Angry Jasper-Nine

Jazz watched Katy’s ship as it pulled away from the Governor’s palace, at the top of the Space wheel. There was no mistaking its gleaming silver phallic profile. He groaned with heartache and turned away. Jazz failed to notice the pursuit craft shadowing Katy at a distance.

He preferred to think of himself as an orphan. It wasn’t true, but as far as anyone else knew Angry Jasper was an orphan. Fair number of folks believed that’s what made him so angry, and Jazz was always happy to encourage that myth. But then a lot of folks reconstruct their past to fit the pretense of their future or to soothe their own egos. Jazz was no different. Which wasn’t to say growing up was good. It wasn't, not by any stretch.

His father had worked a methane freighter running a route between Neptune and a handful of frontier outposts beyond Pluto. Depending on his mood, and in direct proportion to the amount of Martian rot-gut Bourbon Jazz consumed, his dad was either a mechanic, an engineer, a pilot or a galley cook. Each tale depended fully upon his level of self pity at that particular moment. By now Jazz had told so many different tales, he was no longer certain what his old man did. What was true was that the guy wasn’t a pleasant soul to be around. He was quick tempered, and just as quick with a backhand, and Jazz, and that smart mouth of his, had caught that hand a fair number of times.

Back then the freighters were a good deal slower, and paid a lot less, that is until a number of crews mutinied or turned to piracy. Families often accompanied the crew on runs that might last an earth year or more. Those were the days when most everything was still measured in a standard Earth time.
His mother was a whole other story. She liked to tip the bottle morning noon and night. It got so that Jazz couldn’t recall a time when she wasn’t sloshed, or passed out in her own festively colored regurgitation So, given all that, you might say Jazz was an orphan. In every tall tale is a cornerstone of truth, and Jazz carried his stone alternately in his heart or chained to one ankle.

Jazz watched Kate’s ship disappear behind the black limb of the moon. He might have pounded the console and yelled out loud from the heartache just at seeing her ship, if not for his busted ribs. Instead his head just sort of dropped to one side, as Jazz let out the longest and saddest moan. Memories flooded in upon him, all of them about Kate. In all the solar system and almost a trillion souls, why was there no one who wounded his soul the way Katy-did…did? Sometimes the universe doesn’t seem big enough to run from a busted heart.

He recalled the first time he’d seen her, all those years ago when he was working for peanuts flying security for freighters.. He didn’t recall on purpose. Instead the memory was like one of those old phonograph records playing over and over again. It was like trap, like some part of his guilty heart was intent on torturing him either for finding her or for letting her go. Either one seemed like a burden at this point.

It seemed a lifetime since that first magic moment. It seemed forever since that first time Kate threw a drink in Jazz' face as he drenched his interplanetary sorrows in that d ark and dingy space bar. There was nothing as beautiful as the grimace on her face as she fired a full glass of hooch at him with the utmost venom. Not that he hadn't had a drink or two-or twenty-thrown in his face, but there was something more to the w ay Kate did it. Hate for her was passionate and erotic. She was se4nsuously cynical and inspiringly vengeful, qualities he found far more stimulating than any other he could conceive.

He slapped her hard across the face, the sensation almost electric and arousing as the spit flew from her mouth. The slap wasn't a bind reaction to her initial affront. Something told him to slap her, and that doing so was more a matter of fate than anything else. Jazz only wished that something had also warned him about the roundhouse slug she delivered a moment later.

“Bitch!” jazz spit a mouthful of bright red blood at the floor. More ran down his chin and dripped onto his chest. Jazz smiled. It was wonderful and exhilarating!

“Pig!” she snarled, her arm and fist cocked for another go.

Twenty stall shattering minutes later Kate was leaning against the stall door, fighting the urge to grin through her eternal angst. She was puffing on a cigarette. Jazz pulled up his trousers, wanting to shout for the most amazing sex of his life, with the most amazing woman he'd ever known.

“I suppose I should go,” she chewed her lip, doing her damndest to appe ar aloof. Kate wanted him to believe this was hardly more than another casual lay when she wanted to scream and leap into his arms and never let him go.

“See you again?” he asked.

“Don't know. Small solar system.”

She pushed open the stall door and flipped the cigarette butt away. She stood at the busted bathroom mirror adjusting her clothes, and teasing her long red hair with her fingers. Jazz watched her from the stall. She was in profile, silhouetted against the mildewed walls of the bathroom, fat cobwebs hanging in the corner. He marvelled at the curve of her back, sloping back to the roundness of her ass and knew right then and there he could never love another woman.

“Let me ask you a question,” he began. “What's a girl like you doing in a crummy place like this?”

She turned to face him, threw back her head and scoffed. “That was about the best csrew I ever had. Don't dick it up by turning this into a cliche.”

It was six months before he made it back to that quadrant again. There wasn't a day he didn't think of her. The moment he walked through the door and s aw her at the bar he knew she felt the same. Being the secretly romantic souls they kept hidden from the re st of the universe they consummated their love the only way that seemed fitting. Forever after that toilet stall would be their special place.