Noble Warrior

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  “Not sure I follow,” Stanzer said.

  “Ever since Detroit went bankrupt, things have gone to hell. Crime is up, schools are down, and they keep slashing our police department budget in ways that make it impossible to function. My guys’ cop cars,” he said, “they don’t get oil changes. Ain’t got no money. And what happens to a car that don’t get its oil changed? Fucking transmission breaks down. Feels like we got more vehicles sitting in the shop than we do on the street, so my guys, they buy their own Quaker State. And they get pink-slipped anyway. R.I.F. notices come every three months. You know, Reduction in Force. Whole thing is bullshit.”

  The passion of Puwolsky’s words turned his cheeks red. As the man in charge of overseeing a special forces unit whose primary goal was to keep the Motor City safe, the colonel’s team had been through the ringer. Fewer officers meant fewer arrests, which meant more violent offenders on the streets, which meant more victims on the crime ledgers and more bodies in the morgue.

  “We’ve always felt like we’ve had to operate with our finger in a dam,” Puwolsky said. “Now we got our dicks in it, too.”

  Puwolsky sniffed his nose, rubbed a meaty paw over his chin and got to the real reason he’d traveled to New Jersey in the first place.

  “We want you,” Puwolsky said to McCutcheon, “to assassinate the High Priest.”

  Neither McCutcheon or Stanzer replied.

  “Like I said, it’s almost perfect,” the colonel continued. “They’re fucking asking for you, and this D’Marcus guy, he’s gotten too large, too big, he’s in control of too much,” Puwolsky said, growing more and more animated. “We need to decentralize power. When the gangs war within themselves or war with one another, it’s the soldiers who die. However, when they’re unified, it’s the civilians who pay.” Puwolsky flashed soft eyes. “Like your friends David Klowner and Nathan Wachowski from your MMA gym. Like your girlfriend Kaitlyn Cummings. This guy, the High Priest, he’s like a fucking terrorist, and right now you’re the only one who can end his reign.”

  “Might I remind you that murder is illegal?” Stanzer said.

  “Everything you’re doing is illegal, Colonel,” Puwolsky replied. “The question is, would it be immoral?”

  McCutcheon didn’t speak. Didn’t reveal any emotion. Didn’t touch his salad, either.

  “Just think about it a sec,” Puwolsky said. “You get to eliminate an enemy of the state, you get to avenge the murder of your friends, and you get to save the life of your girl. Whaddya say?”

  “No,” he said.

  Puwolsky spent the next twenty minutes firing below-the-belt shots saying anything he could to coerce McCutcheon into accepting the mission.

  He appealed to M.D.’s sense of duty.

  “This is what agents like you do. They deliver justice to the dark corners of our country, where the courts can’t reach.”

  He appealed to his sense of guilt.

  “Why do you even think your friends Klowner and Nate-Neck are dead? Because of you! ’Cause you never let ‘em know what was really going on with the Priests the night of your last fight. You got ’em to be your cornermen and they paid for their friendship and loyalty with their lives. And you just let that slide like some little bitch? Own it, son. Their blood is on your head.”

  He appealed to McCutcheon’s sense of heroism.

  “Detroit needs a champion. Detroit needs someone who is willing to step up on behalf of all the good and decent people who are being terrorized in this city. Aren’t you a victim of that terror? Didn’t you come from the ghetto, the belly of that beast? And now you’re going to turn your back on all those little kids, on all those helpless mothers, on all the people who need someone to fight for them because they do not have the power or ability to fight for themselves? Kid, you may be one of the baddest mixed martial artists in the history of the sport, but deep down underneath it’s pretty clear to me that you’re nothin’ but a little sissy bitch.”

  Puwolsky came at McCutcheon with every hurtful arrow he could fire. And Stanzer just sat there letting M.D. take it. He didn’t intervene. He didn’t stand up for his man. He didn’t once say the words, “All right, that’s enough.”

  Why? Because this was M.D.’s dragon and no one else could slay it for him.

  “You have my answer,” McCutcheon said in a polite and even tone. “May I be excused, sir?”

  His cheeks flushed, Puwolsky snorted, pissed that he’d gotten nowhere. What the hell is wrong with this kid? he wondered.

  “You may,” Stanzer said to McCutcheon. “I’ll be in touch.”

  M.D. exited the building and walked to the downtown bus station, knowing that two other agents had already scrubbed and ditched the rented white minivan. His mission done, it was time to head home.

  If he could even call it that. Bellevue, Nebraska, was about as different from Detroit, Michigan, as orange juice was from a kangaroo.

  McCutcheon preferred taking the bus back to the Cornhusker State as opposed to an airplane because the long ride gave him a chance to sleep, think, and recover. As he settled into a window seat and tossed his hoodie over his head, M.D. reflected on all the venomous things Puwolsky had said.

  None of it bothered him. Sure, the colonel’s words were harsh, but no one had harsher words for McCutcheon than McCutcheon had for himself. On the inside, M.D. understood something about who he was, a truth so raw that it made Puwolsky’s words pack all the punch of cotton candy.

  McCutcheon owned secrets. Dark little dirty ones he kept hidden from the rest of the world. He found them so terrible he felt ashamed to even acknowledge their existence.

  Deep down, and I hate to admit it, I’m scared. I’m really, really scared.

  Beneath his chiseled surface, fear, hurt, sadness, and shame swam in a cesspool of putrid inner funk.

  I’m not as strong as everyone thinks. It’s just an illusion. I’m actually weak and worthless. A fraud.

  The Noble Warrior mask I wear is a lie. People think I am good and decent, but I know the real truth is I’m just a worthless piece of shit. Savage, violent, and guilty of having done many horrible, hurtful things.

  The Greyhound made its way east on Interstate I-80 as the inner tape recorder playing inside McCutcheon’s head spun round and round on its negative loop.

  I suck, I’m scared, and in this cruel and brutal world I am all alone. But that’s what I deserve. Because I’m hideous, I’m a monster.

  The rain tapped against the window next to his head, soft plops playing a gentle lullaby, but Mother Nature’s peaceful music did nothing to calm McCutcheon’s storming soul. A map of scars across M.D.’s flesh told the violent tale of a life lived at war, and provided all the evidence McCutcheon needed to prove to himself that any emotional pain he suffered was all much deserved. He looked at his hands, large, scarred, and raw. Each lesion came from a different battle, each gash occurred during a different era, yet all of them were united by a common thread.

  Bam Bam Daniels destroyed people. This was his gift. Not music. Not poetry. Not photography, painting, or graphic design. McCutcheon’s talent came in the form of delivering pain. Deep in his heart he wanted the opposite. M.D. hoped to help people. To heal them and protect them and make them feel safe and secure in a way that he never was.

  This is why he joined Stanzer’s unit. McCutcheon hungered to bring justice, light, freedom, and protection to the world because these things were always absent from his own life, and he knew how much people who didn’t have these things starved for them.

  Yet now he was being asked to kill.

  Why did all of his good intentions end up in a sewer of piss and garbage? Only one answer made sense.

  Because I’m trash. A worthless kid from the ghetto who deserves all the horrible suffering he gets.

  McCutcheon clutched on to another buried secret, as well. One worse than any other. In his heart he believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he ever did take his first life it would lead to the taking
of many, many more.

  If I taste the blood of death, it’s over. I know me. It will be all over.

  Bury enough anger in a warrior’s heart and like gunpowder it one day explodes.

  You can’t do it, M.D., McCutcheon told himself. You can’t. A single death will lead to dominoes, and only I can contain myself.

  No, he would not kill. Not even for Kaitlyn.

  After eighteen hours and forty-five minutes, the silver Greyhound cruised across the Iowa border and entered Nebraska. Sleep escaped McCutcheon the entire trip. Too many thoughts. Too many concerns. Too many worries.

  Too much awareness of the idea that most people become the thing they fear the most.

  “Doc’s home! Doc’s home!”

  McCutcheon’s baby sister Gemma rushed to M.D. and threw her arms around his neck with a giant squeeze.

  Gemma loved Bellevue, Nebraska. She loved the swing sets at the parks, the pies at the diner, and all the nice neighbors who never scowled and only locked their doors at night.

  But most of all she loved Doc. He was the big brother who tickled her tummy, did push-ups with her sitting on his back, and had gotten them out of D-town. Escaping the projects of Detroit used to be their mantra, their chorus, their dream.

  “Who’s tough?”

  “I’m tough.”

  “How tough?”

  “So tough.”

  “And why are we tough?” McCutcheon would ask, a steely look in his eye.

  “’Cause that’s the way we get out.”

  “Gimme a kiss,” M.D. would say, and Gemma would peck him on the cheek.

  They’d spoken these words to each other a thousand times. When their father stole the grocery money for drugs and left them with nothing but ketchup in the refrigerator for dinner. When their mother disappeared from their lives without a note, a wave, or even a hug good-bye. When birthdays came and there was no money for presents, when snow came and there was no money for coats, when the storms of life crashed down on them, and there were no adults anywhere to provide safety and protection, they’d speak these words to each other because these words were all they possessed.

  Somehow, like Jack’s magic beans in the fairy tale, they’d worked. Gemma and M.D. did get out, and when it came to Detroit, Gemma prayed nightly that she’d never go back.

  McCutcheon, of course, felt differently about the matter.

  “Wanna see my habitat? Do ya, do ya?” Gemma, still in her koala bear jammies, pulled her brother by the arm and dragged him into her yellow and pink bedroom. With M.D. home, Sarah—McCutcheon didn’t call her Mom anymore, he called her Sarah—left early that morning for the preschool where she worked as an early childhood specialist. It was Back-to-School night there and a thousand things still remained needing to be done.

  It’s true that Sarah once abandoned her kids, but she said she only did so in order to save her own life. Maybe theirs, too. Back in Detroit, Demon was turning his son into a savage cage warrior, and once some real money started to roll in from M.D.’s underground battles, Sarah stopped being a fan. Too violent. Too dangerous. Too illegal.

  But Demon only saw stacks of green, and when push came to shove, he put a knife to his wife’s neck and said “Leave or be carved.” High on a combo of speed, coke, and booze, he’d do it, she knew. As a former boxer who grew up in a violent home himself, Demon had been knocking Sarah around for years. Even hospitalized her a few times. To call the police seemed stupid to Sarah, though. Cops in Detroit weren’t even able to keep up with all the murders, so how were they going to help with a tiny little domestic dispute?

  With nowhere to turn, no one to phone, Sarah fled. Just packed a hasty bag and disappeared, fearing for her life.

  When the FBI finally found her, Sarah leaped at the opportunity to rejoin her kids and enter into the Witness Security Program; she was thrilled at the idea of getting a second chance to be with her children. McCutcheon expected to adore having his mother back in his life.

  He didn’t.

  People fight for what they love, M.D. thought. And she ran. If she really did care for her kids she would have been willing to die for them. Just like M.D. was willing to die for Gemma. But spooked, Sarah turned tail and bailed to go save herself, and as a result McCutcheon and Gemma went through years of abusive hell. The next time they did see their mom, Sarah had put the broken pieces of her life back together, landed a new job, and scored herself a cushy downtown condominium with a panoramic view of the skyline.

  Good for her, M.D. thought. Really fucking happy for ya, Mom.

  In Bellevue, the Daniels’s town house boasted trimmed hedges, a nicely painted red front door, and a flower bed near the entryway that made the outside appear charming. Yet it was all a facade. Behind that nicely painted red front door, wars raged.

  “You fucking left us.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Picked up and ran.”

  “I have no defense.”

  “Real mothers don’t do that. Selfish, horrible mothers do.”

  “You think I don’t feel guilty?” Sarah said. “I’ve felt it every day since the moment I left.”

  “Don’t make this about you. You’re a piece of shit.”

  “You’re angry,” she said, tears pouring from her eyes. “But also,” Sarah lowered her head, “you’re right. I’m a terrible mother, an awful person, Doc.”

  “Don’t call me that. Only one person is ever allowed to call me that and it’s not you. Got me...Sarah?”

  McCutcheon’s mother didn’t try to defend her actions. She hated herself for taking them. When the family first moved to Nebraska, Sarah tried to put on a brave face. Tried to pretend the past was the past and that the family could move forward with smiles in their hearts toward a bigger, brighter future. But deep down she knew her cowardice had caused McCutcheon and Gemma incredible, unforgettable pain.

  Good mothers don’t protect themselves at the expense of their children. Good mothers, good people, she knew, do what’s right despite how hard it might be. Gemma may have been too young to understand all of this—but not M.D.

  He’d lived it. And he loathed her for it.

  Every time McCutcheon thought about his mother’s decision, anger surged in his heart. From this rage he felt strength—battle strength—yet he knew that drawing ferocity from the toxic well of anger would end badly. Drinking from the cup of hate never ended in positive outcomes. Yet still his fury flowed, a silent rage that quietly but constantly fed his shackled inner beast.

  He didn’t have to look hard to see how his monster had been born. He and the beast were at war and yet, they were one.

  Before five weeks had passed in their new life—a life filled with safe playgrounds, and nary a sound of gunfire—McCutcheon and Sarah spent almost no time together. The happy reunion each one envisioned turned out to be fantasy. Delusional dreams the two held while apart, gave way to the reality of being together. McCutcheon did not respect his mom and she did not respect herself, so when one of them was home, the other would find a convenient excuse to leave.

  Like departing extra early in the morning to go prepare for Back-to-School night.

  You fight for what you love, McCutcheon believed. You fight for it to the death.

  Then a question crossed M.D.’s mind.

  But do you kill for it? Dying for something and killing for something are not the same thing.

  “I was gonna make a desert habitat, but I made a jungle habitat instead, although I could have done something with fish.” Gemma held up a shoe box she’d converted into the plains of Africa as McCutcheon tried to shake the fog of his wandering thoughts from his head. “Desert is spelled with one S. Dessert has two. That’s because everybody loves dessert so the word is longer ’cause there’s more of it and I think my lion is really cool, don’t you? Are you taking me to school today?”

  “I am,” McCutcheon answered, trying to keep up with Gemma’s constant stream of words.

  “Well, we need to be on t
ime because Mrs. Regali is a stickler for being on time, and she’s a stickler for capital letters, too, but in math it’s okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from them. I’m gonna go brush my teeth. You didn’t say you liked my habitat.”

  “I do.”

  “And my lion?” Gemma asked.

  “King of the jungle, right?”

  “Reminds me of you.”

  McCutcheon wrinkled his brow.

  “Strong, handsome, wants good things in the world for other creatures, and always tries to be polite,” Gem responded. “Other than to zebras. Lions eat zebras but even though you don’t eat any zebras, you still try to be polite like a lion, Doc.”

  “No, I do not eat zebras,” M.D. said with a smile. His six-year-old sister always saw the best in him. But if she only knew the truth, he thought.

  “You don’t even eat pizza,” she added.

  “I am gonna eat you if you don’t hurry up,” M.D. said.

  Gemma rushed back into the arms of her big brother. “One more hug,” she said, squeezing M.D. tight. “I missed you, Doc.”

  “I wasn’t gone that long.”

  “A day without my brother is like a day without the sky. I wrote that in my journal. Are you staying a long, long, long, long time before your next trip?”

  “I’m not sure if there are going to be any more trips, Gem.”

  “Yay!” she exclaimed as the doorbell rang.

  “Now hustle up and go get dressed before the mighty lion has to use his CLAWS!”

  McCutcheon picked Gem up and spun her around with a whoosh. Her smiled beamed a thousand watts as M.D. whirled her like a toy. Nowhere did Gem feel more safe than in the arms of her brother. Many kids had siblings; Gemma had her own private wolf.

  Gemma bounced off to the bathroom to get washed and brushed for school as M.D. crossed to answer the front door. In Detroit, M.D. always looked through the peephole before answering. In Bellevue, without dope fiends or thugs to worry about, he didn’t see the point.

  “’Morning.”

  McCutcheon exhaled a sigh. “That was quick.”

  “You’re the one who takes the bus. I fly.”