Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life Read Free Page A

were ecstatic at the bloodshed and battle. There were calls for suicide and for going to the police. One powerful voice, that of a Spanish priest, said, “God will not forgive an unrepentant sinner.”
    “God?” I said from the rafters of my mind. “How can you talk about God when you are where you are?”
    “All deeds are divine,” Father Clemente replied in the same mental idiom. “He has placed me here to succor those lost and sundered souls.”
    For a moment, I saw and felt what that Catholic minion believed. His sense of the Deity was so intense that I could not help but defer. I felt myself fading inside my own mind. Other voices gained ascendance calling out for confession and absolution. These voices were of all religions, and some were simply devout believers. They wanted to be freed from the prison they found themselves in. The husk of my mind was for them, at that moment, an unbearable limbo.
    “No!” It was a man’s voice that cut through the moaning and wailing of religious piety and confusion.
    This pronouncement was so loud that I was forced to sit up and then get to my feet. I went to the terrace and breathed in the chill night desert air. It was late in the evening. We had been at it for hours.
    “They were going to kill us,” the new voice said above the waning din of pious complaints. “There was no choice, no crime. And we need more information before we can go to either God or the law.”
    What should we do? I thought.
    “Let’s make a call,” the as-yet-unidentified voice said.
    On the walk from my bed to the terrace, I wondered if I was schizophrenic with side orders of multiple personalities and delusions. Had I been to a place called the Steadman and killed those men? Maybe I had stayed in this room the whole time imagining deeds, actions, and crimes.
    A phone number worked its way into my thoughts.
    After pressing a nine and a one, I entered the number on a tan phone that sat on the blue desk.
    Six rings and she answered, “Yes?”
    “Anna?” the man who stopped the religious convocation said.
    “Yes?”
    “This is Ron.”
    “Ron?”
    “Tremont.”
    There was silence for a moment … two.
    “Anna.”
    “Who is this?”
    “I don’t have time to explain, A. But I can tell you that on June 24, 1999, you did something to a man named Charles Willis that I cannot repeat on any phone line.”
    “Ron?”
    “You always called me Tremolo.”
    “Ron Tremont is dead.”
    “I thought that might be the case. But here I am … sorta.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Vegas. I’m … I’m not quite myself and I need help. You can get in touch with a guy named Jack Strong at the Motorcoach Extended-Stay Motel.”
    “Your voice … it doesn’t sound like you.”
    “On Tuesdays I always brought lemon-filled doughnuts to work wherever we were, and on Fridays you bought chocolate éclairs.”
    Anna—Wolf was her last name, I knew—went quiet again.
    “Anna.”
    “How can you expect me to believe this?”
    “Your husband came out to you four years before the divorce, but you remained faithful to him and never told his secret to anyone but me.”
    “I was with you when you died,” she said.
    I suddenly remembered driving down a two-lane highway outside Cincinnati. One moment I was fine, and the next my heart felt like an expanding balloon causing a pain I’d never experienced before. I pulled to the shoulder and threw open the car door. I heaved up and out of the driver’s seat while Anna was shouting my name. Three steps into my attempted escape from the heart attack, I fell to the ground. Anna rolled me over with some difficulty because I was a fat man. The last thing I remember seeing was her face. Her coloring was dark ocher. Her race was what is called African American.
    “I was a coward at the end,” I/Ron said into the phone. “I begged you not to let me die.”
    “Ron,” she said with a kind of semi-certainty.
    “I gotta go soon, A. You still with the