Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story

by Bousquet, Mark

  “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.

  “The court is going to find you guilty,” King Iula says, motioning for what looks like a turkey leg. “You’re going to be
fed to the lava ocean. Your death will be painful and long.”

  “So … I should probably try to escape, is what you’re saying?”

  Iula chuckles and bits of meat juice dribble down his chin. “The Coupling Mushrooms are one of our oldest traditions. Do you know,” he asks, life momentarily coming to his clouded eyes, “how Jula has spent the last ten years for shaming me with her thievery and mockery of our marriage customs?”

  “It’s a castle and you’re a king, so I’m guessing there’s a tower or a dungeon involved.”

  The drumstick, still mostly whole, falls from Iula’s hand as he licks the skin around his lips. Two servants run up the small steps to his throne to dab juice away from his rolling neck but Iula shoves them away.

  “There is a tower, yes,” he says, pulling his chain mail off his stomach to scratch his belly button. “It is kept a thousand kilometers from here, in a deep valley of rock. Nothing grows there. No one has ever wanted to go there, which is why we built our prison in that canyon. Jula is there, in a prison cell with a small bed. She is not kept with the general population, of course, because no one knows she is alive. If they did … well, I would not be king anymore. The forces that conspire against me would use her whore behavior to turn the tide against me, and I cannot have that! I cannot have that!”

  King Iula’s rant dissolves into a fit of coughing as saliva runs out of the corners of his mouth.

  “While you have lived your life, my daughter sits in jail,” he continues when his coughing fit has stilled. “Her life is lived in complete solitude. There are no windows for her to look out, no visitors for her to converse with. Even her meals are delivered when she sleeps. There is only one thing to break up her monotony.”

  “What?” Jason asks. “Bridge club on Fridays?”

  “We do not kill lightly, human, but for those who have broken our most honored laws, death is an option we keep. Since Jula has been imprisoned, we have put 159 men and women to death for various crimes against Faunakyat. Before they are killed, they are given a last meal, a last visit from a loved one, and,” his eyes narrow, “an hour with my daughter to do whatever they want. I have read your book, human, and take it to your core when I tell you that for all the depravity you describe, there are none so deprived as those with two hours to live and one hour to do whatever they want with the beautiful daughter of the man about to execute them.”

  12

  Jason’s hands ball into fists and he forgets, for the moment, that he is no longer what he was. He forgets that six months ago he could do no more than hold his own with a jealous husband in Hicksville. All he can see is the girl he knew and the pure evilness of a father who would punish his daughter in such a manner.

  “I am going to fucking kill you,” Jason promises.

  The handcuffs on his wrists and ankles send waves of electricity through his body, dropping him on the spot.

  “Why would you want to kill me?” King Iula asks, licking meat juice off of his fat fingers. “I plan to make you heir to my throne.”

  PART

  THIRTEEN

  2013

  continued

  20

  “If you want details on what Jula was like when I opened her cell door,” Jason says, his eyes raging at Belle, “you can go drown yourself in Viking Boy’s piss.”

  Belle is taken aback at the story, but determines she will hold her ground. A large part of her thinks Jason is lying, even with the obvious pain recounting this portion of the story causes him.

  “She seems to have recovered,” Belle says. “The tabloids have been full of stories about the two of you over the past few years. If you’re not breaking up, you’re making up. Plenty of expensive vacations, too. Not to mention the affairs, the partying, the visits to see Fred at the reserve.”

  Jason slumps back, defeated. “Lies. All lies,” he says. “All those vacations were photoshopped and all the stories were made up. I haven’t seen Fred since I gave him to that animal preserve. The story that King Iula fed the press was that we had spent the last decade traveling in space and had now come home. No one smart believed it, of course, even if they didn’t know Iula had been whoring her out to Faunakyat’s worst criminals, but the public did love their prodigal daughter. We were given a room in the castle and we made a few public appearances and the like, but it was all at the king’s bidding. Mostly, we just sat in the room and grew to like being quiet with one another.”

  “I …” Belle lets her voice trail off before taking a deep breath. “I swear to God, Jason, if you’re lying about this …”

  Tears start coming to his face and he finds he can’t stop them, that he doesn’t want to stop them. All the pain that he’s been through, both the pain he's experienced and the pain he’s caused, seems to rise up in that moment and he understands what a failure his life has been. “When Iula died … his court … they killed her. They fucking killed her.”

  “Jason,” Viking Vot says calmly, “she’s not dead. She was on the news earlier.”

  He shakes his head. “Body double. Fucking clone, actually. They killed the king, killed her and would have killed me, but that’s when Zen and the Temperance arrived and saved me. Lucky me,” he says, but it sounds like he believes anything but that. “I wish I’d died there,” he admits, sobbing. “Jula was … she was damaged, of course, but over time …” he shrugs and wails in pain before controlling himself.

  “Two damaged people, her and I,” he says. “At least for awhile, there, we had each other.”

  21

  “What are we going to do with him?” Bubblegunner asks.

  “I don’t know,” Belle admits.

  “It’s your call,” Gunner tells her. “Vot and I will back it, whatever it is, but as much as you don’t want him around, Belle, we can use him. We can take down the Temperance and we can get all that cocaine he stole. We are cops, after all. The Eunofalagians can feed their entire popu—”

  “I know what they can do with it!” Belle snaps. She takes a few breaths and looks over to Jason, who’s busy blowing his nose and composing himself from his story. “I know what they can do with it,” she repeats in a calmer voice, “and I know what we are.”

  “Then what’s the problem, Belle?” Vot asks.

  Her eyes have never left Jason, and now his eyes are looking up at hers. Belle doesn’t know what to think because she’s thinking everything, reliving every moment, every feeling, every memory of the person Jason was and what he’d been through. He could be charming and funny, but he could also drop away to dark places. She knows why that happened after seeing what the Amulet of Anamnesis had taken from him, but he broke up with her because he didn’t respect her enough to …

  “What’s the problem, Vot?” Belle asks. “Honestly, I don’t know if I can trust him to not screw this up.”

  22

  “If you screw us on this, Jason,” Belle says, handing him a bottle of Schlitz, and letting the thought go unfinished.

  “You’ll what? Not talk to me for another decade?” he says, taking a swig and looking at the other 23 bottles in the case. “Do you really expect me to drink all that?”

  “I expect you to drink as much as you can until you pass out or Zen’s crew gets here first,” Belle says. “It will explain where you’ve been since you disappeared from Tribold’s sight. Our tech people say they’ve been scanning any and all electronic bands for you. Gunner payed cash for the beer, but we’ve ordered you a hooker under your own name. I’d suggest you sleep with her. To keep your cover, and all. It shouldn’t be hard, unless sex isn’t the most important thing in your life anymore.”

  Jason shakes his head and looks up at her. “I’m sorry for what I wanted from you back then, Belle. I am.” He rises to his feet, knocks back his head, and downs the rest of the bottle. “But I wonder if you’re more angry at me for being an asshole, or at yourself for loving an asshole like me. Because if you didn’t ever love me, you wouldn’t be such a bitch to me now.”

  J
ason tosses the bottle towards the bathroom, where the bottle shatters against the hard floor, but doesn’t take his eyes off of Belle. He wants her to apologize or back down or do so little as to give him the twitch of an eye to show that his words had an effect, but she is stone cold blank.

  There is a knock at the door.

  “Your whore is here,” Belle says. “I ordered her for you myself. Picked out her wardrobe, too.”

  23

  Jason opens the door and the hooker smiles at him.

  “Hi, love,” she says. “Are you, Jason?”

  She looks exactly like twenty-year old Belle, right down to the costume she’s wearing.

  24

  “So I walk in,” Lavinia laughs, “and Jason here is balls deep in some hooker, a bottle of Schlitz in each hand, screaming like a wild child. ‘Take it, Belle!’ he’s yelling. And the hooker, oh gods, the hooker is like, ‘My name isn’t Belle,’ and Jason is like, ‘You’re a hooker! Your name is what I say it is! Hooker!’ Gods, funniest thing I’ve seen in months.”

  A drunk Jason shrugs and laughs and plops himself down into the co-pilot’s seat in the Temperance’s cockpit. He puts his hands on the controls and acts like he’s trying to fly the plane.

  “How’re ya felling there, Kid?” Zen asks.

  “I really want to bury my face a mountain of cocaine,” he says, smiling and licking his lips.

  “Oh, yeah?” Livinia says, standing behind his chair and giving him a massage. “You wouldn’t know where we could find some, do you? You know, to help us not go there?”