Oasis

by Brian Hodge

  A menagerie of stuffed animals lived on her bed, and these she pitched into a corner with an exaggerated flourish. She flipped back the covers, then turned to me, her hands in her pockets, legs wide and rigid as she rocked on her heels. Behold, the temptress. “Got the idea?”

  I nodded, throat suddenly as dry as the Mojave. Outside of locker room stories, not many guys ever got this kind of offer. Why does it have to be now?

  “Ummm … I think maybe we’ve both had the same thing on our minds for a while. You know?” For a moment she slid from flippantly bold temptress to demure waif. “Chris, I just didn’t want the first time to be in the back seat of a car.”

  Valerie took my hand, fingers interlocking with mine. I didn’t want to say anything. Pro or con, nothing seemed to fit. And then her face was suddenly in mine, her lips parted, tongue flicking out. I nuzzled back — obligations, again. She worked harder, kissed deeper. And at last I began to thaw, to heat up a little. After all, the male libido at eighteen is an awesome force. Don’t leave home without it.

  We undressed, Val doing most of the work. We paused now and again for a kiss, some of which were real teeth-clackers. Then we slipped beneath the sheets, cool after a day of central air. We embraced, delighting in that initial full-body contact, totally unobstructed for the very first time. Her hands probed at me, and she pressed in, teeth at my neck

  Oh hell, I thought wearily, trying to maintain a momentary passion and make it last longer, who am I trying to kid? And in that second, everything just folded up and died, the ashes blowing away.

  “Did I … did I do something wrong?” she asked, finally catching on.

  “No, no. Don’t think that.” What a talented liar I was. “It’s me, Val. Just me.” Good going, Chris. By now, any other guy in your place would be about as introspective as a wild boar in rutting season.

  “Do you just want to talk?”

  “Maybe for now. If that much.”

  But what did I really want? I wanted to think, to understand, to come up with some answers. I wanted to run out to Tri-Lakes and somehow grab onto the whole damned place and squeeze it and shake it and wring it until Rick tumbled out. And then I’d never let the guy out of my sight again. That’s what I really wanted.

  Valerie lay to my left, on her side, her head snuggled in against my shoulder as she absently stroked at my chest.

  “How do you feel?” she said after a while.

  “I don’t know. Strange. Numb, maybe.” Alone.

  “I wish I knew what you were going through.”

  “Don’t wish that on yourself, Val.”

  Her hand continued to dance lazy circles across me, moving lower now. Up to her old tricks again, trying to raise the dead. “Do you wish you’d never found that place? Tri-Lakes?”

  I laughed, a bitter, spiteful sound I barely recognized as my own voice. “What kind of question is that? One of my best friends in the world disappeared up there. How the hell do you think I feel?”

  Her eyes flashed, wounded. “Sorry,” she said hoarsely.

  Before this night, had I snapped at her like that, I would immediately have apologized. But something plugged it up this time. Instead, I planted my arms behind my head and stared at the ceiling. “For the past week I’ve felt like somebody’s reached inside me and yanked out my fucking guts. That’s what I’m going through.”

  For just the slightest moment, she flinched back, and if she’d maintained that extra margin of distance between us, things might have been fine. Not great, but fine. But no, she had to care, had to try to help me through it. Valerie reached over to hug me.

  Invading my space. With the craters yawning open inside me, this naughty girl was overstepping her boundaries. And needed discipline.

  I grabbed each of her wrists and held tight.

  “Chris…” she said, a growing unease in her voice.

  An image of the two of us flickered in my mind’s eye, showing me what she needed, and I knew I wanted her after all. I wanted her so badly I saw red, and felt myself growing in response.

  “Are you trying to make me feel better, is that it?” I asked in a fierce whisper. “Is that what’s going on here?” I squeezed her wrists tighter.

  She was starting to squirm, and shadows suddenly filled in the creases across her forehead. “Chris…”

  I clamped down as hard as I could, almost to the point where I could feel the bones grind in her wrists. It brought a tiny cry of pain, and my breath quickened. I was all confidence now, all power, all dominance to her submission. No way would I be denied now.

  “You’re hurting me, Chris, now stop it!” Her voice was rising in pitch as well as volume, and it was music to my ears.

  But I think I was as surprised as she was when I found myself on my knees, jerking my hands around and rolling Valerie onto her stomach, face down. She cried out again, but this time the sound was muffled. I released one wrist long enough to grab the back of her head and shove her face deeper into the pillows. Her free arm flailed uselessly as she thrashed beneath me, her voice a muffled tirade of protests, confusion, and fear.

  And pain. Oh yes, sweet pain.

  And for a second I almost forgot where I was. Val’s bedroom.

  But why am I…?

  Because we like it this way.

  No turning back now. My free hand returned to her wrist and I stretched out both her arms toward the headboard, pinning her down on the mattress. Her head whipped back and forth, as if she were saying No no no nonono.

  “Then make me feel better,” I said, and it brought on another rush of confusion, because I scarcely recognized the sound of my own voice.

  She began to cry hot tears, and her voice became a snuffling whine. I couldn’t recall ever having made her cry before, and I didn’t think she’d looked any better than she did right then. Like she was ready and waiting for me to reach within and ream her out body and soul. There’s no other power like that on earth.

  Keeping a tight hold on her wrists, I shifted around directly in line behind her. She thrashed even harder, then lifted her head. “Oh, Chris, Chris,” she said with a high voice balanced on the verge of sobbing, “don’t do this to me, not like this Chris pleeease.”

  With an angry savage thrust, I went ahead as planned. Her scream sounded as though it had been ripped from the deepest hollow of her soul. And I’d never felt anything so good in my life.

  Valerie managed to free one of her legs, and she brought it up between mine with the force of a field-goal kicker. For one crazy moment I thought of the old carnival game, the test of strength, where you take a big mallet and try to ring the bell at the top of a column … because I could’ve sworn she’d sent my balls clanging straight up my throat to the top of my skull.

  Then the vise-grip of pain set in. And if you’re a guy, you know there’s no more debilitating sensation in the world.

  I keeled over onto the side of the bed, nearly toppling off. I curled up into a tight knot of agony while Valerie rolled the opposite direction to land heavily on the floor. I was dimly aware of her retreating to a corner, clutching a sheet to her chest.

  “Oh shiiiit,” I moaned, because the pain wouldn’t subside. If anything, it had taken root and swelled into a vibrant throbbing. And I was back, just me and me alone, the Chris Anderson I’d always been, who’d never been much of a threat to anyone. The Chris Anderson who’d been afraid to slow-dance at his first prom for fear of getting an erection. Whatever had been inside me telling me I liked what I was doing was long gone.

  For a long while neither of us said anything. I was far too preoccupied to think about forming coherent sentences, and Val simply sat in the corner, sobbing as she hugged herself with the sheet.

  I have no idea how long it took, but finally the pain began to ebb. And my mind was free to move on to what I’d just tried to do to Valerie, and how I’d driven her to hurt me like that. The pain in my groin was minuscule compared to the way I felt about what I’d just done — such a debasing, h
ateful act.

  I propped myself up on one elbow. “Val, I … I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t look at me!” she screamed. Her head lifted briefly and the tears spilling down her cheeks glistened in the moonlight. Then she dropped her head back down, obscuring her face atop her arms and knees.

  I lay back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling again, listening as she cried herself out in the corner. The sound just wouldn’t quit, it went on and on and on, and I knew I’d be hearing it for days to come. Days, weeks, an endless accusation I couldn’t dodge.

  “Valerie, I’m sorry, you don’t know how sorry I am. I just don’t know what happened.” My voice trailed away, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t understand it.

  “You,” she began, then stopped as her voice faltered until she found it again. “You acted just like you did the night you got into your fight up there. I didn’t know you then, either.”

  “Val, please, that wasn’t me. Then or tonight.”

  “Well, who else was it?” she cried, and slapped the floor with her palms. “What am I supposed to believe?”

  I struggled up to sit on the edge of her bed. Mostly to buy time to sort out an answer to that one. “You just don’t understand what’s been going on in me the past few weeks.”

  “No! No, I guess I don’t!” Her hands twisted and knotted the sheet into a tight cord. “But maybe if you’d opened up a little more of yourself, I could’ve tried!”

  Something I had no comeback for. So I just sat there.

  Slowly but steadily, Val regained some resolve and composure. She let the twisted sheet fall from her hands, and it slowly uncoiled like a lethargic snake. “Just leave now, Chris. Please.”

  Now I was the one to start sounding whiny. “Can’t we talk about things a little more?”

  “Actions speak louder than words, Chris.”

  I hated it when she got sarcastic. She was so damned good at it.

  I looked at her, and she wasn’t budging. But then I knew that this icy, bitter demeanor was just a front, if an effective one, and that soon after I was gone, she’d probably break down into a fresh attack of hurt, perplexed tears.

  All my fault. So I’d best get while the getting was good.

  I dressed quickly but carefully, oh so carefully, especially when fastening my jeans. And then I left her sitting in the corner in the dark, her head averted so she wouldn’t have to look at me. I felt my way through the house until I reached the living room, where the moonlight cast a silvery-blue glow over everything.

  Including Kodiak at the front door.

  It must’ve been guilt that made me fear him, as if he’d been standing alert at the door, hackles raised, snout wrinkled back from his teeth as he growled deep and low.

  Instead, he got to his paws, tail wagging lazily as he padded up to me. He nuzzled at my hand, a hand that minutes before had tried to force his mistress into submitting to intentions about as vile as they came.

  He looked up at me with that trusting, sappy expression dogs sometimes have, as if trying to tell you that you could never be so bad as to lose their friendship. Hey, it’s okay, don’t worry. Maybe you’ve got a few problems, but I don’t mind. You still like me and I still like you and everything’s gonna be just fine, right? Right?

  I patted his head, and couldn’t have felt guiltier if the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and Bono from U2 had all come together to point their fingers and cast me off to some far-flung purgatory.

  “Good boy,” I muttered to him, then slipped out the front door. How many times had I left that house feeling as if I hadn’t a care in the world? Skulking out to my car this time felt like a perversion of all those happier days.

  Driving away, I knew things between us were finished. Just as surely as I’d known I would never see Rick again.

  Just as surely as I knew that something was leaving me more and more alone in the world.

  Chapter 17

  Sunday afternoon rolled around, and this time you couldn’t have found me at home. I’d been out cruising for a while out of restlessness. Damn the gasoline costs, full speed ahead. A line from an old Chuck Berry tune that Rick had been fond of popped in out of nowhere and ran through my head like a groove from a broken record: No particular place to go…

  Friday night with Valerie had left me about as cheery as a man forced to dig his own grave. But I’d learned something the day before that sunk me even lower. I had called Stanton at the sheriff’s to see if they’d tried dragging the pond at Tri-Lakes. They’d done so last weekend, and had indeed latched onto one item of clothing: a left-foot boot.

  It matched the right one that Dennis Lawton had been wearing the night I’d smacked him with my car. After he’d drowned.

  Stanton found it to be a coincidence of major proportions, but didn’t know how to tie it all together. My imagination was off and running, but I still wasn’t much better off than he was. I couldn’t explain it, not yet, but this cinched it for me that Tri-Lakes was a bad, bad place indeed, and was somehow the root cause of all the rotten turns that life had taken this summer.

  Something else also became apparent. My attitude toward the place was shifting. No longer was I vaguely and uneasily afraid of Tri-Lakes. I was getting angry. After all, nothing had happened to me. It had all fallen upon those around me, whether Tri-Lakes had acted directly on them, or through me.

  With no particular place to go, then, I suppose it was inevitable that I wound up at Tri-Lakes. I stared at the grove, and the trees rose tall and stately, no more concerned than if I had been an ant struggling through the grass. It felt arrogant … and somehow responsible.

  More than any time since this ordeal had begun — when? graduation night? — I longed for someone else to talk to, to lean on, to share the burden with. The secrets I carried inside were piling up like sandbags, and they were so bad that I didn’t think I could even sit down with Phil about them.

  But what could I say? I had nothing definite, nothing concrete. All I had were paranoid fantasies, born out of images and sensations that lingered like remnants of bad dreams.

  “Happy now?” I said aloud, to the grove. And in the air I felt a peculiar tingle, the chemistry generated when a genuine rapport is established. “What the fuck else do you want?”

  A breeze sighed through the trees, green and endlessly leafy, and they murmured softly. The grove heard, all right. And understood.

  I took several steps toward it, away from my car. “What is it with you?” I shouted. “WHAT ARE YOU?”

  The electricity of tension rippled the air, and I could feel the tiny hairs on my arms prickling. I took another few steps forward, until I left the asphalt and stood on the ground, overgrown grass and weeds brushing my ankles. I spat contemptuously, facing that huge tree and feelingas David must have felt facing Goliath.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

  I stood my ground, unsure of what would happen, if anything. A breeze stirred again, but no more forcefully than before. Nothing weird about that. Except then it seemed to grow colder, just as it had the night that sudden drop in temperature had spooked Phil and Rick and me.

  Soon it seemed that the world itself was blurring, slipping out of focus, but never directly before my eyes. It happened on the borders of my peripheral vision, like photographs you see whose centers are sharp and distinct but whose edges grow hazy.

  We faced each other for a long while, as I waited for something more. Then it gradually occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d heard a car over on Route 37.

  If Route 37 is even there anymore.

  Slowly, almost expecting what was to come, I turned to look back at my car. Which was no longer there. Nor was the asphalt. I remembered the night we’d first found the place, or the night it had found us. And I recalled the way it had begun to feel when I walked toward the grove … like the world was younger, more resilient. More primitive. No doubt this was the logical extension of
that night. My car was gone because, somehow, we’d slipped back in time before anyone had conceived of such things as cars.

  Slipping in time, and maybe place, as well.

  The landscape had changed. The grove remained, but beyond, everything was hillier, rockier. Craggy. The pond had drawn itself out like a ribbon whose ends stretched out of sight.

  No, not a pond, I wanted to say, those childhood days of studying my heritage coming back to me. A fjord.

  I knew I should have been scared, petrified, but I couldn’t find fear within me. This had all the surreal qualities of a lucid dream, when you’re fully aware that you’re dreaming.

  I peered around at these new surroundings in awe. And recalled Aaron’s voice, coming at me from a night that seemed both past and future: Nature gave us our first cathedrals, Chris.

  Then I knew why there was no fear. Because this place, this strange land that had somehow blossomed around me, wasn’t new to me. I had been there before, because the land felt like home.

  The black rocky hills to my left … someone had appeared there, astride a massive horse. He was too far off to discern clearly, but he too was big, this much was apparent. He raised a thick arm in greeting. Or was it defiance?

  Now, finally, the cold taste of fear.

  He kicked the horse into motion, and rode down the side of the craggy hill as easily and effortlessly as if he’d floated down on a magic carpet. He drew some kind of bladed weapon, brandishing it over his head. The horse’s hooves grew into thunder that shuddered the ground. Foam lathered its muzzle, and its eyes gleamed feral.

  As they drew nearer, I could see the man’s furry clothing, his flying tangle of filthy blond hair, his matted beard, and worst of all, his eyes, harboring more fury than I knew could reside in any one person.

  I remembered Rick from some indistinct night, his face wounded because Phil was laughing at him. Laughing because of something Rick claimed to have seen. It looked kind of like a bear.

  Watching this apparition sweep down from the hills like a human tornado, I suddenly found Rick’s comment more credible.