27, Rebirth

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I consult for the mother fucking Chair Force, I’ll tell you that.”  Sergeant Schuman was annoyed, not mad.  She rolled her eyes and said, “You tell cap’n fuck face that I appreciate the offer, but I’ll be with Team Whiskey ’’til they lay me in the ground, thank you.”  She aggressively hung up her cell phone and looked up at the evening sunset.  Beautiful hues of red and orange danced along the mountain line in a display of pure beauty.  “I get so fucking tired of the brass and all their bullshit, Porter.”

“If Spec hadn’t recruited me for the Army when I was in flight school, I’d have joined the Air Force.  Everyone of my friends who enlisted seem to like it!”  Pilot Porter was more chipper than usual, which was saying something.  “Most people feel flattered when they’re offered a job!  What gives, Sarge?”

Porter normally had a supernatural ability to calm her friends down, but Sarge was having none of it.  “I’m pissed because that asshole knows, I’m not fucking leaving the Army!  Jesus Porter, he should’ve been talking to you!”

“Nice try, but I’m not falling for it.  Besides, that job would ground me.  No thanks!  I was born to be in the air.”  Porter’s dreamy eyes snapped back to reality.  “Don’t change the subject.  For real, why can’t you just appreciate when people recognize your greatness?”  Her compliment went in one ear and out the other.

“Greatness, shmateness.  I’m not spending the next five years of my life at a base in Germany trying to make their operation more efficient so I can retire with a few more pennies in my pocket.”  Schuman checked her watch and changed the subject.  “It’s twenty one hundred hours.  The fights are about to start.”

A month earlier Sarge had clashed in a bare knuckles boxing match with a very good fighter who defeated her.  It was the only fight she’d ever lost in her life.  Good fighters turned the woman on, and her opponent that night was the best she’d ever faced.  The man was a stranger in all respects.  She didn’t know his name or how to get ahold of him, but her irrational love for the stranger who defeated her burned inside like the fire of a thousand suns.

Since that night Schuman had been on a walkabout around Bogota, Colombia trying to find that man.  It was a fruitless endeavor, but her motivation had not waned and showed no signs of slowing.  The defeat had ignited a part of her soul that she didn’t know existed.  Calm but desperate desire was all she felt anymore.  It was awesome and awful at the same time.

A block away, a couple of guys who looked homeless walked intimidatingly towards the ladies.  The two women didn’t change anything about their conversation, but Schuman naturally found herself walking a step in front of her friend.  “I need to learn better Spanish, but I’m pretty sure they said there are already twenty or more fighters who’ve signed up!”

Porter saw the sketchy dudes getting closer but showed zero sign of fear.  “Do you think you’ll sign up to fight?  Your face finally looks good and your black eye is basically gone!”

“I feel good.  I’m loose.”  Schuman smiled.  “I’m ready to fight again.”

The men were close now but neither woman acknowledged them.  When they were only a few steps away, one of the men spoke.  “Hola muchachas!”  He tried to say something dirty but the words didn’t have time to leave his mouth.

Sergeant Schuman loved to fist fight.  It was part sexual, part addiction, and pure bliss.  She stood five feet six inches tall and barely weighed one hundred twenty five pounds soaking wet with heavy change in her pockets, but she could hit like freight train.  Out of nowhere, Schuman threw a hard left jab at the first hobo.  His body collapsed instantly as his consciousness was knocked out of him.  The second hobo only had a second to process what had just happened before he too was being punched and dropped. 

Porter had kept her leisurely walking pace and Schuman was now a few steps behind her.  “Well clearly you’re ready to fight again!”

“This is nothing.  I have to find him, Porter.”  Schuman stopped walking and put her hands on her knees as if she might vomit.  “I have to.” 

Porter knew her friend was crazy, but this was something brand new.  Mental health was no laughing matter in the military, but irrational or not, Porter trusted this woman with her life.  “We’ll find him, Sarge.”

Schuman spoke as if the outcome was already a done deal.  “Tonight’ll be our lucky night!”  She muttered to herself, “I’ll find you, Bean Pole, I’ll find you.”

The underground fight scene still hand’t recovered from the frantic shootout that happened last time Schuman fought.  The story had become legend.  

“A White Angel came in and taught our young men a lesson in punching power until the seventh fight when the Bean Pole knocked her out.  That’s when the shooting began and we ran.  A week later, Tiberon and his generals were all gone.  We have no Narcos for now.  It is a time of peace.  Let’s box.”

Sarge and the Bean Pole were infamous, but only by legend.  Regarding the memory of her, no one really recalled what she even looked like.  Bartenders and bouncers all knew of her story, but when they saw her in real life, they dismissed it because she was simply too small to be the White Angel in their minds.  Tonight she was rumored to be making her reappearance, and the buzz on the streets reflected the excitement.

“The community is finally speaking up about all the atrocities that Tiberon and his men committed.  There’s no one loyal to that dynasty anymore, but just in case there’s a vigilante out there who wants to settle the score, our friend Dirt will have a lot of his own people undercover with him tonight too.  We’re protected.”  Pilot Porter wiped the sides of her mouth as she finished eating the last bite of a delicious food truck burrito.  “For real, just relax and do what you do best.  This will all unfold as it’s supposed to.”

Sergeant Schuman was wearing her tight white muscle shirt and a pitch black sports bra.  It was the perfect blend of feminine athletic beauty mixed with savage muscularity.  For the first time in a month, she found herself smiling a genuine smile of excitement.  She felt most alive when she got to fight, and both the crowds as well as the competitors were ready.

The next twenty minutes passed in a blur.  There were announcements in Spanish, followed by big entrances of some of the better known local fighters, but Schuman didn’t ever see Bean Pole.  That was ok, because her plan was simple.  Knock everyone out, become a local legend, and then put the word out that she wanted a rematch with Bean Pole.  No more walking around the community.  They’d bring him right to her.

Sarge’s first opponent regained consciousness as the smelling salts shocked his olfactory nerves back into working order.  His trainer kneeled above him and looked concerned.  The fighter asked, “how’d I go down?”  

“A quick left jab.”

“She hits like a bullet.”

“I can tell.  Let’s get you out of here, Amigo.”

“Hey, how long did I last against her?”

“About fifteen seconds, Amigo.”

Her second opponent was an incredible boxer.  His footwork was fire, he dodged jabs beautifully, and he had power.  He was getting frustrated because Sarge had a perfect ability to dodge punches to where they’d only miss her face by half an inch.  She could counter punch in less than a blink of an eye, but her connections didn’t deliver the bone crushing power for the knock out.  It was a dazzling display of boxing skill, but Sarge would connect another counter punch every ten seconds or so, and it was wearing the man down.  As he tried to improvise, Sarge threw a perfectly timed punch that connected.  A hook and jab combination connected right afterwards and the man went down.  

The crowd was deafening, but it was as if Sarge was in a dream land of silence.  In a strange slow motion mental scene, she surveyed the rowdy spectators.  She could see Pilot Porter sitting with a good looking man who was a pilot.  Sarge didn’t know how she knew this.  A few rows above her sat Dirt, complete with his cheesy Hawaiian t-shirt and scraggly salt and pepper beard.  The two Latino men sitting next to him were clearly drunk and would be no good if any kind of shootout actually did occur.

As the slow motion understanding of the room enveloped her, she could see that some men were desperate gamblers while others were timid mice who were trying to unlock some primal part of their inner selves by watching the bare knuckle violence.  The whole scope of the human experience poured through her, and as if in some cheesy Japanese anime movie, the sum of the incoming magic unlocked the caged beast that Sarge buried deep within.

The next ten minutes were a blackout blur.  Fighter after fighter tried and failed to hit the little blond haired woman.  It was as if her feet walked on clouds.  She dodged punches before they were thrown and connected counter punches as easily as wiping down a messy kitchen counter.  She had a fixed maniacal smile as she got in close to fighters and connected hard at the perfect times where they were vulnerable.  

There was no crowd noise.  There was no ref.  There was only the memory of a tall well built fighter whom the public called The Bean Pole.  She relived the fight in her head over and over while fighter after fighter fell.  Her subconscious beat each boxer with ease as her conscious mind replayed her one and only loss.  As if she were on some sort of high powered mind altering substance, Sarge had no concept of reality or madness.

“Do you consent?” yelled the announcer in English.

Sarge snapped back to reality.  She looked down at her hands.  Her knuckles were red and bruised and her forearms had taken a beating blocking punches, but she was in perfect fighting shape.

“Do you consent?” asked the voice again in a much more aggressive tone.

Sarge looked up to see a fighter who was six foot six, three hundred pounds of pure steroid reinforced steel muscle.  Her eyes got huge.  The audience mistook this as a sign of fear and everyone gasped loudly.  The sergeant wasn’t scared.  She was turned on for the first time in a month.

She extended her arm and beckoned the big man into the ring, as if inviting him into bed with her.  The crowd noise went berserk.  In the corner of her eye, Sarge could see Dirt on his feet with both hands on his head while Porter was still flirting heavily with her pilot friend, probably completely unaware that there was even a fight going on.

Sarge was now in the moment.  This was her favorite way to spend her time as a living being.  It was better than drugs, sex, rock and roll, and any other silly little buzz combined that other humans wasted their time chasing.  Fighting was the ultimate rush, the most pure expression of what it is to be a hairless monkey living in a common unity.  Organized violence for the sake of mutual entertainment.  The rush was exhilarating.

The large man was over confident and punched with all of his might with a right over hand hook.  Schuman was over a foot smaller and it took very little energy to duck the punch.  She had the perfect base under her hips to throw a hard uppercut.  By the time her fist hit his jaw it might as well have been a wrecking ball.  The man went down so hard that it knocked the breath out of him.  The crowd lost their minds.  The fight had lasted three whole seconds.

Three seconds earlier, Schuman was wildly turned on, nearly on the verge of orgasm.  Now with her opponent at her feet, her libido had instantly dropped to zero.  

Her mind involuntarily drifted back to Bean Pole as the ref lifted her hand in the air.  Schuman looked around.  The crowd loved her.  They literally were losing their minds.  She smiled widely and the sound became even more deafening.  The ref let go of her hand and stepped backwards but Schuman now threw her head back and raised her other hand in the air, as if she were some messiah calling to the heavens for a revelation.  Porter even took notice of the intensity.

Sarge opened her eyes and looked at the crowd, then gestured for people to bring down the volume.  As if she were in perfect control of the crowd, the place became eerily silent.  When Schuman spoke, it was with authority and power.  “Friends, thank you, I love to fight and I’m grateful I got to fight for all of you tonight.”  The crowd went berserk again.  Even the fighters whom she’d knocked out were all clapping while holding ice to their jaws.  Schuman had won everyone’s respect.

The crowd got quiet again so Schuman continued.  “I’m asking for your help.  One month ago, I fought against a man known as The Bean Pole.  He defeated me, and I would like to fight him again.  Can anyone arrange for me to meet him?”  Her voice carried through the room perfectly.

“I can help you, lady!” said a voice in the crowd.  Murmurs erupted around the room but the man’s voice cut over the noise.  “Those Russian dudes paid The Bean Pole a lot of money to go fight in Russia.  He’s over there, now!”  His thick Spanish accent was hilarious to Dirt and Porter, but all Schuman heard was the information. 

The murmur in the crowd was getting louder as a Sarge was processing her next move.  She didn’t know why, but she lifted her head and spoke to the crowd.  “Well then, I guess I have to go to Russia.  I’ll be back to fight again for you, Bogota!”

Schuman gave a big bow to all four directions of the ring as the explosive cheers consumed her.  She got out of the ring and every fighter wanted to shake her hand and get a picture.  Fans were lined up and seemed incredibly patient.  Dirt somehow found himself in the roll of being her personal manager and keeping the line moving while Sarge patiently played the role of the star athlete.  

An hour passed as the last of the fans got their pictures with Sarge.  She looked at Dirt and asked, “Where’s Porter?”

As if on cue, Porter walked up, “I’m back.  I needed a tune up before I go tune up the bird.”  Porter laughed at her own sex joke but no one else seemed to find it funny so she moved on.  “Guess what?  The team is headed to Russia as well to meet up with Owens.”

Schuman had a reckoning with reality.  “Oh yeah, I should probably go back to work at some point.”  She shrugged at Porter and said, “let’s go meet up with them, then.  Besides, Von Stryker owes me twenty bucks from when I beat her ass at checkers.  That bitch pisses money down her leg when she gets to hitting the gin, lemme tell you.”

Porter was already walking to get the car.  “Meet me out front and we’ll just fly there right now.”

In the distance, a Colombian pilot was barely regaining feeling in his legs from having wild and unbridled passionate sexy time with an American pilot who twisted him up like a pretzel and left him in begging for mercy as he grimaced through the deepest smiles he’d ever smiled.