PROLOGUE: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Jul 25, 2019 21:12:18 GMT -5
Adam Dante, BonnieBlue, and 6 more like this
Post by Fuckin' A on Jul 25, 2019 21:12:18 GMT -5
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Written by Troy Butler
Written by Troy Butler
There's a man sitting alone on a bar stool. He's sipping his whisky like it's his last night on earth. He's dishevelled. Tousled hair, plain flannel shirt, old wranglers tucked into cowboy boots. His hands are rough and dirty. A mechanic's hands. Or maybe an engineer's. He's the kind of man the other patrons in this bar want to avoid.
I pull up a stool beside him and ask if he's the man I'm looking for.
He doesn't answer. Not at first. He stares forward. Either to the bartender who's giving me side-eye or the dusty mirror covered in liquor bottles behind him. After a silence filled only with the tinkling of shot glasses and the lull in drunken conversation, he answers me.
“I might be. Who you lookin' for?”
I tell him the name. He gets this wistful smile on his face. If I had to guess, he was late-fifties.
“I haven't been called that in a long time.”
The man I'm looking for went by the name of Caleb Hart. He was a wrestling promoter.
A few days ago when news broke on the Alpha Pro-Wrestling website that the company had just finished another round of signings, there was the usual fanfare for those names. There were twitter users complaining, cheering, and lamenting the choices we had made. Why sign Noris Cranley when up-and-comers like such-and-such and who's-your-daddy are still killing it across the territories of these United States? The sort of thing that doesn't catch the eye of this gumshoe reporter. No sir.
All except one.
I of course mean [REDACTED] A, whom I will refer to as Freakin' A for the sake of publication.
There were no letters for him. No tweets decrying his signing, or encouraging us that we had made the right move. In fact, searching for Freakin' A on the Internet at all reveals nothing but a MySpace page from ten years ago (and yes, Tom is the account's only friend). Stumped, I put the thought out of my mind and went about my business. After all, press releases didn't write themselves.
And around that time is when I received the email. There was a subject line that simply asked, 'why him?' Curious, I read it. In it were these three lines:
You shouldn't have done that. You've made a mistake. Get rid of him while you can.
After some correspondence I learned that the email had come from the man on the bar stool beside me. Caleb ran an independent wrestling organization in the southwestern United States. Apparently things had gone swimmingly, up until the man he only refers to as “The Kid” showed up.
“It was hell from the start,” the man says after I ply him with a few more shots of whisky. “He'd go in to have his match and then something would happen. Whether it was decking a fan in the audience or breaking the teeth of his opponent or, hell, grabbing some of his 'toys' from under the ring. That's what he calls them, you know. His 'toys.'"
I ask Caleb why he kept The Kid around if he was so much trouble.
“Because no-one realized it at first. Everyone thought there was just a string of bad luck. We'd been running so hot for so long that we got cocky. Didn't realize what was happening until it was too late.”
“And what was happening?”
“Our undoing,” he says with a shrug.
I ask for more stories, and Caleb Hart is only too eager to oblige. He tells me of the time when an older wrestler named Timmy Gunns told The Kid to smile more. The Kid answered by widening Timmy's smile with a box cutter. Another incident involved a woman and her young child. The Kid apparently performed a suicide dive, a standard move in any high flyer's arsenal, only he squashed his opponent and hit the kid in the process.
“That was a nightmare,” Caleb sighs. “Family sued us. Which was just fine, since we were already getting sued by three dozen other people and Timmy himself. The Kid kept having these little 'incidents' and it just showed no sign of stopping.”
I ask why they didn't fire the kid, or bar him from wrestling in future events.
Caleb thinks on that.. “I think it's because... the son of a bitch could draw a crowd. But it was the wrong kind of crowd, you know? Our promotion—my promotion—it was family friendly at first. We had a few guys cussin' here and there and maybe some guys would get busted open, but nothing worse than you'd see in any professional fight. There was an understanding to keep it relatively clean. For the kids, you know?
“And then... The Kid came and that all changed. It was slow at first. Subtle. First the moms changed. Then the little kids. Then the grandpas and the grandmas. And over time the audience got replaced, almost like... did you ever see that movie? The one where people in a town get replaced night after night by plant people?”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” I answer.
“Yeah,” he says, his eyes lighting. “That's the one. It was like that. I would look out into the crowd and I'd see the same faces I'd always seen, but they were different-like. Their eyes were wilder. Sunken. Like they hadn't slept in days. They were bloodthirsty. They wanted this kid's blood something bad. No, they wanted him dead. And they couldn't have it. Because no matter who I put him against The Kid fought harder. He cheated. He drew blood. He did whatever he had to. And if he couldn't beat the guy, he'd bring the guy down with him.”
I ask what brought about the end.
He says he'd rather show me.
I help Caleb out of the bar and to my rental. We drive for a long time in silence, nothing but the tick of turn signals and the shift between high and low beams to fill the air. After awhile, he mutters something like 'turn here' and I do. We pull into a gravel driveway in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where his home might be, wonder if maybe I wouldn't be the one murdered and left on the side of a road instead of Dani.
But then I spot it. It's a small trailer. There are car parts and what look like turnbuckles littering the 'yard.'
“This is home,” he tells me.
We take the quiet walk up to his front door. He invites me in and I'm hit with a wall of stench. Stale sweat and desperation, mostly. Some mildew. When Caleb turns on the lights I see why.
There are boxes of memorabilia piled from floor to ceiling. He shows me how to navigate them. We find our way to a fold-out kitchen table and he gets another beer. I refuse on account of seeing how he lives.
Before he speaks he leans over one of the boxes, digs around, and pulls out a photo album. Yes, they still exist. He flips through a few pages, sipping beer, smiling distantly at the ghosts on those pages. He finds what he's looking for and turns the book toward me. One stubby, calloused finger pointing.
It was a beautiful picture. There's a clear blue sky behind a colonial home on what must've been at least ten acres. There's a family in front. Children. A beautiful wife. Idyllic.
“Yours?” I ask.
He nods solemnly.
“This was before the lawsuits,” I say.
“It was.”
“How is it this 'kid' wasn't named a defendant?”
Caleb shrugs. “That, I don't know. Often wondered myself. Maybe the people knew he didn't have money. Far as I could tell he whored and drank it all. Or maybe nobody could track him down and subpoena his ass. I don't know how that all works. I do know that once upon a time I had a dream home with a dream family, and a good business. And now because of that little bastard it's all in the rear-view. My wife—ex-wife—took the kids and now she's in Tampa with her folks. Heard she was waitressing now. And of course you have the other wrestlers in my company. They all hate my guts. Won't none of them talk to me no more. Tell me I'm an asshole and other such vulgarities because of what I let happen to us.”
There's a glint in his eye. A kind of wildness that I hadn't seen before. It lingers as he says, “that's the bitch of it. They think it was something I let happen. Like I opened the door and invited the devil on in. I did no such thing. True, I let the money we made blind me to the real issue. That this kid, despite the money he was bringing in, was costing us a hell of a lot more.
“Are you a God-fearing man, Mr. Butler?” He asks suddenly.
I tell him the truth.
“I see. Well, sometimes when I can't sleep because I've got this buzzing in my head from all the bullshit I've been through, sometimes I lay awake and I wonder if maybe this Kid wasn't a test of some kind. Biblical-like. Maybe if I was a wiser man, a better man, I would've seen the signs and maybe my company and my family would still be here today.”\
“It all sounds like one rotten run of bad luck,” I offer.
“Yes it does,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Thing is, I ain't the only one who ran into it.”
That's when I lean in closer.
“Thought that might interest you,” he chuckles drunkenly. “Turns out there's rumours all over the west coast. Up and down. Small-time places. Underground places. Places that pop up, do some business, then disappear like a fart in the wind. Only they don't disappear. This 'kid'... he puts them out of business.
“I'm convinced that this boy ain't no boy at all. He's cancer given flesh. I don't know why, but he's chosen professional wrestling as the thing he's planning to kill. He comes in a joint, he sucks the place dry like some kind of vampire, and then he leaves nothing but a withered husk behind him. And then it's onto the next place. The next time. And on and on on and on it goes because nobody, and I mean nobody, has tried to stop him.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because they're all as blind as I was,” Caleb says thoughtfully. “They see too much green to notice the red pouring across the canvas. Only, eventually, that green turns red. And then it turns black. And then it turns to ashes in your hand as your entire world burns down around you.”
I tell him that I find this all a little hard to believe. That there is some kind of urban legend of pro-wrestling that shows up like death on the doorstep of a promotion.
He chuckles and nods. “That's fine. Don't believe me if you don't want, Mr. Butler. I know what that kid did to me. And I know what he did to a dozen others. And if you're not careful, if your company ain't careful, he'll do it to you, too.”
I don't know what to think of my time with Caleb Hart. From all the fact-checking I could muster, his story checks out. He ran a successful used car business, even opening locations across the greater southwestern united states. A few years later he funded a wrestling promotion and did so successfully for many years. Then, all of the sudden, lawsuits bring his empire under. Payout after payout left him destitute. But could it really be the fault of one man? A “kid”? I have a hard time believing it, and yet I still can't shake this feeling as I look into the profile head shot of Freakin' A, that there might be something to it.
Because, reader, when I look into those eyes, in plain black and white, I'm not bothered by what I see.
I'm bothered by what I don't.
--Troy Butler
July 25, 2019
