I Am a Hero

Albert Beiman had dreamed of being a super hero all of his life. Like many young boys, he collected comic books containing tales of superpower-wielding men performing amazing acts of courage. He hid the comic from his father who was a practical man upon whom fictional feats of strength and courage were wasted.

Albie’s dad was a firm believer in hard work, and when Albie had expressed early interest in comic books and super heroes, his father had lifted the small boy up, set him on his workbench, and explained that real heroes were the men and women who got up each morning, worked hard at their jobs, and looked after their family members. Flying, ex-ray vision, and super-strength were merely whims of fancy and not worthy of one’s time.

When Albie’s father finished, he noticed his son was on the verge of tears. The man hadn’t intended to upset his son. He’d simply wanted to instill a work ethic in the boy, and he feared an over-active imagination would lead to a path of laziness. He, like any father, wanted the best for his boy. He wanted Albie to surpass him in whatever he undertook in his life.

“I’ll make you a deal, Albie.”

The young boy looked up while continuing to fight off tears.

“I’ll share a little secret with you if you promise not to tell anyone.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed as he considered what his father had said. His young brain was processing whether or not his dad was teasing him or was about to reveal something worthwhile. The boy settled on the thing being worthwhile and nodded his head vigorously.

Albie’s father looked carefully to his left and then to his right. He made a show of peering over his shoulder, putting a finger over his lips to instruct the child to remain silent, and then he leaned in close to Albie.

“The truth is, I have a secret power of my own, and if you want, I’ll pass it along to you.”

Albie’s eyes narrowed again, and he crossed his arms over his chest. He knew a gyp when he heard one.

“You’re lying, and lying isn’t right.” The indignance in the boy’s voice was punctuated by the firm nod he tacked on to the end of his sentence.

Albie’s father shrugged his shoulders, grabbed the boy under the arms, and hoisted him up slightly so that he might place him back on solid ground. “Well, then. Off you go, I suppose.”

The boy watched as his father turned away from him and began tinkering with something on his bench. It shocked Albie that this father wasn’t even going to try to convince him of his supposed power. It shocked the boy even more that his father had simply dismissed the entire thing so abruptly and returned to whatever it was he he’d been working on.

Albie didn’t want to bite—he was sure his father was only ignoring him to get the boy to pursue whatever it was he was going to say he could do—but the silent treatment his father had dished out was making it very hard for Albie to resist pursuing the issue.

The boy stood behind his father while mentally ordering himself to turn and leave, but his orders were those of a child, and even in his child’s mind, they held little weight.

“Okay, tell me, then,” Albie blurted out.

His father stopped what he was doing and made a show of turning around and looking down at him.

“You’re still here? I thought you’d gone off somewhere. Now, what was it you wanted?”

Albie took in a dramatic breath, rolled his eyes at his father, and replied, “tell me your secret power.”

It was the father’s turn to narrow his eyes.

“Can I trust you to keep my secret?”

The boy was getting frustrated, but he obediently nodded his head. As an afterthought, he made an “X” over his heart with the index finger of his right hand.

Albie’s father reached down for the boy and placed him back up on the workbench. He didn’t look around or remind the boy to be quiet this time, but he did lean in close to him before saying in a whispered voice,

“We Beiman’s keep the world on course. We’re not ordinary electricians.”

Albie’s disappointment covered his face.

“C’mon, Dad. Being an electrician’s not a superpower.”

The father raised an eyebrow, “Oh, no?” he asked his boy. “If I don’t have a superpower, how can I do this?”

As he spoke the word “this,” Albie’s father made a gesture with his right arm and hand in the direction of the garage door opener, and as if on cue, the door slowly ground to life and began to open.

“Wow! How’d you do that?” Albie exclaimed.

His father began to answer when Mrs. Beiman pulled into the driveway.

Albie was too disappointed to notice the surprise on his father’s face. The boy waved at his mother and grumbled out a request for his father to put him down. Mr. Beiman did as the boy asked and didn’t pursue the super-power issue with the boy who stalked off toward the station wagon in search of whatever treasures his mother had brought home from the grocery store.

* * *

“Why so glum, Albie?”

Albie’s response to his mother was a half-hearted shrug of his shoulders. He wasn’t in the mood to admit to his mom that his father had suckered him into a fleeting belief in a familial superpower. His mother was about to pursue her son’s mood when the phone rang.

“Hello? Yes, he is. Just a moment.”

Albie’s mother cupped one hand over the bottom of the telephone receiver, looked down at her son, and asked him to go out to the garage and tell his father the phone was for him. Before Albie could move, his father walked in and stepped toward the receiver his wife was holding.

“I’m on my way Mick. Be there in ten minutes.”

Albie’s father hung up the receiver, looked at his wife who nodded as if she knew exactly what was going on, and then he spoke to his son.

“Want to come along and see what your ol’ dad can do?”

Albie couldn’t think of a single time his father had asked him to tag along on a job, and this fact put the boy’s mind on edge. On the one hand, he wanted desperately to refuse simply because his father had asked him, but on the other, the opportunity to tag along with his father was too cool to pass up.

“Okay, I guess.” Albie tried his best to sound bored when he answered.

“Peter, it’s not safe.”

Albie’s father looked at Albie’s mother, and the boy saw a moment of doubt cross his father’s face, but before Albie could issue a plea in his defense, his father replied.

“It’s time he learns, Vi.”

Albie’s mother gave her husband the slightest of nods and moved toward her son who she grabbed and pulled into her and from whom she collected both a kiss and a hug before releasing him.

“You two be careful,” she said as she blew an air kiss to each of them.

* * *

To Albie, the drive seemed to take forever, but in truth, it took the pair just under ten minutes to arrive at their destination—a destination that was hundreds of miles from their home. It would be weeks before Albie put all of the pieces together: the fact that his father had known there was a call for him; the way his dad answered the caller without so much as hearing the voice on the other end of the telephone line; how his father had simply climbed into the van and driven to a location without being told where to go. All Albie knew at the moment they arrived at their destination was wherever they were, it wasn’t anywhere near his house. In fact, they seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

“C’mon, son.” Albie’s father had climbed out of the van and was motioning for the boy to follow him. As Albie got out, he noticed there was nothing in any direction as far as he could see, save for an old, beat up truck next to which stood a man.

“Where’s she at, Mick?”

Mick’s head ticked slightly, indicating the thing was behind him and to his right. Mick also managed to shoot a long, hard stare at Albie.

“What’s with the kid, Peter?” The man’s head ticked again, only this time his motion was directed at Albie.

“There’s nothing to worry about. This here’s my son, Albie.” As his father spoke, the boy saw him look in his direction, and there was something in the look his father gave him that made Albie understand he needed to be on his best behavior.

“Pleasure to meet you, sir.” Albie took a step towards Mick and extended a hand as he spoke. Mick didn’t return the gesture. Instead, he spat a used up wad of chewing tobacco into the dirt at the boy’s feet, climbed into the bed of his truck, started up the engine, and drove away.

Albie watched the truck’s disappearing dusty path, and looked back at his father who motioned for him to follow. A few hundred feet from where they had met up with Mick was what they were after.

“There she is.” Albie’s father pointed to a tangle of wires sticking up out of the ground.

“What is it?” Albie asked his father.

“That, son, is a reset device.”

“What’s a ‘reset device’?”

Albie’s father took a step toward the wires and produced a pair of cutters from one of his back pockets.

“A reset device is just what it sounds like: if it’s activated, everything gets reset. That means the world goes back to the way it was at the beginning.”

Albie looked at his father, and his earlier anger began to resurface. He didn’t like his dad teasing him.

Albie’s father saw the look on his son’s face, and while it disappointed him his son didn’t believe him, he recalled having had a similar reaction when his own father had passed along the gift.

“I’ll tell you what, Albie. How about I let you cut the wire, okay?”

Albie didn’t mean to do it, but a snicker escaped him. It wasn’t that he believed his father, but he hadn’t meant to be disrespectful, either.

His father’s face wrinkled in what was clearly angry disappointment, and Albie found himself divided: part of him was glad he’d hurt his father, but the other part of him felt a bit of shame. He steeled himself with a reminder that this had all started because his dad couldn’t accept his reading comic books and admiring superpowers. Albie assured himself his father deserved a certain amount of disrespect for pretending he could control energy, and for mocking a young boy’s imagination.

“Hey, are you listening to me?”

Albie looked down at his father who was bent over the tangle of wires. The boy hadn’t heard a thing his father said.

“I said I could prove our powers to you, boy. Pay attention!”

Albie was shocked at the tone and level of his father’s voice, and he focused on what his dad was doing.

“You’ve got to look at the wires closely. The green wire disables the device. The yellow one pauses things. The red wires activate it, and that means resetting the world, and that’s not a good thing.”

Albie looked at the bunch of wires, but they were all red. Even when he crinkled up his nose while squinting the sun away, all he saw was a gob of red.

“Are the green and yellow wires buried?”

The man looked up at his son, and then back down at the wires.

“You don’t see them?”

Albie shook his head, and for a moment, the look on his father’s face went completely blank. During that moment, a sense of dread spread over Albie, and he grew very afraid.

His father’s eyes met his own, and he opened his mouth as if to ask the boy another question, but instead of releasing words, his lips spread into a smile, and with his father’s smile, the boy’s sense of dread disappeared.

“Try now.”

Albie’s father handed the boy the wire cutters he’d been holding, and as soon as the boy had them in his fist, the green and yellow wires appeared in the tangle of red ones.

“Cool! How’d you do that?”

Albie still didn’t believe his father had superpowers, but whatever he’d done with the wires and the cutters was a great trick, and Albie had already begun to count the ways he could use the trick to his advantage with the guys back home.

“There’s no trick, kiddo. It’s just what we Bieman’s do. We make sure the world doesn’t get reset.”

Albie’s father could tell his son was impressed, but he also saw clearly the boy’s excitement was not because he was taking his father seriously.

“I’ll show you. Take the snippers and clip the yellow wire.”

Albie did as his father told him, but nothing happened. At least that’s what Albie believed until he looked back at his father and noticed the five o’clock shadow on his father’s face and the receding sunlight.

Before the boy could pepper his father with more questions, the man looked at his watch and then back at his son.

“Cut the green one, Albie. The time’s almost up.”

“Time?”

“Once the unit’s located and dug up, it’s got to be deactivated within ten hours, or it goes off, and. . .”

“And the world gets reset, right, Dad?”

Albie’s father grinned at the boy who looked back at the tangle of wires, reached out, and clipped the green one.

Nothing discernible happened, but Albie understood this meant things had gone well. He smiled up at his father, handed over the wire cutters, and proudly followed his dad back to the van.