was the first member of his family to attend college, and his parents, California fruit farmers, had never expected that any of the family ever would. They wanted a son who would grow up to work the orchard. They got one who read every book he could lay his hands on and who was curious about the world around him.

The hard work to get off the farm made the man hard. Charlotte forced herself to remember his homecomings more accurately. Even though he was often away for weeks, Charlotte’s mother would store up all her transgressions and bad behavior to tell Dad when he came home. Then he would play his role as enforcer of the rules. In those days that always meant a spanking. No one had invented ”time outs” yet, and Dad would have scoffed at such coddling of children.

Charlotte grew up fearing the father who meted out the punishment, and loving the father who brought books on all subjects into the house, some from exotic places. She met Tintin and Asterix when he brought the books home from Europe. She read and reread his library of Burroughs, Stevenson, H.G. Wells, and others.

He never read the books to her. He never hugged her. He was a remote figure, usually away on important business. There was humor in the house, and a certain togetherness at the rare times they were together, but Charlotte knew there was something missing.

Now, after growing up and being married and divorced twice, she knew that she had never learned how to love.

The man that caused all these conflicting emotions was now a husk. He could barely walk, even with a walker. He had to be helped in the bathroom. He wore diapers night and day. And with a start, Charlotte realized he was watching her.

“I want you to do something.” Charlotte’s dad said. She had thought he was asleep, but his eyes were now open. He seemed clear of mind, not hallucinating about being on his parents’ farm, or about spectres, or whatever. Sometimes in these lucid moments Charlotte had tried to get to know him, to talk to him as she never could when she was younger. He had remained guarded even then, and slipped back into his role as authority figure, slipping away from any human connection.

“What?” she said.

He coughed, said something garbled, then cleared his throat and tried again. “Call the company.”

This made no sense at all. What company? Charlotte couldn’t think. He didn’t seem confused. He held his gaze on her. This was something important to him. Then she asked, “The insurance company?”

“Yes.”

“Dad, you’ve been retired for fifteen years. Why should I call them?”

“Call,” he said.

“I don’t have the number any more.” She frowned. Was this a hallucination? He sometimes thought he was in California, on the farm, but he had never said a word about the company he used to work for. In fact, in her entire life she had never heard him say anything about his work.

“In my desk.” Then he fell back on the pillow and slept. Charlotte waited by his bed for an hour before deciding that he wasn’t going to say anything more that night.

Going back to the house probably wasn’t a good idea. After all, she had been told it might not be safe. It was all she could think to do. Dad had asked her to do something, and that was rare. It might be nonsense. Maybe he thought he still worked at the insurance company. It was worth at least looking in his desk for that number.

She sat at her father’s desk and turned on the desk lamp. It was an island of light in the dark house. She felt like a little girl going into her father’s private things, and that even though the old man in the hospital had asked her to do it, her real father, the tall, handsome and vengeful father of her childhood, would catch her at it and punish her.

The papers in the desk hadn’t been disturbed in years. Dad hadn’t been in any condition to understand business or finances for a long time. Charlotte didn’t find anything very interesting in the top drawer. A desk calendar from years ago and some pens. She opened each drawer and looked through all the items. There wasn’t much.

Dad had never worked at home. He never brought papers home in a briefcase. He worked hard, there was no doubt about that. The company called him in at all hours for emergency work. Charlotte remembered many times when the phone had rung in the middle of the night, and Dad would be gone when she got up in the morning. She also wasn’t allowed to talk for very long on the phone, because the company might call.

Charlotte had never been clear what kind of insurance work involved all the emergency calls and all the extended absences. She had asked Mom, but was told that her father was working hard for the family and that’s all she needed to know.

The drawer on the lower right of the desk held a small address book, the kind meant to be carried in a pocket, and nothing else. Charlotte picked it up, then sneezed from the dust that she had stirred up.

She didn’t even remember the name of Dad’s company. She started to leaf through the little book. It was empty. All the pages were blank, until she got to the F’s. ”Frugal Insurance” was written in Dad’s handwriting, along with an 800 number. Charlotte checked the rest of the pages. The insurance number was the only thing written in the whole book.

She dialed the number. There was a click and a hum. Then a recorded voice said, “Please leave a message.” Not ”Welcome to Frugal Insurance, your call is very important to us, please leave a message after the beep.” or “Frugal Insurance. For sales, press one. For customer service, press two.” No, just “Please leave a message.” followed by a short beep and the expectant hiss of a machine waiting for the caller to speak.

“I, um, My name is Charlotte Green. My father works for, used to work for your company,” Charlotte said. “He told me to call you. His name is Horace Green.” Charlotte paused. The machine continued to hiss. “It’s probably nothing. He hallucinates sometimes. He’s almost ninety now.”

She hesitated. There was no reason to keep talking into the phone. No one at Frugal Insurance would even remember her father. She found herself going on, though. The empty static on the phone seemed to invite her to speak. “He seemed pretty clear when he told me to call you. I don’t know what he thought you would do. I don’t even really know what he did when he worked there. He never talked about it.” She was starting to sound sad and weepy, even to herself. “So anyway, he told me to call, and I’m calling. I guess that’s it.”

Charlotte held the phone to her ear a moment longer, as if a friendly voice would come on and comfort her. The unsympathetic hiss went on. She hung up the phone, lay down her head, and finally gave in to the tears that had been pressing behind her eyes for hours.

After a while Charlotte got to her bed and lay there, thinking. What was she going to do? Was it finally time to put Dad in some sort of home? She had fought it as long as she could, but it was getting harder and harder. She realized she hadn’t given any address or phone number to Frugal Insurance, though it was unlikely they cared. Just before falling asleep she worried about the hole in the house. What had happened? How much would it cost to fix it? Sleep took the worries away, for a few short hours.

In the brightness of early morning, Charlotte went to make coffee and found a teenager hanging upside down from the ceiling of her kitchen.

She gaped at him, unable to process the idea that a young man was hanging head down right near the breakfast nook.

“Good morning,” a woman’s voice said.

Turning her head, Charlotte saw two people sitting at the kitchen table, wearing matching underwear. No, it wasn’t underwear, it was skin tight, brightly colored costumes. Coordinated costumes, as if the two played for the same sports team. The woman was smiling, and the man waved, while stuffing some toast in his mouth with the other hand.

“We made breakfast,” the woman said. “I hope you don’t mind. We decided to let you sleep, but we were famished.”

The man at the table nodded. “Didn’t get much to eat last night, what with saving the world and all.”

“My husband exaggerates,” the woman said, smiling fondly. ”We only saved North America. Maybe a bit of Central America too.”

Charlotte tried to say something like, “Who the hell are you people?” but all that came out was a croak.

“I’m sorry, we should introduce ourselves. I’m Leslie Bowman, and this is my husband Jim. Force and Graviton. Your father must have mentioned us.” This statement made as little sense as anything else that was going on, so Charlotte shifted her gaze to the upside down teenager.

“This is Brian, your would-be burglar,” the brightly clad woman said.

“He tried to take advantage of the situation with the missing wall of your house. We arrived just in time to stop him. Tell the lady you’re sorry, Brian.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” the teenager wailed.

“Take him to the police?” The woman turned to the similarly dressed man.

“Nah,” her husband said. “I think he’s learned his lesson.”

The woman waved her hand and Brian tumbled to the floor. He stood up and fled. Charlotte heard the front door slam and could see the teenager pelting across the yard as fast as he could go.

“Coffee?” Force asked.

Charlotte finally found her voice. “Who ARE you?” she shouted. She didn’t know if she should be frightened or not, but she couldn’t come up with a better idea.

The man at the table stood up. “We came as soon as we could after your call. We worked with your father,” he said.

“He taught my class at the academy,” Force chimed in.

“We’re so sorry that BB is so ill,” Graviton said solemnly. “It was hard to see him last night, so...used up. I remember him as so able, so strong. It’s a shame.”

Something they had said struck Charlotte as funny. “You people work in insurance?” she asked, gaping at them in their costumes that would look more at home in a high wire circus act than in an office.

The two just looked puzzled. “You shouldn’t have tried to handle it by yourself for so long. In his condition, Horace is a danger to himself and everyone around him.” The man, Jim Bowman, Graviton, whatever he called himself, looked serious. “You should have called us a lot sooner.”

Were they talking about her phone call last night? “I called Dad’s company, where he used to work, last night. Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes. What happened to your house could have happened to you, or anyone in the neighborhood. It’s very lucky that no one was hurt.”

“BB was one of the most powerful superhumans I ever knew,” Leslie Bowman said. “I remember once, in Africa, he got tired of waiting for the local officials to dig a well for the village where we were staying, so he just did it himself. One of his bolts, straight down, and the earth just evaporated.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said, shaking her head and trying to clear it, ”you people have the wrong house, or something.”

Leslie brought a chair over and settled Charlotte into it. “I’m really sorry, maybe it’s a shock seeing us here this early in the morning. But after moving Horace last night to a safe place, we thought we should be here as soon as you woke up.”

“Moved? What do you mean?”

“As I said, he’s dangerous. Where we’ve taken him he can’t hurt anyone.”

Charlotte leapt up and her chair fell over. “You can’t just take him somewhere! Who do you think you are!”

The man and woman stared at her. “We’re friends,” Force said. ”We worked with Blue Bolt for years.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Charlotte said, “I don’t understand. I want to see my father.”

“Of course,” Graviton said, standing up. “We should have taken you there right away. If you’ll just follow us.”

Graviton and Force, Leslie and Jim, the two circus tightrope walkers, whoever they were, promptly moved towards the front door.

Charlotte followed, because the strange logic of the situation seemed to demand it.

They went out the front door, and Jim opened the door of a car in the driveway. Leslie motioned Charlotte towards it and opened the rear door of the vehicle.

When the two woman got in and all the doors were closed, Graviton said, “Everyone settled?”

Before anyone said anything, the car started to move. Straight up. ”I used to fly people around carrying them in my arms,” Graviton said.

“Then I realized that they would be much more comfortable in a nice seat. And it’s just as easy for me to fly the whole car.”

“I believe it was my idea, dear,” Force said.

“Right as usual, honey.”

Charlotte watched the ground rushing away. “Don’t worry about your house,” Force said. “I placed a force field around it that’ll last a couple of days. No one else will break in.”

“I won’t say I’m dreaming,” Charlotte announced slowly and carefully, as if talking to people who were hard of hearing. “My dreams aren’t this detailed. I don’t think I’m hallucinating, unless I’ve had a stroke and don’t know about it. So assuming this is real, tell me simply and in small words what you people know about my father.”

“He’ll be taken care of at our HQ,” Force said. She was turned around on the front passenger seat of the strange flying car, and looking concerned.

“No,” Charlotte said. “Start at the beginning. What does my Dad have to do with any of this? I gather that you are some of those super people I see in the news sometimes, but what does that have to with my father?”

“Well, Blue Bolt was one of the founders of...”

“Stop. Right there. Who or what is Blue Bolt?” Charlotte gazed at Leslie, or Force, demanding the truth with her agonized expression.

“Jim, I don’t think she knows.”

Graviton glanced back but didn’t say anything.

Leslie turned back to Charlotte. “Didn’t he ever say anything? He was, your father is Blue Bolt, he’s been a superhero since World War Two. He has saved so many lives, fought so many bad guys in the last sixty years or so that no one can count them. He’s a great hero.”

Charlotte burst out laughing.

Force turned to her husband. “How can it be? She doesn’t know.”

“I suppose he fought bad guys at the insurance office,” Charlotte said, snorting laughter, “and defeated them with his super powered actuarial tables.”

“Almost there,” Graviton said. Charlotte could feel the car descending, and a look out the window confirmed that it was almost on the ground. “Where are we?” she asked.

“At our HQ,” Force said. ”We’ll talk more inside.”

Getting out of the car, Charlotte saw they were next to a tall building, but that it was the only building in the area. Miles of prairie surrounded it, with no town or city in sight.

They entered through normal looking glass doors, but after that, nothing was similar to any building Charlotte had ever been in. A massive steel gate closed off access to the inner regions of the building. The security guard wore a skin tight uniform similar to those of Force and Graviton. Besides that, he looked nothing like them, being eight feet tall and muscled like Arnold Schwarzanegger cubed.

Force stepped onto a circle in the floor and waited a moment. A green light blinked. Graviton had the same result.

The giant guard rumbled, “Please step onto the circle in the floor.” It took Charlotte a moment to realize he was talking to her. She hesitantly stepped into the circle.

“Normal human, no weapons,” the guard said. The green light flashed.

The steel gate began to open. Charlotte and the others were barely through it when Force turned and said, “Before you see your father, I have something else to show you.”

They threaded through a bewildering array of hallways and rooms, and went up, or down, on two different elevators. Somewhere along the way Graviton went off to do some other business. Finally, Force opened a door to a drab room filled with computer terminals.

Charlotte sat at a terminal that Force indicated. She still didn’t really know what was going on. She still completely dismissed what she thought the woman had said about her father. It was ridiculous. It was impossible.

Force did some things on the keyboard of the terminal. She then walked to the door of the room. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready,” she said. The door closed softly behind her.

The terminal lit up and showed Charlotte the impossible. It started with newspaper clippings from the nineteen forties. They hadn’t even coined the term “superhero” yet, but the glowing reports of the men and women who used special abilities to fight for the Allies were full of adjectives like “mighty” and “colossal”.

One of these people was known only as Blue Bolt. He gestured with his hands and mighty bolts of blue energy erupted forth and bowled over whole columns of Nazi tanks. Cameras were never present to record these feats, so they were illustrated by artists. One actual photograph of Blue Bolt was printed in LIFE Magazine, in which he stood and saluted a tattered American flag.

More images followed. Comic books from the nineteen fifties, with brightly colored adventures of “Real Super Heroes!” The stories in them were clearly fictional, and badly written, but Charlotte did recognize some of the names that she had seen in news reports all her life. She also noticed the name “Grey Spectre”, which went with an illustration of a ghostly figure with a swastika on his chest.

A short clip from a nineteen sixties demonstration, in which wild-haired young people shouted that all superheroes were “super pigs”. A bit from a Geraldo Rivera Show in which the mustachioed host chased after a group of superheroes to try and get an interview. They just walked away, but there was a close up shot of Blue Bolt, who glared at the talk show host from under his blue mask with, yes, with the same fury that had looked at the young Charlotte when she did something wrong. A chill went through Charlotte as she recognized him, even with the mask on.

The last thing was his personal file. There were two photos, one in costume, one normal. It said, GREEN, HORACE A.K.A. BLUE BOLT. It gave personal information, including the address of the house she had grown up in, the house that currently had a missing wall in the master bedroom.

She cried for a long time.

Force was as good as her word. She was still in the hallway when Charlotte emerged. Charlotte took a few steps, then stopped. “Do you think my mother knew?” she asked.

“We assumed you all knew,” Force said. “Horace was very strict about maintaining his secret identity, but we never imagined he kept it from his family.”

“He kept himself from us,” Charlotte nearly whispered. “We never knew him.”

Force put her arm around Charlotte. “Let’s go see him.” they moved down the hall. Through the bowels of the huge building, through more ups and downs on elevators, Force talked about her memories of Charlotte’s father.

“He was severe,” she said. “He was from the old school of absolute morality. But he could be funny. I told you he taught my class at the academy. He told us stories about the war. He taught us to control our powers. When I started going out in the field with him, he was always great to work with. I might even say he was like a father to me. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”

Charlotte didn’t say anything because she couldn’t express what she was feeling. Horace Green had never been a father to her in any emotional way, she thought bitterly, and she was his real daughter.

They came to a large window. It didn’t look outside, but into a large room. Inside was a bed, dwarfed by the room, and in the bed was a man.

“He’s having more and more episodes,” Force said. “The room is hardened against his bolts.” Just as she spoke a burst of blue energy erupted out of the man on the bed. Even through the thick glass Charlotte could hear him shouting.

“He shouldn’t spend his last days alone in there,” Charlotte murmured.

“I know, but it isn’t safe. He’s being taken care of by robots, and he’s destroyed three of them so far.”

“Can you give me some time alone?”

“Of course.” Force disappeared down the hallway.

Charlotte leaned against the glass. She didn’t know how long she watched. She didn’t see any more flashes of blue energy. A robot glided up to the bed and then left, intact.

She had taken care of Dad for three years, ever since she got a call that he had fallen and seemed confused. She had packed up and moved back to the family house from another city. She had been able to afford the nurses due to his surprisingly large pension.

Even with the help, though, she had felt trapped in the house. She had wondered if she would be free before she herself needed nursing care.

Now she was. These strange people, his real family, would do their best for him. She was sure they would. She could pick up her life again. Except that she didn’t have much of a life to pick up.

Charlotte Green leaned against the glass and cried, weeping for a man who had been too busy being a superhero to be a father.



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