"This is for you, Monk," he said under his breath so that only the stars could hear him, "wherever you are, you grumpy old bastard."
He took another long pull on it, rolling the smoke across his palette where it felt silky and warm on his tongue.
"I was hoping I’d find you here," a familiar voice came drifting in from across the vast emptiness of the roof.
Cleese looked across the flatness of the roof, over the ventilation ducts and idle air conditioning unit. At the place where he’d left the ladder propped, he saw a large shadow of a man coming over the retaining wall like a hippo over a yard fence.
Weaver.
"Cleese…" greeted the baritone voice once he’d gotten closer. "Jesus… that ladder gets higher and harder to get up every goddamn day."
"Is it that it gets higher or you’re getting older?"
"A little bit of both, Son…" Weaver said chuckling. "A little bit of both."
"I didn’t know whether you’d make it tonight. I mean, I figured seeing as it is Friday after all. I was just coming up here to burn a Mac in Monk’s honor."
"Hell, Son, I was coming along to do that very same thing." He pulled a cigar of his own out of his breast pocket with a sly grin and a flourish.
Cleese handed over another stick match from his pocket and returned the smile. Weaver took it from him with a nod of gratitude and raked it against the stucco. Soon, his cigar was burning as brightly as Cleese’s.
"I was beginning to worry that this tradition of ours was going to fall by the wayside now that Monk’s moved on," Weaver said as he sat his big ass against the short wall. He adjusted himself and then spit a bit of tobacco over the side of the building. "He and I spent far too many nights up here and I was a little sad when I thought we might not get to do it again."
Cleese nodded and said, "Tell you what, Old Man… I’ll take his place up here with you for as long as I’m around if it would make you feel any better."
"It would indeed. It would indeed. And I’d be damn glad to have ya, Son."
Cleese looked over at Weaver and grinned.
"I didn’t know if you’d be here or not, but just in case you were, I brought you something," Cleese said as he reached into the shadows at his feet. He pulled a slender bottle into the moonlight, hefted it in his hand once, and then handed it over.
"Saaaay, now we’re talking!" Weaver exclaimed, turning the bottle over in the half light so that he could read the label. "Glenmorangie… eighteen year old, single malt Scotch." Weaver laughed and shook his head. "People will say we’re in love."
"If they do," Cleese responded with a wry grin, "then you’re The Bitch."
The men laughed and eased themselves down into a comfortable sitting position; backs pressed against the stucco. They sat, both looking up into the sky as Weaver pulled the lead foil from around the bottle’s neck. With a squeak, he tugged the cork out and set it to his side. He lifted the bottle to his lips and opened his mouth. The rich, brown liquid poured over his tongue with a hearty "glug-glug" sound.
"Aaaaaaah…" he sighed after he’d swallowed. He handed it over to Cleese, his face reddening in the dim light. "That’s mother’s milk right there, Buddy. Fuckin’ A!"
"Glad you like it. I was meaning to give one of these to Monk before he left, but what with Corporate moving ahead everybody’s plans and everything getting so crazy, I was never able to get around to it."
"Are you saying you have another one of these bottles lying around?" Weaver said, cocking an eyebrow inquisitively.
"Yeah, I do. I’ll bring it next time, you fuckin’ lush."
"Ahem…" he said and he gave a little bow, "I prefer the term
connoisseur
,"
"Whatever you want to call it, Pal. Your liver is just as screwed."
"Prolly true…" Weaver took the bottle back and raised it in toast. "To Monk then…" He took a large slug of the stuff and then handed the bottle back to Cleese.
Cleese accepted it and raised the bottle in kind.
"To Monk."
The two men sat, their conversation falling into a comfortable silence, passing the bottle back and forth between them for some time. Neither saying a word nor feeling the need to. It was enough that they were together, hanging out and drinking themselves into a state of forgetfulness. It was a well deserved respite from all that they’d been through in the last few weeks. With Monk gone, Weaver and Cleese had become closer, like acquaintances drawn together by the absence of a mutual friend. Their interaction could still be awkward at times, but Cleese was content in the knowledge that their friendship would find its own path in its own time. Soon enough, things would fall into their own rhythm and things would grow to be more natural between them.
After a few minutes passed and they’d both begun to feel the first wave of their buzz, Weaver looked over slyly and nudged Cleese’s elbow with his own. His expression was comically conspiratorial. His thick eyebrows arched and a mischievously insinuating grin spread across his face.
"I notice you and the filly spending more and more time together now that Monk’s gone AWOL." The caterpillars that passed for Weaver’s eyebrows danced up and down on his forehead. "What’s doin’ there?" he asked.
"You know… I’m not sure," Cleese responded honestly. Feeling slightly embarrassed, he scratched himself behind the ear. "She’s not like any woman I’ve ever known before. I mean, she’s strong, capable, smart… She doesn’t expect anything from me and asks for even less." He trailed off and shrugged. "I’m just enjoying her company is all and I plan on taking it as it comes, to spend time as time is spent, y’know?"
Weaver nodded in the darkness. "I do indeed. She’s a nice girl… good in The Pit, too."
Another pause settled in and the two men sat quietly smoking and absorbing the stillness of the night. Cleese was encouraged by Weaver’s acceptance of his blossoming relationship with Chikara. It felt a lot like having a dad approve of the girl you were dating.
"So," Weaver said, handing the bottle over, "you hear anything from Monk?"
"Nope. You?"
"Not as of yet. I’m thinking he’ll wait until he finishes up his hitch in the UFL. You know, wait ’til he gets to his daughter’s place and he has something to report other than how jacked up that dog and pony show is."
Cleese nodded almost imperceptibly in the moonlight.
"He wasn’t exactly happy with the way things finally went down, you know," Weaver said, shaking his head in disgust. "He told me that he wanted to make sure you were going to be ok before kicking you out of his nest."
"He was mothering me."
"Well, the hardest thing for a parent to do is to take their hand off the back of the bike. I doubt he had any desire to see you get your ass ripped apart in front of him." Weaver looked Cleese in the eye. "He liked you, cared for you like a son."
"I hate to admit it," Cleese said over the lip of the bottle, "but I’m gonna miss that son-of-a-bitch. He beat my ass—and I cursed him—more times than I’d like to admit, but he was also more help to me than I could’ve ever told him." He took another long draw of the Scotch. "He kept me alive in this damned place."
Now it was Weaver’s turn to nod. Monk had dragged his meat out of the grease more times than he could recall as well. They’d befriended one another in the early days of The League and both considered themselves to have a deep and abiding affection. He felt a pang of remorse when he thought of how he might not ever see his friend again.
Cleese handed the bottle back to Weaver and they were both once again left to drift on the stream of their own thoughts. There was no pressure to fill the void with unnecessary chatter or small talk. It was enough that they could sit and smoke and drink in silence.
And so they did.
Finally, Cleese, coming back to the here-and-now, broke the stillness.
"So, how long are
you
gonna stick around here? I mean, you ain’t getting any younger."
"Hey, you can go fuck right the hell off, Pal. I plan on doing this shit for another ten years
at least
," Weaver said laughing. As his chuckling fell under his breath, he said, "Some people’s fuckin’ children…"
"Hey, no offense meant."
"None taken, ya prick."
Cleese smiled and reached over for the bottle.
"No, seriously, don’t you have plans for your Golden Years?"
"Listen, Cool Breeze, I’m not even pushing sixty. I ain’t got no retirement plans just yet. My job here is something I do without much thought and I’m really fuckin’ good at it."
"Agreed, but don’t you have family? I mean, back out in The World?"
Weaver got suddenly quiet, almost sullen, and looked away. A dark cloud passed over his expression and his mood darkened. After a minute, he took the bottle back.
"I did… once," and he lifted the bottle and drank. "Same old story, y’know?"
"Sorry," Cleese said meekly. "I didn’t mean to dredge up any bad memories."
"No, it’s ok," Weaver said and lightly touched Cleese on the arm with the lip of the bottle. "See, back in the day, I used to work in, of all things, the electronics industry. Did that shit for years. I kept track of thousands of parts at a semiconductor manufacturing plant. I did what they called ‘destructive analysis.’"
"Sounds fitting."
"Yeah, well… it was all pretty meaningless, but I had me a wife, a home and a good life goin’. The old American Dream, y’know?"
Weaver’s gazed drifted off as he began wandering the meadows of his memory.
"It’s funny how things can change, eh?"
Cleese nodded silently and settled back, not wanting to get in the way of whatever it was Weaver had to say.
"Anyway, one day, I’m on my way home, drivin’, y’know? And—bam—I hit this massive gridlock on the freeway. Ain’t a car moving for shit. People are cussin’. People are honkin’. Then, in the next car over, a radio starts blarin’ on about how there are people goin’ crazy: mass murder, cannibalism, all kinds of craziness. Shit, you know how it was…
"At the time, the news guys were all talking about everything from Venus probes to some kind of infection, like a virus. Whatever it was and wherever it came from, it was makin’ people to go crazy."
Cleese again nodded remembering that day all too well.
"Honestly, I figured it was all one of them
War of the Worlds-
type things. You know, complete and utter bullshit. Anyway, I’m sitting in my car for quite a while, waiting for the gridlock to break. All I wanna do is get home and get back to my life, but as time goes on, I start getting more and more nervous. Not really sure why, but this anxious feeling starts skittering up my spine. So, I pull to the side of the road and drive up onto the shoulder, thinking I can circumvent this shit by doing some off-roading and get my ass home faster. I go four-wheeling through the toolies and get to the next exit. I bounce up and over the curb and come screaming down the embankment."
Weaver had a faraway look in his eyes as he continued. From the look on his face, it was like he was back there, seeing it all play like a movie across his mind’s eye.
"Anyway, long story short, I finally get to my street and as I pull up to my house I see the place surrounded by a dozen or so of those motherfuckers. They’re all milling about, but gathered around something on the lawn. At first, I was like, ‘what the fuck?’ and start fearing the worst. Little did I know that not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined ‘the worst.’ I start turning toward the house and, as I come up the driveway, I see that the thing on the ground is Fran Johnson from next door. She’s lying on the ground and her clothes are all pulled open and there’s blood and guts and who knows what else spread all over my lawn. Now, I’m still thinking that this is some kind of joke, like a Halloween prank, but the look on her face told me that it was all real as shit. These animals had torn Frannie to pieces and, from the blood on most of their faces, they looked like they had, as weird as it sounded, been eating her. I mean, fuck me…"
He chuckled in disbelief.
"Anyway, as soon as these fuckers see me coming, a whole slew of them, all pasty-faced and bleeding gashes, come lurching across the lawn, toward the driveway. Unable to stop, and not really wanting to for that fuckin’ matter, I hit the sidewalk and plow straight through them sons-a-whores. I mean, I
slammed
into ’em. A handful goes under the front wheels and their bodies make loud thumping sounds under my wheels as I run right over them. The others bounce offa my fender like bowling pins."
Weaver lifted up the bottle and drank again to both wet his whistle and to calm his nerves. In a moment, he cleared his throat, swallowed, and continued talking.
"I slide to a stop near the front door and I’m about as scared and pissed off as a cat in a washin’ machine. Not really thinking about whether it could or would be dangerous, I jump out and get a clear look at the situation—Frannie torn open on the lawn, the blood, the people I’d run over starting to get back to their feet, the whole mess—and I know
somethin
’ ain’t right, y’know? I mean, I’m just fuckin’ smart like that.
"Then, I see
Frannie
move…"
Weaver paused long enough to take another pull on the bottle.
"So, I dive back into the car and pull an old tire iron out from under the seat. I get back out and just start swinging. I mean, I’m cavin’ in heads and breaking off fuckin’ limbs."
Weaver looked over at Cleese in the waning light and smiled.
"You’da been fuckin’ proud of me, man."
Cleese grinned and nodded.
"Anyway… It was about then that I hear my Dora screaming from inside the house and I
panic!
I start beating my way through the crowd of these sons-a-bitches. I must have flattened a football team’s worth or so, I swear to fuckin’ God! So, with my adrenaline now pumping, I make it to the front door and kick the motherfucker down. Inside, there are one or two more wandering in the front room and entryway. I lay them out and go running through the house and up the stairs toward our bedroom. I get to the doorway and I see Dora…"