Post by Jai Savage on Jan 12, 2019 22:37:03 GMT -6
After I count down
three rounds
In Hell I'll be in good company
three rounds
In Hell I'll be in good company
"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]