Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

After a final, prolonged yelp, the young man in the hat surrendered the microphone, bowed to a bit of belated applause, and took his seat. He was flushed, exultant, mortified. With one arm tucked across his belly, the other busy with his drink, he moved his head this way and that, careful not to look around at his neighbors but not at all sure what to do, where to look, how to settle himself. He took a long drink and calmed down a bit, leaning back in his chair, as a woman wearing jeans and rhinestones stepped up to announce the next performer.

“That’s Amelia,” Ian said. “Plays the organ at my church. She and her husband, Jim, own this place. Their son—the one with the fiddle—got together with three of his friends and started playing here Thursday nights. For beer money, you know. They’re not too good, and they’ve all got day jobs, but we like them well enough. For a buck, they’ll play backup. Pick a song from the list on the table there, and they’ll give you lyrics and a microphone. The whole thing works out great.”

“Ed?” Amelia called, peering through the smoke. “You out there?” When Ed sidled up to the microphone, staring at it in terror, Amelia turned to the band. “ ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon,’ ” she said.

“Ah, shit,” said the guitar player. “Not again.”

“One of my all-time favorites,” Joe said, grinning, his thumbs in his belt loops, chin in the air.

As he looked around at the patrons of the Last Resort, watched the man named Ed falter and fumble through his song, Joe wondered how many of them had ever been more than a hundred miles from Belle Haven, ever seen a ballet, ever read To Kill a Mockingbird, ever learned the exact configuration of the fifty states.

“These are the diehards,” Ian said, waving an arm at those seated in the back room. “They’re on deck. You in good voice tonight?”

“Not bloody likely.” Joe snorted. “Come on. Let’s get something to drink.”

A few minutes later, not paying much attention to the onslaught of sound from the back room, Joe suddenly noticed that the bar had become quite still. People were turning toward the back room and around again. Then the stillness was gone and the din back, as before, but Joe, curious, got up to have a look at the man who was taking a turn with the band.

He was not a young man, not an old one. Neither plain nor fancy. He had a hard face, a hard body, clean clothes, lots of sun. He was bowed a bit with drink. Joe could see the weave of his shoulders and the lazy slide of his eyelids. But there was nothing sloppy or weak about this man. And the way he was singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home” made Joe think that maybe he had someplace he’d rather be.

“Who’s that?” he asked Ian back at the bar.

“That,” said Ian, “is Mendelson. The man I told you about this afternoon.”

“The firefighter.”

“The firefighter,” Ian sighed. “After a fashion.”

Mendelson had a good voice. He put the rest of the singers to shame. But he sang with his eyes closed, clearly unconcerned with the reaction of the audience, attentive only to the words he was singing and, perhaps, the way the microphone trembled in his hand, the way the sound came back to him from the walls, the way it feels to sing a song you love.

Later Joe watched Mendelson return to his stool at the bar, pick up his drink, light a cigarette, and stare into the middle distance. He was alone. He talked to no one and no one talked to him. After a while he got up, put some money on the bar, and walked out. Before the door had shut behind him, his drink had been cleared away, his stool occupied, and the sound of his voice purged by a fat man who had a twang like a banjo and could barely sing for hiccups.

Anthony Mark Mendelson had at one time been known as the Centurian, the finest wrestler in his corner of Kentucky and for a hundred miles beyond. Had he been an indifferent competitor, less able, less ambitious, he might have spent some of his youth exploring other arts. But he was a great wrestler, and that was enough.

Wrestling is an odd sport, not quite fighting, not quite not. A quiet sport, but for the grunting and the slap of flesh. An unflattering, unglamorous business, memorable for the sight of buttocks, of tendons rigid as machinery. But to wrestlers, it is a sport like no other. Its roots twine back through the ages, touch Olympia, blend the salt of dead champions and live boys, herald the unaided, unadorned, unqualified virtue of might. Throw in nicknames like Gibraltar, Pretzel, the Centurian, and wrestling becomes, to even its youngest and its most ungainly participants, a secret society, closed to outsiders, sacred and sublime.

When too many pulled hamstrings, too many displaced joints, too many hernias forced Anthony Mark Mendelson to give up the sport he loved, he continued to think of himself as the Centurian. Tony was not such a bad name. He had always liked it. But to settle for Tony seemed like a surrender. He had wanted to wrestle for the rest of his days, even bald and incontinent, and he was angry to have been denied this intention. He was a disappointed boy who gradually became dissatisfied with nearly everything about his life. Nothing sat quite right. So, at the age of eighteen, what he could change, he did. His hair, his habits, his name. When he left high school, he became Mendelson. Period. It sufficed.

After high school he joined the army, learned all there is to know about intimidation and a great deal about engineering, missed Korea by a handful of years, and—both too old and apathetic—skipped Vietnam.