Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  “You sounded excellent today, Paul, excellent.” Vince was all smiles, fed and fat and happy and no doubt unspooling a mental stag film starring the young lady out front. He leaned back in his chair, an oversize leather throne on casters. The entire office, with dark paneling and brass and cut-glass liquor bottles displayed with snifters, was a crafted womb of power.

  Popeye leaned forward, elbows on desk, offered Paul one of the two chairs before his desk.

  “No thanks, I’ll stand.” A trick of dominance; the chairs sat lower than did Popeye’s, putting you at the disadvantage of having to look up to him. “It won’t take long.”

  A tiny flickering frown. “Suit yourself.” Smoothly shifting into response, eyes straying across his desktop and finding a book, A Passion for Excellence, that had to be reshelved. He remained standing, still maintaining a frozen smile.

  Oh go on, nobody lives forever…

  “Since you seem to be into understatements today,” Paul said, “I’ll put this in the same kind of terms. A lot of people around here would be upset if you suddenly let Sherry go.”

  Popeye’s smile began to crack around the edges, and he tried to salvage it with a show of benign ignorance. “I beg your pardon? Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul wheedled, two could play this game. “Because, say, you two are mismatched and she’s the one with enough brains to know it?”

  This one torpedoed the smile off Vince’s face. His blood pressure must have been on the rise, for so was his color. Red.

  “How I conduct myself around my employees away from work — and no one here is paid for their lunch hour, by the way — is no concern of yours.” Strained through clenched teeth. “I suggest you haul ass out that door and not bother yourself with what goes on in the off-hours. Understand?”

  “All I want to understand is that you’ll just let Sherry do her job. Without worrying about what she has to do — in the off-hours — to keep it.”

  Popeye breathed heavily through his nostrils, a bull ready to charge. “Do you like your job, Paul? Because nobody is indispensable around here. Nobody. Do you understand that?”

  Paul felt a peculiar relaxation wash over him, the eye of the hurricane. When it came down to the bottom line, this was the worst the man could do: terminate his status as KGRM midday man. Paul doubted he would have any trouble catching on somewhere else before long. Hell, industry wisdom maintained that you haven’t truly worked in radio until you’ve been canned once.

  “I think my job’s just peachy. One or two things around here I might change, but…” He left it at that. Understatement.

  “Well, if you like your job, and if you would like to have it tomorrow, I suggest you find your way to the production booth and start cutting the commercials you have to do.” Florid-faced and leaning across the desk to uphold that vital dominance, Vince emphatically pecked his finger into Paul’s chest. “I think you’ve got more than enough in there t—”

  Paul fired his own hand up to catch Popeye’s in mid-peck, before he even realized it. He clenched tight and held firm, not budging as Vince’s eyes bulged, all rage and loathing. And surprise? Yes. That too, and how gratifying that was.

  You fat bastard, guys like you don’t even belong in the same species with the rest of us.

  He longed to say it, but while convinced that Vince’s threat was bluff and bluster, he saw no sense in taking the extra chance. Besides, there was a certain power in limiting your words to as few as needed. It kept others guessing.

  Paul released his hand, turned, and vacated the office. While Popeye didn’t say a word.

  Point made. And taken. To the bone.

  Vince Atkins left the KGRM offices at close to six that evening and had, in nearly three hours and by conservative estimate, urinated six times. Heavily, big long satisfying pisses that felt like he was draining away the weight of a bowling ball. Didn’t seem right, not at all. A fever, maybe?

  Not to worry, he came from sturdy stock, and he wasn’t even thinking about it while leaving the building. Mind on a pitcher of martinis — that would taste better than good, that would taste glorious. And wouldn’t hurt toward slaking that powerful thirst he could feel coming on…

  …for within his body, a shift was occurring on microscopic levels, dextrose and sodium and potassium leaching into his bloodstream, emptying into his bladder, voided, flushed into the sewers. Electrolytes fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. The entire process sped along by the world’s most common diuretic, alcohol, and the floodgates had just opened…

  Twenty hours, give or take, and Paul grinned at the change in Sherry’s mood. Yesterday afternoon had been trauma. Today, and likely to stay, was malevolent glee. She meant business, and Paul never wanted to get on her bad side. Women were just sneakier when pushed, that’s all there was to it. Heritage, he supposed. Shortchanged in upper body strength, might as well compensate in covert operations. Paul could respect that.

  “I had a talk with Lorraine last night,” she said.

  He was juggling a CD and an album and commercial carts with precarious dexterity, and paid her more than all the attention he could spare. This should be good.

  “She gave me something to nail Popeye if he ever tries anything like yesterday again. I almost hope he does.” She grinned.

  “An elephant gun?” He peered toward her purse.

  Sherry opened it and withdrew a small tape recorder, wired with a small remote microphone. “Lorraine said she had to use this once herself. I can hide this in my purse and have the mike near the top, and take it straight to a lawyer.”

  Headphones cockeyed on his skull, Paul swiveled the chair around and shot her a victorious thumbs-up. She smiled and went through some brief pantomime, and he wasn’t sure, but it looked like a scissored castration. Ouch.

  “Any more subtle advances out of him this morning?”

  She shook her head. “He’s barely said two words to me today. Maybe your talk scared him off. And if it did, thank you. And even if it didn’t, thank you anyway, for trying.”

  He mumbled something, no thanks required, and realized he wasn’t handling appreciation very well. Probably because he had been doing a lot lately for which thanks would be given if only the recipient knew whom to thank. Which was fine, really, no attention was the way he preferred it. He had gotten used to the secrecy rather quickly.

  “But you’ve got to admit,” Sherry said, “it would be fun to sue his fat pants off,” and they laughed. “Anyway, I don’t think he’s feeling good today. He only comes out of his office to refill his coffee mug. But at the water fountain, isn’t that weird? Just since eight o’clock, I bet he’s gone to the fountain a dozen times.”

  Speculation was rife with comic possibilities. In anyone else, it, would sound like a bizarre new fad diet, but Popeye?

  By the next day, it was obvious that dieting was the last thing he was up to, the polar opposite. Universal KGRM assessment was just how awful the man looked. Truly awful. Spectacularly awful.

  Merely fat before, he was now positively bloated. Peter said the sight reminded him of Elvis in his last days, sweating his way across the stage in a miserably grotesque parody of himself. Russell St. James predicted that, despite obvious evidence that something was awry, he would be too proud and stubborn to consult a doctor anytime soon.

  And Sherry reported that he had switched from a coffee mug to a large plastic pitcher, economy by volume, yet those trips to the fountain were even more frequent than the day before…

  Within his body, a state which would have sent alarms clanging through the head of someone more sensible, less stubborn, oh, this horrid thirst that had no end.

  But the body could metabolize only so much water at a time, and Vince had gone into overflow, having saturated his cells, then his bloodstream. Now the incoming water and newly released glucose — from his body’s breakdown of fatty adipose tissue in a desperate bid for energy — had no place to go but between his tissue cells. Fluid
steadily damming up within his lungs, around his heart.

  Diluted, his blood thinned such that its pressure had dropped to a level dangerous even for a man who was fit and trim, let alone carrying so much extra poundage. Decreased lung capacity allowed the buildup of carbon dioxide acid in his bloodstream, as he grew shorter and shorter of breath, but the thirst, THE THIRST, it would not go away…

  Thursday, near the end of a horrendous week, and Vince Atkins sat wheezing behind his desk, all he could do to manage upright posture. Tired, so tired, and weaker than a month-old teabag. The past couple nights’ sleep had been a joke, no more than a single hour of unbroken slumber at a stretch. Countless times awakening to the bitter darkness of his bedroom, groaning at the realization it had been mere minutes since the last time he’d checked his clock. Sometimes it was the diarrhea that woke him, building up with sufficient force to shoot out like a cannon; other times, the parched landscape of his mouth and throat.

  It wasn’t bad enough that he drained seven pitchers of water at his bedside last night, and unmeasured more at the sink. He was also piddling and soiling the bed like an incontinent child, awakening to find the sheets soaked and stained and cold. No dignity in this at all, this knew no boundaries, and he never wanted to get old, lose that bodily control for good.

  Vince braced head in hands, there, more pain. Like heavy needles through his brain, jab one in long and slow, then twist, twirling gray matter into swirls like a fork in pasta. He coughed, an anemic rumble as he labored for breath, and even the lights were painful today.

  With spastic hands, Vince grasped his pitcher, brought it sloshing to his lips. Clamped his mouth down and tilted it back. The relief was minor, temporary, and more than a little water cascaded down cheeks and chin, soaked his shirt collar, which in itself was giving him fits. Too tight, as were his shirt cuffs and slacks and shoes. Even the waistband of his underwear had become a length of razor wire threatening to slice his belly.

  For the dozenth time, maybe more, reaching for the phone, letting his hand fall short, I’ll beat this on my own, won’t find me whining to a doctor about being thirsty, for fuck’s sake.

  His hand.

  It looked like a rubber glove filled taut with water.

  Slowly, slowly, he poked at the flesh on the back of his wrist, and stared in horrified fascination as the puckered dimple stayed there, like an indentation pressed into bread dough. What the hell?

  He attacked the pitcher again, like an alcoholic’s fervor for the day’s first bottle, and lapped at the rim to catch every last drop. He gurgled and set it down, not enough, never enough.

  Vince’s in-basket had become, since Tuesday morning, a logjam of paperwork. Endless paper tide, where to even start, and now it was Thursday, and what the hell was he doing here in the first place…?

  Empty. The pitcher was empty. That would never do.

  How many had he downed today? Fifteen? Twenty? The normally shiny top of his desk was covered with dried water rings, side to side, front to back. A mineral quarry.

  Empty. Already? Time for a refill, immediately.

  He shoved himself to his feet, heave ho, swirling gray mist in the room. He wavered until it cleared, gasping, then scooped up his pitcher and lurched for the door. A dinosaur plodding through the offices, ignoring the stares of alarm from the staff, and then Cliff Frankl in his face, where’s that contract I turned in for signature on Monday, I need it before August billings are compiled, and Vince became W. C. Fields, go away boy, you bother me, and he still managed to lose the water fountain twice.

  He found it, then decided to bypass it entirely. Far too slow, he needed some real water pressure, and made tracks for the bathroom. Should anyone be inside, especially that son of a bitch Paul, then they would automatically be dubbed earth’s lowest life-form, subject to immediate squashing.

  The john was as empty as his pitcher, and he was puffing like a steam engine, and slumped against the wall to catch his wind. Those lights, fluorescent lights, ground zero nuclear blast, squint, and he shut his eyes altogether when he saw the sweaty, bloated thing he’d become. That brief glimpse in the mirror had shown him a blimp made flesh, wearing a damp, rumpled suit inadequate to even close around him. Set into an otherwise shiny face, his eyes looked dark and sunken — and dead.

  He cast aside the pitcher, as inadequate as his suit.

  Fumbling with buttons and zippers, wrestling the hateful strait-jacket clothing from his bulk, no time to waste, and he really should call a stupid doctor, soon as he was through here. He lumbered into the shower, twisting the knob for maximum output and the cold spray was a shock to his body. Furthest thing from his mind, though, it mingled with the sour sweat greasing him from head to foot. He adjusted the nozzle from spray to jet…

  Cold, soothing water…

  Finest of nectars to minister to the raw ravages of his throat…

  By standing on tiptoe, Herculean effort, Vince hauled himself up by the stall frame and clamped his mouth around the nozzle. Bit so hard his teeth grated on metal, and he swallowed, and he inhaled, and even though his filled-to-capacity belly rejected it and sent the water surging back up his throat, even though he gagged on the fluid jetting into his lungs, he tried to gorge even more, sometimes you just can’t get enough of a good thing.

  It hit him like a pile driver, the left side of his chest, then paralysis in his left arm, and Vince Atkins was dead on his feet of congestive heart failure.

  His body came bursting out the open door of the stall, timber, and struck the floor with a tremendous thud that sent a geyser of regurgitated water arcing across the room to splash the opposite wall.

  And there he lay until someone on the outside noticed the water seeping beneath the door.

  Chapter 13

  Gabe Matthews loved taxi drivers, was in love with the whole idea. Perfect capsulized examples of sterile encounters in a world where people were afraid to even touch one another, never could tell what diseases were waiting to be caught. But cabbies, they were friends in friendless lands, whisking you where you wanted, no questions asked. They could even point you in the proper direction for things they could not do. All it took was the application of the proper solvent.

  Gabe had long known how the game worked.

  Tonight, just one more demonstration. The driver who had picked him up in front of Nashville’s Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza proved eager and able to earn a quick and painless hundred. Two phone calls, that’s all it took, and then they were rolling on pavement that steamed from evening rain. Saturday night, final night of August.

  The Arm of the Apostle tour had rolled into town hours before, a night of freedom before the scheduled Sunday night rally. They had checked into the Crowne Plaza — the Hyatt, once upon a time on previous visits, but so goes the world — around four, then rode the glass capsule elevators to the ninth floor, where a wing of rooms awaited.

  Donny had roamed, restless as a lion, and shortly thereafter disappeared into his room to unpack. Then he emerged and simply stood at the retaining wall near the elevators. The hotel’s floor plan was square-shaped, the tower built around an open central core, twenty-five stories of free-fall shaft. Spy down upon the lobby, upon greenery and chairs and love seats, all so tiny so far below. To jump would be easy, immortalized in hotel legend.

  Gabe had been watching through the hair’s breadth he had opened his door.

  Donny had gazed down for minutes, then disappeared into his room for good. He had already announced intentions to dine via room service tonight. A far cry from the old days, an odd nostalgic twinge, when Donny and Amanda would hire limos to take them and several select guests to dine in the finest of four-star restaurants. Champagne at a hundred bucks per softly popping cork.

  Gone, those days, maybe for good, and if there was pity on Gabe’s part for Donny and the loss of his glory days, there was also an admiration for the newfound asceticism, get back to those roots. If indeed room service and a TV could be called austere.
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  The taxi was steadily approaching Nashville’s southern fringes, the last sign he had noticed reading HILSSBORO PIKE. Night was falling like an angry cloud, and the clockwork sweep of the windshield wipers kept perfect time with his heart.

  So in tune tonight, so alive.

  Gabe was as casual as he got tonight, pressed cotton slacks and a dark blue polo shirt, a light jacket to ward off the rain. Running his hand down through the open V of his shirt, his fingers closed on a thin gold chain he constantly wore. Rarely visible, usually walled behind closed collars and ties. Donny had the mistaken impression that it bore a crucifix.

  Naïve, but understandable; a harmless deception.

  Gabe’s nimble fingers teased it out, letting it hang outside his shirt for a moment. A gold-plated razor blade. Two edges, double your pleasure, double your fun.

  Their month of touring, with another three weeks left to go, had been an unqualified success. The nightly offerings were usually grossing, depending on the sizes of the venue, city, and crowd, somewhere between forty and fifty thousand, mostly in small bills. Gabe himself supervised a staff of four who counted and sorted and parceled it in one of the auditorium’s back rooms. He also walked it by suitcase to a safe aboard the motor coach Donny rode in, a task for which he occasionally helped himself to an allowance. This was not stealing, this was appropriation of funds.

  The camera crew was filming each night, and every Wednesday a courier jetted back to Oklahoma City with the week’s film, to review it and select the best night. Which was then edited in the studios for regular Sunday syndication.

  Donny had been in peak form most nights in the pulpit, cresting the audience like twelve-foot breakers. Apart from the pulpit, though, he had been as introspective as Gabe had seen him over the five years. Yes, knowing your wife lay at home in a coma could dim anyone’s enthusiasm, but it didn’t end there. He fully expected — or hoped, anyway — to pull that healing rabbit out of the hat again. The poor man, why couldn’t he just face reality? Probably because he had such a limited view of reality to begin with, but that was hardly his fault.