by Xander Hades
“What the hell was wrong with that?” Val exploded. “He was trying to save someone’s life! He helped to…”
“VAL!” Rocky’s voice sounded like a shot in the room and the office was very quiet after that. She looked at him, she knew her eyes were flashing. Hoodoo always said that her eyes flashed just before she started beating on a man. In a moment, she was going to take on this pathetic manager and her “boyfriend” and the entire bureaucratic bullshit factory of the MMA. Mostly, she was going to kick Rocky’s ass for talking to her that way.
It’s the pressure. Let it go, girl, give the man this one, let him be stressed…
Gritting her teeth a little, she sat back in her chair, arms crossed tight over her chest, as if she could physically hold herself in that way.
“Murray,” Rocky said quietly. “The fight next month. The one that is supposed to set my professional career, the one that’s supposed to pay the mortgage on this place?” He grabbed a piece of paper and crumpled it as he held it up for Murray to see. The word FORECLOSURE was emblazoned on the page. “I need that fight, Murray. There’s a hundred kids out there that need this fight.”
“It’s not off the table,” Murray said and his tone was apologetic. “It’s just… not likely. Look, it takes time to do inquests and autopsies. They need to grow cultures, to look into all kinds of things and it takes time! I don’t think it will be done before the fight and right now, you’re… suspended. Until the results of the findings.” Murray bit down hard on the toothpick. It’s a wonder the thing wasn’t so many splinters in his mouth by now. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Murray, I can’t just give the bank an empty promise. I already did that. This money from the last fight will float us for a month, maybe, if I don’t have anything pop up, but something ALWAYS pops up!”
Val sat back in her chair and caught her lower lip between her teeth. She needed to think.
“Rock…” Murray said. He sighed and shrugged. “Right now, I would say that you’re probably not going to get that fight. I don’t think so.”
“Well…” Rocky stood. Val’s heart broke. It was like seeing a tiger caught in a cage. All strength and heart and fearless and nothing at all he could about it. He was trapped. And the trap was getting worse by the minute. Much, much worse. “Ok, then get me another bar fight like last night. A few of those while I’m waiting will float the motel and keep the kids…”
“ROCKY!” Murray yelled over him, waving a hand in front of his face as though to knock him out of whatever dreamland he was in. “You can’t. If you so much as slap a man, in the cage or outside of it, you’re out. Don’t you see? You’re a loose cannon, Rocky. They don’t know who you are! You got into a cage with a man that had no business being in there with you!”
“You set it up!” Rocky yelled, poking his finger at his manager.
“I did! I didn’t check the opponent, I should have! But you might have handled him better, too. The doctor at the hospital said you cracked a rib.”
“He moved as I was taking the shot.”
“That’s what an amateur would do, Rocky.”
“This isn’t his fault!” Val leaped to her feet. “Don’t blame him for this!”
“Val!” Rocky said sharply. “NOT NOW, PLEASE!”
I gave him the one. Not this one. He wants to lash out, it’s not going to be at me. I’ve had enough of this shit in my life. I don’t need it from him, too.
Val looked at him a long moment and stormed out, slamming the door behind her.
She went to her bike and grabbed the bags she’d bungeed to the back to accommodate his bulk. It was a wonder she hadn’t lost everything.
She held her hands on the straps and wondered if maybe she already had. Maybe she had lost everything after all.
Get on. Fire it up. You have enough money to get home… that brought her up short. Home? Where is that? With the Gilas? With my missing brother somewhere? In the graveyard where my parents are? THIS was supposed to be home. Here. Him. After a few days of sex in South Dakota and I throw everything away and chase a man 1000 miles like some love-struck little school girl. I am completely the fool here.
“Hey.”
The young boy next to her had no idea how close he came to having his head torn off. “Don’t sneak up on people,” she admonished automatically, trying to get her heartbeat back under control.
“Sorry,” the boy didn’t sound very sorry, he had a big naughty grin on his face. “Rock said to get you a room unless you’re with him in his room. We have one, we all chipped in and got it all cleaned up. Or are you staying with him?”
Val looked at the kid and smiled. She sighed and looked once more at the Valkyrie painted on the tank. Slaying demons to save a warrior’s soul. Ever have one of your clients bitch you out because he’d had a bad day?
“Maybe you better show me to this room you all worked so hard on,” she said after a moment and even dredged up a smile for the boy that almost felt genuine.
She set aside visions of the open road and turned back to the Valkyrie. Take the fighter from last night, Skuld. Wing the man to Valhalla. He was brave, but not too bright. She looked at the office and untied the straps. That seems to be pretty common for a warrior.
Chapter 10
Rocky closed the door quietly as Murray walked out. He sat heavily behind the desk and picked up the crumpled notice, smoothing it out on the desk. The fight was in a month. In two, the kids were back on the street.
The gangs were still out there. They would gladly take them in. Or they would kill them. And the girls… Rocky set the paper carefully down on the stack of bills that piled on his desk and took out the check from his “victory” last night. It wasn’t enough. Not if he was going to feed everyone and keep the lights on.
Rocky dropped his head in his hands. He didn’t know how people did this, lived like this from bill to bill, always in a state of panic about how the next one was going to be paid. As a child growing up he’d been kept unaware of such things. As an adult, life hadn’t been this hard. Not when he’d started this place. The money from the fights had been good. He’d been winning. Lately though he’d been in something of a dry spell. Murray had told him he’d had to be choosy if he were going to build a career.
The money would come later. After he’d made it big. Then they could really do something.
The problem was, he’d wanted to do it all now. There were too many kids that needed him. Too many families needed a place to begin again. He hadn’t been able to wait.
I have rich friends. I could get help.
Michael was rich. Rocky could go and beg him for money, but he needed to keep his friendship on the quiet side. If the MMA hooked him to a mafia leader, it was truly the end of his career. The door opened, and Rocky turned to glare. The kids knew better than to come into the office. This was his little place to be alone.
A smiling face surrounding a lollipop grinned up at him.
“Diego.” Rocky moaned. “Man, what are you doing here? You know you’re not allowed in the office. And where did you get that candy? It best not be from the stash, you weren’t stealing from me again, were you?”
Diego’s bright smile vanished as he remembered the last time he’d been caught snitching something from the kitchen and he placed his hands over his butt reflexively. He shook his head fast.
“DIEGO!” Maria called from the outer office. “You know you’re not allowed in here.”
Diego smiled at Rocky like he’d shared a great secret and ran. He slipped past Maria and through the door.
“I WILL BOX YOUR DAMN EARS, BOY!” she called after him, but the boy was long gone.
“What was all that about?”
Maria sighed and put her hands on her hips. “Your girlfriend,” she said with a wry shake of her head. “Diego helped her move in and she gave him that lollipop. Now he’s running up the walls and even the wind can’t keep up with him.”
Rocky nodded and got up from the desk. �
�I kind of snapped at her,” he admitted.
“Really?” Maria looked at him, head tilted. “So, let me see if I have this right. She drops everything, drives 1000 miles through the desert, leaving her friends and family and work and comes out here to be with you, and on her first day, you snap at her. Did I get that right?”
“Alright, alright, I know. I get it.”
“No, you don’t get it, if you got it, you’d have a cute little girl on your arm and maybe wanting to grope your muscle-butt, but what you have is a cute little girl in a separate private room that don’t do you any good, and takes away a room from a kid who might need it to get off the street. You’re hurt, she’s hurt, and some poor damn thing is sleeping in a gutter because you can’t figure out how to talk nice. That’s what you don’t get.
“I’ll talk to her, ok?”
“No. No, it’s not ok. You’re gonna go talk to her? Really? Isn’t that how she got moved in to a private room in the first place, because you talked to her? Rocky, man this isn’t like the old days, we’re not children anymore. We both have responsibilities and every single thing we say and do can make a huge damn difference to the people around us.”
“Hang on.” Rocky waved his arms. “You bitch me out for not talking to her and now you don’t what me to talk to her?”
Maria dropped her arms and sighed. In the same voice she used to tell Marco that he can’t lick a light socket, she explained it to him. “Listen little brother, if you really like this girl, don’t go talk to her. Go listen. Unless you like her because she’s a mute who’s good in bed and there is nothing going on in that pretty little head of hers, maybe what you need to do is listen. And for that matter, she looks a damn sight more intelligent than you do right now with your mouth hanging open like that.”
“Maria.” Rocky said quietly, needing her to understand. “The fight from last night. The man I fought, he died.”
“Oh lord have mercy,” Maria crossed herself. “You know I didn’t ever like you fighting for a living, it seemed too much like fighting you did for free. But I am really sorry that someone died, Rocky.” She looked at him for a long moment, her face melting and merging between emotions. “Wait, died? I thought you told me that no one gets really hurt, that it’s just bruises and such. Now you’re telling me that people die in this?”
“Of course, there are injuries,” Rocky said and it was his turn to look at her like she was the crazy one. “You can’t hit a man without injuring him. I said that they take precautions, they’re careful to minimize any hurt.”
“No.” Maria shook her head. “No, you did not. You told me, ‘Don’t worry, they don’t actually hurt each other, just a few bruises’. I remember the very words, I can tell you where we were, I can tell you the show mamma was watching when you said it.”
“How the hell do you remember that?”
“Because it’s one of those things that burns into your mind when someone you love suddenly tell you that he’s going to go and take stupid risks for money. Because it scared me, and you lied to me about it just to shut me up.” Maria was fighting tears.
“Look, I’m… “
“… sorry,” Maria said. “You’re sorry. I get that. Maybe you best go to this girl of yours before she decides she’s sorry that she came here. You’ve got a lot of these kids counting on you, little brother. If she’s staying she’s going to take on a lot of this, too. Even if she doesn’t want to, even if she just lives here, she’s in this up to her tits because you are. That’s a hell of a lot for someone to walk into. Especially someone I think you want to stay a whole lot longer than two weeks. Or have I misread the situation?” She looked at him long and hard. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
Rocky closed his mouth and stood. He went over to his sister and kissed her forehead and without a word walked out.
“GOOD GOD, HE CAN BE TAUGHT,” she called out after him. He then heard her calling for Diego and spared a moment of sympathy for the child. He walked to the room he’d asked the kids and his sisters to get ready for Val. He raised his hands to knock, and spared a moment of sympathy for himself.
As his knuckles hit the door, all the old Vincent Price horror movies he’d watched as a child came back to him. The knocks echoed hollowly through the dank castle and his doom came to the door to spring it open and…
And gave him a very foul look. Val blinked and waited him out. Rocky kept his lips together. He sure as hell wasn’t apologizing in a hallway for every person in the place to hear. Val walked back into the room and left the door open.
Rocky followed her in and sat on the edge of the bed. “There’s a big storage area near the empty pool,” he said. “It locks. It would be big enough for the bike.”
Val looked at him and went back to the bag lying on the bed. It was open, but it was still full.
“I can’t tell if you’re packing or unpacking,” he said after a minute.
“Nor can I.” Val answered him coldly.
“I wanted to slap him,” Rocky admitted, “or punch or kick. But it’s not Murray. He’s not doing any of this, he’s just the poor sap that has to deliver the news.”
“So you yelled at me?”
“Yeah.” Rocky said. “I did. I shouldn’t have, you didn’t deserve it, but I did. Because if I yelled at him, I couldn’t have stopped. Because you were saying what I was feeling, and I can’t feel that way, I can’t afford to.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong!”
“I know that!” Rocky said quietly. “So what?”
“So what? They can’t punish you for not doing something wrong.”
“They are. They can. So what difference does it make if I did or didn’t do something wrong? I’m still here, nothing changes. I don’t even know who ‘they’ is, all I know is that someone is preventing me from fighting. And that’s all I know. I never trained for anything else.”
“Wait a minute.” Val’s forehead creased in confusion. “Hoodoo said you went to college, ASU, right?”
“Right.”
“So what did you get your degree in? You have that.”
“Physical education and child psychology. I never finished, though. My stepfather died, I had to come home.”
“I’m still finishing my masters,” Val admitted. “It’s taking longer because I’m trying to not be swallowed in student debt.” She plopped down next to him. “I nearly left just now. I don’t like being treated like that.”
“No one would.”
“Don’t do it again.”
Rocky nodded and wrapped an arm around her. She actually let him. It felt like progress. He rested his forehead against hers. “I started fighting when I was younger than Diego. I was good at it. Too good. I worked my way through college doing odd jobs and professional boxing. I got an associate’s degree, but never finished the bachelor’s.”
“I worked as a waitress,” Val said quietly. I worked at a strip club for a week.” She laughed and pressed him back into his seat. “Down boy, I wasn’t a stripper, I was a waitress. I have a lot of respect for the girls, though. It’s tough doing that for a living.”
“A week?”
“Well, I broke a tray.”
“Those things happen, that sounds kind of harsh.”
Val smiled and talked from the corner of her mouth. “I broke it on someone’s head. He was the millionth person to grab my ass, so he got the prize.”
Rocky smiled. That sounded like her. “Then,” Val continued, “I broke a fingernail.”
He looked at her a moment. “One of yours?” he asked.
“No. One of his. I broke the finger and the nail kind of splintered, too.”
“So… you got fired.”
“Oh yeah.” Val nodded as eagerly as Diego had. “But... then I started working at Sidelines…”
“Hey, I know that place!”
“That’s where I met Hoodoo and Mad-dog. They took me in.” She leaned against his chest and put her hand on his thigh. “I had this crap car that
kept dying on me and I thought that the bike was a good idea, less gas…” She shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” Rocky said.
“I know,” Val said, settling in and closing her eyes. Rocky thought she said “home,” but her voice was too quiet to be sure.
She fell asleep against him, sitting on the bed. Rocky held her. And even though he was in love and she was the world to him, and his mind still managed to focus on the fight, the bills, the kids…
“I’m sorry,” he said again, but Val didn’t hear.
Chapter 11
“Hector left,” Maria said quietly as Rocky came into the office the next day.
Rocky looked at her for a moment and swallowed hard, all the happy feelings he’d had from waking up with Val in his bed, having disappeared in that instant. “I didn’t think he’d leave,” he said, as he sank into his chair. “He was doing pretty well here. Or did I miss something?”
Maria handed him a piece of paper. Considering that Hector was illiterate seven months ago, the choppy penmanship was still a minor miracle.