Walking Wounded

by Robert Devereaux

  “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 corners 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.

  They had plans to lunch together tomorrow, give him a chance to settle in today, teach his first class, hang out with the family, knock the road dust from his ears.

  He was still semitumescent as he opened the door and wrapped a towel about his waist. Katt, hangering laundry, caught a glimpse. “My, my, what have we here?”

  “All for you, dear, but not right now.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Early to bed, hon. Early to rise.”

  “Never seen a healthier man in my life.”

  He kissed her warm lips, felt her hand on him through the towel, smiled away to pick out clothing. He liked the house anew: plush off-white carpets, opulent but tasteful fixtures, pleasing wood cabinets and closets, a feeling of brightness and space everywhere. His mate was maybe a bit too spread out, a little in need of reining in. But she’d adjust soon enough. The lunch she prepared, omelettes and hash browns in the breakfast nook, brought a perfect unity to the family, the three of them laughing again as if four months of separation hadn’t happened.

  Then it was time to gather his notes, his handouts on Shakespeare, his well-worn Riverside, and walk through the warm afternoon sun to campus. Three quiet blocks north to Prospect, crossing there and sauntering one more street to Lake and he had arrived at the edge of campus, a mere five minutes away from the Eddy Building, south of the library, where his class was scheduled to meet. He put the family, his staid domestic scene, behind him. CSU was all Sherry. He felt her spirit here, the paths across grass at science buildings, the possibility that he might turn a corner and there she’d be, that cruel branding her insane husband had given her hidden under killer clothes, just as she hid her lovely dark passion from those not privy to its incredible strength and beauty.

  Katt had had some of that fire when they met. But in the intervening years she’d somehow gone bland. Initially they’d lived together, tried an open relationship-no love but between them, sex with congenial friends only. Seemed to be working, his trysts anyway. But her first time gone had driven him mad. Toss and turn, had to negotiate anew, could taste the fucker on her for weeks. Yes, she’d said, they’d try for something more traditional. And what could be more traditional than so-called cheating, he thought-a roll in the hay for the roving-eyed hubby, guys were built that way, women nested, men hunted. Worked out fine. And as long as he was careful with his condoms (which he was), he’d br
ing home nothing harmful to Katt.

  The first class meeting was surreal. Disorientation, road spinning under him, made the classroom too confining. He traced through his notes, marveling at how it all swung together from his mouth, how he smiled so glibly, and made easy eye contact, and picked out the winners and losers in the space of five minutes, his smarts-detector unerring as usual. And yet he was on autopilot, head still full of a monotonous road-pound. By the hour’s end, he’d cohesed an odd assemblage of students into generalized novices on the Elizabethan milieu and on the realities of the Globe, bent on tackling the doubled twins of A Comedy of Errors at the next meeting. His eyes were drawn to a young woman in the front row, Belinda Lymon according to the seating chart he had them fill in. Wide eyes, full breasts, a perfect turn of thigh. She was surely too young to be a probable. But he’d be sizing her up, alert for signs, hints dropped. As long as she lay grade-wise in his power, he’d try nothing; there was fair and there was foolish. Besides, the allure of sexual uncertainty, the coy flirtation with a forbidden student-teacher affair slowly gathering in each mind, were part of a very potent package by the time the semester was at its end. Explosive orgasm, whether repeated or not- to cap and fulfill the expectation that had built for weeks-invariably ensued.

  After class, he found his office, tested the key, did a quick survey of shelf space and filing cabinets. Movers ought to deliver his boxes by Thursday afternoon. A minor diminution in what he’d been used to at Iowa, but the view from his window was pleasing and it felt nice and intimate for whatever, intellectual or sexual, arose. New blotter, cool tight pseudo-leather desktop, dustless surfaces, fresh in cleanliness; there was even a vased bouquet of six pink sweetheart roses, a gesture he guessed from the department secretary, far too risky for Sherry to have dared.

  Katt smiled from the kitchen when he came in. “First impressions?” she said after their hug.

  “Are the best,” he completed. They laughed together, a good feeling, then he said, “Basically I took the stage, set The Bard on automatic, and wowed the audience. I kept all the road weariness inside, in a secret place, and they were none the wiser, fresh-faced dewy-eyed innocents all.”

  She hugged him. “Sounds like you’ve got it made.”

  “Yep, I feel on top of things, all right.” If Conner hadn’t come in at that point, back from a walk, Katt would have given him a nice close horizontal inspection of their bedsheets. But as it was, they had to wait for their son to fill his mom in on every mile’s doings between here and Iowa, a special dinner centerpieced by candles and flowers (he withheld mention of the office roses), and a blessedly brief after-dinner sit-about.

  When Conner, dead tired, dragged himself to his room, Ratt coyly cleared her throat, bent to embrace Marcus, and murmured, “Don’t you think it’s time we got reacquainted?”

  I sure do, he’d said, and they went upstairs and shut the door and eased away clothing and sampled secret flesh, as if the whole ritual were new again-which it was oh yes it was-her hands her mouth so incomparably good there, an intoxicating taste to her as she parted and lowered, knees denting mattress to either side of his head. And then she turned about, woozy after orgasm, and sank her heat around him, the incredible satin clutch claiming him, coaxing him heavenward, drawing him up little by little and out, throb of head and loins, the buck and weave. After a time, warm embrace and goodness of enclosure, she slid up and off and started to massage him, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, deep and drifty.

  “I’ll fall asleep,” he warned in a soft slur.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “You’ve had a long day.”

  She was right. She understood. He felt the soothing hands lull him, moving from neck to jaw to facial muscles, on up to brow and scalp, so good there, so easing. Sherry swam up as he drifted off, sweet harp-hipped Sherry, naked and bending for him and gazing back, begging for it, there beneath the soothe of Katt’s loving touch.

  Sometimes Katt had massage customers who fell asleep. Rare but not surprising. Grace Kantor, the woman with the mole from yesterday, had been one. There were others, the stressed-out businessmen who carried the twist of commerce in their necks, people who’d been stroked to sleep as kids and who fell naturally into their old pattern under Katt’s maternal touch.

  Now here was Marcus asleep on their bed, and here she was with her fingers resting upon his head. And the night was coming on behind windows and Katt had time and to spare to do what she would. Here lay a naked human being, entrusted to her care, the man she’d once loved and loved still. He looked so serene, so close and so distant to her, and without even trying, he was circumscribing her life, stifling her. They shared nothing, save for Conner. Marcus had his secrets, and she hers, but the freedom that she’d tasted for four months was suddenly shriveled, gone, familied and killed in the sudden mundanity of her brood’s arrival and settling ineternal visitors who’d never ever leave, a pillow pressed over her nose and mouth.

  Divorce him. What was so difficult about it? People split up all the time. Write a note, no, take him to some nearby park, cry wordlessly until he himself got the hint, brought it up, then move on from there. But all her ideas lay straitened and immured behind brick, immovable, inert, unactable on, as her mother’s soft rant rose in her mind’s ear, Hunts never do the D-thing. No they don't. Katt, and don’t you forget it.

  Outside where unseen a duck pond lay, a slash of bird sound tore down across the evening sky. As the geese came in, a far-beached splash flared up and subsided. Katt was kneeling beside Marcus’s body on the bed, low to him as he lay there. Her fingers were entangled in his hair and the tips touched scalp, thumbs upon his brow, octopod of eight digits settled in to harm him. She shrank at the thought. Tension drained from her fingers, but she kept them there. Foolish notion, she told herself; she could never hurt her husband. But she could find the spot inside him that kept his disease wound tight, cure him, put his worries forever to rest. Then she’d tell him what she’d done, do likewise for Conner; and at last draw upon her newfound strength to find the courage to… ah but she could never do the D-thing, Hunts never do the D-thing. That’s right, Katt, as right as rain and as certain as raindrops. The D-thing is something we Hunt women never do.

  Find it, at least. No harm in that. Maybe even some good. That quelled her misgivings, though she knew it was a trick. Still, she shut out the clocktick, the moonglow, the distant ache of a train passing through the night, and focused on bone beneath her fingers. Her awareness passed beneath it, his skullbone a dumb thudding numbness quickly noted as healthy and sunk through, meninges next, followed by a brunt of brain, deepened through layer on layer until she arrived (remembering now a drawing in the medical book on HD) at the caudate nucleus, and slowed to probe. There was something not right here-not a softness in the actual tissue, but that’s how it presented itself, a readiness to crumble, to dry up, to desiccate.

  She realized she was shaking, almost as if she needed to urinate, though her bladder was empty. Warring visions held sway: Marcus the man, whom she had no right to harm; and this place in a coolly detached brain, this place that held the key to her

  freedom, that wanted only the smallest twist of intent to activate. They’d shared so much, these many years. How could someone be your best friend and yet no longer be any friend at all? How could so convincing a closeness exist and yet be all lies, the distance so great and unspeakable and unspoken of? She didn’t know, but her hands tensed upon him and his sleeping fatality lay inches below them, so easy to tip into imbalance. Katt’d rightly be called a murderer, unprovable but she would always know it had been so, and there would be Conner to remind her in case she forgot. But there surged now her secret strength and she knew what so often she’d told herself, that in the planning of them, some actions that resonated deep in your soul took on an inevitability. This wrenching was her one escape route-now was the time and here was the place, and she inflected her will to urge it forward.

  A thought-ripple.

&nbs
p; Had it happened? She knew and didn’t know. Like the trick of the eye upon a trickle of tapwater, did the twist shift or not as you watched? Her fingers eased. A flurry of wings below taunted her ears. She trembled, indeed had been shuddering for some time, she now realized. When Katt looked at her hands, they would not hold still. A passage from a library book came to mind. A silly feel-good book. But one notion had made her cry: Picture your worst fear, it said, as a wailing baby. Lift it up. Hold it. Soothe it. Talk to it. Katt’s throat tensed and her eyes teared up. Then she was crying, tamping it down, but her breaths inward were audible and there was Marcus, sixteen years of mostly good times and real connection, lying there, and she had done something horrendous to him. But if she had, and he showed signs, she could go back in and reverse it or at least halt it, surely. Her sobbing would not stop, became less easy to conceal there in that confining room.

  “Katt?” A soft sleepy voice.

  It starded her. She eased back upright, drew an arm across her eyes. With her fingers she squeezed the bridge of her nose.

  “Are you all right?” He was scarcely awake.

  Calm. “Yes.” Came out a whisper. “Yes,” louder and the panic rose again. “It’s just that… we’ve been so far apart and… and I’ve missed you.”

  Marcus drew her down. She let herself stretch out at his side, feeling his embracing arms encircle her. Bursts of sob escaped, but not as violent now. “There there,” he said sleepily. He gave a yawn. “We’re here now.” Rustle of sheet as he raised it up over their shoulders. “Cry it out, rest now, we’re back together again.” He drifted off almost as he spoke, and she lay there, wide awake, for the longest time, feeling alien and elated and displaced, time ticking softly on the nightstand and pond sounds rising as geese touched down to ease her gradually into sleep.

  ***