Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (21 page)

2013

continued

19

Jason regains consciousness in a hotel room that reminds him of his suite at the Grand Vegas. For the briefest of moments, he’s back there, a 20-year old kid out on his own for the first time with a new city to protect and a hot girlfriend to have ridiculous amounts of dirty sex with. He smiles.

“The hell are you smiling at?” a woman’s voice — the bartender’s — says to him.

Jason blinks his eyes as a tall, strong blonde in a pink and white outfit with guns and knives strapped to her arms and legs moves into his line of sight. “Who are you?” he asks, and then recognizes the color scheme. “Wait, are you … um … Bubblegum Girl or something? Duplication Girl used to have one of your t-shirts.”

The woman raises her fist to punch him, but Belle Flower steps in to hold the bartender’s hand back.

“Easy, Gunner,” she says. “Jason is harmless. A complete fool, but harmless.”

Belle is out of her red, singing dress and back into her superhero costume: a red left half, a white right half, with an image of a long-stemmed rose that goes from her lower leg before finishing on her upper chest set against the white. She’s older now, of course, but there’s still a soft, roundness to her short, athletic frame that breaks his heart today as much as it did when he was sixteen and she was twenty.

“I don’t know what’s more surprising,” he says, rising to his feet and rubbing his jaw. “That I found you here, on Gratify, or that you’ve hit middle age. I guess I always think of you as —”

“Shut up, Jason,” Belle says, then points to the woman in pink. “This is Bubblegunner, and that,” she points to the viking behind him, “is Viking Vot. They both really love violence, so behave. Forgetting for a moment that your presence here threatens to ruin our operation, what are you doing running with Zenaforn Guez and his pirates?”

“Your operation?” Jason asks. “What are you —?”

Viking Vot steps in and hits Jason in the kidney, knocking him to one knee.

“Fuck!” he grunts. “What the hell is —?”

Belle steps in and kicks Jason in the chest, knocking him back against the wooden chair he was sitting in when he awoke, and sending both chair and person tumbling onto the gray carpet.

“Fuck’s sake, Belle!” Jason yells, putting his hand to his chest and pushing himself into a sitting position. “What the hell’s happened to you?”

Belle takes a few steps towards him and stops, letting him know she’s choosing not to step right to him. “You don't get to ask questions,” she says through a snarl. “I haven’t seen you since 9/11, though I am well aware of your exploits on
Faunakyat
.”

“Not all of what made the tabloids is true,” Jason says defensively. He sees Vot and Bubblegunner share an amused glance between them, and the woman takes a seat on a large, high-backed chair while the viking crosses his arms. “Just … just tell me what this is,” he says, making a circling motion with his index finger around the room, “and I’ll tell you anything and everything.”

Belle says nothing, but Vot answers for her. “We’re ORION Patrol. Special unit. Undercover.”

“I thought Gratify was a planet where everything was legal?”

“Not human trafficking,” Belle answers, offering Jason a hand up, which he takes. She points to a comfy chair and he sits in it, and she plops herself down on the foot of the bed on the opposite side of the room. “Last I heard of you was ’03 or ’04. The Revolutionaries had finally given up on you and blocked your access to the Peak formula.”

“That was 2003.”

“How’d you spend 2004?” Belle asks. “And keep it brief.”

“I cleaned up and went to work as a TV commentator,” he answers. “For American News Channel. Then later, RED News.”

Belle looks neither surprised nor impressed nor distraught by this. “2005.”

“I published my memoir,” he says, coughing with slight embarrassment. “It was called
Sex, Drugs, and Capes
, which got me fired from RED because it was … well, it was about sex, drugs, and capes. Very salacious. I was trying —”

“2006.”

“Two for one,” he says, not bothering to do anything but be compliant. This new, harder Belle was scaring him. “I spent most of 2006 and 2007 doing the convention circuit, selling and signing memorabilia.” He purses his lips and his eyes drop to the floor. “I … uh … well, it was a miserable life and I started hitting the coke, again.”

“2008.”

“Fuck, Belle,” Jason says, throwing up his hands. “What turned you so damn cold? I mean, I own my mistakes, but —”

“2008.”

Jason sighs. “After I published my memoir, no one in the superhero community wanted anything to do with me, so I couldn’t appeal to anyone for help. I, uh … oh, hell, I checked myself into a rehab clinic. I mean, it was also a reality television show, but I needed a way to pay for it, so —”

“2009.”

“God fuck it, Belle!” Jason yells, to the amusement of Vot and Bubblegunner. “It worked. Finally! It worked. I got off the coke and haven’t been back on it, since! That’s almost five years now!”

“2009.”

He slumps back in his chair.

“Well, that’s where things get complicated.”

“You’ve got,” she glances to the clock on the wall above him, “one hour, six minutes before we have to move. Unless your pirate friends find us first.”

“Look, they’re not —”

“Jason,” Belle says, rising to her feet, crossing the bedroom floor, and leaning down to stick her face in his, “you are not nearly smart enough to tell us what’s going on. If you’re running with the
Temperance
, you’ve either gone bad or you’re on your way or you are the dumbest piece of crap on a planet made of crap. Now, tell me what happened to you in 2009.”

2009

1

Jason has never felt more uncomfortable in his own uniform.

It’s been six years since he was officially Kid Rapscallion, but while the Revolutionaries cut him off from his steroid serum, they did not confiscate his uniform. He wears that red, black, and white uniform on this night, as he sits at a table and signs autographs for his latest book,
The Good We Did
.

He has a call in to Nancy and a call in to his attorney. Tonight is the penultimate stop of this increasingly disappointing book tour, and after hitting Oxford in two days, he’ll be heading back to Las Vegas. He’ll see Nancy, if she lets him, because there isn’t anyone else to see. Hopefully, he’ll hear back from his attorney in the next few days about Rapscallion’s will. It’s been tied up in legal red tape because of Colbie’s disappearance, but he’s hoping it’s finally time to let him have his money. Jason doesn’t know how much money he’s getting, but hopes it’s enough to buy a small house somewhere and drop off the grid.

But tonight …

“Thank you,” Jason says to the heavyset guy wearing a t-shirt two sizes two small for him as he hands back a copy of his book.

Three and a half years earlier, he had published a scandalous account of his life as a superhero entitled
Sex, Drugs, and Capes
. It was a brief
New York Times
bestseller and helped re-stock his bank account, but it also ostracized him from most of the superhero community.

“Why did you write it?” the bookstore’s assistant, a somewhat attractive woman in her mid-30s asks him. Her job for this signing is to sit next to him and make sure the autograph seekers have a copy of the book out and turned to the correct page; she also writes their name on a Post-It note that she slaps on the book so Jason knows how to spell their name. When the signing started 23 minutes ago, there was a decent crowd, but the line has already been exhausted, and most of the people milling about the chain store now have little interest in Jason. As a result, the woman — her name tag reads, “LYDIA” — has decided it’s okay to engage Jason in conversation, even though she is not supposed to engage him in conversation.

Jason decides not to complain about it; it’s his agent’s decision to include that rider and Jason isn’t in the mood to enforce it. Besides, LYDIA looks like a bit like Rachel Ray and that works for him, even if the accent is wrong.

“Which book?” he asks, knowing that most people still want to talk about
Sex
instead of
Good
.

“This one,” Lydia says, tapping the new book.

“My therapist thought it was the right thing to do,” Jason says, offering a small smile.

“Your TV therapist or your real therapist?” she asks. “I saw
Super Addiction
,” she adds, though she doesn’t need to. “I thought Prospector Patty was awfully mean to you.”

“Well, she does think of me as her nemesis,” Jason adds, taking a sip of water as his eyes scan the bookstore, hoping to draw anyone to him so he can sign another copy. The eyes that do meet his from passers-by are either quickly averted or look at him through a cloud of confusion, trying to remember who he is. Wanting to change the subject, he says, “I was born a couple hours from here, you know. Topha, Mississippi.”

“You don’t sound southern,” Lydia says, increasing her own accent in the process.

“We moved around a lot when I was a kid.”

“Say,” Lydia says, adjusting herself on the seat, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Jason says politely, knowing this question is going to be something about Belle or Becca or Duplication Girl or maybe whether or not Rapscallion ever buggered him because of course he would deny it to everyone else but sure, what the heck, I’ll tell you, woman I’ve known for 27 minutes. “What would you like to know?”

Lydia gives the store a quick scan to make sure no one can hear her, then leans in, smiles, brushes a stray piece of hair off her face, and asks, “Do you want to fuck my tits?”

2

“Ready for round 2?” Lydia asks.

“Yeah,” he says as she rises from her knees and and turns around, placing her arms on a stack of books in the store room. “Oh, and put your mask on. It’s hotter that way.”

3

“God, that was good,” she says, smiling as she pulls her clothes back on. “Just, make sure you don’t tell anyone, okay? My husband is the jealous type.”

“Not a problem,” he says, thinking this woman has, without question, the filthiest mouth he has ever heard in his life. For the first time since his youth, the just-completed sex feels dirty in all the wrong ways, and shame descends on him. He wants to be out of this bookstore and away from this woman.

“I mean, if you want to include it in your next book, that’s totally fine, just change my name to Lynda or Lisa or something, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, with no intention of ever writing anything about this moment.

“Say, do you have a Twitter account?” she asks, running a hand through her sweaty hair to make it look presentable.

“I don’t,” he says.

“You totally should,” Lydia smiles.

4

Jason sits in a Waffle House in normal clothes, halfway through his Southwestern omelet and extra large orange juice, trying to think of something cool to say for his first tweet, when the shots are fired.

“Where is he?” a large man with a thick, handlebar mustache bellows as he fires off two more round. “Where is that wife-stealing piece of shit, Kid Rapscallion?”

5

What Jason sees is the angry husband, the Colt .45, the panicked crowd. His first instinct is to run at the husband, his second is to stay where he is as the man is firing into the ceiling and not into the crowd, and the third instinct is driven by the shame of hesitating. He does not have his powers anymore and it’s been years since he’s fought anybody beyond the occasional drunk cosplayer at a comic book convention.

“I’m here,” he says, rising to his feet. “Let everyone else go and you and I can-”

The husband fires three shots and Jason flinches, but the bullets sail over his head.

The husband keeps firing.

Click.

Click.

Click.

He throws the gun at Jason and charges straight at him.

6

What Jason doesn’t see as his muscles try to remember how to deflect and counter against a larger opponent is Lydia standing in the window with a video camera, smiling madly as her husband trades blows with her latest lover.

7

Jason runs away before the cops arrive, pausing only when he has reached some abandoned train tracks a half-mile away. He has knocked the husband down and bashed him in the head with a plate half-covered with hash browns and a three-quarter eaten southwestern omelet. He tells himself he has run away because he wants to draw the husband outside, and he supposes that is a half-truth.

There is a rental car in his name back in the parking lot, and he is pretty certain at least one of the waitresses has recognized him.

He hears the police sirens before he sees the husband exit the restaurant, and he knows he has to go back.

“Should’ve grabbed the gun, dummy,” he scolds himself.

“Kid Rapscallion, you are under arrest.”

“For what?” he asks, spinning around. “Oh, shit,” he says, seeing that the man facing him is not one of Mississippi’s finest boys in blue, but a red-skinned man in black chain mail and leather pants. “The CC.”

“Kid Rapscallion,” the alien police officer announces, “you are under arrest for engaging in premarital relations with the Princess Jula. How do you plead?”

“Um … not guilty?”

The officer reaches behind him and pulls a paperback copy of
Sex, Drugs, and Capes
. “Not according to pages 152-156 of your book. Or is this a lie? I will inform you that libel is also a class one crime on
Faunakyat
. Either way, you are coming with us.”

8

It takes six months for The Trial of Kid Rapscallion to start on
Faunakyat
, a world of high fantasy that pioneers the use of “green” technology. Jason’s cell is private and made of thick vines with large, waxy yellow leaves. He is allowed to read and exercise, and his grassy cell is larger than the house he shared with Melody back in Las Vegas.

He almost wants to stay in jail.

9

“I would like to read into the record a section of Kid Rapscallion’s autobiography, the lasciviously-rendered
Sex, Drugs, and Capes: The Kid Rapscallion Story
, written by the man sitting in the Chair of the Accused. I quote:

“‘Maybe the age difference between us was too great. I was 17 and Belle was 20 and there’s a lot of growing up between the two. I don’t know. These are the things my therapists have said, but back then, what mattered most to me was that I was sort of dating one of the most beautiful women on the planet and she wouldn’t have sex with me.

“Think about that. Think of how many guys thought of Belle Flower’s boobs while pumping their seed into a spare sock or in the shower and here I was, dating her, and doing no more they were. Seriously, I actually asked for socks for Christmas because of the workout I was giving them. It was frustrating.

“You can forget sex and hand jobs and blowjobs and whatever jobs, too. She wouldn’t even let me make out with her and feel her up. There was zero dry humping allowed.

“Did I love Belle? Sure, but I was 17, you know, and I had women throwing themselves at me all the time, offering to do things my girlfriend wouldn’t. All because she didn’t “believe in premarital sex.” I don’t even know what that means. I mean, it was happening to lots of people all over the place, so it’s not like it was Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, you know? But Belle wanted to be some kind of idealistic hero.

“We should have all respected her for that, but we hated her, instead. It was like, do you read comics? That’s silly. No one reads comics anymore. Have you seen one, though? They’re all made of glossy paper and shiny and they look amazing. Remember the comics from the ‘80s? Or ‘60s? They’re all icky and dull and have, like 6 colors or something. Well, the rest of us at the Training Center hated her for wanting to be one of those heroes. We thought we were all shiny and new and there was Belle, actively reminding us of old ideologies and approaches.

“Here’s a truth I didn’t realize until later: even if she’d had sex with me morning, noon, and night the relationship wouldn’t have lasted.

“The day we broke up … she showed me something I didn’t want to see. But Belle, in her infinite wisdom, thought I did need to see it and so I broke up with her and called Jula to see if she could get to San Francisco in time to go with me to see Pearl Jam.

“I barely remember anything about the concert except that Jula had brought these hallucinogenic mushrooms with her, which we ate before the show even started. There were native to
Faunakyat
, she said, and were used by lovers to enhance their sex. Something about how the mushroom broke down with saliva and I don’t know. Once she said, ‘I didn’t come all this way to hear about Belle, okay? I came all this way to be your first.’

“She wasn’t my first, of course, as I had just learned thanks to Belle and that stupid Amulet of Anamnesis, but I wasn’t about to tell her about that other stuff with Sandra, so I nodded dumbly and followed her around all night. We ended up near the Golden Gate Bridge and while I’d like to think I was amazing, I know it was her that supplied all of the amazingness. When we were finished, she kissed me on the cheek, said she’d see me back at the Training Center when the summer was over, and left me there.

“I never saw her again.’”

10

“Do you know the cultural significance of the Coupling Mushrooms?” the prosecutor asks.

“I do not.”

“They are reserved for married couples,” she informs him. “The mushrooms are ingested by couples on their wedding night.”

“Okay.”

“Their wedding night, Mr. Kitmore,” the prosecutor repeats.

11

Jason is hauled in handcuffs to the castle. It amuses him, in some way, that he has been dragged across the universe and put in jungle prison for six months, only to wind up in a castle made of what appears to be ordinary bricks. The castle is not enormous, as these things go, and neither is the personality of the man he is brought to stand before.

King Iula, Jula’s father.

The middle-aged king in the ratty black furs has seen better days. Jason has never met him, but the bulbous, coughing, withered man in front of him is nothing like the warrior-philosopher that Jula had described to him at the Training Center in Zurich. There is an attendant on either side of the throne, and an army of servants standing at the ready with all manner of drink and food and medicine.