Post by Vhodka Marie on Jan 12, 2021 14:01:05 GMT -5
There’s really no place like home for the holidays because no matter how far away you roam when the time comes that you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze you can always get on your boyfriend’s private jet and go home sweet home. I think that’s what Perry Como said, right? It had been a long time since I had been back home to Bent Fork for a family Christmas and even longer since the man beside me had been there. We’d come once, years ago when the affair had just begun and things with his ex-wife were fresh enough that he could still slip away from time to time without much questioning, a phase that ended much too quickly for my liking back then but seemed only a distant memory now as the truck bounced down the uneven backroads of rural Tennessee. God, my mother still talked to this day about the Christmas we spent in Bent Fork back in the early aughts, it had become the stuff of hillbilly legend like Ronnie Van Zant being buried in a Neil Young t-shirt or Dale Earnhardt Sr. being secretly murdered by Richard Childress Racing for a hefty life insurance policy. The damage done by the fire had grown in the telling over the years cementing Vincent Black as a kind of local folk hero to the people of Bent Fork, right on up there with Davy Crockett.
If you would have told me a few short months ago that I would be heading home to spend Christmas with my family and Vincent then I would have called you crazy. If you would have told me not only would Vincent be by my side but that the much smaller less violent version of him would also be joining us I would have asked how much of BMoore’s stash you had smoked. Yet, here I was and here they were, all headed down to the Ponderosa Estates like one big happy family. Quite frankly, I was shocked when Vin had told me that his son wanted to spend Christmas with us this year and even more shocked when his mother agreed to it so easily. After the shock wore off and my brain started firing on all cylinders again the puzzle pieces started to come together to form a picture that spelled a certain disaster for me. Who better to enact a sinister revenge plot than the innocent little child no one expects? Clearly his toilet clog of a mother had been biding her time just waiting for the right moment to pounce and claim revenge upon me for breaking up her happy home and stealing her husband out from under her. I had to give it to her, sending the kid in to do the dirty work was a smart plan, one that most people would never see coming. But as per usual, I was already three steps ahead of her. Yep, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to pull the wool over ol’ Vhodka’s eyes and the big red sea monster just doesn’t have the wits for it. I’d play it cool for now, can’t let the kid know that I’m on to him just yet, no, let him think that he has the advantage in the situation. Then when he makes his move... WHAP! Lay the hammer down!
Fucking wolves, man. Everyone and their Mama’s are a wolf these days. You walk into any wrestling promotion in the United States and you’re going to find at least twenty people purporting to be wolves talking out their ass about pack mentality and making bad animal references. What’s the deal with Wolves anyway? How did that get to be the hot animal everyone wants to fashion themselves after? Like you hardly ever see tigers or bears or lions or fuckin’ barracudas. No, just wolf after wolf after wolf. Wolves to the left of me, wolves to the right. Literally. Vincent goes by Vincent Black in the ring, but his family name? His legal government name? Fucking Wolf. Can you believe that shit? All the rest of these morons are gallivanting around dubbing themselves wolves like the lame kid in class who wants to be cool so he starts calling himself Raven Riot or some other goofy shit but this man was actually born with the last name Wolf and now he’s stuck getting lumped in with absolute losers like those two in F2B. The kicker is, I’m not even a Wolf! Screwing a wolf, sure, but that hardly is enough to earn me the title. Hell! I don’t even HAVE a last name, just the first and middle... or is it two firsts? Like Mary Sue or Peggy Ann? You know, how they did it back in the day. Fuck, now I’m having an existential crisis and it’s all thanks to these goddamn canine copycats.
« Vhodka Marie »
You gotta change your fuckin’ name.
« Vin Black »
For the last time, I’m not changing my name to Robin. If anyone is Batman in this relationship, it’s me.
« Vhodka Marie »
No, not that. I’m talking about Wolf. And also, no.
« Vin Black »
My family worked hard in this business to be where we are, it was a given that lesser talents would want to attempt to ride our legacy to the top. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
« Vhodka Marie »
I thought the sincerest form of flattery was skinning someone alive and wearing their skin like a giant fleshy Halloween costume.
« Vin Black »
That too.
He was right of course, because Vincent Black was always right. Had I not loved him more than my McDonalds Happy Meal 101 Dalmatians toy collection that might have annoyed me, but I did so it didn’t. Actually, the fact that he always had the right answer to anything life threw at him, or me for that matter, was one of the things I loved about him – though I’ll never ever admit it to his face. I spent a lot of my life around people who... let’s just say didn’t quite understand me. My mind would spiral and come up with these insane scenarios and all these questions that snowballed into one another and somewhere around the twelfth or twentieth question the eyes of the person in front of me would start to glaze over as their brain short circuited trying to keep up. That never happened with Vincent. He’d sit there and listen, eyes intent on my own and sometimes interjecting to ask clarifying questions and then by the time I had word vomited all of life's mysteries out of my mouth and gotten so far away from my original point that I’d have forgotten what it even was he’d have already put all the pieces together to form the perfect response. We were an excellent team.
Vin and I were kind of like feet when you really thought about it, and believe me, I had put some time into this analogy. Stick with me here: you have two feet and with those two feet you can do lots of things. One foot can be planted flat on the floor while the other is used to propel someone's teeth down their throat, for example. Both feet are doing their own important jobs but not the same job. Then imagine that after you perform a low-cost dental procedure you want to walk across the room to pick up one of those now newly independent teeth, well, your feet work together to get you there. Mirrored images of one another, both very different but still the same, both working together to move your giant meat vehicle of a body to the land of teeth and promise. Sometimes Vin was the foot planted into someone's jaw and I was what supported him while he did so, sometimes we moved alongside one another to get us where we wanted to go. There were times when we were apart but we always ended up finding our way back beside one another at the end of the day. Sure, someone might come along and amputate one of us or there could be some sort of unfortunate accident with an escalator but how often does that legitimately happen? If the unexpected happened I’d come up with a new analogy but for now we were feet.
I had the sudden urge to touch him in that moment, not just because I wanted to but because I could. There was a time in our lives where we had to be very careful about how and when we touched one another but that was done with, now I could touch him however and whenever I pleased and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t relish every moment of our newfound freedom. In this newfound freedom came new experiences, like meeting his birth father a few weeks ago and traveling to his childhood home earlier today. I’ve known about his upbringing since the beginning but something about experiencing these things had set me on a protective edge, making me really really want to punch anyone who looked at him wrong in their big dumb fucking face. I was self aware enough to realize that the people I truly wanted to knock the fuck out of were his so called fathers but since that wasn’t currently on the table I’d have to find a couple of surrogates to pin the duo of abusive bastards faces to.
My childhood home was the nicest trailer park in town, which wasn’t saying much considering there was only one other in town and the only reason people considered it nicer was because it was occupied by more families and aging seniors than meth labs and convicted felons. The Ponderosa Trailer estates sat on the edge of town, brushing up against the Tennessee wilderness where I had spent my teenage years hiding from Sheriff Brown and planning my great escape from this little scrap of land that I felt I was rapidly outgrowing with each and every year. As we drove against the setting sun through the trailer park I was struck with how everything can be both the same and different all at once, it’s funny how that happens. My parents trailer has always sat at the very back of the neighborhood with its back to the woods but it’s undergone a few slight changes over the years. Originally, we started out in a single wide trailer that was passed down to my parents after some distant relative keeled over and through the years after I started to see a little success they have used the money sent back home to… add on, so to speak. In this case adding on meant that whenever someone died or went to prison they would use the spare money to buy that trailer and then my dad and a few of my drunk uncles would set to configuring the new trailer around the original trailer. Since lot space at the Ponderosa is at a premium they found themselves having to build upwards instead of spreading out so the trailer now resembled the world's first hillbilly Tetris game. As the truck rolled to a stop I could feel Vincent’s eyes taking in the Redneck Winchester House in silence.
« Vin Black »
It all makes sense now.
« Vhodka Marie »
What!
« Vin Black »
It’s like you. It starts out normal enough and then you start peeling back the layers and then…
He gestured vaguely toward the home before us as we opened our doors and slid out of the truck. His hand is a loud slap on the side of the truck before his son's head pops up from the bed of the truck. Apparently, the kid had never ridden in the back of a pickup truck. Can you believe that? It seemed a shame to deny him one of any country kids favorite childhood experiences so we had told him to hop in the back and duck out of sight if he saw the police coming towards us. Between you and I, I was kind of hoping that if we took a pothole hard enough he might bounce out before he got the chance to slit my throat in my sleep. I should have known he wouldn’t be as easy to thwart as that, given who his father was. The boy stands and begins the task of climbing out of the back of the truck, his eyes never leaving the trailer in front of him.
« Callan Wolf »
Wow. It’s like ready player one.
« Vin Black »
...what?
Vincent looked at the boy in confusion but he paid him no mind, Call’s eyes were wide and his lips remained parted as he was clearly blown over by the feat of engineering in front of him. Yeah, you couldn’t get this kind of craftsmanship in that hoity toity uptight cult compound this kid grew up in, that’s for sure. He was also probably having to take some time to reformulate his attack plan against me on account of not expecting me to have such a distinct home ground advantage. The sound of my mother’s voice shrilly cut through the night as she sprinted towards us, totally bypassing me to envelop Vincent in the world's largest bear hug by the world's smallest woman.
« Beulah May Bickett »
Lordy boy, get over here and give Mama some sugar! What’s it been? Three weeks? Oh, it just feels like ages! Now don’t you worry about a thing, I went around after Buck was four beers deep and hid all the bullets from him so you just relax and enjoy yourself tonight.
Vincent peered at me over no less than six inches of blonde bouffant likely wondering if the five foot nothing woman could death roll him like some very feminine gator. That, or he was recalling the last time she greeted him where she laid a very big kiss on his mouth only moments after he had laid a very deep kiss on my… well, it wasn’t my mouth but there were lips involved. Beulah May Bickett was an institution in Bent Fork, she was more revered than the reverend, more respected than the mayor and sometimes more feared than the sheriff. It was a wonder that she hadn’t gone into the wrestling business before my foray into it, she could have single handedly ran every promotion from Oregon to Tennessee with an iron fist and a cloud of peony perfume. She released Vincent so abruptly that he might have stumbled if she weighed more than three pounds, turning her focus on the small child before her.
« Vhodka Marie »
Do you hear a tea kettle?
« Vin Black »
It’s your mother. She’s been making that high pitched whistling sound ever since her eyes focused on Call.
« Beulah May Bickett »
He’s a beautiful angel! It’s about time you two brought me a grandbaby home.
Her eyes darted back and forth between us accusingly before settling on me with a certain weight that reminded me a lot of when I was a kid and just about to receive news that my mother was very well aware of whatever trouble I had hidden from her. I shifted in place a bit uncomfortable and trying very hard to keep my face from showing anything in this moment before she finally turned her attention away from me and moved to wrap her arms around Callan, turning their bodies to steer him around the truck to the sound of voices carrying from behind the trailer.
« Beulah May Bickett »
Oh I am just so glad you’re here! Now, you can call me Grammy B and I’ll take you ‘round to introduce you to PePaw Buck and all your aunts and uncles and kin. Your PePaw and I have so much planned for you while you’re here and we fixed you up your very own trailer all to yourself so Grammy’s baby doesn’t have to share. I wasn’t sure what your favorite food was so I just went ahead and made them all..
Her voice faded into the sound of a crowd as they rounded the trailer and disappeared from sight. I had to give the boy credit, he took my mother and her exuberance of him like a champ - a lot like his father. Our hands found one another as we moved through the dusk to follow in the direction they had gone.
« Vhodka Marie »
She’s excited.
« Vin Black »
Better him than me.
« Vhodka Marie »
Don’t act like you aren’t jealous of not being Mama B’s favorite anymore.
« Vin Black »
Everyone she meets is Mama B’s favorite.
« Vhodka Marie »
That’s not true, she just tells people that. You’re her REAL favorite, I can tell.
« Vin Black »
How?
« Vhodka Marie »
She hid Daddy’s bullets.
« Vin Black »
Having met your father several times I feel like she probably frequently hides his bullets.
« Vhodka Marie »
Yeah, but this is the first time she’s hidden them to the benefit of keeping one of my boyfriends alive. That’s huge.
« Vin Black »
To be fair, the bar wasn’t very high.
« Vhodka Marie »
So help me God, I will give you the purple nurple of a lifetime.
« Vin Black »
You wouldn’t dare, I’m Mama B’s favorite.
« Vhodka Marie »
I lied, she doesn’t even know your name. She’s got dementia. She thinks you’re my Uncle Remus back from the war.
« Vin Black »
Which war?
« Vhodka Marie »
Episode Six.
« Vin Black »
That was a bad one. Lost a lot of good men in that war.
« Vhodka Marie »
We really did.. so many good men...
« Vin Black »
Yoda, for example. Great man.
« Vhodka Marie »
I never said it was an American war.
Around the back of the trailer Christmas eve and the residents of the Ponderosa Estates were in full swing of holiday celebration, the men gathered around a fire pit in various lawn chairs and pieces of ass sized trash suitable for sitting. The women were mostly segregated to the other side of the clearing where food was being sat out on tables, scurrying in and out of various trailers with covered dishes of all different shapes and sizes. As we approach the men surrounding the fire a plump round woman with a black bouffant hands us a pickle jar and jam jar, respectively as she passes by.
« Vin Black »
Why did that woman give me a jar of pickles?
« Vhodka Marie »
It’s a cup. Just drink it.
« Vin Black »
This is not a cup. This is a pickle jar.
« Vhodka Marie »
It was born a pickle jar but chooses to identify as a cup now. Don’t be intolerant, it’s 2020.
« Buck Bickett »
You two ladies gonna keep jaw jappin’ back there with the rest of the hens?
The laughter of the men around the fire was enough to stop all arguments and guide our feet in the direction of the men around the firepit. My father is secretly one of my favorite people in the entire world, a real break-the-mold kind of guy. He was born dirt poor and had to fight for every single thing he claimed as his own in this world. Where this would have made some men bitter it just seemed to make my Dad more motivated to conquer everything life threw at him with the swagger of a man that has run out of fucks to give. He and my mother were really the best parents anyone could have ever hoped for – they may not have had much to give in money but they had more than enough to give in love and that made up for everything else. When I was a kid, my mother was the law in our house and she didn’t take kindly to my somewhat unconventional manner. My father seemed to relish his role as both accomplice and alibi, always willing to help get me into trouble but even faster to come up with a lie to keep me off my mother's knee when she eventually found out whatever foolishness I had landed myself in this time. As I got older and started growing from a tomboy kid to an eccentric young lady (as my mother framed it at the time) my father’s role also shifted from accomplice to protector, frequently greeting dates at the trailer door with loaded shotguns and the steely gaze of a man with a shallow grave to fill. We were currently going through another sort of shift with all that had happened recently in my life and this shift had more to do with the man beside me and less to do with myself personally. On that long ago Christmas that I had brought Vincent home for the first time and introduced him to my family my father and he had gotten along like a house on fire but ever since the affair and the details surrounding it had been made public, he now had reverted back to his role of protector and in his mind, Vincent Black was exactly the kind of man I needed protecting from.
« Vhodka Marie »
Hi Daddy.
He leans back squinting through the beer goggles, no doubt, to focus on my hair. My hair is an on-going dispute with my father. He prefers blondes and I prefer not being told what to do – you can see where the disagreement happens. There was a thirty second period that I had considered going home with a nice conventional hair color, but it was short-lived.
« Buck Bickett »
Green, eh? I guess it’s better than orange. Last time we came to visit the girl looked like an orangutan's ass.
Usually, my father is a lot nicer, but judging by the smell wafting off his breath he was about three sheets to the wind and sans filter by this point in the festivities. His eyes shift from my hair to Vincent standing beside me. Daddy motions in the direction of my Uncle Eddie, wiggling his fingers until a can of Coors Light is produced and deposited in his hand. The beer can is extended in Vincent’s direction. Oh no, imminent disaster.
« Vhodka Marie »
Oh, we just had a big meal! He’s probably full. On account of all the food. Bologna and Funyun sandwiches, very filling.
Truth be told, Vincent was a beer snob and wouldn’t be caught dead drinking something like Coors or Natty Light. But to tell my father and Uncle’s that would have been a downright act of war and assured that they never ever warmed up to the man by my side.
« Buck Bickett »
What's the matter? City boy too good to sit down and have a beer with the rest of us? Should I send the butler out for some fancy bottled waters? What do you prefer, Ozarka or Dasani?
I opened my mouth to speak but before I could the beer was in Vincent’s hand and then it was opened, and then it was downed in one very impressive gulp. The can is crushed in his hand and thrown over his shoulder as some heavy macho male eye contact is going on between him and my father.
« Buck Bickett »
Look at that, the city boy can drink! Give him another. Ed, scoot your big ass down and let the boy sit, maybe we can salvage him just yet.
His hand is a tight pulse in my own before he lets go, moving to perch himself on the old tire next to my father that my Uncle Eddie has now been unceremoniously kicked off of. I could feel that protective streak kicking in again as I weighed the pros and cons of leaving him alone with the men of the Ponderosa. From what I could tell it didn’t look like anyone had brought their guns with them so he was likely safe from the most immediate danger but still... Vincent’s eyes catch my own, wordlessly telling me to go. And so I do, moving further away from the comradery of the Christmas Eve festivities and to the woods beyond.
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