Chapter 1

Michelle’s father is a teacher.

While Sam Houston is buried in the city of Huntsville, Texas, and his name graces the State University there as well as the National Forest between Huntsville and Lake Livingston, to the best of my knowledge and research no town or public high school in the State of Texas is named for Rene-Robert Cavalier the Sieur de LaSalle who traveled the length of the Trinity River in his exploration of North America. That is truly a shame, so I rectified it.

SATURDAY NIGHT

Dinner had been fine, I guess. I told dad it was great, and that was not a lie, I have had his pot roast with its accompanying carrots, new potatoes and onions many times. It’s always good. My mind just wasn’t on dinner. It was on Steve and how his absences from the commitments that he makes to me has become a troubling pattern.

If it’s important to Steve, he seems to find a way to be there. When it’s important to me, for instance him being here for the christening of dad’s new boat dock on the lake, well, sadly, not a surprise, no Steve. So after Peter, my little brother, and I had finished desert, and helping dad with the dishes the three of us went out to the brand-new floating dock dad had built on the lake.

Dad poured us each a plastic cup of bubbly, and we stood on the brand-new wood deck looking out at the cove on beautiful Lake Livingston, and the lush piney woods surrounding it. We were admiring nature, and dad’s handiwork. It was magnificent, I just wished mom was with us today.

“Is Pete old enough to have Champaign?” I teased.

“Old enough to vote, old enough to drink,” he answered.

“Sounds like a good example of cause and effect,” our dad, a high school science teacher, opined.

“May I?” I asked.

“Please do Michelle,” said dad.

“To the dock, and our father David, its builder.”

“Here, here.”

“Thanks for coming guys.”

We lit a little fire using some wood scraps in the half oil can embedded in a pit of dirt, cinders and rocks, and made smores like we did when we were kids, before the sun’s departure and nightfall caused us to retreat to the house. There we watched some old family photos that dad recently had put onto VHS so we could view them on the big Magnavox TV set with the ‘clicker’ remote.

It was fun watching a more innocent time when we were all together. But seeing mom in so many of those pictures heightened my feelings of confusion. Thinking about mom not being here, and the relationship my parents have with us, and each other really made we think about Steve and our potential future together.

More accurately our seeming lack of a potential future together. Mom and dad were married for twelve years and had two children together. They shared a profession and so many interests. They never fought, they never disagreed. Even today it’s like they are best friends, but no longer married to each other, or to anyone else for that matter.

My many questions were eating me up, but the boys were having fun reliving the past, I didn’t want to ruin their evening with my doubt and my self-pity. After a polite interval I said that I was tired, and said my goodnights kissing dad goodnight and mussing Peter’s hair affectionately before I walked up the stairs to my old room. My home before I half-way moved into Steve’s apartment three blocks from Sam Houston State University where we both went to school.

An amicable divorce, what a bizarre concept. I mean I guess it is better than a bitter divorce, but really if both of you are sober, responsible adults sharing interests and children why not remain married. It’s 1980 for God’s sake, not the dark ages.

Steve and I have less in common than mom and dad did, still do. We, Steve and Michelle, are doomed. Both Steve and Raylene, our mother, had been invited and neither saw fit to attend. They were in Huntsville twenty-five minutes west of here, a short drive through the rolling hills and piney woods of the Sam Houston National Forest, in their separate apartments near campus.

I couldn’t sleep so I took a walk. I was going to ask Pete to come with me, but he was having fun watching himself and me and dad and mom in bygone years, so I did not disturb him. I walked through the woods with my trusty old corrugated aluminum Ray-O-Vac flashlight, and then along the moon-lit shore of the lake. As I approached the boat-house I saw lights burning inside, but what concerned me were the strange sounds coming from within.

In retrospect what I did was not smart, sneaking stealthily into that building alone. What if I had surprised a burglar or a Yeti. But what I discovered inside the boat-house was even stranger than I could ever have imagined, and the event that I witnessed there that night changed the entire trajectory of my life.

I did not see my father, but I saw her. She was a very pale complexioned lady like a porcelain doll with short red hair and lots of freckles, and she was naked and dancing. Well, almost naked, she was wearing a pair of fire engine red pumps.

The sound that I had heard was her garbled muffled screaming. It was impossible for me to discern the fact that it was a woman screaming because she had a large gag in her mouth. A big hollow cylinder, probably a piece of plastic pipe, secured very tightly. Painfully tight I thought, by a black leather strap running through it and holding it to her head.

She had an oversized rectangular black leather mask on covering her eyes and blindfolding her, and a very tall thick black leather collar with rings and studs on her on her neck that matched the two cuffs buckled to her wrists.

She was dancing a dance of pain, screaming intermittently as jolts of electricity ran through her body. Probably from one of the two large metal clips attached to her outer cunt lips through her genitals and out the other clip. They had large wires attached to them that ran to a box that someone just outside of my field of vision was holding.

Or the electricity was possibly making a complete circuit connecting both of those biting clamps on her cunt lips and the two huge adjustable clamps attached to her nipples which were attached to a rope and perhaps a wire connected to an overhead hook.

The rope doing double duty, its lack of length severely limiting her ability to move. She would start dancing around, and then tense up and bend her knees and elbows and scream into the gag, and semi-relax, and then begin the process all over again. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing.