Untitled.FR11 (4 page)

And then something happened that washed her anger away or at least diluted it with sorrow. Love Bunny, undressed to the navel, displayed her naked torso for the inspection and admiration of all. But what held Katt’s eyes were the stunning shouldters and the white back and—branded in bold crude letters, slantwise left to right across her backribs—the single word MINE, her scars dead-pink and flat, like strips of thin clay, upraised, a hot roar of cruelty still vivid in them despite the passage of what she guessed must had been years.

When the fat woman’s fumbling hand reached ’round and scrabbled along the M, Katt quick-inhaled, close-jawed, in sympathy. No wince over there. Just hands moving, mouths meeting, a slow loosening writhe of fabric.

Momentary community had begun. Sherry had felt these four hands upon her before, belonging once before to these two bodies, other times other bodies. Didn’t much matter, long as a thread of connection existed first and the cocks looked healthy and wore condoms come penetration time. In this case, Feelers had good hands and Boobs tongued like a pro; both gave a convincing semblance of caring, hot words and nasty and nice, no strings, no hassles, just good sex, the kind where she could go off afterward and be alone yet not feel lonely.

Newcummer was an odd duck. In her e-mail and in chat mode on The Symposium, she unleashed a powerful libido, an out-front sensuality that seemed to be amplified on CFRnet and on Kinknet, a nationwide hookup for sexual persuasions of all sorts. But in person she was reserved and calm and quiet—solidly herself to be sure, but there was a sadness there and an aura of persistent beauty, despite what would have to be called her so-so looks. Sherry wondered if she might be moved to join in, but a glance thereward caught a rapt look on a face content merely to observe.

She knelt, naked now but for black lace bikini briefs patterned below, where stubby fingers roved. Scar-stretch on her back tightened as she bent in service, but that was so familiar a part of herself that she scarcely took note. Derek, her insane spouse, the first and last one she vowed ever to take—thankfully removed now to Austin with a girl mired in submission—had shared with her an itch for ropes and bedposts, spankings and light floggings, the drawn-out teasing that led at last into the intensest of orgasms for them both. He’d suspected infidelity. He’d been correct, though he had the gender wrong. No matter. Sherry had no chance to explain or extenuate. Derek had jumped her, put a gag in her mouth and beaten her savagely, hand and fist, belt and buckle, all over her body. Then he’d brought out his crude brand, passed it over a bucket of fire, back and forth before her eyes in a ripple of blinding heat, and at last straddled her and set it on her lashed flesh and bore down as Sherry cried, going out of her mind with the agony and begging deaf gods to bring her death in any form. She heard the hiss, saw downcurlings of steamflow, smelt burnt pork. But finally his poundage was somehow lifted,

and he sliced the ropes that bound her ankles and wrists, spat in her eyes, and slammed away. Never saw him again. For six months in her head, she did all sorts of violent acts upon Derek as payback. But when she healed, the thought of one unnecessary moment in his presence—whether in a courtroom or captive and at her mercy in solitude—determined her to put him out of her mind and get on with living. MINE said the brand, and mine I am, she thought, no one else’s. She found pride in that scar, milked it, mined it.

Boobs and Feelers raised her to her languid feet, the half-clothing they wore discarded now where her dark dress lay like pooled ink on the coffee table. A stray touch of hands, continuous, suggestive; she eased them off her, the gentle face of Newcummer moving into focus for a moment as Sherry turned. “Sure you don’t want to join us?”

“I’m fine.” She was and wasn’t. “Really.”

Sherry nodded, turning back into the hands which made to drift her down onto the thick carpet, blue pillow under her head, an eager grin moving on her warm thighs, lip and tongue pretending prolongation of suspense, but leading to a quick and clear destination. Tickle more than turn-on at first, then an obsessive practiced turn-on indeed.

She wondered if ridiculous old Marcus Galloway’s wife was anything like Newcummer. Had to be frum-pier from what Marcus said. Never catch her at a party like this, likely a knockoff of Sherry’s mom, plain bitch, chisel nose, chin dimpled like peachpit. In a moment of pure rage, Sherry’d defiantly proclaimed her bisexuality, which had gotten her disowned, written out of the will, and barred from setting foot ever again in her parents’ home, the place she’d been so fiercely raised. Boobs brushed a rubbery nipple across Sherry’s lips, watching her husband’s mouth encunted. The shape of a young woman appeared, kneeling close, dark eyes wanting a part of this: the cute couple, young, taut, her man’s face wrinkled in a knowing grin. Sherry reached out to him, took his hand—cold, sweaty, gripping. Beyond the sweet young thing’s right shoulder, there was Newcummer in steadfast gaze and something more. And she realized, most bizarre indeed, that she felt somehow closer to this quiet woman than to any of the accommodating people now engaged, or preparing to be, in acts of intimacies with her.

Conner sat slumped in the passenger seat, sucking the dead straw of a strawberry milk shake. Dad, as he had for mile upon mile, stared at the road, the landscape, humming tuneless tunes. But Conner could tell, from the upratchet of tone if nothing else, that Dad was growing excited. To end the endless travel, to reach Mom, to see once more the neat house they’d bought, Easter week, on Wallenberg Drive overlooking a duck pond, and to realize that it was home—these thoughts brightened both their spirits.

He glanced at the odometer. Wyoming was behind them; before that, numbing stretches of Iowa and Nebraska. They were thundering down 1-25, closing the final gap. “Twenty miles left. Two zero point, um, eight, to be exact.”

Dad lifted a palm, glanced through the wheel. “Won’t be long now. Look, Scenic Vista ahead. Want to stop?” A broad smile, road glance, smile, back to the road.

“In a pig’s eye, Dad.” They shared a laugh. “In one of them Iowa pigs’ puffy eyes.” An emphatic straw suck.

“Don’t knock Iowa, Conner—you were born there, which makes it, in my judgment, the best state there is. You’ll miss your friends—”

“A couple.” More than a couple.

“—but there’ll be new ones.”

Yeah. Mom and Dad always said that. As if he didn’t know, as if he’d never make another friend in his life. A scary thought—and one he’d had, truth to tell, many times since their visit Easter week to several junior highs, the kids he saw then bouncing his own wary looks back into his eyes.

Clear day. The Rockies comfortably off to the right. Flat plain on his left. He loved the confused skyscape, a fitful jumble of clear and cloudy, rainy and sunny; that’d given him a kick the week they flew out. Still, something not right had hovered between his parents. Dad seemed not to have missed Mom much, or he hadn’t shown it anyway, and Mom’s calls had been sporadic at best. Imaginings. There was nothing wrong, not anywhere but in his mind—where his Huntington’s disease bided its time.

Conner looked over at his dad, humming there; snapped a brain-photo of him and pretended to look out at blurs of grass as he processed it: a strange-looking man, but your dad maybe always seemed that way, an archaic everthereness to him. Glasses, smooth face, a V of partially ruddy skin at the neck where his shirt flared. Upbeatness, a hint of the nerd, but he was cool if quirky, hung out with younger faculty and grad students despite his forty-nine years and mostly didn’t seem out of place. Conner took another suck of chalk-warm pseudo-milk, a bare half-drip on his tongue, and wondered if he’d ever feel half so confident. Boyhood hadn’t been too awful, but this teenage crap was the pits. He was glad to have seventh grade over, smelly baboon kids on top of the heap razzing him about pimples and coming to school dressed up the first day and hanging out with loser kids and—when Mom got her job in Colorado—being too good for them, too good to stick it out the entire three years. Yeah. Like his new school in Fort Collins was going to be any better.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

He felt the frown, relaxed it. “I was thinking about the new house, how I was maybe gonna tack posters up in my room, velociraptors and you know.” Easy lie.

“A fearsome flick,” Dad said. “I’m glad we got to go see it before we left. Sam Neill has lizardy eyes, that’s why I bet Spielberg hired him.”

“I guess.” Conner saw the actor’s craggy eyebrows, a turn of the head like the pair of raptors in the stainless steel kitchen. Not a bit like Dad’s soft looks. He moved like liquid and his mind was precise and engaging. Conner tried often to imagine jerky movements, or strange strings of words indicating mind rot. That’s how it had been with Woody Guthrie, the folksinger, when Huntington’s had

taken him over. But the imaginings just wouldn’t come, not with the way Dad was, the way he’d always been.

And yet, despite his dad’s cheery nature, Conner knew that deeper stuff lay beneath. Two years ago, a day after his eleventh birthday, he’d told Conner about the disease, about Grampa’s slow sad decline and the possibility of its eventually attacking them too. More out of shock than any sort of bravery, Conner had responded calmly, soberly, far beyond his years. But inside, he’d obsessed about HD. He got hold of a Guthrie biography, skimmed medical texts way too far over his head, and began to pester his father with quesdon after question. One moment, calm. The next, Dad blistered with rage and yelled at him—more than a typical parental yell, something much deeper, scarring him like no momentary anger—telling Conner to shut up, he didn’t know and he didn’t care, that Grampa had died quicker than most but not quick enough for him, his house a mindless hell at age ten and the news of Grampa’s death, as he came in from a walk around an abandoned playground, a relief.

Conner shuddered, remembering Dad’s upset.

That’d been one of the creepy things about the sex ed class they’d had, all the focus on AIDS and how once you’d contracted it and it started to grab you, there was no way to stop it, you just got worse and scarecrowlike and began to look and act like someone else. Just like Huntington’s disease. All the kids wore weird worried looks as Mr. Pym carried on, but Conner felt twice as spooked. The teacher seemed to be describing, at least in the outward symptoms, the Woody Guthrie he’d read about and probably the way his Grampa Galloway had acted long before he was born. It had been spooky sitting in the back row, trying to control his shivering, afraid that by clamping down on it, he might be somehow activating the disease.

Now maybe that was stupid. But he wasn’t really sure of that. Nobody had a clue. They didn’t know how to tell if it lay sleeping inside you. They couldn’t predict when if ever it would decide to wake up, though grown-ups mostly drew the short straw. And they had no idea how to stop it or reverse its course. A mystery disease, just like AIDS. Mr. Pym just kept yammering on about all that creepy stuff and giving Conner the willies real bad.

And he mixed it all in with teaching about crap that made him sweat and blush, all that between-the-legs stuff, spoiling anything romantic between him and Melissa Darren, who sat there with her new bosom and her long curly auburn hair, seeming to blame him for the outrage of it all.

“Here’s the turnoff.” Dad hit the blinker.

Motel 6 off to the side. Thunder-highway with skewed roads at lights and a slash of railroad tracks bumbling at the tires and then it became Mulberry Street, looking more like a town—trees, houses, a left onto College Avenue and south along the campus. Lights, lights, obliging ones and just the right number of cars and bikes and people, and he felt light and happy inside. “Look! Prospect!”

“Prospects are bright, my lad,” Dad joked, arcing the wheel about, more tracks jouncing beneath, the multistory Holiday Inn going by on the left; then a

long patient wait at the light, a left onto Whitcomb and down all the way to Wallenberg, and Mom happened to be out weeding, looking up at the sound of their car and rising and waving with her hat tied beneath the chin—and Conner couldn’t wait to yank at the door and suffer her hug and feel his smile hurting the high wide comers of his mouth. '

It was good to see his wife again, good to be held by her, good to hold her. Not bad for thirty-nine, and Marcus wondered for a moment if she’d had offers, taken lovers in the time they’d been apart. He dismissed it. Faith meant something to Katt, and he let her think it meant something to him, monster that he was. Funny how you could feel not at all guilty, even good about yourself, and yet do things that from the outside seemed like betrayal.

“You smell good,” he murmured after the kiss, and she did. A soft breeze brushed by them. The street was as he remembered it from Easter time when he’d flown out to help Katt find and buy this house—quiet, traffic-free, a green haven rich with new homes. The start of a bikepath lay at the street’s west end, where a bridge crossed a brook.

“You smell good too,” she said.

“Yeah, like three hundred miles of bad road.”

Katt demurred at the joke, but a shower was his first priority after unpacking the car and after watching Conner unwrap his welcome-home present from Mom (a CD of Branford Marsalis) and give theirs to her. During the shower, warm steam behind clear glass off their bedroom, Marcus thought of Sherry and got hard. His final flings in Iowa City had been

fine, a nice grope in City Park with a brilliant grad student and a leisurely motel evening with a lovely, wide-lipped, big-nosed secretary in the Art Department. But in his head, when he replayed past loves, it was Sherry Feit, redhead in abandon, he most often turned to. She’d lit up that hotel suite, blazing it brilliant in his mind forever after; and their e-mail, as hot and steamy as this shower, had been the core of many days since. Early mornings, his wife asleep, he had composed messages to Sherry, carefully copied them to disk, hidden them on the PC with the handy-dandy attrib command, brought them in to put into his Unix account and e-mail to his lover, first thing that morning. She’d bat back electrons of her own and again usually once more before the day was done.