by Brian Hodge
“Do you think I’m a good singer?” Asked after untold minutes of lazy stroking.
“I think you’re a fantabulous singer.” He leaned in to peck her ear, exposed in a bawdy swirl of hair.
“You’re not just telling me that?”
“Hey, I already got laid, I don’t need to lie now,” and he couldn’t help himself, it was out before he could bar the smartass at the door, and he laughed as she feigned a huff and tagged her elbow down onto his ribs. Ow. Then, “No, I’m not just telling you that. Why?”
She still faced away in the gloom, her voice distant. “Oh … people do. People lie. They tell you what they think you want to hear, never mind what they really think. I used to love the compliments. Then I got suspicious of them, I was always wondering what this person wanted from me.”
He said nothing, probably the wrong move, but his brain was in slow gear, downphased by postcoital languor. He roused only mildly when she rolled over and straddled him, sitting on his stomach, hands clamped down onto his shoulders. Captive, while outside, rain streamed shapeshifters down the window, dim light projecting them hugely onto the walls.
“What do you want from me, Paul?” she whispered. Leaning down toward his face, and was she serious in this? Her face was so difficult to read. He saw it break into a Cheshire smile floating above, and even that offered little reassurance. “What do you want from me?”
“Everything,” he whispered back, and in that moment it was wholly true. Good or bad, he wanted it all. The bout of lovemaking had confirmed one thing: He was tired of shielding himself from feeling.
“Good answer, you win the prize,” and she eased off to roll back beside him. Facing him this time, new breakthrough. “I lied to you the other night.”
He pushed up to one elbow, a little elevation for the revelation. He waited, patient, proceed at your own risk.
“Jax, the guitarist I was with for those years?” Her eyes tracked his own, not blinking. “We didn’t exactly … break up. He shot himself one night. In front of me. Right in front of me,” and out it came, a tale distilled to high potency, of a night of morbid anxiety and floundered dreams and too much Wild Turkey. I figure our chances of making it are one in six, at the very best, Laurel said he had slurred from a sagging couch. Probably not even that, but that’s all the room I have, and he showed her the .38, cylinder flipped open to reveal five full, one empty. One in six, Russian Roulette for the hardcore, and she’d screamed and jumped to thwart his chancing the odds while he’d put the muzzle to his ear.
Losers both, and if his brain wasn’t working so well by that final hour of life, in the end he cast a good portion of it aside. If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out.
The story hit Paul like a club, all her pain still boiling beneath the surface, and he could feel its heat. Trying to imagine what it must have been like. He’d witnessed death up close and personal, violent death, and there had been nothing pretty about it at all. Ugly business indeed, and the fact that its most recent visits had befallen people he hadn’t liked didn’t lessen their impact. How much greater the devastation, then, to watch one you love extend the invitation to the reaper, willingly, catch me if you can.
Paul was at a loss over how to react, so he led with his heart, reaching for her. She wanted more, though, and gripped him fiercely, both arms and both hands, and one strong leg curling around his own. Something was different this time, something else churning beneath surface niceties, and damned if it didn’t stoke his own ardor.
She was off the bed in a flash, dumping the contents of her purse. They hit the floor with a clatter, a jumble by night light, and she knelt amid it all, seeking … something. She drew a harsh breath, tossed her hair back over her shoulders, and he could see the sheen of sweat. Fresh outbreak or earlier residue, he didn’t know, didn’t care. She was back on the bed with the same demented speed, pressing something into his hand.
Her hairbrush. The back was wide, flat. Smooth and sturdy.
“Use it,” a plea without pleading, and the first thing to pop into his hopelessly naive mind was the conventional route. But no. No, somewhere when he wasn’t looking, this assignation had gone round an entirely different bend, and after a moment’s assimilation he surprised himself by realizing he liked it.
Consenting adults, after all.
“Use it,” firmer this time, her voice huskier, and she rolled face down and hinged in the middle, her behind rising before him like some kind of altar, poised and waiting. Laurel murmuring into the pillow, “I don’t want you to pretend to be my father, or tell me I’ve been a bad girl, I’m not into that, I just like the feel of it. So use it on me and be yourself. Use it.”
He swung one halfhearted swipe, tag-you’re-it, and she told him harder, and he complied. The crack was loud and shocking to his ear, and she expelled a sharp breath and he knew he’d done right. Harder, and he was there for that, too, dimly watching this unexpected kink from outside himself. Paul, performing like a dazed automaton, raise and swing, raise and swing, and as he broke his own sweat and could admit to himself that he was totally into this, he converged body and soul.
Laurel was biting the pillow in delight, her rump swaying gently, rolling and rising up to meet each fall of the brush, the sounds from her throat nothing at all like those of her earlier orgasm and tremors. Deeper now, throatier, huskier, coming from someplace farther inside. The rain washed across glass, and he could feel her heat baking him as he knelt beside her, and she had to be glowing a cherry red back there by now.
He was flailing with an arm gone wild, every smack of brush on bum a sensory taste he’d never dreamed he would like. The wielding of the power, however tyrannical, however instigated by her — it made no difference. Oh, she had read him well. Bonded to him once with the tender sweetness, then turned and showed him the other side, the brazen underbelly.
So that he could see himself reflected.
They were two of a kind, really.
Paul was hard as a diamond by the time she snatched the hairbrush from his grasp and pitched it to the floor. Still maintaining her position — who was master now and who was slave? — she gripped him by one thigh and pulled him behind her, and his passage was assuredly easy.
No problems finding rhythm now, they were in sync, they were fundamental, they were primal, and he felt the red-hot stinging glow before him, on hands and hips. As he melted into it, its captive, like death by fire.
Laurel woke him in the morning, not much after dawn, by the looks of the light at the window. Still wet, still speckled — the rain must not have ended long ago.
She was dressed already, and sat at bedside stroking his tousled hair. He lay facedown and her fingernail traced a chill up the furrow of his back. Laurel smiled down at him, and the previous night might have been a bizarre dream, were it not for one thing. The look of intimacy in her eyes was new and undeniable. They had exchanged more than bodily fluids; they’d exchanged pieces of themselves.
“I have to go,” she said, and it never ended, did it? The curse of random collisions in these hectic times, eat and run. “I better get to my own room before anyone else is up and moving around.”
He smacked his mouth; it felt pasted together. “I thought you didn’t care.”
“You know what I mean.” She planted a kiss at center back. “I’ll see you later. Okay?”
He nodded and sleepily murmured yes, and she was gone in tiny footfalls and a soft latching of the door. No voices from the hall expressing shock, dismay, or jealousy. Coast clear.
Paul turned onto his back, arms behind his head. Watching the ceiling again, same as before her arrival. Oh, the difference a few hours could make, another layer of innocence peeled away. He ran a hand down himself — all parts present and accounted for. His pubic hair was crusted, felt like steel wool. He returned his hand behind his head. Sighed.
Laughed to himself, new morn exhaustion. He really should think about taking up smoking.
Chapter 29
> If unemployment was the tree, then too much time for thinking was the bitter fruit. It was hanging right there next to humiliation. Simple revelations, profound in their truth, hit different men at different times. Rusty Sykes was morosely drunk, and never had the world looked clearer.
Barston, Oklahoma, on a Friday afternoon. A town of over forty thousand, some fifteen miles to the south of Oklahoma City.
Thirty-six years old, a roustabout for an Oklahoma petroleum company called Alamo Gas and Oil, and all it had taken was the flick of a managerial pen to pack him off to the land of the shitcanned.
Something was not right somewhere in this world.
Rusty had fallen victim to the modern equivalent of the witch hunts that had provided so much work for medieval purveyors of moral standards. Urinalysis for drug use. Rusty, of the scraggly blond hair and untrimmed beard, knew he was no angel, no one was ever going to mistake him as such. But he did not foul his own nest by indulging in controlled substances while on the job. He might tip a beer or two out in the oilfields, but who didn’t? Under that bitch of a sun, you were sweating it out as soon as it hit your belly.
Extracurricular fun was the culprit here, residual leftovers after a weekend bag of Popacatepetl Purple. Marijuana by any other name would smoke as sweet. But all bags were not created equal.
He lumbered through his house like an unsteady bear, in the kitchen upsetting a stack of grubby dishes. Countertop to floor in one easy move. The crash induced a headache, and he found the plates had been a condominium for a growing family of roaches. Eviction was fast and furious, as Rusty stomped as many into oblivion as he could, decorating the linoleum with a haphazard new design. Frame it and sell it, he could use the cash.
In the living room, Rusty slumped into his mortally wounded couch. TV time, it had been blasting since morning, when he had awakened out here. He only kept it on for company, agreeable voices, and rarely had any idea what was playing. Oprah now, he recognized her, the one with the weight problem, up and down like a yo-yo. Her voice sounded warbly, and it was neither her fault nor the TV’s. He broke wind in salute, and it burned, flaming methane. Three-thirty in the p.m., and breakfast had been a mere hour before, two slices of dry toast and a bottle of Mexican tequila. Half gone and counting.
Too much time on his hands. He supposed he could ring up Ned, his former brother-in-law. Fishing might go down easy about now. But Ned would know something was up if he called this time of day. Rusty had barely left the house in a week. A man didn’t admit to failure or drag anyone else into his problems. Period.
So what was a man to do, then? Rusty knew the answer to this one like he knew the scars on the back of his hand. A man didn’t take being fucked with by sitting on his ass. He took a stand. And if no-balls pricks in suits were the cause of all misery in the known world, then a man had to start holding them accountable. They robbed the poor, they looted the savings and loans, they dropped trou and waved their fat white untouchable asses at the little guy whose sweat had built their palaces.
A man — the real article — looked Fate in the eye and spit in it until it closed. He put his convictions to the acid test of action. Remaining forever true to his personal vision of divine retribution.
Rusty shoved himself vertical, wavered a moment, let the room flow back into shape beneath his boots. Steady…
He left the tequila by the front door, didn’t want to forget that on the way out. He clomped into the kitchen for a tiny bottle, half filled with a clear and heavy-looking liquid. He uncapped it, held it beneath one nostril while pinching the other shut and deep-sniffing, then switched nostrils. It was no counterbalance for the tequila, but at least the amyl nitrate was a welcome change of pace. For several timeless moments, his entire face felt as if it were sliding off his skull. One more mess to scrape from the linoleum.
And the world was looking better and better.
In the bedroom, he kicked clothes and underwear around until car keys surfaced. From the hall closet, out of which rolled a swarm of dustballs, he lugged his fishing tackle box. He and Ned hadn’t been for a month or more, but it was time to recall it back to active duty.
Ready, set, go. With one steel-toed boot tip, he turned off the tube by kicking a televised face into a million shards of smoking glass.
Tequila bottle in one hand, tackle box in the other, car keys in his teeth, Rusty sauntered outside to his car. Parked on an ugly bare patch of front lawn, and while the house may have been leaning toward condemnation, the car was finer than a thousand-dollar whore. Late model Trans-Am, charcoal gray, gleaming from a loving bimonthly coat of wax, her engine a seductive proposition to his ear.
West, then, past the fringes of town, toward a site built along the Canadian River. The gaudiest shrine to Alamo Gas and Oil. Two blocks from his house, before his exiting dust cloud had even settled, he began to laugh. Could not shut down, all this clarity, how deliriously funny it all seemed now. His former employers, all eunuchs and geldings saddled with terminal cases of wishful thinking. Alamo Gas and Oil — give us all a break. He entertained a vision of Alamo’s CEOs in their OK City headquarters, pretending to be Texas wildcatters, snakeskin boots and ten-gallon hats to a man.
He knew how to catch their attention: give them a hard swift kick in the wallet.
Westward, a pleasant afternoon drive, plenty of time for deep thought. Dipping into the reservoir of news of national tragedy, a random item from a few years back. The finer details were hazy, but the big picture was clear. Some pink-slipped flight attendant who’d taken a Magnum aboard a plane owned by his former employer. Scratch one passenger airliner from the schedules, gone to kiss the ground in fireballs and screaming metal. Now there was a man worthy of respect.
Rusty wasn’t sure when the cop picked up his tail, didn’t even realize he was blowing traffic signals. Sometimes they hung back to torture you, make you squirm, but today the laugh was on the cop. Rusty saw the roof lights lit up and heard the siren whoop to life. Police escort to the promised land. Rusty braked the car, pulling over to curbside. One eye on the tackle box, the other on the mirror while one of Barston, Oklahoma’s finest made the macho stroll from his cruiser.
Time to spare. Rusty slugged from the tequila bottle, felt the guave worm slide past his lips. Eat the worm and see a vision, he’d always heard. Cause and effect. He unlatched and opened the tackle box, hefting out one item and setting it alongside his thigh, no way could the bacon see it from the window. Not the most typical of fishing gear, a .357, but readiness was everything.
Footsteps outside his window, a well-pressed uniform, mirrored shades and the smoothly officious voice of courtesy: “Sir, would you mind stepping out of th—”
Instinct ruled. Rusty swung the .357 up from his thigh and stared straight through the windshield as he jammed the gun out the window. He squeezed the trigger, one amazingly well-placed shot reducing the top of the cop’s head into flying wet rubble.
“Asshole.” Rusty spat on the leaking scarecrow splayed wide in the street. He’d become quite the center of screaming attention from everyone else out on this fine day, and noticed none of it. “You don’t bother a man just trying to do his job.”
He slammed the car into gear and continued on his way. West, and he could smell it even before he saw it, the lifeblood of the nation, the world.
Nothing else on earth smelled like petroleum.
With the highway on one side, the river on the other, the refinery looked like a city unto itself. A city with its entrails yanked inside-out. At the end nearest Rusty’s hammerdown approach, a row of enormous white storage tanks sat like huge vats. Beyond the tanks stood the oil distillation towers, hydrotreaters, catalytic crackers, and more … the spires of a cathedral erected to pay homage to the gods of motorized transportation. Linking everything was an incomprehensible network of pipes and pumps, furnaces and industrial blenders, with ladders and catwalks the only mode of access to more remote reaches.
Oklahoma crude, flowing throug
h at fifty thousand barrels per day. No great shakes when compared with some of the majors that could handle ten times that, but when most of your days were spent looking at a few humble pumps chugging in the middle of a lonely field, this sight was still mighty impressive. This was the true heart of the country, from where the blood was pumped. This was where the crude became something useful, instead of the earth’s excrement.
He wheeled off the highway onto a frontage road, then onto the refinery’s parking lot, fancying he could hear the distant bray of sirens. More than one. Yeah, well, they would soon be joined by a shitload of others, you could bank on that.
Rusty vacated the Trans-Am with the tackle box clenched in one hand, ready to start fishing for paybacks. He slapped a grimy hardhat on his head, all the better to blend in with the rest of the drones servicing the petroleum queen. They paid him no mind as he passed, and he knew the drill. Too much to look forward to this weekend, a coming paycheck to carry them through. Rusty was anonymous, one more slave in dirty clothes and hardhat, with a toolbox on its way to fix someone else’s problem.
Rusty wound his way into the middle of a row of four storage tanks, dwarfed beneath them, the only thing bigger the sky. He stood between the center two, snugged himself at the base of one, an arbitrary choice. It would not matter.
They were all about to turn into the biggest dominoes in Oklahoma.
Rusty opened the tackle box. So many memories, all those fishing trips when he and Ned got too drunk or too lazy to bait hooks or rig lures. So they improvised, chucking in the occasional stick of dynamite. Detonation, a belch of water like a sudden geyser, and a few moments later you had a king’s bounty of belly-up fish to choose from and net up. Ned worked construction and had ties to demolition experts. Ned appreciated a sporting edge.