The Bodyguard ("Saved" story #87)

SAVED
by Michael Kroetch

The bodyguard’s mother is decided. Like a battleship tossed onto dry land by a tornado, she stands at the top of the rickety stairwell. She’s outside the secret policeman’s door with her hand up ready to knock. But she is not going to let it happen. Cigar or no cigar, this is not who she is.

This afternoon she was more herself when she was, for the first time, face-to-face talking to her two prize-winning homosexual wedding photographers in their perfectly matched white sequin suits. She’d kept her poise as she’d told them that she’d tried, but it was impossible. She just couldn’t use them. That the church frowned on it. That she’d gone as high up its ladder as the archbishop himself and had threatened to drop Jesus on his cross from the top floor of her law office—but it didn’t work. The archbishop had just stared at her as if she’d had mustard on her lip and wasn’t sure if he should be the one to tell her about it. Bastard! So smug in his conical hat. When she was in school they’d put those kind of hats on the dumb kids and made them sit in the corner with their nose against the wall. The photographers had been silent after she said this about the archbishop. Then they'd spoken together and in such perfect and singular simultaneity that it made her drop her purse. They wanted to know what the basic problem was with them being in her ceremony. That’s when images of what they probably did in private invaded her mind and she’d had to erase them by visualizing her three most favorite laundry commercials—which, thankfully, had worked. She’d heard the TV music, seen the beautiful, sparkling images, smelled the newly improved lemon freshness and been saved.

Now, she looks at her hand up there, cocked and ready to knock on this door—and she can feel it already moving toward the wood. It’s as if she’s not really there and is watching it from somewhere else, somewhere where she has a diet soda on ice and a bowl of microwave parmesan popcorn in her lap. She wants the laundry detergent commercial to come on in her head and rescue her like it did this afternoon, but it isn’t. She can see her hand keep moving down toward that darkly stained door. She wonders if maybe she shouldn’t have said what she said to the archbishop about letting go of Jesus, letting Him plummet downward. She thinks it’s probably what’s responsible for this. Usually she’s able to make herself smell lemon freshness in emergencies, and usually can then keep her body in control.