Odd. In one corner of the living room, though it was mid-June, stood a Christmas tree, a couple of little girls in pajamas tossing dice on a board. When Katt asked their host about it, he grinned. “Special goings-on around that tree last New Year’s Eve. Me and PestleMaid keep it up to remind us of certain, um, lace and latex ornaments some of our guests adorned its branches with.” Ah, she said. She knelt, attempted to say hi to the girls but they glared at her and continued their game. Bing-bong went the chimes. A tap on her shoulder. “It’s Rhino,” Love Bunny said, and this beached-whale walrussy sort of mustachioed guy ambled up into view, glad-handing Twisted Man and waving at other folks like faded royalty recalling past parades. He found a drink— or rather, PestleMaid, knowing his tastes, had it handy for him in advance. Tugging at his knee creases, he settled into one end of the long couch, adjusting, nodding at Katt and Love Bunny, righting his butterscotch eyeglass frames with the fingers not clutching his drink.
“Stay with me,” Katt murmured to her companion.
“Don’t worry,” came the reply. “He observes, he 27
does himself favors, but he only rises—gets up, I mean—for an occasional potty break. It’s a sight to see.” Love Bunny smiled and Katt noticed that, pretty as she was, her teeth stalactited out of high pink gums.
A couple arrived, cute off-kilter folks, with a sweet shy girlfriend in tow. Nope. Correction, they’d happened to arrive simultaneously—but Bashful broke off from them, and sat in an armchair near Katt’s folding chair. In soft thoughtful tones, from behind a Veronica Lake waterfall of auburn hair, she ventured upon a verbal volley full of the oddest and most brilliant wordplay Katt had ever heard. A young man, owner of Phantom Zone, a Denver BBS, rolled out a passable Steve Martin imitation on Bashful’s other side. He was clearly drawn to the shy young girl, puzzled, awed, and bowled over by her. But Katt watched him run his eyes over Love Bunny too, when she swayed by to check on Katt’s state of mind before returning to the hard knot of raucous partiers crowded around the kitchen table, running through rounds of beer and jokes. A belcher showed, a six-pack on his shoulder, some jock boozer seeming out of place though he appeared less so as time went on.
Strange. Two days more, Monday midafternoon, Marcus and Conner would pull in off the road, movers following by a day’s lag or so. It seemed, here in this night-darkened house, an eternity away. Protesting ritually, the pajama-girls reboxed their Risk! game and dawdled off toward some hidden recess of the upstairs. Katt wondered if they were locked in, or if they’d contrived to place hidden mikes or cameras where Mom and Dad would never find them. Already, the walrus man’s hand was busy at his lap. He brought his iced tumbler there, an odd gesture, she thought, until she realized he was anchoring the zipper so his free hand made a smooth ripping glide downward without snag. Single-hand to unbelt, unsnap at the top. There bloomed a sudden limp V of trouser, a weary gull’s wingspan, an unconfined bloat of white belly outward. And what had been private was now public, the pull of his hand as casual as an idle scratch. He drank as his fingers moved, then righted the glass, ice cubes knocking about like clattered miniblinds. His eyes roved over women in the kitchen, less so here in the front room.
She’d been listening to Bashful spin incomprehensible biochemical puns around her bewildered prey, content to be an outsider to what went on. Then the stroked cock across the way appeared, so matter-of-fact it did nothing to heat her up, and yet it was the first distant trumpeting of the theme of exposed flesh, a theme now threatening variations at the other end of the couch. A plump henna-rinsed woman verging on fat had started playful banter with Twisted Man about the U-swooped top she wore over a busteous bosom—as to whether she dared reveal any more. Katt looked at Love Bunny on her left, who smiled and shrugged and clinked her glass of ice held in a down-clawed grip, hunched over like a pretty young vulture, legs crossed. Twisted Man’s hands sculpted the air, a hefty squeeze of cantaloupes his point of comparison.
“Softer and warmer. And bigger, dammit,” she said, a grab of hands bunched at her sweeping neckline. The young man she’d arrived with, midcouch, had an arm stretched on the cushion behind her. “The proof is in the viewing,” her host teased. At once, she tugged the tight cling out and down over her breasts, so that their huge unsagging bulk, pinked and ruddied with awesome sprawls of areole and nipple, for the moment captivated every eye. “Ah,” said Twisted Man, “you are right, dear one, and I am wrong. Forgive me. Might a taste, for atonement’s sake, be granted?”
“Yes,” she said. “This one. For a moment.”
And then Katt’s host, who lived in a normal house and had normal kids and most likely worked in a normal office, laughed and asked Love Bunny to save his seat and rose and went to his knees before the couch and started licking the big-bosomed lady’s right nipple. Her boyfriend said, “May I lick the other one?” She said okay and he did, as Rhino watched and worked on himself, and Katt marveled in silent shock at the sight. One minute tops, the two men rose and returned to their places, the licked breasts half-vanished again behind the cloth, and conversations picked up at the point they’d been suspended.
Katt leaned toward her husband’s lover, who beamed at her with an impish glow in her eyes. “Is that it?” Death hung inside her now, same way she’d felt being picked up a few blocks from home: a stunning indifference to what she witnessed, a sense that she was outside it all.
Love Bunny murmured low, “Things usually begin with a tease.” She touched Katt’s neck, first touch, a tingle to her spine. “Watch me liven things up.”
“No, don’t,” said Katt, but Love Bunny got up and set her Anchor Steam beer on the hearth and sirened toward the pair on the sofa. Katt didn’t quite know when the feeling began, whether the tingle at her neck set it off, or if it started when Love Bunny bent to kiss the smiling boyfriend slow and sensual on the lips; but surely by then, her rage had clearly defined itself. Her husband’s mouth must have sampled, in precisely this way, her provocative kiss. His hands must have risen, just so, to stroke her breasts, the dress she wore then the same as she wore now. Seductress. She laughed as she broke the kiss, straightened, pulling a man’s hands to her chest, this man’s hands Marcus’s hands, rousing them with slow rotation, with lynx-eyed lust. Her husband had bit upon the very lure Katt now witnessed, had been reeled in cross-country, family and all, to savor the slink and sleeve of this odd brazen bimbo, this university professor, who now fondled the busty lady on the couch and lipped her, then coyly tossed her shiny red hair and began to unbutton her top. The duo on the couch gazed greedily. “Lovely, lovely,” announced the walrus man but Love Bunny, swaying as the couple stroked her silky thighs, flung him the offshoots of a keep-your-distance smile and continued unbuttoning.
Katt swore she’d kill this woman as well—kill Marcus and then kill his lover. But even as the impulse took its way through her, Katt knew the difference between one urge and the other. This one arose from head and heart, quick, angry, primal, territorial; the other lay deep in the gut, a needful thing, a quiet imperative.
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 co
me 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 el
eventh 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.
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