Walking Wounded

by Robert Devereaux

  “You hear me, Katt?” her mother droned.

  “Uh-huh,” Katt said.

  “Because the D-thing’ll haul up and bite you, yes it will, if you let your vigilance drop for an instant.”

  Katt’s head told her her mother’s ravings were absurd and even comical. But her heart spoke differently. She’d been cribbed in that parlor, heard the dark mahogany clink of teacup on saucer in her bones, imbibed their mutterings with her formula. Though she could remember no specifics, the D-thing had been ever on their lips back then.

  “Granny Hunt pointed with pride to her family line, a hardy stock who believed in working on their problems, not running from them. Work produces grit; running away makes for mush-brained ninnies. And you’re no ninny, Katt, but a true Hunt woman. I know you are.”

  “You’re right, Mom.”

  They’d drawn her into their mumblings, addressing her first in the crib, like one might talk to a pet. And when she started babbling, they brought her in in earnest, that topic rooting her solidly in their love. When she went to school, she soon learned to put away her D-thing talk; but at home, for years, it won her way into her mother’s heart like nothing else could. As for her father-as for Bill-he came home from work, and sat in his study, and suffered her sitting on his lap, until she caught on that he didn’t want her there. Dad seldom spoke. He looked at Katt even less often. He seemed in remembrance blasted, like a tree trunk scored by lightning.

  She couldn’t divorce Marcus. It would kill her mom’s love for her. It would drive her over the edge. She’d be the first Hunt woman to do it. Whenever she got near that notion in her head, it threatened to shred her soul.

  “Mom, I have to go.”

  “-and they, I don’t know if you remember them, they lived five houses down… oh, I’m sorry, was this a bad time to call, Katt?”

  Katt said it wasn’t, although it was.

  Then she lied about the massage-something her mother would never understand-making it a late-night dinner date with a girlfriend at work.

  “No problem, Katt. I’ll call again soon. You go and have a good time.” Her calls were sporadic, unpredictable as the wind. They invariably threw Katt off balance.

  “Okay, Mom. We’ll talk later.”

  Her mother said goodbye and Katt hung up.

  Relief, the dropping of lead weights from her spirit. No more psychic drain from that quarter for at least a few days.

  The clock on her nightstand said 7:45. Christ! Time to run. Fortunately, Lyra and Joseph were lax about clock time. But Katt liked to honor her commitments-one minute to gather her things and she was pummeling down the stairs and heading for the garage.

  ***

  Their cabin was warm and cozy, and they were working her over, Lyra and Joseph, as she lay on her back, gazing through a clear curved skylight at the glowing round moon above. She’d been up here a few times before, but always in daylight, when pure blue broken by slow scuds of cloud or chance glides of Canadian geese blessed her eyes. But Lyra, odd duck, had gently averred that the energy vortex was at its strongest under a full moon and Katt had given in finally to her repeated invitation.

  Energy vortex. Sure, why not? Massage was for Katt an avocation, a supplement to the software work that paid the bills. But Lyra, co-founder of Healing Pathways, had sunk her soul into ortho-bionomy, a massage technique that focused on trauma. Over the years, Lyra’d gathered about her practitioners in aromatherapy, in psychic counseling, in bodywork of all sorts. Small wonder, then, that a few odd ideas developed, that they were reinforced and formed a web of mutually supportive harmlessness in that lighdy incestuous family near Old Town Square. If it worked for Lyra, fine. As she lay supine on the sheepskin rug under a cone of moonlight, Katt mused that anything but prudent silence about the existence of energy vortexes would have been in bad taste.

  Especially so given the downright magical power this same energy vortex had clearly given her, over the course of her visits to this cabin. Did she believe the New Age trappings, the crystals and candles and all the rest, had any effect? No.

  But something clearly had.

  And now Lyra and her laconic spouse were helping her body find itself, feel its way into places it most wanted to be, detect resistance and explore its borders. Marcus would not leave her mind, not even in the peace of Lyra’s cabin.

  “Relax,” said Lyra. “Don’t try to resist.” Joseph, between her legs, had them elevated, bent at the knee and cradled in his muscular arms. Lyra’s hands supported her neck and head, gentling them this way and that.

  Here they used no table, preferring proximity to the earth. Massage tables were fine in their place, Lyra had said, but the Earth Mother worked better without them. A decided intentness gripped them as they bent over her and sculpted her flesh with their hands.

  “Let it all go,” Lyra soothed in Katt’s ear.

  “Mmm,” she replied, sighing it. Massage, especially here, always triggered strong thoughts and tonight’s were the strongest yet; but she’d mastered the art of relaxing her body, even as visions raced brilliant and razor-sharp through her mind.

  Still, tonight it was difficult.

  Katt felt Marcus’s hold on her tighten.

  “Let the tension go.” Lyra’s words fluted, streamed crystal over rock. The cabin rose again to view, a piney smell, the rich glow of the fireplace blocked by a couch, her friends’ hands warm and suggestive upon her, floating her, gently rocking her into goodness.

  “Sorry,” Katt said.

  “You’re perfect,” countered Lyra, “just as you are.”

  Candlelight played over Joseph at her legs, his huge' muscled arms emerging from an all-cotton shirt that vee’d at the neck. Above, Lyra’s dark pageboy swayed about her babyface in the same rhythm as her stroking hands. Their shirts matched; same catalog, the one selling Deva pants, drawstring, loose-fitting, environmentally proper.

  Such sure hands, both of them. Katt had never asked them but Lyra and Joseph seemed to have been together for lifetimes. They’d found this land, built their cabin at (they claimed) the center of the vortex, planted an earth flag ineptly into the soft soil just outside the doorway, its thin pole oddly angled and waggly-but they’d made up their minds that karma so dictated, that spearing it into the ground uncemented seemed somehow more “natural.” The ground, at a radius of a hundred yards, was dotted with a series of dug and refilled holes, some strange way they’d devised to commune with the Earth Mother.

  Still, for all their quirkiness, Katt loved them.

  And it could not be denied that, in her three visits to this cabin, something new had been introduced into her own massage techniques. Not just the novelty, to her, of orthobionomy, a gentler osteopathy that put one’s body in touch with its own right ways of being; but some peculiar other thing, the deep healing, the surety-or was it mere hallucination-that she could see and sense and influence the health of what lay beneath her touch, even unto nerve and muscle and bone. Odd fancy. And yet when she’d gone along, not resisting, her strokes deepening downward, her clients had risen and dressed with the most amazing looks on their faces and the most grateful compliments on their lips as their sessions ended. Here, in Lyra’s cabin, the bizarre notion that she could heal-and more so with each visit and exercise of these new ways-seemed a certainty. Power of suggestion perhaps. Power of place. A harmless delusion, a sure sign (Katt chuckled to herself) that she was going off the deep end.

  Crystals hung everywhere here. Katt knew Joseph kept worry dolls under his pillow; Lyra was big on soulcatchers and the writings of James Redfield and Mario Morgan. Her friends dabbled in all the blithering mindfads of the New Age. Katt wondered if their influence, subtle as it was, had damaged her in some way. She rejected all that stuff as intellectual pablum; and when she was removed from the massage table, when her hands weren’t locating discomfort deep in the body and easing it, she wondered if she might be losing her mind.

  Losing her mind? Tell that to Lana Phelps, a driven
woman who’d mentioned ulcers before Katt began to massage her a week before. Above her navel, Katt had paused, had directed energy to the inflamed lesion that came so clear to her inner vision, had seen it diminish and the stomach lining soften and heal. That night, Katt felt she’d been party to a miracle. Afterward she doubted. But now, as the earth cradled her and the moonlight drifted down upon her, she knew clearly that it had indeed happened.

  Grace Kantor came to mind. The mole. Marcus.

  Katt’s mood darkened.

  Beneath the sheepskin rug Katt lay upon, the palm of a goddess flexed. A subtle thing, a chthonic shift.

  When the urge arose, the urge that startled her with its audacity, it did so slowly. Mingled in the sweetness of almond oil, a base blent with oil of musk, sandalwood, and dark amber, there came first to Katt the image of her Grandma Jasper. Not the horrific mental image her mother had once conjured and which with the twitch of one eyelid she could recall: the way the police found them, toddler and mother, embraced and crying amid the stench of gore and cordite. No, this was a photo, black-cornered into a fat photo album in the attic, of Grandma at age four on a trike in the living room. Blocked pedals, streamers, two childish hands, and a squinched, bit-lipped look Katt had seen often in the mirror. When her mother found her with the album, Katt suffered a spanking right there, the most violent ever inflicted upon her. Why, she wondered-as a quartet of trained warm hands moved upon her-were images of her insane grandma springing so vividly to mind?

  “Some resistance here,” Lyra said quietly, and there was Katt’s friend, a dark fiery glow upon her soft shirt, bent intently to massage her. Katt’s head floated in her maternal grasp. “I wonder what it means.”

  “Don’t know,” said Katt. Still, even with the cabin about her and the stars above, the images of her mother’s real mother (the trike, hugging her blood-caked daughter) and her adopted mother (hunched over her teacup, nodding, more rings on her fingers than was natural) persisted and grew. A low voice, under the unhurried crackle of flame, seemed to whisper something-a female voice, lips moving, a black-on-black silhouette of neck and chin. Katt tried to hear it. Tried to see what couldn’t be seen. Skilled at her legs, Joseph moved them am-niotically, his muscular chest brushed with puffs of golden hair where his shirt’s vee plumped them out.

  Then the atmosphere in the cabin shifted.

  Katt tried to forestall it. I’ll tell him, came the thought, I’ll end it. She could do that. The new powers the cabin had bestowed, the powers she’d drawn to herself from Lyra’s energy vortex-surely they would give her the strength to call it quits. Marcus, we’ve lived apart for four months; let’s remain so, all right? But even as she thought those words, they choked in her. She knew they’d never be said. Hunts never do the D-thing. The terrible phrase spoke with all the force of divine law.

  Suddenly she saw herself in the Iowa Medical library, looking over a book of clinical essays about Huntington’s disease. She’d been curious about what Marcus and Conner might be faced with. The words were impenetrable but the images burned into memory, they were so horrendous. Dead rotted brain matter, browned, shriveled; curved vacancies where healthy tissue had once plumped out. Why, she wondered, had those images chosen this moment to return so vividly?

  Muffled through wood, an owl hooted in the distance, a swift surge and halt that thrilled her bone-ward. There was a message in that sound, a message that resonated and spread like the bloom of a bell. She couldn’t hear it or she refused. But uprising from the earth, the palm-press she’d felt earlier closed on that sound in a precise mesh. Righteous intent rose in her. Kill Marcus, came its soft cry, sharp as polished bronze, voiced without sound. The dark silhouette, elusive, lay beneath shadow, long enough to mouth it again and drift off into blackness. But howl Her reply, shocking in its swiftness and coldbloodedness, shared the voice’s casual inevitability, which astonished her. Just as swiftly, an answer came: You know how. No words. A soundless sound that sculpted her conviction in utter darkness, holding it up for approval and purchase.

  And she saw it all: meeting him coming in from a two-day trek from Iowa, reuniting and pretending more joy than she felt (but no, there would be joy mingled there), being the loving wife and mother even as he went off to prick up his Love Bunny. And then laying on her hands. Her spouse adored the way she massaged him, particularly as she moved into sensual touch. In ten days, on June fourteenth, they would arrive. Katt’s hands itched as she enjoyed the soft mauling of her friends. That day, she would bathe her man and fluff him dry and lie him down and thoroughly massage, to begin with, his face, his brow, his scalp.

  Beneath it, the brain.

  But no, she tried to throw the temptation off. There in her mind’s eye, Marcus lay naked upon the bed, an ebony nest of curls rising and falling on his chest, still manly and muscular despite his forty-nine years. Below, a plane of flesh led to a riot of dark bestial hair (Mediterranean somehow), where his limp penis lay like a dead eel-carcass waiting to stir. How could she harm him, even being aware of his lies? He had secrets. He’d cored out the heart of their marriage with his lust bunny, yes. But the paradox, and it startled her, was that they were still deep friends despite it all. And they’d continue so even if his trysts came to light.

  His death is for you! came the voiceless voice.

  A positive good, thought Katt, riding the suggestion as her friends’ hands worked upon her. A way out. A way which not taken would surely mean the death of her spirit. That was what killing her husband (the idea both horrified and excited her) signified.

  It could be done. The fancy was strong, and that was often a good indicator that the reality might be achieved.

  Ten days and they’d arrive. Ten days to toy with the dark notion, to turn it over again and again in her head.

  “You’re unusually tense tonight,” Lyra said, her soft voice as unobtrusive as ever. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” said Katt. “Everything is fine.”

  And to her amazement, it was.

  1

  HAMPERINGS AND PERTURBATIONS

  The drive to Denver would take an hour. The sun was touching the mountain peaks to the west. By the time the skyline grew jagged with the city’s downtown, night would be upon them.

  Katt studied the profile of the woman driving. Love Bunny. She thought of her that way, even though she knew her name was Sherry Feit-BBS information could be easily cross-checked, real names to aliases, if you wanted badly enough to ferret but someone’s identity.

  The passage I-25 followed, straight south, was known as Colorado’s Front Range. As Love Bunny drove, the talk kept to safe topics-the explosive growth in Fort Collins and outlying areas, the Front Range’s changeable weather, how the Old Town Square refurbishment was finally firming up as a new city center. Her husband’s lover, Katt knew, was being careful to shield her identity until she gained a clearer notion of who Newcummer (Katt’s computer alias) was. Trust was a precious commodity, not to be doled out too eagerly. Love Bunny was being sensibly cautious.

  But she didn’t hold back when it came to filling in, in delicious detail, her precious BBS descriptions of the Denver parties, the couplings she’d seen and participated in these past many months. The host, not without reason, had adopted the alias Twisted Man and his guests likewise went by their BBS names during the festivities.

  “Things start normal,” she said, her deep red hair a straight tug of bloodlit filaments in the gathering dusk. “But once his rug rats go beddy-bye, the stuff everyone’s been waiting for finds its way out.” Love Bunny had huge Sarandon breasts, a tight waist, a tasty flair of thighs, and sleek legs. No wonder Marcus lusted after her. Katt had planned to drive down to Denver on her own. But last night, in chat mode on their favorite BBS, Love Bunny had wheedled her into being picked up, at any place of Katt’s choosing, so they could get acquainted on the drive down, after months of BBS conversation, and invade the party in force rather than as singletons.

  “Tell
me about that Rhino guy again,” said Katt.

  Love Bunny sniffed in laughter, a quick impish glance as her eyes came back to the dusk-dimming road. “You have this thing for Rhino, don’t you?”

  Katt supposed she had returned again and again to him in their exchanges. “It’s kinda sad and repulsive and-”

  “-and your mind has the hots for him, admit it, girl, someone who sits there on the couch and unzips himself and pulls it out to play with, as easy as if he were twiddling his thumbs. It’s gotta fascinate.”

  “Doesn’t he, you know, dribble on the fabric?” Love Bunny sniff-laughed again. “Newcummer, I swear, you are truly a perv of the first water. Told you so lots of times.”

  Katt smiled. “Admiring me all the while.”

  “Of course admiring you-takes one to know one.” The Longmont exit rushed past on the right. “You’ll just have to ask Twisted Man’s wife. I forget her alias, PestleMaid or something goofy like that. Make a fascinating study on Sixty Minutes, house-cleaning after BBS parties, how to get the nastiest stains out of couch and carpet.”