Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  Over the week following that first night — the first Wednesday of October — they swung by on an average of every other night. Neutral ground away from Dawson Ministries, and they had the time to spare. Laurel had her music, which she worked on primarily according to the whims of her own schedule, and the weekly radio show’s production hardly kept Paul busy with a full-time job. Only Thursday nights were spoken for, when they cleaned up and went before the cameras to strut their respective stuff.

  Except she had no idea what he was really doing there, which seemed regrettably one-sided to Paul. She sang, and enthralled the crowd. While inasmuch as could be demonstrated, all he accomplished was making sure no one tripped over their own suffering feet. A noble endeavor, though hardly a specialty. If only she knew. Secrets already. It was a bother.

  Over cappuccino and successive nights, their backgrounds unfolded before each other like a miniseries. Laurel told him she was originally from Eugene, Oregon, a nice laid-back town. Lots of relics there, throwbacks, flower children come from wherever to settle and go to seed. She found it quaint.

  Blue-collar family all the way, her father a trucker who spent road time for the logging companies, then compensated for his frequent parental absence by ruling like a tyrant whenever he was home. Mom kept a clean house — no wife of his would ever work outside the home — and deferred to his omnipotent authority over Laurel and her brother, two sisters. Father knew best. With punishment to match for the nonbeliever.

  “It was classic love-hate, all the way.” She spoke as if it were someone else’s life, perhaps that of a friend from long ago, whose life had been made fair game by time and distance. “I loved him and wanted him to be proud of me. But I hated him, too, because he would never, ever, loosen up enough to act like a friend to me. Not even just for an evening at home, not even an hour. It was like living with your school principal. You remember when you were a kid, how the principal never seemed like a human being?”

  Paul said he did. The principal, demigod of education. Corporal punishment had been allowed freely in those days. Horrors.

  “That was home,” Laurel said plainly. “Here are the rules, here are the forbidden zones, and woe be unto you if you cross either one.”

  “He’s still alive, though, isn’t he?”

  She nodded with an obligatory smile. “Oh sure. He’s barely even past fifty. And now he’s proud, all the neighbors get to hear about what I’m doing here. He calls me his little choirgirl — and I suppose it makes me a terrible daughter, but I really hate that. It’s like he’s trying to make me a kid again and make up for all that lost time. But too little, too late.”

  “At least you have a father that’s around. At least you know. Some of us, all we can do is imagine.” He’d already apprised her of his own loss of innocence, that first vicarious trip through Hell, pushed through by the Big C. See Dad, see Dad rot.

  Laurel hadn’t taken it lightly then, nor did she now, reaching across the table to shield the back of his hand with her own. “It depends a lot on what you were left to remember. Did your father touch you?”

  Paul smiled, an attack of nostalgia. His father had been the first to teach him of the therapeutic bliss of the backrub. Even little kids got muscle kinks. “Yeah. He did.”

  “Mine didn’t, except to spank. He never hugged me that I can remember. Even the spankings, the touching there was almost by remote control. He always used a ruler, or the back of a hairbrush. Anything like that, to keep the distance.”

  A postpuberty father, what a concept. They said you couldn’t miss what you never had; they were wrong. But debating this topic was no good at all. Their frames of reference were too wildly dysfunctional to get much beyond agreeing that the other at least had a valid point. Leave it.

  As she’d grown older, Laurel had looked elsewhere for gratification and validation of her true worth. Music became salvation, as she had been gifted with a voice that easily covered a four-octave range and could run a stylistic gamut from ethereal lilt to saccharine to down-and-dirty grunge. She preferred the latter, and during college, she put it to work in a band called Cain’s Mutiny. One of those typical half-assed we’ll-play-for-beer attempts at its inception that gained weight as they began to land paying gigs after a year. Typical bar band, but with proficiency to spare, they were no slouches. Boyfriend/guitarist named Jax, and she the only female, upfront chick to provide a visual anchor. Yeah, well, so long as people listened. They wrote their own music on the side, and sometimes nobody even griped when an unfamiliar piece slipped through.

  Eventually, college could wait for completion. Dad had been volatile, but she was no longer living under his roof, and Laurel allowed herself petty satisfaction over his tirades.

  The band eventually fell apart, though, one more rock and roll casualty of ego and disillusion. She and guitarist/boyfriend Jax parted company, gone the way of couples who woke up to discover they were treading divergent roads. In the telling, Laurel breezed through it all in a hurry, no wasted breath. No big deal, she said, just one of those things growing up entails.

  It hurt her, Paul decided. It hurt her more than she’ll ever let on. But he still had an inside track, didn’t he? Gabe’s nonspecific admission that she had suffered trauma.

  “That was around fourteen months ago,” Laurel said. “And I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I was twenty-four, almost broke, I had no job, no prospects, and only about five-eighths of a liberal arts degree. And I was way too stubborn to go back home.” She wiggled those heavy eyebrows. “My prospects were not good.”

  She told him she went bumming up to visit a girlfriend in Seattle. A weekend turned into two months, uncertainty nosedived into depression, and her hundred and fifteen pounds swelled to one-forty. Life, as a rule, sucked rocks. She happened across an ad for a Donny Dawson revival one night and, with nothing better to do, decided to go for laughs, who knew, maybe he could touch her and make her thin again, ha ha.

  But something happened that night. One lost and hurting soul cast adrift in a sea of others, everyone else swept away by passion and music and theater, she found it hard not to be moved. A fallen-away Catholic, that was Laurel. Still considering herself as a part of the faith, but only marginally. There are no ex-Catholics, she told Paul she had heard said, only recovering Catholics. She was used to solemn ritual, and the happy freewheeling bustle of the Dawson service took her by surprise. By the end of the night, she had shanghaied an usherette and was begging to audition for the choir.

  The rest, of course, being history.

  They’d finished exchanging bios by early in the week following their initial meeting, just in time for first kisses. They caught a movie at an art house, crumbling, with all the charm that suburban mall cineplex clones could never even aspire to. The seats squeaked beneath them as they watched a revival of Dr. Strangelove, roving hands seeking one another in the dark, then interlocking, not two minutes after lights out.

  Touching, sitting there safe and content, actually leaving his killer’s hand in the care of another with no dire consequences unless he counted his happily stricken heart. No worries, only giddy relief. In weeks past he’d felt truly loathsome, not even entirely human, with precious little rebuttal from anyone else on his behalf. Now, finally, here it was, and she probably didn’t even realize how much it truly meant. She stroked her thumb along his own, and he knew that whatever this was between them, it was at least real.

  Later that night they closed down Bran Central and endured its cry of last brew, then drove back to the compound to walk among its trees beneath a hazy moon. A cool October night, and beneath its passive watch their lips met for the first time. And again, and again.

  “Nice,” she murmured into his throat, and they went another round while the heat burned hotter and the passion smoldered, while the bodily grinding grew more fevered. First kisses were like fuses, some duds, some slow-burn, others so short as to be suicidal. They were falling just shy of the latter extreme, which was f
ine, given the locale. Any hotter, and clothes would begin soaring.

  As her lips grazed along his throat again, Paul tilted his head back, eyes open to the sky. He could swear the moon had visibly moved since they had stopped here, and how insanely wonderful, he was actually feeling short of breath. He cupped Laurel’s face, and they smiled at each other through moonlight.

  “You keep at this,” he said, “and I won’t want to let you go to your own room tonight.”

  “Ooo, danger, danger.” Laurel was mischief personified, then abruptly more serious. “So, um, you don’t think that would be wrong.” Statement, not question, spoken with such neutrality he could not discern her own leanings.

  “What? Are you kidding?”

  “Well,” and she shrugged easily, locking her arm in his. Starting to walk again, time for a little stroll, and damn it, he hoped he hadn’t blown it by saying too much too soon. He found it easy to forget where they were. The remark had been half in jest, anyway. Half. “Not that I necessarily go along with every consensus, but what do you think the average dorm rat over there thinks of shacking up?”

  “I see your point.” Paul breathed easier. Maybe he’d not stomped on such thin ice after all.

  There was the men’s dorm, and the women’s dorm, and yes, they were connected where the wings met in a right angle. And no, the doors were not locked, and no resident advisers stalked the halls in search of anyone of improper gender and intentions. It was more like an apartment complex in that respect. But the moral imperative seemed unspoken: Fornicators shall die horrible never-ending deaths by fire. How cheery.

  How manipulative. Be good cattle.

  “You’ve lived around here a lot longer than I have,” Paul said. “What does go on under that roof?”

  “Very little, I think. We’re all brainwashed to hide our bodies.” Then she leaned in close to him, pressing tight a moment. “I’m sorry, you must think I’m a tease all of a sudden. It’s that lingering Catholic guilt, I can never get rid of it.”

  He decided the topic of sex could use a respite, until circumstances were more conducive. A segue was in order. Opt for religion, of all things, no powder keg there.

  “I’ve been curious the past few days,” he said. “Why did you leave the Church? And become a—” What was her phrase for it? “A recovering Catholic?”

  “This is just me, you understand? If it works for someone else, great, more power to them.” Laurel walked silently for several seconds, putting thoughts in order. “It just got to the place where it didn’t really fit anymore. It didn’t apply to whatever I felt I needed. There was all this ritual, all this pageantry, I guess you’d call it … and once I got old enough to really start questioning things and wanting understanding, all of it seemed so hollow to me. Religion by numbers, you could walk through it in your sleep. The whole idea of having to confess your sins to your priest instead of God, like you need a lawyer to plead your case for you. And then, the acts of contrition he gives you. Magic words, and everything’s okay.”

  “Let me play the devil’s advocate for a minute,” he said. “How would you answer someone who told you, hey, you get out of it what you bring to it? If you feel it’s hollow, it’s only because your heart and soul are empty.”

  “You are tough, aren’t you?” She thought for a few steps. “I guess I’d say that’s true for most things. But when it comes to something spiritual, I can’t buy it. It should be there to help carry us through when we’re too tired to go on. It wasn’t that I was going to Mass feeling empty. I was going with a real desire to keep getting some meaning out of it. And it was letting me down.”

  Paul nodded, squeezed her arm. “Well spoken.”

  “Votive candles,” she said softly. “I still like lighting votive candles. Somehow that still has meaning for me.” She laughed in spite of herself and shook her head, here walks a hypocrite. “Guess what I used to wish.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I used to wish I was black. At least on Sundays. Have you ever seen some black services? All that singing and dancing and joy, like they really feel it inside. All that celebration. Yes, there’s a time and a place for being solemn. But I have no use anymore for any denomination that wants me to be dour all the time. You know? And I don’t want to be judged by people for who I am. And I want to feel excitement that there’s something out there so much bigger than I am, and loves me. That’s all.” She sighed, mighty heavy out here tonight. “Anyway. Your thoughts? Arguments? Rebuttals?”

  Again, that deep-seated wish to share what he knew of the body-spirit connection. Not that there was much understanding, but it would sure illuminate something.

  “I don’t think any one group has all the answers, to be honest. Some come closer than others. And some of the more cult-oriented groups, I think they miss the point entirely. But I don’t think you could jump from one to another, like a smorgasbord, and pick and choose and put it all together and still come up with the whole picture, either. Our minds are just too small. Everybody’s just trying to make sense out of it the best they know how. And if they need a bunch of little guidelines and rituals to tell them what God really is, if that’s what gives their lives meaning and makes them feel secure, then where’s the harm? As long as they don’t kill anyone in the name of God.”

  Walking, silent and dark, trees stirring mildly overhead. From a distant branch, an owl hooted of some mundane mystery.

  “That excitement,” Paul said. “Did you find it here?”

  “It was a start,” and in her voice he could read that she wouldn’t find all her answers on these grounds, and she knew it, and would make no apologies. “I can build on it. That was all I needed when I came here. That, and some time.”

  He smiled, knowing she could never see it, but then it wasn’t really for her. Ironic. Laurel had come here to build and grow and make things more complex. He had come here to simplify. Both under the wing of Donny Dawson, along with the others. Children, in a sense, one and all, and he their focal point of heaven on earth. A poor choice, perhaps, but Donny was, after all, mortal. As were they. Children of an ill-chosen god.

  They walked, they talked, they grew sleepy. Even Laurel’s caffeine load fizzled out in time. She rubbed her stomach and complained of upset — a burning, maybe too many spices — and goodbye kisses came sweet and long in the dorm lobby. They had it to themselves, and when they broke for separate ways, he wondered if she was anywhere near as frustrated as he.

  Soon, he thought. Soon enough.

  The next night, late, lying alone in his bed and staring at the ceiling. Blue skies earlier, but come evening they had given way to a constant rain, occasional rolls of thunder. Hours long, a marathon of a downpour, thirty-nine days to go and too late for an ark. If he smoked, that’s exactly what he would have been doing at the moment.

  He’d flashed on something earlier, nothing overwhelming, but too often the little things were what crawled under the skin and burrowed until you had to scratch or go mad. Subversive little thoughts, they could pass unnoticed, until they grew fat and surly.

  Once upon a time, Lorraine. Now, Laurel. Both blondes, both with the power to wrap their hands around his heart. Naturally, he was forced to wonder: Was he merely substituting the latter for the former? Go figure, Paul wasn’t even sure he would care were that the undeniable truth. It felt too good.

  Hardly fair to the singer if he was, though.

  Enough. Away, away. He was thinking far too much. Let a couple of superficial similarities spring to mind, and he was off and running to question motives. One was supposed to lead with the heart, not with the head, and his heart said go with it.

  And never mind what role the hands played in it all.

  Late at night, and waiting, and when the small tapping knock came he rose to answer. Laurel on the other side of the door, and he let her in and shut the barricade. Leave the prudery and the frigidity out in the hall, trading it for what lay on this side of the door.

  “N
obody saw, I don’t think,” and then she smiled and arced a featherweight slap across her own cheek in chastisement. “Oh, who cares?”

  He would have taken her coat had she worn one, but the trip had been indoor all the way. Can I take your clothes, instead? It seemed a bit pushy, but within minutes of initial issue-skirting small talk they were all over each other. Peeling clothes from themselves and each other with frantic urgency, get down to the altogether. Bodies by flickering lightning, and it was heaven, beneath the flash there were no such things as flaws. Laurel. She was long and she was limber, no trace of whatever weight gain she had contended with fourteen months ago, and he admired her for telling him at all. The honesty and forthrightness that had taken, particularly in a culture where the cult of body worship ruled all.

  He worshipped only hers this night, reveled in it, and she in his. Her breath panted across his receptive skin from thighs to forehead, and he knew it had been a very long time for her, as well. Laurel took it all from him in a rolling lock of fevered limbs, months of buildup. Since Lorraine, he hardly even turned his own crank.

  It was sweet and it was tender, Laurel beneath him with arms drawn around his shoulders, then his neck, eyes shut tight in the lock of good vibrations, tiny little cooing noises escaping as she crested each rise and fall. And if it was less than perfect, faltering now and then with unfamiliar rhythms, it bothered him not at all, for the welding of emotions more than compensated. They were here for each other, not to work on each other.

  They spooned together in the afterglow, Paul fitting around her comfortably, encircling her with his arms across her breasts, and Laurel reaching back to drape one arm over his bare hip, her hand on his rump. He took absurd pride in that he was different from the norm in such moments as this, at least if women’s magazine polls were to be believed: He rarely dropped right off to sleep.