The House on Bellwood Lane

A pre-recorded video begins. Scott Hunter is seated. No music. He looks tired. He’s not in ring gear, just regular clothes. He’s looking slightly off-camera at first, then finds the lens.

Okay.

I need to tell everyone something before I get into any of the rest of this. Because I don't want it coming from somewhere else, and I don't want it showing up in a headline before I've said it out loud.

…

My dad died last week.

…

That's why I left the arena the way I did. I'm sorry I couldn't say anything at the time. I wasn't ready. I'm honestly not sure I'm ready now. But I'd rather tell you than have you find out some other way.

So. There it is.

His funeral was two days ago. Which is, that's where I've been. That's where my head is. I'm recording this from home because I'm not in any shape to speak in front of a crowd this week, and I wasn't gonna let anyone read a statement either. If I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna say it.

I almost didn't do this at all. My head isn't where it needs to be. I'm not gonna pretend it is. But I'm doing it anyway, because my dad would've been furious with me if I didn't. He watched every match I ever had. Every one. If I was on television, he was watching. If I was wrestling in a high school gym in front of forty people, he was in the second row. He told me he was proud of me, in his own words, before he passed. And I'm not gonna repay that by hiding.

My sister Emma told me the same thing. Go. That's what she said. Dad would want you to go. And she was right. So here I am.

Nate Colton.

You and I have a match on May 29th. And I've been trying to figure out how I wanted to do this. How I wanted to step to that.

Scott pauses and exhales.

And I want to start by saying something I don't think a lot of guys in that locker room have the courage to say to your face. I like you. I do. I think you love this business. I think you take it seriously. I think when you talk about what the Universal Title is supposed to mean, you believe every word of it. And I respect that.

That's part of why this is hard.

Because I watched and listened to what you’ve had to say the last couple times you had a match, Nate. The one with Cecilworth. The one with Big John. I watched them while I was sitting in a hospital room. I watched them while I was sitting in a funeral home. I watched them on my phone in a parking lot at two in the morning because I couldn't sleep. So believe me when I say I gave them my attention.

And here's what I kept coming back to.

You talk about being real… more than anyone I've ever heard in my life.

And I don't mean that as a shot. I mean it as a question. Because the realest man I ever knew, the realest man I'm ever gonna know, never once told me he was real. He just was. He didn't tell me he was gonna raise two kids by himself after we lost my mom. He just did it. He didn't tell me he was proud of me. He showed me. Every breakfast. Every drive to practice. Every match. Every phone call after. He…

Scott stops. Looks down. Few seconds. Looks back up.

…he showed me.

That's what real looks like, Nate. Real doesn't announce itself. Real just is.

And I started counting. I went back through what you said, and I started counting how many times you said ‘I'm just a man. I'm meat and potatoes. I'm not a brand. I'm just a guy.’ You said it a lot. You said it more than most men say their own names.

And I have to be honest with you. The more a man tells me he's just a man, the more I start wondering who he's trying to convince.

It isn't me. So it must be you.

Now.

That story you told. About the legend on your couch. The one who let you down when you were a child.

I'm not gonna turn that story sideways. I'm not gonna get clever with it. That happened to a little boy, and I'm sorry it did. Nobody deserves that. Especially not from somebody they looked up to.

But I have to tell you something, Nate. And I need you to hear it. Because I'm sitting on the other side of this in a way I wasn't a week ago.

You've been carrying that man around for twenty years.

You've been using him as the reason nobody else gets to be great. Every guy you don't like, he's the drunk on the couch. Every champion before you, drunk on the couch. Every man who's ever beaten you to that title, drunk on the couch.

That isn't fair to them. It isn't fair to you.

You can put him down, Nate. You're allowed to.

Some of us had fathers who didn't let us down. Some of us were that lucky. I was one of them. And I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of it. So when you tell me, Nate, that legends don't live up to the legend, I have to respectfully disagree.

Mine did.

His name was Frank Hunter. He wasn't a wrestler. He wasn't famous. Most of you have never heard that name before right now. But he was a giant to me, and to Emma. And he was a giant all the way through. Not just when the lights were on. Not just when people were watching. All the way through. He was the same man at the kitchen table that he was at my matches. The same man at my matches that he was at the hospital at the end. The same man at nine in the morning that he was at midnight on a Tuesday when his daughter had a nightmare and his son couldn't sleep.

Brief pause. A small, sad laugh, once. He shakes his head slightly, more to himself than the camera.

He was something else.

Pause. Composes himself.

That is the standard, Nate. That is what real costs. You don't get there by talking about it.

Let me talk about something else you said.

You said guys like John Pepper made themselves smaller by standing with somebody. By having a partner. By backing another man up. You called him a parasite, more or less.

Nate.

I'm one half of the tag team champions.

Clay Byrd and I hold those belts together. We won them together. We defend them together. And I have never, not one single time, felt smaller for standing next to that man. I've felt bigger. Every day.

You want to know who was the first person to call me when my dad got sick? It was Clay. You want to know who drove four hours to sit with Emma at the hospital so I could get some sleep? It was Clay. You want to know who took the phone out of my hand at the funeral and told the locker room I wasn't gonna be available? Clay.

And you want to know who flew across the country on his own dime to be there two days ago? Who's been my best friend in this business for over a year? Who's run the roads with me, gotten in trouble with me, gotten in fights with me, and still showed up in a black suit because he knew I needed him there?

Kerry Kuroyama.

You call that weakness, Nate? You call that smaller?

My father raised two kids by himself. He raised us to take care of each other. He raised us to take care of the people who take care of us. He raised us to understand that a man who tries to do everything by himself isn't a strong man; he's just a lonely one.

I learned that from the strongest man I've ever known. So I'm gonna trust him on it. Not you. Maybe that makes me naive. I can live with that.

You want to talk about titles?

Let's talk about titles.

You said the Universal Title needs you. That you're not there because you need it, you're there because it needs you.

Come on, Nate.

You went after that belt against Cecilworth, and you lost. I went after the Five-Star back in December, and I lost, too. Different title, same lesson. Welcome to the club. There are a lot of us in here. And I'll tell you what I learned in that club. The belt doesn't need anybody. The belt sits there. The belt waits. And the men who go get it are the ones who stop telling stories about why they deserve it and start earning it.

I want another shot. I'm not gonna lie about it. I want it badly. And someday I want a Universal Title shot too. The big one. I'm not pretending otherwise.

I want it for me.

I want it for Clay, because he's carried me for the last month, and he deserves to see me get there.

I want it for Kerry, because he's been my brother in this business, and he believed in me before most people knew my name.

I want it for Emma, because she's been through enough this year, and she deserves something good to point at.

And I want it for my dad. Because he believed I could do it. He told me so. And I'm not gonna spend the rest of my career proving him wrong.

The road forward, for both of us, Nate, runs through this match. You know it. I know it. You need this win to climb back up after Cecilworth. I need this win to keep climbing. So neither of us is sleepwalking into May 29th.

Good.

So here's where I am.

You and I are gonna have a match this week. And when we do, I'm gonna shake your hand before. I'm gonna shake it after. I'm gonna look you in the eye both times, and I'm gonna mean it.

And in between?

I'm gonna give you everything I have. Everything.

Because I owe that to you. I owe it to this company. I owe it to Clay. I owe it to Kerry.

And I owe it to my dad.

Scott looks at the camera for a moment. Doesn't say anything else. Reaches forward… and the video cuts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ONE DAY EARLIER

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The gravel road ran a quarter mile up to the house, and Scott knew every soft spot in it. He'd helped grade it the summer he was fourteen, the summer his father decided one of them was gonna learn to run a tractor, and it might as well be the one with the strong back. The truck rolled past the new fence Scott had put in over four weekends last fall, white wood still bright against the green. His father had stood on the porch the day Scott finished it, drinking coffee, and said ‘that's a good fence, Scotty.’ That was all he said about it. Scott had thought about that sentence at least once a week since.

The farmhouse came up around the last bend. White clapboard, green tin roof, the wraparound porch sagging in the front-left corner where it always had. Two big live oaks threw long shadows across the side yard, Spanish moss hung from the lower branches in gray curtains. Nobody else for half a mile in any direction. That was the whole point of the place, his dad used to say. You could hear yourself think out here. You could hear God think, if you were paying attention.

The screen door slapped shut behind him. The house smelled of morning coffee and the lemon polish his mom used to use, which his father had kept buying long after she was gone. He said the house didn't smell right without it. Everything sat where it always had. The recliner. The lamp with the wobbly shade. The framed Polaroid on the mantel of Marie holding Scott as a baby on this same porch, twenty-nine years ago.

Everything where it always had been. The house felt smaller anyway.

Emma sat on the floor of the den with a cardboard box in her lap, sorting through papers she'd pulled from the bottom drawer of their father's desk. She wore one of Dad's old flannels over a t-shirt, sleeves rolled past her elbows, hair pulled back the way she always did when she was about to get into something. She looked tired in a way that went past tired. She'd looked like that for months.

He sat down across from her and reached into the box.

"You don't have to do this today," he said. "We can let it sit."

"If I let it sit, I'll never do it." She didn't look up. "And if I never do it, it'll just be here in this drawer being his, and I can't have it be his anymore. I have to start letting it be ours."

Scott pulled a folder from the box and opened it. Tax returns from 2003. He set them aside.

"Look at this," Emma said. She handed him a yellowed envelope. ‘Frank — keep this one,’ in their father's handwriting. Scott opened it. Inside was the same Polaroid as the one on the mantel, or close to it… his mother on the porch swing, holding him as a baby, squinting at the sun coming through the oaks. He'd never seen the back of it before. In his father's careful block printing: ‘Marie and Scotty, June 1997. Took her three tries to look at the camera. Worth it.’

Scott studied it awhile. He set it on the floor beside him, gentle, like it might break.

"He kept everything," Emma said.

"Yeah."

"There's a shoebox in the upstairs closet that's just my report cards. All of them. Even the bad ones."

"You had bad ones?"

She smiled for the first time that morning. "I had two B-pluses in tenth grade. He kept those too."

Scott laughed, which surprised him, and then he had to look away because the laugh wanted to turn into something else. Outside the well pump kicked on, that low mechanical hum he'd known his whole life, the sound of the house being a house. It ran a few seconds and clicked off. He reached into the box for another folder.

They worked a while without talking. Some things went into a keep pile. Some things went into a donate pile. A surprising amount went into a third pile that didn't have a name, because neither of them could figure out what to do with forty years of hardware store receipts from down in Homestead, and neither of them could throw them away yet either.

After a while, Emma said, "How are you doing? Honestly?"

Scott turned a Christmas card from 1999 over in his hands.

"I don't know. I keep waiting to feel something specific. Like, I keep thinking it's gonna hit me. The big one. The wave. And it doesn't. It just stays the same level all the time."

"It's not good or bad. It's just how it is right now."

"How are you doing?"

"I don't want to talk about how I'm doing."

"Em."

She set down what she was holding. Her eyes were tired and red-rimmed and had been for a long time.

"I'm angry. I'm so angry at him. Which is stupid, because none of this was his fault. But I'm angry. I gave him two years, Scott. I gave him every day for two years and I'd do it again. I'd do it ten more times, but I'm angry, and I don't know who to be angry at, so right now I'm angry at him. Is that horrible?"

"No."

"It feels horrible."

"It's not."

She wiped her eyes with the cuff of the flannel. The flannel was too big on her. It had been too big on Dad at the end, too.

"He used to call me when you were on the road. Every Sunday. He'd sit out on the porch swing with the cordless and wanna know what you were up to. I'd tell him what city you were in, what match you had coming up. He couldn't always follow it. The names. The weekly drama. But he'd listen to every word, and then he'd go, ‘that's my boy.’ Every time. ‘That's my boy.’"

Scott looked down at the Christmas card. He couldn't look at her.

"He wasn't faking that. He used to tell me he didn't understand how somebody made of half of him got to be that strong. He said it like it was the most amazing thing in the world to him. He was proud of you, Scott. All the way through."

Scott set the card down. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and held them there. Emma waited.

After a minute, he lowered his hands.

"I have a match on the twenty-ninth," he said.

"I know."

"Nate Colton."

"I know."

"I shouldn't be thinking about it today."

"You should be thinking about whatever you're thinking about today. That's how this works."

He picked the Polaroid back up. Marie and Scotty. June 1997.

"I want to win. More than I've wanted to win anything in a long time. And I keep feeling guilty about it, like I shouldn't be sitting in Dad's den the day after we buried him thinking about a wrestling match. But I am. And I want it."

"Scott."

"Yeah."

"Dad would think it was strange if you weren't."

He looked at her.

"He'd have wanted you thinking about the match, watching tape tonight. He'd have wanted you on a plane tomorrow if you needed to be. The only thing he ever wanted was for you to be the best at whatever you decided to do. So go do it. That's not a betrayal. That's the opposite of one."

Scott nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak yet.

Emma reached across the box and put her hand on his arm.

"I need something from you, though."

"Anything."

"I need us to be okay. After. I gave Dad everything I had, but I don't have anything left for losing anybody else right now. So I need you to come home between matches. I need you to call me on Sundays like he did. I need us to be the kind of family that doesn't drift after."

"Em. Yeah. Of course. Yes."

"I mean it. This house. This porch. I need it to still mean something. I can keep it standing. I can't keep it a home by myself."

"You won't have to. I promise."

"And I need to start doing things again," she said, quieter. "I need to start being a person again. I haven't been a person in a while. I've been a daughter taking care of a dad. I was glad to be. But I need to remember how to be the other thing too."

"I'll help."

"You will?"

"Em. Yeah. Whatever you need. Wherever you need me to be."

She nodded, patted his arm twice, and went back to the box.

Scott pulled another folder from the box and found a stack of newspaper clippings, every one of them about him. The local Homestead paper. High school. College. Indies. A grainy black-and-white photo of him at nineteen with a trophy and a smile like he was about to crack in half from the size of it.

He held the stack a long time. Then he put it in the keep pile, reached into the box for the next thing, and kept going.

Later, after Emma had gone to lie down in her old room, Scott walked out onto the porch. The afternoon was warm, but the breeze off the pasture was kind. He stood at the rail and looked out at the long white fence running toward the road, the oaks throwing their shadows across the grass, the gravel drive disappearing around the bend, and beyond it the orange grove going on as far as he could see.

His father had stood right here and told him it was a good fence.

Scott rested his hands on the rail. He felt the wood under his palms. He felt the breeze. Out behind the house the well pump kicked on again, ran its quiet half-minute, clicked off.

He had a match on the twenty-ninth, and he was gonna win it.

He went back inside to start dinner for his sister.