The Boys from Santa Cruz

6

After leaving the dining hall, Skip and Pender commandeered the golf cart for a tour of the grounds and soon discovered that Pender’s cell phone was useless even at the higher elevations. They also learned that there was no practical way of securing any of the buildings, much less the surrounding wilderness area. “Instead of flanking Oliver,” said Pender on their way back, “one of us’ll have to keep watch on the other two at all times, from concealment, if possible.”

“It should be me-I’m the better shot,” Skip pointed out.

“Only if there’s a good stationary vantage point-if not, it’ll have to be me.”

“Fair enough,” said Skip, casting a longing glance at the bathhouses coming up on their left.

Pender either caught Skip’s glance out of the corner of his eye or read his mind. “You want to take a dip while there’s still time? I can keep an eye on Oliver.”

“Why don’t we take turns?”

“I’m not that big on hot tubs or saunas,” Pender confessed. “They make me feel all watery in the knees. And to tell you the truth, I’ve never been all that comfortable taking my clothes off in mixed company.”

“What’s the matter, you afraid you’ll get a hard-on? That hardly ever happens.”

“To you, maybe,” said Pender proudly.

Up the road from the Center, on the other side of the dirt lane, there were four volcanically heated springs housed in ascending order of temperature in dim, echoey, half-timbered fieldstone bathhouses the size of one-car garages. After a mandatory shower and a dip in the lower pool, Skip worked his way up to the hottest spring, where he lay alone, submerged to his chin in steaming 113°F water, listening to the plangent echoes, watching the Tinker Bells of light dancing off the azure-tiled walls, and feeling the tension and soreness of the last forty-eight hours gradually beginning to ooze out of his aching-

Skip awoke with a gasp from a half-conscious dream in which he was being attacked by a vulture, and inhaled a mouthful of sulfury-tasting water. Splashing, floundering, coughing, windmilling his arms like a drowning man, he had just succeeded in struggling to his feet when Dr. Oliver’s statuesque assistant Candace appeared out of nowhere, naked as a jaybird, and began slapping him between the shoulder blades with one hand while guiding him toward the side of the pool with the other. “Just try to breathe normally.”

“I’m okay, really I’m okay,” protested Skip, lowering himself onto the submerged ledge that ran the circumference of the pool and patting the bandage covering the talon marks on his shoulder back into place.

Candace eased down next to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of her magnificent young breasts bobbing on the dimly sparkling, silvery gray surface of the water. “I don’t want to interfere in your process,” she said in her soft, imaginary-gum-chewing California accent, “and no offense intended, but you seem to be wired rilly tight for some reason.”

“No, I’m fine. Just a little PTSD flashback, is all.” Posttraumatic stress disorder. “I can handle it.”

“Oh.” Candace nodded knowingly-the Oliver Institute had held a sliding-scale retreat for troubled veterans a year earlier. “Were you in Vietnam? Is that where you hurt your leg? If you don’t mind my asking.”

I’d-I’d rather not talk about the war, if that’s all right with you, Skip wanted to say, haltingly and humbly. Instead he told her the unglamorous truth, then quickly changed the subject. “About this thing tonight,” he said. “You know, I’m not really all that clear on exactly what’s supposed to happen.”

She smiled and touched his forearm lightly. “Lucky you,” she said. “You get to be surprised.”