Deathgrip Read online

  “You know I’ll be leaving tomorrow for our crusade tour. But I still want to be able to speak to Mandy every day. Before you leave this afternoon, I’ll leave you a Sony Walkman and a pair of headphones and some tapes I’ve made. I want you to make sure she hears a tape every morning, on a rotational basis. Would you do that for me?”

  “Of course I would.” Almost astonished he might have doubts.

  Donny paused, hand on the door. “I, uh … I suppose you think that might be silly.”

  Shaking her head, “No, no, not at all.” Tentative smile. “I think it’s a very sweet thing to do for her. I think it’s very loving, and I think it couldn’t do anything but help.”

  And when she left, he knew she had been the proper one to entrust with this responsibility. Edie Carson was as quietly reliable as anyone he had ever met. Call it a hunch, but meek, mousey Edie probably had little else in her life, and thereby drew all her satisfaction from career. Humanitarian pursuits.

  Donny settled into the chair by Amanda’s bed. Looking any better today? No, of course not, same story every morning, the hope struggling to remain alive.

  It was not enough that she remain forever sleeping, so far beyond his reach. It wasn’t enough that she not respond to his voice, his touch. No. There was more. He got to watch her age perform a race of gold medal stamina. Got to watch it surge from behind, catch up with her, surpass her.

  She had dropped some weight in the month-plus she’d been comatose. The precoma five-foot-five Mandy had weighed a trim 120. She was down to 106 now, and Irv said she would level off around eighty-five to ninety, in time. Her skin, translucent and pale and sweat-sheened, looked drawn, wasted. Dark circles still ringed her eyes, and whenever he thumbed back her eyelids, the pupils remained fixed in that same unequal dilation from the fall. Her feet and ankles were puffy with fluid retention. Her right foot had been propped up with a dense foam device designed to fight foot-drop, wherein the top of the foot on the afflicted side leveled out with the shin.

  Irv Preston had tried to prepare him for it all. Comas are unpleasant, comas are unsettling. Their victims do not look like their usual robust selves taking a long nap. Forewarned is forearmed, Irv had said.

  Sure. As if he truly knew what it felt like to watch your wife deteriorate day by day into a breathing corpse. As if Irv could begin to empathize with the eloquent pain. Irv knew clinical facts, barely understood the wretched grief, dear God, spare me this ceaseless waiting, waiting, waiting.

  And as he had done for a month of mornings preceding this one, Donny linked his hands with hers, speaking softly into her ear, telling her he was with her, asking her to remember. Begging her to remember…

  The best days they had ever known.

  The reputation of a man whom an entire congregation — even in the Alabama outback — has seen heal a retarded boy of mortal injuries begins to precede him in certain quarters. The man is a certified draw, of monetary offerings as well as spectators.

  There are drawbacks to this, as well as obvious advantages. For one, the spectators arrive at revivals with preordained expectations. History is expected to repeat itself. They want a miracle, they want it now, and they hate disappointment. So what are you supposed to do?

  You give them what they come for, what makes them happy.

  Donny could have penned a how-to manual on the subject. How to develop a multimillion-dollar business from the early days of abject poverty, when its sole assets were a battered car and a few clothes and dreams and precious little else…

  You keep moving, church to church and town to town, aided by local believers to arrange your next destinations at sister churches nearby. You praise them for their hospitality. You raise their roof with rhetoric, then bring them down with accusations of just what lowly sinners they are, and then promise to lift them up again.

  You pump them for offerings, passing the collection plate as soon as they are primed to fever pitch generosity. Dig deep, now, and feel the love generated by all that giving.

  And, of course, you heal them.

  Not to worry, though, should it turn out that the day by an Alabama roadside was a mysteriously unexplainable one-shot fluke. Never mind that at all, for your corona of holiness is already in place. Your meal ticket is punched.

  Instead, you master a few tricks of the trade. Confronted with a cancer patient? Sleight of hand with concealed stage blood and some organs from a chicken — “Does this look like it belongs in a human body? Praise God, NO, it doesn’t!” — and it appears as if you have reached right in and plucked their tumor out. Meet up with a chronic alcoholic seeking release? You give him a sip of your self-styled holy wine, actually Hi-C fruit drink with a wang of fermentation, and you bless him and admonish him to sin no more. You’re brought someone suffering everything from arthritis to asthma, tired of prescription medicine? You deal with her only after a lengthy session of singing and chanting, shouting and swaying, until all have achieved an emotionally charged state not unlike brainwashing. And by the time you lay hands upon her, she will believe herself cured of anything.

  Prepare to be amazed, by all means, for a great many people will actually walk out of your services feeling better than when they arrived. The placebo effect: They believe? They remain convinced of your claim of a hundred percent cure rate? They don’t wish to be left out in the cold? Then of course they’ll feel better. Whether you have been the push to get them over a psychosomatic ailment, or have stimulated the brain to secrete painkilling endorphins, or have simply convinced them they are far better off for having met you — it doesn’t really matter. All that matters are the results of the moment.

  And, naturally, the collection’s bottom line tally.

  But what happens if the cancer still rages, if the alcoholic lapses into his old ways, if arthritis and asthma flare up with redoubled fury? How do you deal with this without losing face? Simple: It’s not your fault. After all, faith healing consists of two halves. And when faith isn’t sufficient on their part, surely you cannot be expected to bring about a successful healing. Better they know this now, through the reminder of illness, than to forever burn able-bodied in the fires of Hell.

  And how they will love and respect and idolize you for bringing this to their attention. For you, truly, are a saint among men.

  On the other hand, how do you deal with God? Should you feel even the faintest unease over invoking His name as a routine component in deceptions beyond counting? Never. Because you cling to an old adage heard since childhood:

  The Lord helps those who help themselves, which isn’t even in the Bible, but ought to be.

  And to the words of Jesus Christ Himself, according to the Gospels: He who is not against us is for us.

  So. You go forth and speak to larger crowds, increasing numbers of followers. You widen your spectrum of crowd-pleasing tricks by putting your wife on a secret microphone to transmit to your hair-concealed earplug on shortwave frequency 37.15 megahertz. She feeds you information gleaned by staffers before the show, circulating with questionnaires, but to the faithful it looks as if facts are coming to you from divine origins. And you convince the barely-able-to-walk, the barely-able-to-see, that the final remnants of these faculties have never been more acute than when they are standing before you. You slip in a few healthy ringers to feign illness now and then. Oh, your tricks are legion.

  You must, however, ignore those hopefuls who show up in an undeniably irreparable state, left without alternatives by medical science. Those who look to you as the court of last resort, who enviously watch the miracles and wonder why they are so lowly as to never be called forward for the touch of your blessed hands. And who leave in tears.

  You don’t even think of them. Don’t meet their eyes, for now and again one might convey such misery that a hole is ripped through your righteous facade and will leave you feeling like the parasitic swindler you actually are. Keep your distance, dealing with them only through the buffer zone of your mailroom ministry, sen
ding them personalized computer-generated form letters to let them know you pray for them by name and need, and wouldn’t they like to plant a seed of faith with Donny Dawson Ministries? No amount too small, because you feel in your heart that A MIRACLE COULD BE ON ITS WAY!

  You cultivate that vital mailing list with a gardener’s care. Keeping in frequent touch, at least every other week, and hiring a staff to tend all those names like flocks of sheep whose wool is green. And comes in denominations of ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred.

  And so you amass your bank accounts, and hire a comptroller to manage all that tax-free income, and similarly delegate responsibilities to other specialists. You hit the airwaves and buy TV time to syndicate a show taped in the sanctuary you have built. You rent studio time with local stations to do your editing until you can afford to build your own facilities. And then you can reach more people in a week than during a lifetime of stops on the sawdust trail. Because there’s an entire nationwide market for you, disillusioned by local churches, or too feeble to attend, or who simply prefer their religion packaged in the same manner as the rest of their entertainment.

  Should you gain the attention of detractors — and you will, you will — you need do no more than accuse them of being pawns of Lucifer, seeking to undermine the kingdom.

  And you also have the good sense to hire a young, ruthless commodities broker who comes to you for guidance in remorse over a short career filled with cold-blooded dealings that have left lesser opponents in ruins. He doesn’t have to be named Gabriel Matthews, but it helps. You counsel him, dry his tears of emotional collapse, inform him he is loved as a brother, and loved by God as a wayward child. Seize this opportunity to convince him he should remain at your side, learning the ways of the righteous while serving your needs. Everybody wins.

  Then you can coast. Bask in the earthly world you have created, lit by the light of the heaven you have sold to those willing to pay for it. The fruits of your labor, tangible proof that God is good, and rewards those who do His work.

  Even though you have long since forgotten what His work is all about.

  But don’t forget to pray that the person closest to you throughout the entire climb up the ladder, your lovely wife, doesn’t experience a change of heart over the methods you have chosen to adopt. That she doesn’t examine her heart and conclude that she has been deluding herself into acting as an accomplice to shearing the flocks.

  You want to avoid that at all costs. For if it happens…

  All hell can break loose.

  And sitting there at her sleeping side, he remembered it all. The best of times, the worst of times.

  I’ll quit this someday, Mandy, I promise. Maybe I’ve bent a few commandments, but I’ll go straighter. I — I’ll open a soup kitchen, and a homeless shelter, and — and you’ll see.

  But not now, now’s not a good time.

  Someday.

  Chapter 11

  Dreamtime, visceral and surreal, and Paul watched it unfold with wide-eyed wonder. The horse, large and pale, grazing in a nondescript field of pure pastoral serenity, while a friendly sun shone from a sky bluer than a baby’s eyes. Postcard perfect, until the horse went suddenly wild, electric stark panic one would associate only with a burning barn. Bucking, straining, like an unbroken bronco exploding from a rodeo stall. Until it could do no more than sag its drooping head before splayed front legs, its muzzle dripping foam.

  The hide in the center of its back began to tent upward, sharp thrusts, as if pushed by a secondary pair of grossly malformed clavicles. The flesh itself was torn asunder, parted by a brutal human fist punching through into daylight, the arm next, and a second arm.

  Sky darkened, midday dusk, bruised and swollen clouds rolling in to obliterate the blue, and the world dimmed into a never-ending palette of grays as the rider was born.

  Hands braced on the lips of the massive wound while scarlet ribbons streamed down the beast’s heaving sides. Flex, push, the rider hauled himself out the hard way, head and shoulders and torso and legs yearning to breathe free of their makeshift womb. Until he could straddle the horse while it bellowed equine mortality into a mounting wall of wind sweeping the plains.

  Anonymous, this rider, cloaked in a caul of tattered remnants from his steed and fierce black boots. Stretching, luxurious freedom at last, as he twisted one fist into the mane, then reached back into the red meat crater saddling him to retrieve one last item. A long rod of some sort, glimmering wetly, topped with a short crosspiece. A simple click, and six-inch stilettos came switchblading back from the heavy bootheels. One flex of his legs sent them digging into the horse’s wasted ribs, no mundane spurs for this apparition. Gale force winds and a dead bolt forward, horse and rider barreling past a backdrop of savage clouds, across fields swelling with a sweet symphony of screams too loud to be human, too terrified to be anything else, and he raised his rod on high, readying to sweep it down with the force of a headsman’s axe—

  As Paul awoke with a spasm, never quite so glad to see the simple, mundane ceiling of his bedroom.

  A groan, rolling over on twisted covers, Where did that come from? He shook his head to shoo away those final grotesqueries, and when he did so, up came a wracking surge of nausea. He doubled into himself, fetal-style, shutting his eyes tight.

  Maybe it was the late Saturday night pizza and beer he’d had with Peter Hargrove ten hours prior. Thick crust, extra everything, and maybe a little ptomaine around the edges?

  He tried to wait it out, but the misery had staying power. When he sat up on the edge of the bed, a headache waiting in the wings slammed into place, starting at the top of his spine and traveling upward, opening like a Chinese fan between left and right hemispheres.

  This was some serious heavy-duty hurt.

  Paul scrambled hands-and-knees into the bathroom, barely got to the bowl in time before losing everything in his stomach. It was the most wretched sick-up experience of his life, and he thought crazily of prophecy. Just this week he and Peter had introduced a new character to their lineup of bogus radio voices: the world’s most seasick mariner, Captain Horatio Chunkblower. This was the real thing, one great tidal wave of malaise.

  The porcelain, a cool, smooth friend. He weathered out the worst of it, and when movement brought tolerable misery, he looked at his hands. Pressed them to the sides of his head, why not, what could it hurt to try? He moved one down over his stomach. What rotten luck. Physician, heal thyself? Not this time. Contact with self apparently led to nothing more than a giant short circuit.

  Everybody lucking out on the receiving end except himself — wasn’t that fair?

  He dry-heaved once more and deemed the ordeal finished, then flushed and stood tall enough to wash his face at the sink. He raised the rest of the way, staring at his rumpled unshaven reflection. Pale skin, darkly circled eyes, wet spikes of hair clumping up from his forehead, water beading like heavy sweat.

  “Now there’s a handsome devil,” he mouthed off at the mirror. “Sid Vicious, after death.”

  He shuffled into the kitchen for a can of 7-Up. His dad had sworn by the stuff when the one-two punch of cancer and chemo had left him nauseated, and his mom had given him plenty whenever stomach flu had gotten the best of him as a child. No flu bug this time, though, he felt sure of it, and he hadn’t had nearly enough to drink last night to boil up so virulent a hangover.

  Maybe he’d been pushing it too hard at the hospital, he wondered on his way to the sofa. Two weeks of steady healing, as covert as an industrial spy. He had kept no running tally of how many he’d touched, a silly adherence to a rule similar to Peter Hargrove’s prime drinking regulation: Counters don’t drink and drinkers don’t count. A certain hardcore wisdom there.

  Healers don’t count. But maybe they should.

  After two weeks, surely it had to have been over a hundred patients whose burdens he had helped to shoulder. Perhaps in doing so, he was making them his own.

  But no, that was ludicrous. You couldn�
�t catch injuries, or non-contagious conditions such as arteriosclerosis and sickle-cell anemia. You could wallow in their tissues, and it wouldn’t do a thing.

  Give it all of Sunday to subside, and see how he felt by next morning. Already, with twenty minutes between himself and awakening, he was either feeling better or learning how to tough it out. As for the time being, it might not hurt to check up on how the pros handled it.

  He tuned in to Donny Dawson’s Arm of the Apostle Hour, which by nine-thirty was half over. A warm breeze, sticky with early August humidity, washed through the apartment, and Paul sank into the sofa, ah, blessed solace.

  Dawson wasn’t in his home pulpit, Paul caught this right away. A similar ARM OF THE APOSTLE banner hung in the background, and someone had made an attempt with greenery and so forth to replicate the Oklahoma City church. But home turf it was not.

  “There are a lot of people out there, detractors, you know who I’m talking about, who’ll try to make you feel ashamed of your earthly rewards,” Donny was saying, and some in the as-yet-unseen audience murmured assent. “I think they mean well, I honestly believe they do. But that’s the trickiest kind of guile the devil lays out for us: Making otherwise well-meaning people bring us down for something there’s no sin in. That’s Satan’s oldest trick, divide and conquer, am I right?”

  A thunderstorm of amens rose.

  Donny was nodding, and he paused a moment to mop his brow with a silk handkerchief. When he smiled at the audience, the tape cut to another camera, and Paul could see a great many more gathered than would fit into the home church. With its large main floor and two balconies, the place looked to be a civic auditorium of some sort.

  “Divide and conquer. One of the oldest military strategies in the book. So why shouldn’t the devil get his mileage out of it as well? To set the community of the righteous at one another’s throats over an issue like … money.” Away went the hankie. “But friends, I’ll tell you this, you’ll never convince me that God doesn’t believe in running a successful business. There’s too much biblical evidence to the contrary. How about when Jesus took the five loaves and two fishes — a single boy’s lunch — and multiplied them to feed over five thousand? Now that’s one respectable profit margin!”