Bennie“Hey, Bennie!” the boy shouted. His voice could be heard throughout Radley’s Hardware. A moment later Bennie appeared, a towering young man in overalls. “Hey, Vince,” Bennie said. “How’s your ma?” “She went back to work yesterday.” “That’s good. What can I do for you?” “I need something from the top shelf.” Of course he did, Bennie thought. The boys in town were always thinking of reasons to come in and see what Bennie could do. “All right, show me where.” The tall young man followed the boy to the garden section. Vince pointed up at a bag of weed killer on the top shelf. Radley’s was an old style hardware store. It had been there since nineteen twenty six, when Tom Radley opened it. It had survived the tough times of the depression and all the decades since because the people in town were loyal to it. Even now, you wouldn’t catch anyone driving over to the next town where they had that fancy new Wal-Mart. Radley’s had wooden floors, and the same high shelves that Tom Radley had put in when the place was built. It showed the wear of all those years, but also the care that had gone into keeping it a good place to get anything from a lawn mower to a few tiny nails to fix a birdhouse. “Well now,” Bennie said. “That’s really high up there. I’d better find me a ladder.” He snuck a look at Vince to see the boy’s disappointed look. “Yup, no way to reach all the way up there without a ladder, that’s for sure.” “Come on, Bennie,” Vince said. “Course, you sure you need that brand? That other stuff right there on the floor is pretty much the same.” “Dad said Weed N Gro,” the boy said. “Hmmm, well, how are we going to get that down? I just don’t see that darn ladder anywhere.” “Come on, Bennie, I ain’t even come in and asked for ages.” “Well, all right.” Bennie smiled and floated up to the top shelf. He looked down and saw that Vince was wide eyed and staring at him. He grabbed the weed killer and brought it back to the floor. “This is pretty heavy. You think you can handle it?” Bennie asked. “Could you carry it? My dad’s truck is right outside.” “All right. Your dad did give you some money, right?” Vince nodded. “Then let’s ring you up and get you on your way.” Bennie loved his job. He had spent hours in Radley’s when he was a kid. Back then it was run by old man Garber, who usually chased out any younguns who weren’t likely to buy anything. But Bennie impressed the old man by learning everything about the place, and before long he was running errands, sorting the small items, and helping people carry things to their cars. Bennie couldn’t imagine any better purpose in life than running Radley’s Hardware. By the age of twenty five, he was doing just that. As much as he loved the store, it was a bit stuffy and it was nice to get out on Main street on this spring day and feel a breeze on his face. Bennie plopped the bag of Weed N Gro in the back of the pickup. Vince was about to jump in there too,but he stopped and called out, “Hey, whatchall lookin’ at?” Bennie raised his head and saw a cluster of people standing right in the middle of Main street and staring at the sky. He walked over to where they were and looked up. There was something in the sky. It wasn’t a bird, an airplane, or a rocket ship. It wasn’t anything that Bennie, or anyone in town, had ever seen before. It was kinda lumpy. And bigger than any kind of airplane. Parts of it shimmered, disappearing and reappearing. “Well, don’t that beat all,” Bennie said. Then there was a large explosion on the -- whatever it was. Bennie decided to take a closer look. Bennie didn’t like to brag, so he hadn’t told people in town everything he could do. One thing that came in handy was being able to look close up at things that were far away. When they were searching for the Shermer girl that got lost in the woods, Bennie saw her from about a mile away, then led people in that general direction until it was more reasonable to let on he saw her. His momma had told him that modesty is a virtue, and he believed her. So, standing right there with the other folks who were staring up at the unknown thing, Bennie took a closer look. He saw that the big thing was even crazier and more confusing than it looked from far away. It didn’t look like anything that could fly at all. He also saw that there were smaller things buzzing around it, some kind of machines. They were all menacing looking and bristling with weapons. Bennie thought that maybe this was some secret government project, but that just didn’t seem right. The government didn’t design things that looked so...wrong. Then Bennie saw a human figure, a man with a colorful outfit and a cape, among the machines. In fact, the man was beating the tar out of the machines. He pointed at one of them, and it up and flew straight up, like it was lighter than air all of a sudden, going out of sight up into the sky. He pointed at another one, and it seemed to gain all the weight of a Sherman tank filled with lead. That machine plummeted down and hit the ground, and a moment later a loud crash sound rolled over Main Street. “Did you see that?” Vince asked breathlessly. Mayor Garber, grandson of old man Garber and the man who sold Radley’s to Bennie so that he could pursue a life in politics, but who had gotten no further than mayor despite a couple of runs for a state seat, said, “Hope that didn’t hit anything in town.“ Bennie was sure it hadn’t. Portersville was a pretty small town, and the machine had landed pretty far away. Still, the big floating thing and the man battling the machines was heading straight for them and any more plummeting weapon machines could be a problem. The next thing to plummet towards the ground was not a machine, but a woman. Bennie, with his long eye sight, saw her come around from behind the big shimmering floating thing, standing on some sort of small disk. She floated towards the man in the cape. She was gesturing and all hell was breaking out around her. Some of the machines exploded, others seemed to get sliced up into little pieces. Suddenly an electrically amplified voice filled the street. It was a newscaster. Everyone turned to look and saw that Vince had turned up the radio in his dad’s truck. The newsman was saying, “...pitched battle in the sky is now over North Carolina. Every known superhero is trying to defeat a lunatic calling himself Doctor Electron. Seemingly, Electron was approaching Washington D.C. in an invisible aircraft with the intent of destroying the White House and possibly other government buildings. Somehow the Protectors got wind of his plan and faced him down before he reached his goal. A battle erupted between the villain and the heroes, and while they managed to move him away from the capital, they have not yet taken him into custody or even forced him to land. The U.S Air Force was fighting him also, but the Protectors asked them to back off after two jets were destroyed.” The news paused so the station could advertise a new mint, and Vince turned the volume down a little. All the residents of Portersville resumed staring up at the events in the sky. “You know, Bennie,” Jo-Anne Bartlemeyer said. “You might could help out up there.” “Me?“ Bennie asked. “What could I do?” “All them superheroes don’t seem able to handle this Electron fella,” Jo-Anne said. “If they can’t, I sure can’t,” Bennie said. “I’m not like them. I just help around town some.” “Come on, Bennie,” Joe Blanding said, scratching the top of his head where one small tuft of hair clung on for dear life, “I seen you move Miz Jomiah’s house all by yourself during that flood.” “That’s right,” Vince’s dad tossed in, “and you changed the course of Jackson’s crick so the town would get more water.” Bennie was about to protest again that he couldn’t do anything when the sky exploded. He had looked away from the battle to talk to his friends, so he missed the explosion. When he looked up again, just with normal vision this time, he saw fire and smoke from the explosion partially blocking his view of the strange aircraft. Then he saw the woman falling. It was the lady who had been fighting alongside the caped man. The disk thing she had been standing on was gone. She was falling lifelessly, like a sack of potatoes. Bennie was up before he even thought about it. He had to put on quite a burst of speed to get to the lady in time. As he got closer, bits of smoking metal fell around him. He reached the falling woman when she was only about thirty feet off the ground, and caught her gently, going with her momentum until he could slow them both down. When he stopped, his feet were brushing the top leaves of the old oak tree on the McCamber farm. Ruthie McCamber saw Bennie from where she and her two little girls were watching the show in the sky. “Hey there, Bennie,” she called out. “What in all of creation is going on up there?“ “Some kind of crazy man tried to attack Washington,” Bennie shouted down. The woman in his arms was breathing, but unconscious. “Say, Mrs. M,” Bennie said as he moved himself away from the tree and down to the ground, “Could you look after her for a while? I don’t think she’s hurt bad, just knocked out from that explosion.” He landed right next to the girls, who giggled and stared at him. “My, that’s some outfit,” Ruthie said, eyeing the super lady’s skin tight costume. “My pa would have whipped me good if I went out in public in something like that.“ “Can you fly us?” little Anabelle asked. “Not today,” Bennie said. Both girls pouted. “So what do you say?” he said to Mrs. McCamber. “Sure, put her on the couch. If she wakes up I’ll make her a nice cup of tea.” Bennie went in the house and placed the brightly clad woman on the couch. “Y’all had better stay inside too,” he said. “There’s bits of hot metal falling down from that thing.” Once again outside, Bennie had to decide what to do. He didn’t have any business messing with this kind of stuff. He was just a hardware store owner. On the other hand, the big flying thing was getting closer to the center of town, and if it came down an awful lot of people could get hurt. Bennie sighed and took to the skies again. As he approached the flying craft, he could hardly believe it was able to stay up in the air. It was plain ugly, is what it was. No part of it was invisible anymore, either. Circling around it, Bennie found what he thought must be a door. If it wasn’t supposed to be a door, Bennie would turn it into one. He dug the fingers of both hands into the steel and gave it a good tug. The section came out with a wrenching and screaming of twisted metal. He took the door in with him instead of tossing it away. Wouldn’t want it to land on anyone. He dropped it in the corridor inside. It was kind of hard to walk along the hallway because the craft was listing from side to side. Before long he came to a large room. A room full of heroes. Bennie walked along, amazed. What an astonishing collection of super people were in there. He had never seen one close up before, and now he must be seeing dozens. Each one of them was held in a different contraption, something that seemed to be designed just for that particular hero. The caped man he’d seen fighting was encased in steel and had a helmet on that crackled with energy. A good looking woman wearing chain mail armor was enclosed in a clear plastic bubble. Not a one of them was awake. Bennie hoped they were alive. He moved towards the center of the flying machine, and soon he could hear singing. Turning a corner, he saw the singer. It was a skinny man in an outlandish costume that made even the most garish of the heroes look like a monument to restraint. The costume was yellow and purple, with symbols that looked like the models of atoms in Bennie’s high school science class. The skinny man was surrounded by machines of some sort, like big computers, that hummed and clicked. “I am the King if the World! I am the King!” the skinny man sang without sticking to any one melody. “Er, excuse me,” Bennie said. Doctor Electron’s head whipped up and he stared at Bennie in utter surprise. “Who the hell are you?” he blurted out. “Just a concerned citizen,” Bennie said. “I came to ask you just what you’re thinking, flying this contraption around here. If you drop this buggy on my town, people could get hurt.” “You’re no superhero,” Doctor Electron said. “No sir.” “So some bumpkin is going to succeed where all the world’s heroes have failed. Is that it?” “I don’t know about that. I’m just trying to protect my town.” “I am Doctor Electron!” Doctor Electron said. “I know that, sir, I heard about you on the radio.” “With these machines,” the Doctor said, gesturing around him, “I control matter at the subatomic level. I designed this craft for a pre-emptive strike against all the costumed do-gooders of the world. I created machines out of pure energy to fight the heroes. For every one they destroyed I created two more! I made other machines to restrain the so called heroes. Now, the next time I approach Washington D.C. there will be no one to stop me!” “So it’s your computer machines here that control matter?” “Well, I designed them. It was my genius that created them!” Doctor Electron seemed a little taken aback by Bennie’s lack of fear. “But, yes, it is the machines that do the actual atomic manipulation.” “Good to know,” Bennie said, then made his hands into fists and tore into the machines. He put on a burst of speed and used all his strength, which he rarely got to do, and before the Doc could reach for the controls, the machines were just scrap metal at his feet. The flying machine started to fall. Bennie guessed it had been held up by the machines. “Excuse me a sec,” he said to Doctor Electron. He flew outside, punching a hole right through the hull, then tried to find the best way to support the thing so it wouldn’t fall. It wasn’t easy, but he got it on the ground, carefully picking a wild area away from farms and homes. Going back through the door he had torn open earlier, Bennie saw that there was no sign of Doctor Electron. The machines that had held the heroes had all melted away, into whatever subatomic particles they had come from. The heroes were shaking their heads and wondering what happened. Bennie got out of there before they saw him. Checking back at the McCamber’s farm, Bennie saw Mrs. McCamber talking to the now conscious super lady. He landed behind the barn, then walked out to greet them. “Hey there, Bennie,” Mrs. McCamber said. “This here is Force. Force, this is Bennie, he runs our hardware store.” The two McCamber girls were staring at Force the same way they usually stared at Bennie. Bennie had to laugh when he saw that the superhero was holding a tea cup. “I’m a little confused about what happened,” Force said. “All I know is that that big flying machine landed over yonder,” Bennie said. “Oh,” Force said. “Can I trouble you for a ride over there?” she asked Ruthie. “Can’t you fly, like B...,” little Analisa said, her question ending abruptly when her mother gave her arm a squeeze. “Um, I don’t actually fly. I stand on a zero g disk that my husband controls.” “Cool,” both girls said. “Well, I gotta get back,” Bennie said. “Nice meeting you.” He waved as he walked behind the barn. Then he took off and flew low, getting back to Main street in just seconds. The crowd of people that had been on Main street was gone. There was nothing to indicate that anything unusual had happened. As he approached the hardware store, a voice accosted him. “Where you been, flyboy? I ain’t got all day to wait on you.” It was Miz Jomiah, who insisted on walking into town twice a week, hobbling along with her cane, whether she needed anything or not. Wouldn’t accept a ride, either. “It’s not like you to just go off and leave the store empty,” she said. “What happened?” “Just a little excitement, Miz Jomiah. I’m sure it won’t happen again.“ He landed lightly right next to her. “It had better not.“
Bennie offered the old woman his arm, and they went into Radley’s. The familiar smells of the store surrounded Bennie, and he inhaled deeply. After a day like today, he really appreciated his normal, humdrum existence. It was nice to be back where he belonged.
|