9. Baby Bel – Sihn
CHAPTER 9
BABY BEL
SIHN
Me: I’d like to have you over to my place. Or if you’re not comfortable with that yet…
Man, I really should have seen it coming. She was everything I have ever looked for in a woman. Tall, and curvy, with natural hair, and natural beauty and she’s intelligent.
The sex was phenomenal. And then she just said, “I have a work meeting,” and left me practically naked in her friend’s apartment. She left her own damn friend’s apartment.
Fuck, how could I have been so dumb?
I could tell she was into the sex last night, and I thought, ‘Hell this is my kinda girl.’
I didn’t think it meant she was the male version of me. Mar doesn’t strike me as a one-night-stand girl. So why is she trying to be that kind of girl with me?
I’m the one who does the leaving, not the other way around. Of course, I don’t normally hook up with a chick at their friend’s place… This is a first for me. I very rarely spend an overnight with a woman.
My phone rings and my heart thumps, hoping it’s Mar calling back with her reply, but it’s Harvey. I answer.
“Hey, Gramps.”
His voice is deep and hoarse. “You coming over today, bud?”
A therapist would probably say that I used Mar last night as a distraction from what I would be dealing with today. I don’t see shrinks. “Uh, yeah. I’ll be there in a few hours. I need to shower and then I’ll be down.”
“Can’t wait to see ya, bud.”
My mother was hurt when I was twelve, so we both moved in with Harvey. In the ring, she went by Baby Bel. She had a youthful face, but she was an entertainer first. Everyone loved watching her, I’ve heard. I have a few memories left of her jumping from the top ropes and doing a front flip in the air until she smacked down on whoever her opponent was that night. When I was twelve, she decided to backflip off the ropes and ended up nearly breaking her neck. In the end, she broke her back, and she was never the same after that.
We moved to Harvey’s. It was only meant to be until she recovered from the injury, but she never fully recovered. She could never wrestle again. She didn’t want to be behind the scenes. She wanted to be the star. Mom couldn’t take laying around the house every day. The doctors prescribed medication, but they only seemed to make her care even less.
By the time I turned twenty-one, Mom had succumbed to severe depression by way of suicide and today is her death day. She never was the same after she could no longer wrestle due to her injuries. I inherited my childhood home that we left here in River Falls. It’s a work in progress—small, but it’s mine free and clear. Thanks to Mom. It was the only thing she had of value.
It broke Gramps’ heart when she passed, and I broke it even more by leaving and wrestling. I needed an outlet for my anger. Mom told me I’d love wrestling. She said it was in my blood, and she wasn’t wrong. I’m one of the best in the area, but Gramps wasn’t wrong either. It doesn’t provide enough to even keep food on my table. If it wasn’t for inheriting the house, I couldn’t stay afloat. Not even with my Dine on Demand shifts.
Until I can provide for myself, I can’t think of anything permanent with anyone else, but Mar is practically all I can think about right now. My brain is so consumed with her that I’d blow Harvey off right now if she called.
From Harvey’s favorite spot on his covered porch, I see his lips pull into a friendly smile when my car pulls into his driveway.
When he talks, he always sounds like he’s mad at someone, but it’s his regular voice. Growing up, it was funny to see people scared of him due to his voice alone.
He’s not an intimidating old man. He’s venerable. He looks more and more like the old man he is. Sunspots on his forehead from his days as a roofer. Wrinkles around his eyes like paper cuts from years of squinting. What little hair he has left is winter-white. Before he started to shrink, he was an inch taller than I am now. My very own Batman I called Gramps or sometimes Harvey.
He taught me a lot about life, and even though we don’t see eye to eye on wrestling, I love him all the same. He’s all the family I have left.
He’s lived here for over six decades now. The house, old and weathered much like Gramps, is more home than where I live now. The musty smell is a welcome scent as I sit down next to him on the front porch. The seat I’m sitting on sags in the middle and the paint on the wicker is chipped. Little specks of white scatter the floorboards.
“You ready, bud?” Gramps asks after a few minutes of silence. He’s never been too much of a talker, and to keep from arguing over things on a day like today, I’ve made a vow to keep my mouth shut as often as possible.
“Yep, you think you’ll be able to get in and out of the Altima?”
He clamps his hands down on the armrests of his chair. As his arms shake, he stands up. “Ahh, I’m limber. I might be eighty-nine, but I ain’t dead yet.”
He’s mostly silent on the way to the cemetery. It’s close to his house, but even though he doesn’t like to admit it, he doesn’t get around as well as he once did. Before, he would walk here almost every day to visit my grandma, who passed when she was young of mesothelioma she acquired at her government job. Now he comes when I take him. Although he’d never confess it to me, he has a lady friend who visits him often. She’s about twenty or so years younger, but she seems to genuinely care about him in a friendly manner. Her husband has also passed, leaving her alone as they had no children.
Today is about my mom though. We don’t talk about how Mom passed on her own accord. Depression is mad shit, and she couldn’t find the will to live. I know it’s been hard on him.
We reach Grandma’s and Mom’s graves, and he leans against an old oak tree that he illegally planted. He told the gravedigger that if anyone messed with his tree, there’d be hell to pay.
Mom’s gravestone reads:
Mabel ‘Baby Bel’ James. Mother of Woody .
She never called me by my given name, Elwood. She always called me Woody. I never liked either name. Gramps has always called me Bud, and I’ve taken on Sihn for everyone else.
They say when you visit someone’s grave you are supposed to think back on all the happy memories you shared with your deceased loved one. It’s so hard to think back on happier times. Memories from before the accident. I have them, but they are just so damn foggy now.
On days when she wasn’t training or working at her job as a waitress, she’d take me to a local lake where it was free to swim. She’d pack us a cooler full of snacks, sandwiches, and these orange alcoholic beverages she liked. She hated the water and mostly lay in the sun after lathering up with baby oil. I can still smell the oil when I close my eyes. We’d stay there for hours. The sand wasn’t the kind you could build a sandcastle with, but I tried. I made new friends each time. Other kids were there for the day with their relatives. Those days were nice—aside from the sand stuck in my swim trunks at the end of the day. Mom would talk to me on the ride home like I was an adult as I sat on a towel in the passenger seat. She’d tell me about her work drama and who her next match-up was with.
All of my later memories are of her fragile, pale, and thin. Seemingly wasting away before my eyes. A shell of who she used to be. By the time she took her own life, you could hardly recognize the powerhouse Baby Bel she once was.
I was never allowed to watch her fight, so all I can recall of the time she wrestled was being in the back as she got ready or watching her practice beforehand. I was the only child around. No one else had children, or if they did, they didn’t bring them around. The other parent of the child likely had their kids, if they had any. My mom was a single mom. She never talked about my father, and when I would ask she would cry, so I stopped asking. When I came of age I requested a copy of my birth certificate, and under the name father was blank. Today doesn’t seem like the day to ask Gramps, and I have a feeling he doesn’t know who he is either.
“What’s one of your favorite memories with Mom?”
“Probably the day she was born. Uma wanted a baby and I didn’t, but after Mabel was born, I had never loved a person so much. Probably loved her too much.”
“How can you love your child too much?”
“Ah, you’ll understand more once you have your own, but I would have killed for your mom and not thought twice about it.”
We fall silent. He leans on the tree, his head hung low. I watch as the wind blows a fake flower around in the air.
He breaks the silence by saying, “I wasn’t kind to her when she told us she was pregnant with you at seventeen. I shouldn’t have been so damn mean, but I thought we had taught her better and then she got messed up in the wrestling business. I never approved, but I loved her and never wanted any harm to come to her.”
I patted his back with my hand. “She knew you loved her Gramps. She knew.”
“I sure hope so.”
I give his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “It’s getting late Gramps. I gotta head back early in the morning for work. Let’s call it a night.”
Gramps nods. He’d lean against the tree next to her grave all night if I’d let him. He misses his daughter, and I miss my mom.
Slowly, I lead him around the gravestones and back to my car.
I have to get back to town tomorrow for our weekly Sunday story meeting. Every week Colonel continues a story arc. They last anywhere from one month to sometimes two. If we can generate enough anticipation, we hope to end with a pay-per- view match. I want to be on television. I want to be the next National North American Heavyweight Champion.