In Hell I'll Be In Good Company

[Jai Savage]

After I count down
three rounds
In Hell I'll be in good company

[/font][/b]" he said, sitting down beside Jai and reaching out to put an arm around his shoulders and thinking better of it when he saw the beaded sweat on Jai's skin.

"I fought armed goddamn insurgents in unmapped caves in total fuckin' darkness and some bleached blond asshole gets the drop on me," Jai said. There was no anger in it. A statement of fact. He didn't look at Leo. He toweled the sweat off and dug a shirt out of his bag.

"That's ring awareness, kid. It'll come with time. You just gotta keep at it."

"Yeah."

Silence fell between them, heavy with the anticipation of something to come, some dark cloud drifting into place overhead. A shared gut feeling that neither of them voiced. Then Jai's phone rang, buzzing like a hive from the side pocket of his gear bag. He pulled it out and looked at the screen and immediately stood and left the room in a kind of robotic fashion saying: "I have to take this."

When he put the phone to his ear he didn't speak.

Jenni said his name. It was the first time he'd heard her voice, beyond her voicemail message, in years. He was transported to a time long gone and for that moment in his mind's eye he observed a million things that were and would never be again. He didn't know what to say. Suddenly that gut feeling tightened everything inside of him up like a tangle of sailor's knots.

"Jai?" She broke the silence, her voice tentative.

"Jenni," Jai said as if he hadn't spoken in ages. "I uh... shit. It's been..."

"A long time," she finished.

"Yeah. Fuck. So uh, so..."

"This isn't a social call," she interrupted, but it wasn't harsh. She spoke hesitantly, as though searching for the right words among many and the right order to place them in. "Um. Sandy called me last night. Sandy Tomlinson. She didn't know how to get a hold of you. I don't know how to say this, but..."

The dark cloud. Jai felt it pressing down on him and the world itself seemed to dim. He knew what she was going to say, or maybe it only felt like he knew in retrospect. This was the moment when time went funny on him. When reality became unmoored and the world shifted and nothing was at it should have been.

He didn't want to hear it. So he told her: "Just say it."

"Chris is dead, Jai. It, um... It wasn't an accident. I'm sorry."

Jai was silent. The world fell silent, too. The hum of activity in the arena cut out in that instant, replaced with a nothingness that hurt his ears and pressed in on his brain. He no longer felt the phone in his hand or the floor under his feet. All his senses detached from his body and drifted away in different directions.

"I'm sorry, Jai. I know you used to be close..."

"Yeah," Jai said, and he hung up and slipped his phone in his pocket.

He stood there for a moment and then he turned and he walked away from the locker room and he left the arena wearing his wrestling gear and a t-shirt and twenty minutes later Leo Brewer peered out of the locker room and couldn't find him and wouldn't find him again for months.

------

A month later, as the sun began to dip below the horizon and the golden sky turned to red turned to purple, Jai sat up against Lieutenant Christopher Tomlinson's cold grey headstone and drank from a bottle of Forty Creek. Each word slurred into the next and he spat when he spoke and there was no other soul in the graveyard to tell him to show some respect.

A part of Jai wished he believed in something, so that he could think some part of Tomlinson was hearing him, but he didn't. He believed he was talking to a piece of rock sitting over some dirt and an overpriced coffin and the rotting corpse that was all that was left of his friend.

"You fucking son of a bitch," Jai muttered between swigs from the bottle. "You were the fuckin' one, man. Out of all of us you were the one. You fuckin' made it, with your fuckin' house and wife and kid and picket-fuckin'-fence. You MADE IT, you son of a bitch, and you threw it all away like an asshole. Fuck."

Something stung behind Jai's eyes. He drank and he stared at nothing.

"We all hadda carry it, man. We all did. Share the load n' shit. Then Miller dropped. One down. So it all got a little heavier. But that was all right, man, that was all right 'cause there was still enough of us. Still you at the center. Then Reed dropped. An' now you. Now fuckin' you're gone and it's just me and how the hell am I supposed to carry it? Out of all of us it's down to me.

Christ, man.

What happened to your stupid bar, huh? You'n Sandy gonna buy some place off the highway, real roadhouse shit. Live the dream slingin' drinks. You were supposed to hire me to beat the shit out of the Hells Angels. Where's your bar, man? Where's my job? You had it all fuckin' planned out and now you're in the goddamn ground and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it.

I'm sorry, man. Fuck, I'm sorry. I wasn't around for Miller and I wasn't around for Reed and I wasn't around for you because I'm a shitty fuckin' friend and I let you all down. And now I don't have a chance to make it right. Now I gotta carry it."

Jai listened to the birds and the wind and he hoped to hear more wisdom than the rambling spilling out of the gaping wound in his soul, but he heard no answers and no comfort. He let out a primal scream until his lungs felt fit to burst and his throat was raw, and he hurled the nearly empty bottle of whiskey as far as he could throw it and watched it shatter into uncountable glimmering shards.

Some time later he passed out against his friend's grave and he did not wake when the police arrived.[/ul]

[Jai Savage]

[/b]"[/div]

"No I don't," he mumbled. He didn't know where he was in that groggy half-consciousness but he didn't much care to find out. He wanted the drumming in his head to stop and he wanted the blackness to envelop him again.

"Jesus Christ, Jai."

That voice he did recognize, and so he did not move from his place and did not uncover his eyes to look. It was the last person he wanted to see. He'd take Sergeant Duffy's fat screaming face and the wind and the rain and the mud over this. He should have figured in its inevitability, but it was hard to look ahead when you didn't believe in a future.

"Go away, Leo."

His faculties returned, then, and he understood where he was and didn't remember how he got there but figured he could hazard an accurate guess. He lay flat on a stiff board and the concrete of the wall was cool against the meat of his arm and he decided that it wasn't a bad place to be at that particular moment because it meant he wasn't sitting in a graveyard with a bottle of Forty Creek and the ghost of the last friend he had in the world.

Leo might try to lay claim to that title but the tone of his voice betrayed him. Leo wanted money. That was what Jai understood in both text and subtext. Jai was costing him a fortune he would have otherwise made in fees. He wasn't bitter about that -- it's not like Jai ever gave a shit about it in the first place.

"You dumb son of a bitch, do you know how much money you're walking away from?"

"I did sign the contract," Jai answered flatly.

"Yeah, you signed the contract, the one that you're breaking right now! Come on, let's go."

Jai heard a clanking from behind him, a quiet chiding from the observing officer. Leo against the bars. Still he did not move. The world was out there and Jai didn't want to bother with it.

"I don't think I'm quite sober yet, Leo."

"You goddamn--"

"Hey, officer, I'm done with my visitor now."

He heard the sounds of Leo being escorted away, the scuff of hard soled shoes on a concrete floor and venomous curses spit out in low tones. Jai let a long time pass before he moved and by the time the officers let him out with only a misdemeanor, Leo had gone and there was no one waiting in the parking lot.

[/ul]

[Jai Savage]

[/font][/b]" said Leo from the other side of the door.

"And if I don't?" Jai asked in a dull voice as he walked listlessly to the door, lit orange by the sunlight through cheap curtains. He peered through the peephole at Brewer's round, angry face, at his bulging frog-eyes.

"Open this fucking door, Jai, I swear to god."

Jai didn't have the energy to play anymore. He unlatched the door and opened it and looked down at Leo. Irate little dumpy office worker Leo. For a man so overwhelmingly average in every respect the sheer rage that emanated from him in that moment impressed Jai, and he thought that maybe Leo could have been somebody at some point, instead of who he ended up being.

But who was Jai to judge?

"You look angry, Leo," he said flatly.

Leo shoved a finger into Jai's chest and marched forward, shoving him backwards into the shadow of the motel room. He paused a moment, sweeping his eyes over the scene before him. The empty bottles and the tangle of sheets on the bed and the nicotine stains on the walls and the shattered mirror visible through the open bathroom door and the handtowel wrapped around Jai's knuckles, dotted with bright red.

Leo's face fell but a fraction. He took a deep breath, like bellows to a flame. Then he fixed Jai with a hard stare. All the anger rested upon a bedrock of disappointment. He spoke in a restrained voice, one that took all his effort to keep level.

"I fucking swear to god, Jai, this is the last straw. Snap out of whatever the fuck you're in, come with me, and let's get your career back on track."

Jai let silence fall between them. Something in him, some vague feeling that he couldn't put voice to, began to take shape. He looked down at his hand, pulling the towel away, examining the lacerations across his knuckles with a detached manner. He moved his fingers, gingerly flexed his hand, and when the bleeding began again he replaced the towel and he looked Leo in the eyes and suddenly that vague feeling became a very clear idea in the forefront of his mind.

"What if I don't give a shit about my career?"

The words hung in the air but for a moment. Then Leo Brewer punched Jai Savage square in the jaw and the sharp crack of flesh and bone broke the silence of the motel room like a gunshot. Leo clenched his jaw and stared Jai straight in the eyes and shook the pain out of his hand. Jai spat a trickle of blood out onto the carpet. Then he smiled.

"Hit me again, Leo. Go on. As hard as you can."

"What?"

"Come on, man, you've been saving that for a while. You must have more than one in you. Hit me."

"Jai, I'm not--"

"Hit me, you balding frog-faced piece of shit."

Leo let out a strangled yell and swung with a looping overhand and came down right on the button, snapping Jai's head to the side. And once more Jai smiled, blood between his teeth, a dark look in his eyes as he stared down at Leo still shaking the pain out of his hand. Leo's bravado had since drained from his face and a thin sheen of sweat rested upon his forehead and he looked up at Jai the way one might look upon a wild animal chanced in the woods, a wolf or a bear or a mountain lion just up the trail, stock still and staring, its next action as predictable as a roll of the dice. Leo didn't know that you were supposed to watch center mass for the tell of what strike a man was to throw next, judged by the twitch of a shoulder or hip. Leo didn't know that at all, but he didn't have to.

Jai nodded as though this whole situation was to his satisfaction, having played out in accordance with some unknowable scheme in his mind.

"February," he said.

"...Huh?"

"Get me a match for February."

Leo said nothing as Jai gently ushered him out of the motel room and closed and locked the door.

[/ul]