Hero

by Perry Moore

  In my room I grabbed the Swiss Army knife my dad gave me for Christmas. I stood there picking at a hangnail as I tried to think about what my life would be like once I left, where I'd live, where I'd work, how I'd finish school. I caught myself thinking about falling in love with someone who I hoped was out there right now thinking about the possibility of me, but I quickly banished the notion. It was that kind of thinking that landed me in this situation to begin with. Hope can ruin you.

  I packed exactly seven clean pairs of socks and underwear. I wanted to take more so I wouldn't have to do as much laundry, but the bag was only so big and I needed to be able to sling it over my shoulder without it slowing me down. The hardest part was actually figuring out which clothes to take. I'd need something nice for a good job interview, and my sport coat and tie didn't fold up nicely in the bag. I folded the jacket seven different ways from Sunday before I just wadded it up beside my sweatpants in a corner of the bag. In the bathroom I threw my toothbrush in my dop kit and stopped at my reflection in the mirror. I grabbed some tweezers and plucked at a stray hair growing in the middle of my eyebrows. I'd never seen a hair there before, which could only mean there'd be more, so I tossed the tweezers in, too.

  By the time the moon had drifted above the window's line of sight, I decided my food choices hadn't been wise. I could drink water for free anywhere and therefore should ditch the drinks and pack more food, maybe some canned goods, maybe some peanut butter.

  I headed downstairs back to the kitchen, but stopped by the shelves with the photo albums. I reached up high and dragged one of the albums off the dusty top shelf.

  I opened to a page of me at eleven months drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The tradition continued through my childhood. My dad used to cook out on the grill, when it began to get nice outside in late May, when the gardenia bush began to bloom. He'd come home from work, sometimes whistling a Johnny Cash song, and you'd never know he had any troubles while he dragged out the industrial-size sack of charcoal and filled up the grill, lighting it just so, because only amateurs used lighter fluid. Then we'd wait at least an hour to get the coals perfect, a radiating core of molten light in the middle, before we could actually put the burgers on. It drove Mom crazy.

  Mom would pass the long wait by shooing away flies from the cheap meat patties and slicing onions and looking out on the horizon for something that never seemed to come. While he waited for the embers to light in that perfect configuration, Dad would enjoy a beer (or two) on the deck he'd built with his own two hands. And he'd ask yours truly, each time, to go inside and grab the beer he'd put in the freezer. And each time I'd shake it up as much as possible before I brought it out to him.

  Sometimes I'd toss the can up in the air and spin it like a baton, sometimes I'd jump up and down with it, sometimes I'd roll it down the kitchen floor like I was bowling. I'd walk out onto the deck slowly, as if there was nothing to hide, and I could always tell he knew what I was up to. That was part of the ritual, part of the game. I'm sure he could read my smirk when he took the beer out of my tiny hands, but he played along anyway. Sometimes he'd hold it over the grill and pretend like he was going to explode it over my burger, sometimes he'd ask me to open it. Sometimes he'd chase me around the deck threatening to spray it in my direction, and sometimes he'd open it up and act surprised when the spray caught him in the eye. He was consistent about one thing, however: he always let me take a sip, safely out of Mom's line of vision, before he set the hot dogs on the grill.

  I came across a picture my mom's sister had taken of us at a cookout where I'd accidentally given Mom the can of Dad's shaken beer. Aunt Mary Sue snapped the shot the instant Mom opened the beer, and the entire picture exploded with a foamy spray on top of elated, surprised faces. That had always been my mother's favorite picture, and I stared at a chocolate smudged thumbprint in the corner that proved it.

  I leafed through the rest of the album and pulled down another one. This one had a series of shots Dad took on one of our frequent train-watching trips. Dad loved to follow trains, take pictures of the engines, wait at crossroads in deserted towns for some old, rarely seen engine to whirr past us. Mom would pack a picnic lunch, and we'd pile into the car and bounce along a deserted main street in some choked-out old town, with me crawling around the weeds near the tracks looking for June bugs and railroad spikes while Mom and Dad drank beer and munched deviled eggs until the train passed. By the time I was a teenager, those trips felt like punishment, but in the pictures we were nothing but broad smiles in desiccated towns. We laughed with unbridled joy whenever the trains finally whizzed past and sent the wind whipping through our hair.

  I rubbed my finger over the picture of my mother at my kindergarten graduation. Time seemed to have faded it. My mother stood behind my father in the back row of the audience, and her image had become blurry. I remember how uncomfortable my mother was with having her picture taken. She must have fidgeted each time someone snapped the shot; that would explain the blur. I flipped through the rest of the pages and noticed that while the shots seemed clear, Mora's image in them had become increasingly faded. She'd been growing fainter and fainter by the year, and I was surprised I'd never noticed it before. By the time I saw the picture from my first-ever basketball game, you could barely see her at all sitting behind my father on the bleachers.

  I checked my watch. I'd been stupid to look at old pictures. I should have been on the road long ago. It was a quarter of eleven, and I hadn't even figured out what I was going to do for money.

  I flipped the album's pages to my mom's favorite shot—of the beer can exploding on us. I peeled back the cellophane so I could remove the picture and noticed a little strip of paper poking out from behind it. I stripped the photo off the sticky page, and there it was.

  I couldn't believe what I saw.

  I glanced around the room. Maybe there was a camera, maybe this was a practical joke. It had to be. But when I looked back down at the page, it was plain as day.

  A note.

  The edges of the paper were almost as dry and brittle as the picture. I tore off all the other photos, one by one, and discovered underneath each a hidden treasure of pictures, another set of photos I was never meant to see, until now.

  I stared down at the note in my hands, my fingertips numb, and the words, written in my mother's perfect, deliberate cursive, burned in my mind:

  To my son. Know yourself.

  I tucked the stack of photos into my bag and ran out the door.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AS THE BUS PULLED OUT of the terminal, I remem¬bered I'd forgotten to drag the trash can to the curb for pickup tomorrow. That would be Dad's first clue I was gone. I'd man¬aged to say good-bye to the house, and I remembered thinking that I was forgetting something as I watched the bats dance in and out of the glow of streetlights. It was too late to worry about anything else but leaving now.

  I settled into an empty seat in the back of the bus by the bathroom. The faded cushions smelled like an ashtray, and I leaned my head against the window and stared back at the terminal as we pulled on the highway. I reached down for my bag and pulled out the stack of pictures I'd swiped from the album, a secret history. I craned my head above the seat to make sure no one in the bus was looking back in my direction, and then I started leafing through the piles.

  The first picture of my mother wasn't really a picture of her at all, but of her boot. It was an original black-and-white photo from a newspaper clipping, and there was a chubby, middle-aged woman with a bad perm dressed like a female wrestler in a Halloween mask, and what looked like cardboard, polka-dot wings hastily pinned to the back of her unitard. The chubby woman lay flat on the ground, knocked out, a single stylish boot pinning down her chest. She was wrapped in a lariat pulled taut into the air above her by an unseen force, like her assailant had been magically airbrushed out of the picture, except for the boot.

  Inscribed on the picture was the following message:

  Congratulations o
n nabbing your first villain. Keep up the good work! Yours in courage, Captain Victory.

  I kept staring at the pictures in disbelief. I didn't blink once for at least an hour. My mother had been a hero. All these years, and I had no idea. The questions were just beginning to take shape in my head. Why had she hidden it from me? Did Dad know? Is this where my powers came from?

  I flipped over the picture and found a newspaper article folded and taped to the back. The headline read, "Metro City Mystery Figure Foils Ladybug's Larceny!"

  The next shot was taken when Mom was around my age. I'd never seen any pictures of her when she was a young woman, before she met my father. You know how women can be with their pictures. Most of them don't like to be reminded of how they looked thirty pounds ago.

  But there was a specific reason I'd never seen these. Dad simply would never have allowed it. Not after what happened to him. Not after he'd laid down the law in his own house about superpowers.

  There were more pictures of my mother, her body lithe and fit in a tight costume, in various victory poses with her own rogues' gallery of victims: The Ladybug, Miss Malevolence, Zorba the Meek, Morning Glory and her henchmen, the Pansies (no comment), and this chick called the Quarrel Queen, who had some sort of sonic scream device that poked out of her stom¬ach. God, what a bunch of losers. In those ridiculous outfits did they ever pose a real threat to anyone?

  There were a series of group shots where Mom must have joined a C-list group of costumed heroes called C.R.I.M.E.B.U.S.T.E.R.S! Looked like she was teamed up with a guy who could shoot fire out of one hand and make ice cubes with the other. The entire group was young and tan, their bellies trim, held in effortlessly, and you could tell by their persistent smiles that they were always aware when the cameras were on them. There was a picture of the governor himself awarding them with medals of valor. The "Ones to Watch" article heralded Mom as one of a group of new up-and-coming heroes poised to take over where their golden age predecessors had left off.

  There were also pictures of Mom in her civilian identity when she graduated from teachers college. She posed with a group of friends holding their diplomas and throwing their hats in the air. In the group, Mom was the only one looking at the camera, her graduation cap still on her head, a serene smile on her face, her lips slightly pursed, like she knew something they all didn't.

  And then I saw how my parents had actually met. The banner above them read "LEAGUE TRYOUTS." I had no idea my mother ever got this close to the big time, but there she was up on the platform receiving her official probationary certificate from my father, Major Might. Mom looked elated at receiving official League-try out status; but what you could see in her eyes was the way she looked up at my father. Here she was, fresh out of teachers college, holding a small idea of wanting to fight for truth and justice with her bag of invisible tricks, and a moun¬tain-size crush on Dad, one of the most popular heroes of his time.

  In the next group of shots, you could tell she'd become chummy with everyone on the League. She'd spent this day wandering around their secret clubhouse snapping candid photos. Elastic Elbert caught with his coiled arm down the toilet as he tried to unclog it; Warrior Woman putting on mascara and slathering on some anti-wrinkle cream—showing that maybe that ageless Greek-goddess beauty didn't come without a little effort; and the Nucleus and his sidekicks, the Electrons, engaged in their weekly poker night, cigars dangling from each of their mouths, brown liquor drinks resting on the table. From the surprised look on all their faces, you could tell my mother had uncanny access, a level of intimacy the mere mortals of the world would never have.

  The subjects in the last picture of the series she had more respect for: she'd clearly asked them to pose. In the same fluid cursive handwriting, she'd written on the white border at the bottom of the graying photo, Three generations of my favorite heroes. Captain Victory, the elder statesman of the group, and according to history the world's very first costumed hero, had his arm around his former sidekick, my father, Major Might, who in turn had his arm around his current sidekick, the Right Wing. Each one flashed a handsome smile for my mother, chins held high. Perfect teeth. They each had a raised fist in the air with the three middle fingers up, signifying three generations of the world's most virtuous warriors for truth, justice, and a better way. I studied my Dad's smile in that photo and decided I'd never seen him happier, or more proud.

  I remembered the old guy, Captain Victory. He'd been the only one to lend my father money after he couldn't get work and the bank seized our house. Up until a few years ago, when I started to get serious about sports, Dad had dragged me with him to the nursing home to visit his mentor every weekend. All I remember was the rotten smell of that old folk's home, sickly-sweet wafts of disinfectant meant to cover up the putrid smell of decay. The old man couldn't talk by then, so mostly my dad would bring in pictures or read the newspaper to him, stopping after every other story to grimace at the state of the world. Then Dad would give me a dollar and send me down to the cafeteria to get a bowl of Jell-O cubes, and I'd sit there and watch Dad try to spoon a few shaky cubes into the old guy's mouth.

  There weren't too many shots of Mom in her costume after that. I guess it was always a challenge to snap a good shot of an invisible superhero in action. Then there was a brief piece in a magazine column that asked, "Whatever Happened to Invisible Lass?" The subtitle speculated that it was "The Ultimate Vanishing Act." Apparently, Mom had been as careful to hide her civilian identity from the public as she'd been in hiding her public identity from me. There was never another mention of the Invisible Lass, and just like that, she was gone. I flipped to another shot and that's where my parents' wed¬ding pictures began. I lifted the picture of Mom stuffing a piece of grocery-store wedding cake into Dad's mouth. The hidden pictures stopped there, back to the normal order of things. After a series of honeymoon pictures, mostly of Mom sunbathing and Dad on water skis, I saw the first shot of my mother in a maternity dress, her belly swollen with me crouched up inside her. She was taking a turkey out of the oven and holding it up proudly, while my dad was pointing at her tummy, a goofy grin on his face. I had never seen that expression on Dad before.

  So this was it. This must be why I could do these superhuman things. I had inherited powers from my mother. I wasn't losing my mind at all. I shut out a nagging voice in the back of ] my head that said Thanks a whole lot for up and leaving me on my own right now when I could really use someone like, oh I don't know, my mother to talk to about these major events happening in my life. Instead I held the clippings and pictures in my hand and rested my head on the sticky bus window and looked up at the stars and thought about the future.

  I woke up and wiped a thin trickle of drool off my cheek. In front of me I noticed a three-hundred-pound lady in a pineapple-print muumuu, who snorted every time the bus hit a bump in the road. She munched on a Fudgsicle and stared out the window. Beyond her was a young mother with thinning hair threatening to discipline her little girl with an oversize hairbrush. The kid couldn't have been more than five, and she was whining about wanting to go to bed. She had her tiny index finger shoved up her nose, and with her other finger she picked at her long, unwashed hair, in desperate need of some baby shampoo and an industrial-strength detangler. We made brief eye contact, and she immediately stopped complaining, just before her mom smacked her in the thigh with the back of the plastic brush. The little girl howled and yanked the brush out of her mother's hand and moved to smack her back when—

  SCREEEECH!

  The bus skidded across the highway. The passengers screamed as the rear of the bus fishtailed into oncoming traffic. The force sent the fat lady's face into the window, and her cheek smeared the Fudgsicle across the pane of glass.

  The bus had barely come to a halt against the guard¬rail when the door burst open and a flurry of dark capes whooshed in.

  Transvision Vamp, eyes glowing, whirled around, flicking her black cape over her shoulder, and glared at us. I had never encounte
red supervillains in real life before. I didn't recognize this crew, never seen them on the news. They couldn't be A-listers.

  Vamp glanced at the driver momentarily, her eyes blazing red.

  "Drive."

  The bus driver floored the gas, and my head smacked the greasy headrest as we sped off.

  She turned her attention to the passengers.

  "Keep quiet and no one dies," she purred. Her eyes bored into us, and we felt glued to our seats.

  Behind her stare, the bus driver reached discreetly for his cell phone.

  "Don't try it, asshole," Snaggletooth lisped around his lone fang. He was hanging from the ceiling by his claws. He dropped down and speared the cell phone with one claw, grabbed the bus driver by the collar with his other claw, and casually tossed the driver out the door. He slipped into the driver's seat and slammed his paw on the gas pedal.

  The lady in the muumuu screamed as we watched the driver fly by us horizontally outside the bus. We sped forward past him, and his mouth and eyes widened into gaping ovals. I stared at the driver, suspended in midair for a brief moment, and to my surprise the moment didn't pass. He just hung there, frozen in time, except for the yellow lines that sped past underneath him.

  We looked up and saw he was hanging by someone's hand attached to his belt. An elongated arm and hand slowly pulled him around the bus and inside through the back window. I felt something wriggly and slick under my feet, but my eyes followed the long ropy arm as it began to retract and wander past the bathroom, under the seats, and across the aisle, until it met up with its owner—a short but muscular guy in a scaly green outfit—right under my feet!

  "We said no victimss!" Ssnake hissed at Transvision Vamp, like a grade-schooler tattling on his classmate to his teacher.

  Transvision Vamp massaged her temples with her fingers, and her stare turned a shade of ultraviolet as she peered beyond the passengers into the night behind the speeding bus.