“Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive!”

“Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive!” is the Superman catchphrase Billy Covington used to open games with the younger twins. First heard as part of childhood make-believe, the line acquires a grave second meaning in retrospect: Billy’s death in Vietnam exposes the vulnerability hidden inside the fantasy of invincibility and shapes Ma’s determination to protect her sons.

The Line in Childhood Play

Billy was four years older than Dominick Birdsey and Thomas Birdsey. After his father left and his mother worked downtown, he often came to the twins’ house after school. He excelled at tag and baseball, and Superman was one of his favorite games. For the role, he brought Superman pajamas in his school bag and completed the costume with a bath towel that Ma pinned around his neck. His shouted opening announced the imagined hero’s extraordinary speed and strength; the children’s play made that heroic confidence something they could share.

From Make-Believe to Loss

Billy later became the twins’ paperboy, then graduated from high school and enlisted in the Air Force. He was killed near Haiphong during a bombing raid in Vietnam. At sixteen, Dominick did not dwell on the meaning of Billy’s death or its implications for himself and Thomas. Ma, however, was devastated. On the drive back from the memorial service, she cursed the war—a startling departure from her usual manner—and afterward kept Billy’s photograph beside family portraits and prayed for his soul.

Retrospective Meaning

The remembered catchphrase sharpens the contrast between the boy who played an invincible hero and the young man who could be killed. Years later, Dominick understands Billy as a “preview of coming attractions” for the twins: if Superman’s young companion could be lost, his younger friends were not beyond danger either. What had seemed to Dominick an excessive response to a neighbor’s death now appears as Ma’s fear for her sons. Her choice to abandon her long-saved plan for a grandfather clock and obtain a typewriter instead made their success—and, as Dominick interprets it, their safety—the priority. In this recollection, the Superman line is more than a trace of a childhood game: it marks the distance between imagined protection and the real danger Ma believed education might help the twins escape.