Fight Song

by Joshua Mohr

  Another guitar string tightening. Ace must be paying more attention to the boy than the guitar. The skinniest string gets higher and higher and its pitch goes too high because the thing snaps, and Ace says, “Damn. Dang, I mean. You gotta pay attention or things break on you. Am I right, my man?”

  Ace starts over, winding a new string to replace the busted one.

  Bob staggers into the kitchen with the rum.

  Ace and the kid look over at him.

  The plucking and tightening stop.

  Ace giggles. “Hey, Chump Change, what’s with the long face?”

  Coffen doesn’t want to be alone any longer. He’s crying, but he can’t care about that. Things do break if you’re not watching. He asks, “Can I get Korean barbecue with you guys?”

  “Our entourage,” says Ace.

  Three happy Kiss-loving clams

  “Tell me the name of a genius,” says Ace, eating meat off the bone while sitting in a booth at Korean barbecue with Coffen and the boy. The restaurant is pretty empty. It’s about an hour before they have to be at Empire Wasted for sound check.

  “I don’t give a shit about geniuses,” his girlfriend’s kid says.

  “Shakespeare,” Bob says.

  “Koreans are meat-Shakespeares,” Ace says.

  “That’s racist,” the boy says.

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “It’s still racist.”

  “Come on, name a genius.”

  “No,” the boy says, “your racism is ruining my appetite.”

  “Einstein,” Bob says.

  “Koreans are Meat=MC2,” says Ace.

  “It’s racist because you’re making a generalization about a whole group of people,” the boy points out.

  “It can’t be racist to celebrate the Koreans’ meaty geniusness,” Ace says. “I refuse to believe that. And if it is, then lock me up and throw away the meat-key because I’m a racist for how much I love freakin’ Koreans! Name another.”

  The boy is mum.

  “Michael Jordan,” Coffen says. Hearing Ace and the boy banter makes Bob think of Brent, so he texts his youngest: I miss you very much. You are a terrific son.

  Then Bob sends the same message to Margot, forgetting to change the word “son” to “daughter.”

  Within three seconds, she texts right back: I’m a girl. Thankz for noticin

  Coffen: Yeah, but you get the main message, right? The “you are terrific” part?

  R u guyz divorcing?

  No

  STFU

  What’s that mean?

  Shut the eff up

  You are a terrific daughter. Sea horses tomorrow?

  She never answers, probably enjoying the Great Barrier Reef from the comfort of her bedroom.

  “Koreans slam-dunk their meat like Mr. Mikey Jordan!” Ace says, suddenly an advertising exec, setting back international relations with every new slogan.

  “This tea is terrible,” Coffen says, putting his phone in his pocket.

  “Drink beer, for god’s sake,” says Ace. “We’re on our way to a rock and roll show, and you’re totaling tea? Grow a pair, Bobby-boy. Let down the eight hairs you have left and live a little. Go mano a mano versus the world.”

  In Coffen’s opinion, Bobby-boy does not need to grow a pair. It’s true that he will soon be switching to beer, not because Ace peer-pressured him into it, but due to the fact that Korean tea is horrible. Now that’s something worth being racist about.

  “Tonight I ask your beautiful ma to be my lawfully wedded wife,” Ace says to the boy. “I’m thrilled to have your blessing, dude.”

  The boy frowns at Ace.

  “What’s wrong?” Ace asks.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “You can tell me, my man. I know this is hard for you. Go ahead—put the screws to Uncle Acey. I can take it. You won’t scare me off. Me, you, and your ma are going to be good together.”

  The boy’s frown fades.

  Is that a small smile?

  Yes, indeed, the boy small-smiles at Ace and now the kid says, “Ace Frehley from Kiss.”

  “Are you saying Ace Frehley is a genius?” asks Ace, looking like he might start sobbing with oodles of pride.

  Coffen’s phone vibrates, alerting him that there’s a new text, hopefully from Brent, hopefully confirming a father-son date to the sea horses. After watching Ace struggle with this boy, the task that Coffen has is easy—encourage some other activities besides gaming. Get Brent out of the house. Do stuff together. He can game, too, just not every waking second.

  But the text isn’t from Brent.

  It’s from Schumann.

  And it is not good news.

  It’s what might be called the opposite end of the spectrum from good news.

  Schumann texts: Bagged me a magician.

  Bob: ?

  Stalked him and secured him.

  Why?

  Tied him up and stuffed him in the back of the SUV.

  Tied up??

  Like a turkey.

  Let him go!!

  Where R U?

  Coffen: Meet me at Empire Wasted in 45.

  That sad dank bar that doesn’t have any big screens?

  45 mins!!

  Hut, hut, hike are the final words texted from Schumann.

  “Do you mind if one of my friends meets us at the club?” Coffen says to Ace.

  “You already said your friend from Taco Shed was coming.”

  “Her, too. This is my neighbor, Schumann.”

  “You’re doing French Kiss a favor, helping us fill every seat in the house. The more, the merrier,” Ace says, and then he looks at the boy again. “Like our household, right, dude? We’re three happy Kiss-loving clams.”

  “Happy fucking clams,” the boy says, which makes Bob think of his household: Would they be considered four unhappy clams, their shells boxing them away from everything in the world, much like the subdivision’s electric fence?

  Dumping salt in Coffen’s wound, Ace starts humming here comes the bride, here comes the bride …

  The three of them roll into Empire Wasted before Schumann or Tilda arrive. Coffen dismisses this place, shaped like a big rectangle, as a dump. The walls are stacked cinder blocks, neither painted nor covered, only nude gray concrete. The stage is pretty low to the ground with an empty dance floor in front of it. No tables anywhere. There’s a bar at the back of the room. An old man behind it wearing a tank top. Bald on his head but not on his shoulders.

  Bob helps Ace carry his amp in. Coffen is amped himself, paranoid-thinking about a kidnapped magician who’s probably mighty pissed and ready to cast some nasty curses or, worse, call the cops and rat them out, not solely for Schumann’s solo kidnapping tonight, but also for what he and Bob did to the magician last night.

  Empire Wasted technically isn’t open yet. The only people there are the staff, the band—the rest of French Kiss’s chubby, bald members setting up gear—groupies, if you can call them that, and a few friends.

  Coffen makes his way to the bar to order a beer and another text from Schumann comes through: The eagle has landed.

  Which makes no sense to Bob, who responds simply with: ?

  Code for I’m out front.

  So Coffen gets going out front. Sure as sure can be, there’s crying Björn hog-tied in the back of the SUV, not pleased with the whole kidnapped situation that’s unfurling before his eyes.

  “This can’t be good,” Coffen says. “We’re going to get shipped off to prison for round-the-clock sodomy sessions.”

  “In the right hands, sodomy can be beautiful.”

  “That’s not really what we’re talking about,” Bob says.

  “I have made a breakthrough,” says Schumann, still wearing his football uniform, although thank god for small miracles, he’s not wearing the helmet.

  “Breakthrough with what?”

  “I know what my gladiator identity was missing. I needed to stop using my white man name.”

&nb
sp; “You are white.”

  “I was. Or maybe I am normally, but not right now. Not while I’m wearing the cloth of my tribe. I’m a Native American warrior.”

  “I don’t think so,” Coffen says.

  “From this moment on, I’ll only answer to the name Reasons with His Fists.”

  “I refuse to call you that.”

  It looks like Schumann might start arguing with Coffen, but Björn makes these really angry mumbling noises.

  “How did you even do this to him?” Bob asks.

  “That show you saw last night. He did the same one tonight. So I waited outside and then snuck up and cold-cocked him and tied him up and taped his mouth and here we are.”

  “He’s going to kill us.”

  “We scored a touchdown.”

  Coffen, once worried about being a weekend dad, now is crippled by fear that he’ll be a prison dad, rotting away in a cell, scribbling letters that his children never respond to. They’ll certainly never visit him. Prison dad doesn’t spend holidays surrounded by loved ones. He spends them slow-dancing with his cell mate, resting his head on a muscled, tattooed shoulder.

  “I’ll never see Margot’s graduation,” says Bob. “Somebody else will explain the birds and the bees to Brent.”

  Schumann points at Björn: “We are the winners. I beat your ass, sucka!”

  “I never asked you to do this,” Bob says.

  “We went for the jugular and were handsomely rewarded,” Schumann says.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The killer instinct of competition.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m worried about, Schumann. What if he kills us once we let him go? What if he takes back his word about not calling the cops and he tells them everything?”

  “I am Reasons with His Fists,” he says, “and I fear no man.”

  “You are Schumann, and you should fear that man,” Coffen says, pointing at the wiggling magician, still making angry mumbling noises.

  You are my testes-hero

  Bob Coffen flees Schumann and goes back in Empire Wasted to figure out what to do about Björn. He decides a beer is in the cards, goes over toward the stage once he consumes it in four panicked swigs. Ace is talking with a woman, presumably his girlfriend. The boy is hugging her. She pats his back.

  “Here he is,” says Ace and points at Coffen, by way of a weird introduction.

  “Bob is me,” Bob says to the woman, shaking her hand, watching the other one still patting on the boy.

  “I’m Kathleen. Call me Kat.”

  “Very nice to meet you.”

  “Told you he was all manners,” Ace says.

  “Are you excited for the show tonight?” Coffen asks her.

  “No matter whether me and Ace are fighting,” Kat says, “I never miss a French Kiss concert. They are incredible, and Ace loves playing music so much.”

  Bob is impressed with Kat’s commitment to Ace even when they’re fighting—fighting to such an extreme that he’s sleeping at work. “You are a good woman,” Coffen says. “Sometimes people who you want to support don’t want you around them. Sometimes they say that their Norwegian coach is the only team they need.”

  “What?” Kat asks.

  “Let’s cool it with the moping,” Ace says to Bob. “We’re here to live a little, right?”

  Soon, Tilda saunters into the bar. She sees Coffen right off because the place is pretty empty. He’s hunkered alone at the bar. Ace and the other members of the French Kiss contingent are all backstage putting makeup on one another’s faces, getting into their facsimiles of Kiss characters.

  Bob has switched from beer to vanilla vodka.

  And he’s well on his way to being intoxicated. If intoxication is like putting on a pair of pants, Coffen has one leg in for sure and is now working the other through.

  Bob is so happy to see Tilda. Can Coffen call her a friend? He’s going to. She chose to come here and spend time with him and that’s what friends do, after all—they enjoy each other’s company. Or so Bob’s heard around the water cooler.

  Tilda’s wearing a cotton tank top and tight jeans. Muscles galore. Tanned muscles making lumpy stacks on her shoulders. She could be a cage fighter. In fact, Coffen doesn’t know for sure that she isn’t a cage fighter, so the first vanilla-vodka-atrophied idea that escapes his mouth is “You ever kill a man with your bare hands?”

  “Always wear gloves because these days with all the DNA technology, killing with your bare hands is like signing a confession.”

  “Is that a metaphor?”

  “Which part?”

  “The whole thing.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  “I need to believe you haven’t killed a man with your bare hands.”

  “Then why’d you ask the question?”

  It’s here that Coffen decides to enlist this bawdy Taco Shed confidant into Schumann’s kidnapping ring. Why would he do such a thing? Why involve anyone else? Simply put: He’s telling her because he’s buzzed and feeling useless and like an outcast, a looming divorcé, a weekend dad destined to fail his kids (and that’s not even to mention the terrifying prison dad hallucination), or to be replaced by somebody new, someone like Gotthorm—a man of strong body and mind, one blessed with a severe, Nordic bone structure, one well over six feet tall who can breed a platoon of bloodthirsty Vikings. This avalanche of panic isn’t all that’s going on inside Bob. Add to this the scene he’s recently witnessed at Korean barbecue: the boy who’d been so cruel to Ace suddenly saying that Ace Frehley is a genius; the boy meeting Ace somewhere near the middle, compromising, extending an olive branch of sorts. Will that smart-ass kid do everything in his power to put Ace through the ringer during his teenage years? No doubt about it. But it was touching to see some effort from the boy tonight. Maybe that’s all anybody’s really after: effort. A stab to meet in the middle. All of this piles on Coffen’s shoulders, plus the simple fact that there is a kidnapped sorcerer outside and Bob has no idea what to do next.

  And so Coffen spills the beans to Tilda: “I’m tangentially involved in criminal activity this evening.”

  “Guess you’re not the prude I pegged you for.”

  “You know how you used to think I was a cop?”

  “I’m still on the fence.”

  “Really?” Coffen says, his feelings growing even more wounded. “Why?”

  She nods. “I have trust issues. And if you are a cop, we’re back standing on the fertile soil of entrapment.”

  “What if I was to say that I can prove I’m not a cop right this very second beyond any reasonable doubt?”

  “That sounds like something a cop would say. Are you drunk?”

  “Probably,” he says, taking another swig of vanilla vodka, “and I’d like to let you in on my crime, if you’d be interested in such information.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “What we did was—”

  “Wait, who’s ‘we’?”

  “I’m talking about me and Schumann.”

  She smiles mischievously. “Schumann’s here?”

  He takes her out front to Schumann’s SUV, which is still parked in the same spot as before, which was where Schumann had promised to leave it while Bob went back in the bar to formulate some kind of crackpot plan to deal with Björn, though once alone it occurred to Coffen that a) Schumann probably won’t listen to his plan anyway, seeing as how he went ahead and swiped Björn on his own quarterback accord, and b) he kidnapped a master of the dark arts without any concrete idea what to do with him, simply stole him for some kind of contorted notion of victory, and c) nowhere in Schumann’s cranium does there seem to be ample fear over the very real possibility of incarceration, and d) Schumann might be mentally ill or so hardwired for competition that he’s somehow untrained for civilian life.

  Coffen and Tilda approach. Schumann exits the driver’s seat, walks toward the back but doesn’t open it, keeping Björn obscured.

  “Hello, big f
ella,” Tilda says to Schumann, ogling his football uniform, the implied musculature underneath his sporty shell. “I was hoping our paths would cross when I wasn’t working.”

  “I’ve changed my name to Reasons with His Fists,” he says.

  “Your name’s as meaningless as these jeans I’m wearing,” says Tilda.

  “I’m married.”

  “Let’s not ruin our first non–Taco Shed impression with too many details from our personal lives,” she says.

  “You’d make a good running back,” Schumann says to her. “You see an opening and hit the hole hard, hoping to score.”

  “You’re going to make me blush, Reasons with His Fists,” she says.

  “We need to focus,” Coffen says inconsequentially.

  “My name is a tribute to my tribe,” Schumann says.

  “Are you part Native American?” she asks.

  “I am a warrior ready to ravage at the drop of a hat.”

  “I’m prepared to drop much more than my hat,” says Tilda, enhancing her flirty words with a fellatio-impersonation, her hand moving back and forth in front of her open mouth. She looks like a demented sex-ed teacher trying to scare the kids into abstinence.

  Schumann watches the demo and smiles. “You have the body of a fearsome warrior, too.”

  “I’ve taken my lumps over the years.”

  Coffen can’t take his inconsequentialness any longer and throws open the back of the SUV. The three of them stand, staring at the squirming, angrily mumbling magician.

  “Who’s that guy?” Tilda asks, cool as a sociopath.

  “Our vanquished foe,” says Schumann.

  “He looks pretty pissed,” she says.

  “His arms are probably asleep,” Schumann says. “Not to mention I had to knee his testes to properly subdue him before pitching him in there.”

  “I like the way you say ‘testes,’” Tilda says. “Can I hear it once more, except this time, make it a little breathier, like you’re seducing me?”

  Schumann answers in a baritone Don Juan playboy voice, “Testeeeeez.”

  “You are my testes-hero,” she says.

  “Anyway, this is the guy we kidnapped,” Coffen says.