Bringing the Thunder

Scott arrived at the house at nine in the morning, which was three hours before anyone else was supposed to show up, and that was exactly the point. He set his bag down just inside the door and stood for a moment, taking in the space the way he took in a locker room before a match, not cataloguing it, just letting the space register. Somewhere in this house there was a room with Tony Gamble’s name on it, figuratively speaking, and Scott had things to put inside before Gamble arrived to occupy it. He had driven up from the farmhouse the day before, leaving far before the sun was up, the gravel drive disappearing in his rearview mirror in the grey pre-dawn light. He had the bag he always traveled with, packed with the practiced efficiency of a man who spent most of his life in transit, comfortable gear for the challenges, wrestling gear just in case, toiletries, the armband, which he’d set on top of everything else so he could put it on first. And at the very bottom, wrapped in a t-shirt so it wouldn’t get crushed, the face paint kit he’d picked up at a drugstore outside Philadelphia three days ago, in the general vicinity of intimidating, he’d thought at the time. Although he hadn’t looked at it closely enough to be certain. He’d figure that part out when he got there. He rolled his shoulders, picked up his bag, and went to find the bedrooms. There were four of them, arranged off a single hallway. Scott stood at the entrance and studied the situation with the focused deliberation of a man who had thought about this longer than the situation probably required. He thought about Tony Gamble. He thought about what kind of room Gamble would gravitate toward. Something close to the bathroom, probably, because Tony Gamble seemed like the kind of man who valued personal convenience above all else, including basic human decency, as had been demonstrated at Ultraviolence. I mean, who kicks a koala? What kind of monster? Probably the kind who would take the room at the end of the hall, furthest from the common areas, because he was the kind of man who thought the rules applied only to everyone else. Or possibly the first door on the left, because… The doors had name cards on them. Small brass holders, one mounted at eye level on each door. Simple white cards with black text. GAMBLE. HUNTER. KEYES. WILLIAMS. Scott looked at the name cards for a long moment. Then he picked up his bag and walked directly to the room marked GAMBLE without further thought, and without acknowledging, even internally, that he had just spent four minutes solving a problem that had already been solved for him. He set his bag down in the hallway, opened Gamble’s door, and stepped inside.

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The bathroom mirror was good-sized, which Scott appreciated. He set the face paint kit on the counter beside the sink and cracked it open, surveying the colors inside with the careful attention he gave to a scouting report. He selected the first one, uncapped it, and looked at himself. Time to get his war paint on. He looked at himself for a long time before he said anything. “My name is Scott Hunter,” he said finally, quietly and without self-consciousness, the way a man talks to himself when there's no performance required of him. “I’m gonna win Survivor. I’m gonna do whatever this thing asks of me, climb whatever needs climbing, outwork whoever needs outworking, and when it’s all over, I’m gonna walk into Colossus and challenge for the Universal Title. I’m gonna win that too.” He began applying the first color to his forehead. “And Tony Gamble,” he said, “is gonna understand what it cost him to do what he did at Ultraviolence.” He worked the paint carefully, the way he taped his wrists before a match, deliberate and unhurried. “Kerry,” he said, more quietly. “This one’s for you too, little buddy.” He picked up the next color and kept going.

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The cellophane had been in his bag since Philadelphia, purchased at a hardware store two days after Ultraviolence with a vague but committed sense of purpose. Scott stood in Gamble’s bathroom now and unrolled it with the calm efficiency of a man who had thought this through considerably more than the situation perhaps warranted. The installation took four minutes. The result was invisible from standing height, perfectly taut across the toilet rim, and professionally applied. Scott stepped back from the toilet and surveyed his work with the quiet satisfaction of a craftsman. He thought briefly about leaving a note, decided against it. Notes could be traced. Also, he wasn’t sure what he’d write. He simply smoothed one corner of the cellophane that had lifted slightly, restored it to perfection, and stepped out of the bathroom. He washed his hands in the hall bathroom, dried them, and went to find somewhere comfortable to sit and think about the Aggro Crag.

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The problem with the Aggro Crag, as best as Scott could work out, was that nobody had actually explained to him what it was. He had been given the name. He had been told it was the first challenge. He had nodded at the time as though this told him everything he needed to know, and then spent the better part of two days turning the name over in his mind the way you turned a piece of fruit in your hand looking for soft spots. Aggro. Aggressive. Dominant. Territorial. Crag. High ground. An elevated position. Scott sat in a chair by the window and arrived, not for the first time, at the conclusion that had been quietly assembling itself in the back of his mind since he first heard the words. This was basically King of the Hill. Maybe not by that exact name, maybe dressed up in some Survivor-specific staging, but at its core this was a competition for high ground, and the tribe that took and held the high ground would win. This was, when you really sat with it, almost perfectly suited to him. He had been the undisputed King of the Hill on Bellwood Lane from age seven through age fourteen, when he simply got too big and too fast for the neighborhood to mount a reasonable challenge. The hill in question had been the mounded far end of the front pasture, sixty feet or so from the fence he’d replaced last fall, close enough to the orange grove that you could smell it on a hot afternoon. He had defended that hill through summer heat, through afternoon thunderstorms, through a brief and poorly strategized assault from a kid named Marcus who had outweighed Scott by twenty pounds at the time but had badly underestimated the value of low center of gravity and quick feet. Scott had very good feet, as a very nice but mildly disturbing shoe salesman at a Florida Buster Brown once told him. He stretched out his legs, looked at the ceiling, and allowed himself a small, private moment of confidence. Whatever an Aggro Crag was, the essential principle was clear. Get to the top. Stay there. He understood that principle in his bones.

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He’d found a good light in the kitchen, better than the bathroom if he was being honest, and he’d brought the kit out to the counter. He was further along now, maybe halfway through, though he still couldn’t quite see where it was all heading. He wasn’t worried about it. Commitment to the process was most of what commitment meant. That was called a “definition”, which is something you can look up. That is the definition of “definition”, by the way, although I fear we are on the precipice of a time loop. He looked at himself in the reflection of the dark window above the sink. “At Ultraviolence,” he said, keeping his voice low and even, “Tony Gamble came from behind a ring apron and stomped me into the floor while I wasn’t looking. He and his oversized salty friend blinded the referee and powerbombed Clay into the mat, and handed our titles to the Pop Culture Phenoms.” He applied another stripe of color. “And on his way out,” he continued, “Tony Gamble dropkicked Kerry Koalayama into a stack of equipment.” He stopped painting for a second. “Kerry is in a resort somewhere right now in a full-body cast with a Mai Tai he can’t quite reach because his arms are immobilized,” he said. “Because of Tony Gamble.” He picked the brush back up. “That gets settled,” he said. “Not in a way that costs me this competition. Not in a way that puts winning second. But it gets settled. On my terms. When I decide. Because that’s how you do things when you intend to do them right.” He looked at the reflection. “Whatever’s necessary,” he said. “But in the right order.”

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The plush horse head had been harder to source than anticipated. Scott had assumed, reasonably he thought, that novelty horse heads were the kind of thing you could find at any large general merchandise retailer, such as a Walmart, a Target, or Jimmy’s Hardcore Shack of Horse Heads, the sort of item that occupied a shelf between the Halloween costumed and the gag gift section. This assumption had proven optimistic. Three stores, one very confused stock clerk, and a next-day delivery order later, the box had arrived at the farmhouse, and Scott had opened it at the kitchen table with the careful gravity of a man receiving precision equipment. It was a good horse head. Full-sized, softly constructed, the eyes wide and fixed with an expression that, in Scott’s estimation, captured approximately the right note of solemn gravity for the occasion. He had thought about this purchase for a long time before making it, and he remained confident in the decision. He held it up now and looked at it. Then he set it down on the kitchen table, leaned back in his chair, and let a slow stillness settle over his face. His jaw shifted forward slightly. His eyes went heavy and deliberate. He raised one hand and rested it loosely against his cheek, the way a man does when the weight of a decision has finally landed on him. “Mmmmph… Michael… Santino…,” he said from somewhere considerably lower in his register than his normal speaking voice, the syllables thick and barely formed, shaped around an invisible piece of cotton. “Mmmm…. offer he can’t refuse… Mmmph… Barzini….” He stayed in the impression for another two or three seconds, with the commitment of a man who believed the reference deserved to be honored properly. Then he stood up, picked up the horse head, and carried it down the hall to Gamble’s room, where he turned back the corner of the bedspread, placed the horse head underneath on the bed surface with care, and smoothed the bedspread back around it so that only the top was visible, exactly the way he remembered it from the movie. He stepped back and looked at the bed. He nodded once. Then he went back to the kitchen to finish his coffee.

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He’d moved to the bathroom mirror in his own room for the final stages. The paint was nearly complete. He studied his reflection with a slight frown, not because anything was wrong exactly, but because he couldn’t quite tell what it looked like from the inside of it. He had been applying the colors based on the directions, and the overall effect was still assembling itself. He thought about the armband on his wrist, the blue fabric and the yellow letters that had been there every night since the funeral, that had been in the ring at ReViVal when he stood across from Nate Colton, that had been on his wrist at Ultraviolence when he fell off the apron and heard the stomps and couldn’t get back in time. He thought about Frank Hunter standing on the porch of the farmhouse with a coffee mug, watching him finish the fence, saying that’s a good fence, Scotty, and meaning everything he never said in those five words. “I’m gonna win this,” he said. Not a declaration. Not a performance. Just a fact being stated to the only witness who mattered right now, which was himself, in a mirror, in a house he was gonna leave as the winner of a challenge with a glowing rock waiting at the top. “I’m gonna win Survivor. And then I’m gonna win the Universal Title. And I’m gonna do it the same way I do everything, which is by showing up and giving it everything I have and not stopping until it’s done.” He looked at himself for a long moment. “Dad would’ve thought this whole thing was pretty funny,” he said. A small smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

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Scott finally Googled Aggro Crag at half past eleven, and what came back was not what he’d expected. He sat with it for a moment, reading the same page twice, letting the King of the Hill theory quietly dissolve. It was a mountain. A fake one, built on a soundstage somewhere for a kids’ game show back in the nineties, the kind of show Scott had watched on Saturday mornings while eating cereal in his pajamas. The mountain was maybe twenty feet tall, maybe more, and was covered in things designed to make climbing it as difficult and chaotic as possible. There were buttons you had to hit on the way up, glowing ones set into the rock face at different heights, and if you didn’t hit them, you were leaving points behind. There were obstacles, foam boulders rolling down at you from above, bursts of fake lightning, this cascading glitter-snow stuff that looked spectacular on television and probably felt terrible when it was actually falling in your face. You raced to the top. You hit everything you could on the way. The tribe that got there fastest, that pressed the most buttons, that navigated all of it as a coordinated unit without falling apart on the way up, won. And at the top, jagged and glowing and waiting, was a piece of the mountain itself. They gave it to you. You climbed the whole thing, and you got to take a piece of it home. They called it the radical rock. Scott read that part a second time, and then a third, and then set his phone face-down on the table and sat with what he was feeling, which was a specific and uncomplicated excitement that had very little to do with competitive strategy and almost everything to do with the fact that there was a glowing rock at the top of a mountain and somebody was gonna get to keep it and Scott Hunter intended to be that somebody. Somewhere in New England, an owl screeched that Scott’s inner monologue probably could have been broken into multiple sentences instead of one long string of consciousness, but Scott was too excited to care. Heaven knows no grammar. He wanted that radical rock. He wanted it the way he wanted the Universal Title, which was completely and without reservation, though the reasons were somewhat different and he chose not to examine the distinction too closely. Then he went back and read the part about how the tribe worked together again. All four of them. Coordinated. Moving as a unit up the same mountain through the same obstacles, hitting the same buttons, getting to the top together or not getting there at all. He set the phone down. He thought about Henry Keyes, who was Vae Victis, who Scott trusted the way you trust someone who shows up when it counts. He thought about Rob Williams, who had won twice at Ultraviolence and who carried himself like a man who had been here before and planned to be here again, which Scott respected even if the history between them was what it was. He thought about Tony Gamble. He sat with the Tony Gamble bit for a while. It didn’t get more comfortable the longer he sat with it. The math was straightforward and uncomfortable. The radical rock was at the top. The only way to the top was through all four of them working together. Everything Scott had told Emma at Frankford Hall over beers, everything he’d said to himself in the mirror for the past three days, every reason he’d written down in his own head for why this competition mattered, all of it pointed the same direction, which meant the path ran directly through functioning as a teammate with the man who had cost him the tag titles and put his koala in a full-body cast with a Mai Tai just out of reach. Scott breathed in through his nose. He breathed out. He picked up his phone and texted Henry Keyes. “Here when you are.” Then he put his phone in his pocket and went to check that the cellophane was still holding up, because some things you controlled and some things you didn’t, and the ones you controlled you made sure of.

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Scott stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at himself for what he’d decided was the last time before it mattered. He thought of his dad again, a single tear appearing in the corner of his eye. He was ready for whatever would befall him. He looked at himself for slightly longer than he’d intended. He frowned, then reached out and picked up the face paint kit from the counter, the one he’d been working from all morning, the one that had taken him to whatever this was. He turned it over. On the back panel, in bright orange letters against a field of deep blue, above a detailed illustration of a specific cartoon character with a very specific red and orange face, swept-back hair, brilliant blue eyes, and a raised sword, which he now recognized from a Saturday morning cartoon he used to watch because he believed at the time, and had not fully revisited that belief since, that it was based on a true story… THUNDERCATS OFFICIAL LION-O COLLECTOR’S FACE PAINT KIT Recreate your favorite ThunderCats looks! Ages 4 and up. Scott looked at the kit. He looked at the mirror. He looked at the kit again. “Shit,” he said. He stood there for one more second, then he turned away from the mirror, walked down the hall, and headed out to meet with his tribe.

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They sat in a loose semi-circle in the common area, the four of them, which was the first time they’d sat down together, which Scott noted with the detached awareness of a man whose primary attention was directed elsewhere. Specifically, at Tony Gamble. Scott wasn’t listening to whatever was being said. He was aware that words were happening, that Keyes and Williams were contributing to them, that Gamble’s mouth was moving, that some kind of preliminary tribe discussion was taking place around him. He registered it the way you registered weather through a window. Present. Not relevant. What was relevant was Tony Gamble’s face. His big, stupid face, which Scott studied with the fixed, unblinking concentration of a man reading a very important document, or a man who had decided that if he looked away for even a moment, Gamble would somehow win. Gamble said something. Williams nodded. Keyes responded. Scott stared. He was not aware, in this moment, that his own face was painted in the full red and orange livery of Lion-O, Lord of the ThunderCats, heir to the Eye of Thundera, rendered in drugstore-quality cosmetic paint by a man who had been applying it in a kitchen and bathroom mirror for the better part of three hours. He was not thinking about the face paint. He was thinking about Ultraviolence. About the apron. About the stomps. About Kerry somewhere warm and immobilized. Gamble glanced at him briefly, then looked away. Scott’s eyes narrowed by a degree that would have been imperceptible on a normal face. On a face currently depicting a beloved 1980s cartoon hero, it was slightly more visible. At some point, Gamble and Williams stood up. There was a brief exchange Scott did not catch. They left. The room was quiet. Henry Keyes sat two feet to Scott’s left, watching him with the patience of a man who had been waiting for this moment. He reached over and nudged Scott once in the arm. Scott blinked. Looked at him. Keyes leaned in slightly. “So you know what we have to do, right? Play to win. Buddy buddy with these assholes as best we can. But you and I need to meet Kerry in the finals of this thing.” Scott looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded once. “Yeah,” he said. “We do.”