Chapter 14
Liebestod and Verklarung
Distant university chimes staidly announced the ho with Here Comes The Sun. The blue, dry sky continued chill the summerhouse and rustic garden behind Profess Porter's home.
Mona Forbes had joined Nora on the bench, her nak knees pressing on her rumpled jeans. The British academ' contemplated her squeezeable, teaseable sitzfleisch. He wo~ dered if she'd consider doing a TA in Meryl Beveridge' Humanities 237 course next semester. Certainly "Ruski and the Victorian Nude Revolution" needed more spi than slides of Alma-Tadema's tepidarium matrons.
"I trust our li'l arrangement hasn't inconvenienced yo schedule," Lucretia Sue murmured beside him.
"I'll muddle through. My generation trained to the ri ors of the Englishman's Burden."
"I thought that came from doing it ala St. George." "He is our patron saint."
Badinage gave way to correctional banter from the su merhouse window.
"Lines like a musical stave," Susie Salton marveled. " can fill those in to profit, if you hold your pear-sha cheeks quiet."
Thwack!
"Stop trying to out-point Cynthia Gregory. You haven had the training." Thwiiip!
"Mer-mer-mer-!"
"Merde? Nice talk for a St. Cloud girl." The next fleshy whop elicited a hysterical sound.
Judy Latimer clawed the impervious taproom table. Her behind seethed with pulsing brands of pain-pain-pain. She couldn't feel her stiff feet, trying to maintain tiptoe at a desperate cost.
Her dignity had gone with that peeing eruption during the prior round. Her command of her body receded minute by minute.
THLAAACK!
The loudest sound she'd ever feared beat at her ears. Hotwired agony laced up her nerves. A gibing, mocking voice belittled her incomprehensibly.
Her soul crawled into a tiny place and shut its eyes. Her face lay on the hard boards, hot and panting.
Let it be over, let it be over . . . she prayed from a dark, formless void within.
A white-hot stroke made her body jump and gibber.
Judy emerged into the light, shepherdessed by Susie, who prodded from behind with the cane.
The pledge held her balled red slacks against her cheek like a rag doll. She drifted down the flat stone steps and limply knelt on the icy bronze bench. She continued to clutch her pants to her cheek.
"I think naughty Nora had some extra promised for being flip," Susie remarked pertly. "And my own true sob sister Mo' ..." She chuckled brightly.
Lucretia Sue stepped forward to take the proffered cane. "Gerry and I have been having a li'l conference while you decorated Judy's tail lights. The pledges have all withdrawn, so they're only we three and our guest. You understand?"
Susie's eyes blinked at the three bare-bottomed college girls kneeling on the lawn seat. She stared at the tall grad student.
"It seems appropriate to settle an item of house business," Gerry Vestry explained. "While engaged on quasi- official duties, one of our number has behaved in disorderly, uncooth, hasty, inebriated fashion."
"Not skunk-drunk, you understand, not puking tipsy, but irresponsible and un-Sigmalike," Lucretia Sue specified. "Masturbating during disciplinary exercises sets a bad precedent."
"Now we could employ a formal hearing . . . but this being an unofficial assembly anyway ..." The vice-president shrugged. "I know you'll understand."
A complete and total education registered in Susie's crestfallen expression. "I request summary punishment, Miss Vestry."
"Professor, could you get a mug of tea into Judy and Mona before they catch a dose of the punies?" The redhaired grad nodded toward their blued and beaten behinds.
"Assuredly." He gallantly extended a hand to each. "The 'punies' sounds a dreadful hazard to run."
"Epstein-Barre Syndrome for you city folks."
Judy thawed from her trance and rested her head on his familiar shoulder as the trio processed to the iron-grilled kitchen door.
"Miss Quincannon, could you step over and plant your legs akimbo on this patch of bare dirt here?"
Nora gingerly left the lawn seat. Goosebumps pebbled her loins and limbs. Her Celtic skin seemed bloodless save for stark blue veins and her swollen stripes. She stood like a Rhodes Colossus.
"Supine, Miss Salton," Gerry Vestry directed. "Nose right under . . . um . . ."
Susie plopped her body onto chill earth, eyes straight up at the Quincannon quim. "Let me guess-leg lifts?"
At a nod she canted her hips and swung her limbs. The sturdy autumn skirt retreated to a tangle, showing her pantihose to the world. Her legs tottered and fell. Digging her palms under her haunches, she hoisted valiantly. Her untamed hair spread in the dust.
Nora caught the ankles in a vise grip. Gerry Vestry moved in and skinned the dull cream-colored hose to Susie's knees.
She stepped back and refused the offer of the wicked yellow cane. "You first. I want to use your marks." The pretzel-bent girl blanched.
"Eyes wide. No blinking during a stroke." Lucretia Sue swished the evil wand playfully over the inverted rump. She raised the stick to heaven and swung in with fully wristy follow-through.
The steel-springy wood lapped lustily across the sulcal border between rump meat and thigh. The tip quivered into the rounded right cheek base.
Susie grimly fought winking as her raised nether portions swayed. The cane pressed firmly.
". . . eight . . . nine . . . ten." Lucretia Sue tolled the seconds. The flogging stick lashed up and down in an instant. Susie yipped, whites showing clear around. Her ankles fought Nora's hold.
"... nine . . . ten." The cane flashed and sank exultantly into nerve-screaming girl flesh. The three welts formed a continuous band.
"Pity," Gerry Vestry observed. "She blinked."
A fourth wrist-snapping slice left a seared ridge wide as two fat fingers. Lucretia Sue drawled, "Perhaps she has something in her eye. Look, actual tearing."
"Perhaps some theraputic irrigation would float the foreign object out." Gerry Vestry's glasses sparkled as she stared at Nora. "You're a woman of wide experience and talents. Can you pee standing?"
The pledge braced her left forearm behind Susie's heels. She projected her right index and middle fingers in a V and reached down to her vulval folds.
"I can squirt any mark you set."
Lucretia Sue grinned. "Eyes and mouth wide, Miss Salton. Let fly, please, Miss Quincannon."
A bright, warm fountain jetted downward in the frosty autumn air. The foaming stream hit the sorrowfully gaping girl's forehead, then played deliberately over her eyes, puckered nostrils, and mouth.
"No wonder the Irish drink beer by the pint." Gerry Vestry retreated before the widening puddle. "They need steins to match their bladders."
Lucretia Sue paced back as the crackling flood laved the dismal face with unabating vigor. The vulgar sea broadened; the flow began to pulse in uneven spurts. It slowly slackened and dribbled to an end.
"Did we do this right?" The blonde vice-president studied the golden pond. "I have to stand in that muck to hit her, don't I?"
"Liberation or no liberation," Lucretia Sue averred, "I am not playing Sir Walter Raleigh." She folded her arms across her red and blue wool jacket.
Susie bubbled and snorted, her mouth welling. She expectorated a torrent, coughing miserably.
Gerry Vestry began to unstrap her footgear. "I'd hate to mar my designer originals. Cobbled in South Korea from Uruguayan cowhide according to a design stolen from Enrico of Veneto."
She tugged off her calf-high woolen socks. Her toes squished into the mire as Nora resumed a two-handed grip. The sorority officer took the professor's cane.
"Diagonally, two down each hind."
The yellow doom whistled shrilly and thumped the bent cheek. The tip fell fatly across Lucretia Sue's burgundy mark.
Susie's sodden head rocked, her hair churning in the acrid slush.
"Professor P. calls those doubling tip marks Christmas kisses," Lucretia Sue informed.
The blonde whipped down again. Susie pedaled in frantic fury. Vile foam rose from her lips. Nora bore down hard, imprisoning the wild legs.
Gerry Vestry flogged the other cheek, scoring thickly on the pulsing sulcal weal. Susie grunted rapidly, like a demon in heat for its absent lover.
The final stroke creased the buttock. The tip drummed home excruciatingly. Susie's legs burst apart. Nora clutched at them futilely.
"Bad luck, she's split her pantihose." Lucretia Sue viewed the frenzy dispassionately.
Susie curled on her side in the foul mud. As she puffed and blew, Gerry Vestry approached. She lifted a mucky foot.
"Do you remember how much I like having my toes sucked?"
"I'm ge-get-t-ting off on th-this!" Jan wailed with delight. Her hips wove and plunged. The curving prong's skillfully designed base rubbed her toward the creaming point.
Honey Fitz Sullivan rode on the ever-higher wave of a skimming orgasm, rippling bursts of mini-climax shaking her as Ron jackrabbited her cunt in helpless time to his sister's thrusts.
The star lay back, hands spread over her head, fingers clutching at elven webs of dreamland delight. Her tongue lolled. She barely seemed conscious.
Dorothy Tilden had reversed her position. Ron's tired tongue twanged her ripe clit and inflamed pussy lips. She contemplated the sodomized sibling coolly.
The two suggested such marvelous plans . . . Fitz had been bored down in Hollywood. She'd weathered breaking the Big Forty tape last year, her stardom intact. Each new year would be more and more threatening.
Dorothy Tilden had some script ideas, some projects she might cash in on while her friend had the ambition and box office clout and bankroll to consolidate a mid-life career around imaginative new vehicles.
Ron and Jan-dear, coconut-jugged Janet-would keep Fitz entertained, keep her coming back until some of those ideas coalesced into hard contracts.
The drama teacher squealed with a sisterly delight as she saw the orgasm nova blossom in Jan's wondering brown eyes.
"Cuh-cuh-COMING!" The broad-hammed girl slapped her thighs against her brother's heaving hips. She threw her weight fully onto him.
He collapsed toward Miss Sullivan's throbbing teats. His elbows took the shock, barely bracing his torso off her gold-plated sternum. The star twisted like a blind slug in unfulfilled passion.
Ron lay on her, immobilized by his sister's squirming mass.
"Don't . . . no . . . gotta . . . gimmee . . ."
"Haul ass off her, you two," Dorothy Tilden directed. "She needs an old family remedy."
Jan unplugged her dildo from Ron's rump and retreated, the plastic prong at attention before her. He took longer to extract his still-sturdy prick from the spasming honey pot. His own girth lost nothing by comparison with his sister's artificial ram.
Their hostess cautiously draped herself over the moaning, starfished screen legend. Her long tongue stretched down to console the open, foam-slick love grove. Her own lubricated Venus lips teased at the million-dollar mouth.
Jan squatted on her heels, frozen with fascination as the women shuddered and sucked through a prolonged 69.
Behind her, Ron felt the raw throbbing in his fucked rear. He formally apologized to God for every infidelity he'd ever intended, much less accomplished, toward Mona. He pleaded abjectedly for the privilege of kissing her lap in contrition while he begged her to go steady with him forever and ever. Amen.
For real. This was it. No foolin', Lord.
He glanced around the Sapphic pleasure pit, wondering when the two women would get their rocks off so that he and Jan could go.
Or would Dorothy Tilden demand they stay for coffee and cake? He quailed to think of the table talk. Jan worried him, the way she wore the strapped-on dildo with a military pride as she concentrated on the heavy-duty face fucking.
He absently fondled his condomed cock. The nuts below ached from a weary need to ejaculate.
Abruptly, he began to watch the entwined women with new interest. His hand jogged along his well-juiced jock as they tongued their way to earthly Paradise.
"Thank you for the offer of a restorative, professor." Lucretia Sue wandered about his arcane study, crammed with peculiar books and odd statuettes. She touched a wooden cup decorated with a carven face and a broad human foot base. A set of copulative metal gold weight figures looked familiar.
"I'm glad the others chose not to stay." He gestured at a compact bar of ebony wood strips set with copper panels. "Cognac, Stolichnaya 100, Paddy's, Glendullan?"
"I need a good bracer." She inhaled deeply. "A straightener, to be precise."
"Ah." Amazed delight transformed his ruggedly tanned face. The grey at his temples had expanded, marginally, since she'd studied at his knee and over it.
"I behaved too severely. I lost what perspective my addled brain should have." She shook her head. "Messin' in pledge training's silly at my age. That's for gals who still remember what it's like. I went overboard."
"You mean, Miss Salton?"
"Salty?" She blinked. "Merciful heavens, no. Mona and Judy-I skinned their tails fit to peel armor plate off the Devil. Nora's different, being all grown-up and supposedly responsible. Those other two didn't deserve the lambasting I gave them."
"It would have to be over skin, to be just," he remarked lightly.
"Bare hide and severe." She doubled her arms. A breath swelled her wine-dark blouse. "Thirty with those thongs."
She purposefully drifted toward the hallway leading to a room she had reason to hold in memory.
"I'm obliged to issue a warning." He followed close behind. "I shan't be responsible for any reactions to your punishment."
Her gaze caught an African bronze, a sassy-hipped woman in a skirt, her stately titties on parade as she strutted a deep basket on her elaborately coiffed head. The lips curved wide with confidence, the broad metal nostrils flared boldly.
"Neither shall I." She led the way to his west wing discipline chamber.
The grad student stood before the parallel bars. They stretched along a wall coated with mirror mylar. Behind her, Porter unbuttoned her deep, blood-colored blouse. He slipped a sleeve off her arm.
'"George Randolph in The Memoirs of Dolly Morton speaks to the pleasure of undressing a pretty woman." His lips brushed her bare shoulder. His breath warmed her nape as he continued, "Other authorities find a piquance in compelling a beauty to strip herself."
He cast aside the satin. The buckle on her belt proclaimed in brass THEY'LL TAKE MY GUN FROM ME WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD FINGERS. He'd already loosened it. Now he opened the buckle and lowered her burgundy cords.
"The joys of taking down a lovely woman's panties must be weighed against the cognative frisson inherant in watching her peel her own pants completely off."
... a beauty ... a lovely woman . . . she saw her reflected long-line figure and lean-boned face. Her disorderly carroty hair could never have decorated those rounded, petite marshmallow-and-cream belles who'd ruled as Nature's princesses in Georgia.
"The memory of you has intoxicated my dreams." His spidery fingers skimmed the waistband of her insubstantial panties past her pubic zone, onto her thighs. She remembered a eunuch, by the Persian Gulf . . .
"I don't recollect such cavalier's courtliness when you carved Old Norse runes into my resisting hide." His mothwing touches set flame to the coatbed left smoldering by the canings.
"Then the whipping served as main course, punishment for an errant lady scholar. The . . . aftermath came as dessert." The lips tasted her buttocks' peaks fleetingly. "Now the flogging acts as aperitif."
"You must give a guest lecture to Women Against Rape-Daughters On Guard. They'll find your arguments fascinating."
He eased her sturdy shoes off, her corduroy trousers away. She stood in sensible cotton stockings and luxurious, cobwebby briefs. He relaxed on his heels. She saw the mustache twitch up in a Sybarite's grin. A face of sculpted mahogany . . . shaped by a master.
"You may conclude the disrobing."
She watched her own foolish efforts as she struggled to lip off socks with dignity and panties at her knees. She stepped from her nylon nothings and tossed them onto her tangled clothing.
"Make this more than foreplay." She set her hands on her hips. Six feet of whalebone and rawhide . . . cussed-ness and steely muscles and self-satisfaction. "I need a reminder, to take me down a peg."
"First the savage," he promised, "then the sweet."
"De Gustavus non disputandum." She mounted the springy-railed parallel bars, spreading her legs so that her knees hung along the outside of each bar. She rested uncomfortably, the wood pressing under her thighs.
Porter bent her right calf until the ankle ran along the blond wooden bar. He wound a latex strap three times around both and clipped it, lashing her calf against the outside of the rail.
He repeated the trussing on the left. She twitched herself forward, her rear rising as she brought her shoulders down. Her forearms lay on the bars. Her knees gaped, gripping the wood. The calves quivered, tied but not bearing weight.
A damned awkward position only a maniac could have designed. She felt precarious and vulnerable and immobilized. If she let loose, she'd split in two.
Her lowered head dipped. She stared back at her parted loins. "I look like one of Judy Chicago's hairpie plates."
He'd gone behind her, where the buttocks parted fully. Tantalyzjngly, he puffed cool air over her anus. She goosepimpled in a sudden rush of humiliation.
"Twenty on the hinds, ten on the hams." He undipped the three-thonged whip at his own military belt. She knew each leather strip to be oblong in cross section, a quarter inch thick, three-eights broad. Twenty-nine inches, viperishly notched down the final hand's span, and fire-hardened along that last length like a tawse's striking tails.
She felt the strain in her forearms and thighs. A hot, familiar dread began to suck the breath out of her. She tried for calm. "Shall I-count?"
"Only if I lose myself in contemplation of your mobile grace." His left hand proprietarily enjoyed the inner curves of her open bottom. "I prefer your mind to dwell on pain rather than Pythagorean feats."
He stepped away. She cursed her subsconscious as she realized that she'd mounted to give best advantage to his backhand cuts. She knew his squash court arm and terrible prowess . . .
Three spreading thongs darkened her mind as he pivoted in a backhanded stroke. Each lash seared her crupper in exquisite fire. The hardened last inches galled her shocked flank.
Her recoiling body rode the bouncing rails. Hold on- don't fall-take it like a . . . like a . . .
The leather whipped her spasming flesh, goading her to weaken, to fail, to fall. Her spread inner cheeks glowed with accusing weals, hot as burning fuse trails, bracketing her screw-tight anus and gaping, greedy cunt.
She caught a glimpse of her body, crouched and pantherlike. The parallel bars vibrated. That piss-and-vinegar English school she'd attended had flogged her stubborn behind for unladylike decorum. Other girls had been stretched over the gym's vaulting horse after physical training. Steaming and naked from the showers, they'd been cane-striped again and again for insufficient savagery at field hockey or other group games.
The whip's punishing tongues licked deep along her hide . . . a third time ... a fourth ... a fifth . . . the bars bounded beneath her, shaking her like an earthquake's immortal, demanding fist.
Her fingers hooked around the rails, white as ivory. Her knees gripped . . . don't fall . . . don't fail . . . take the pain like a man . . . you've earned it . . .
Adderlike, the insidious triad bit her inner thighs. Weals blossomed along the back of her right leg. Her knee wobbled, almost failed. She rode out the mounting agony.
Miss Maelstrom had caned her for wearing britches like a man, for sassing back like a man, for playing poker like a man, for drinking bourbon like a man . . . Spite-minded praelictors and senior form girls had not scrupled to torment her for refusing to crawl into their beds like some love-starved kitchen slut lapping after scraps of queenly favor.
Porter . . . Professor Porter . . . the Englishman Porter broiled her convulsing thigh with four more iron-stiff strokes. Then he lashed her fire-lined buttocks.
Take it like a man. Not like a simpering, lace-handkerchief-waving, bonneted Southern princess too pure and goddesslike to leave stench in an outhouse. Take it like a mud-crawling Okefenokee Merydith, half-gator, half-cottonmouth, all-varmint. She clutched her blazing thigh and aching knee to the bar, stiffened her spine under her armor-rigid muscles. Let those marshmallow women sticky their drawers in fear over a li'l whippin' . . . she braced her body and soul like a man, proud and sneerin'.
Nine flogging strokes . . . twenty-seven fresh, sizzling welts . . . passed in a pulsing red haze. She knew the shame of defeat when she tasted the tears fouling her hot face. She blinked them down, tried to clear her vision. A blurry sight in the mirror mylar showed a hell-tailed catamount writhing her hips in slow circles as her bunched muscles rippled.
Satan-red hair hung in wet tangles over a sweat-beaded forehead. Salt-rimmed eyes faced salt-rimmed eyes. She realized her lips parted foolishly as she puffed from pain. She drew them taut over her lips.
Her naked snatch pulsed, jelly-centered, yearning for the lightning strike of his lust-gorged cock. A eunuch by the Persian Gulf had taught her the terrifying resources of her own body, the forces surging like subterranean magma- beyond human control or comprehension.
Her traitorous being clamored for Porter-prod, for the driving penetration of the prick named Porter, for the chance to melt the presumptuous professorial prong, to lick the praelictorous prick into submission.
Five lacerating strokes of the three-thonged whip scarlet-ridged her left thigh. Her knee slipped and she slumped, off-center, heathenishly spread for pistoning like a mare in a box. Voltage leapt along ancient channels of energy.
Wild mammals mate in the position of pursuit. Fear- flight-capture-copulation. Intellectually she'd known the linkages. Not until the Persian Gulf and tortured rapture at a eunuch's hands had she applied the knowledge to the primal centers within her brain, within her body.
Her thighs strained to be parted, to split her up the center as she fell. She clung with her hands. Her legs kept their unbalanced grip. The iron-ended thongs, the hissing firebrand thongs striped her lopsided bottom. Creaming cunt and spasmy anus churned as the soul-purging flame raced on interlaced weals across her buttocks, through her being.
Mona twisted in her mind's raging winds. Mona, her sumptuous adolescent hips tossing against the summer-house table's edge. The excessively purplish markings etched across her tender cheeks had moved Lucretia Sue to clemency. The final stingers had been high on the ham, to avoid crossing Susie's wild traces. The grad had laid in with a will.
The triple lashes sang o'er their supper. The rebel flesh sizzled in lust and mortification. She felt a total union, every member and nerve joined in a white, roaring sheet of sense perception.
The tension in her body and spirit dissolved. Fingers unleashed her ankles. Hands caught her torso. Arms eased her as her grip melted, the blood flowing into cramped talons like prickly white sparks dancing at the edge of a forest conflagration.
Lips and tongue traced their own fires on her beating, salty face. The man kissed the tears from her eyes. His mustache nuzzled her cheek, tickled her nose . . . teased feather-like between her breasts . . . rested warmly across her loins, its waxed strands tangling with her untamed Okefenokee thatch . . .
She'd taken IT like a man . . . she took him now as a woman. She cried out slightly when her freshly wealed thighs hugged his naked, hairy hips. Her nipples roared and radiated pleasure, like additional clits, as his tongue and teeth worried them.
She enveloped his blindly questing member. Her fists hammered his chest, she laughed like a valkyrie riding down upon a battlefield. They bumped and thumped boisterously.
Forces imploded within her. She came crushingly, gruntingly, seeking to throttle the serpent reared within her. Vaginal muscles wrestled the intruder.
She squealed and climaxed . . . without dismounting the erotic night's mare she rode . . . her energies at once cycled back, to build toward another rapsodic eruption.
The mystified, delighted man's face swayed inches from hers. She kissed him, trying to devour his flesh at two ends.
An eternity of orgasms later, she realized that he foun-tained inside her, his seminal sluice gate gushing freely.
She boldly forced his wide hands over her flinching corrugated buttocks. She rubbed his fingers along her flame-rilled thighs. Her teeth ducked and nibbled his shoulder, his cheek, his own dark nipples.
The erotic St. Elmo's Fire within her whipped about him, setting him aglow with shared energies. Her hips unflagging, she fucked onward, driving their copulation beyond satiation.
The unity of sensation within her enfolded him, consumed him, absorbing his muscles and nerves. She shared one flesh in a white, jagged haze of ball lightning being.
Each spurting summation he reached only spun their joint rapture to a higher level of attainment.
Judy Latimer touched her eyes with a tissue. A lanolin-based lotion laced with aloe vera extract and vitamins A and D covered her burgundy-streaked posterior with a greenish glaze.
Knees on a seat cushion, she rested her middle on the back of a once-elegant sofa in Caledonia Roundsong's parlor. Next to her, Mona's bare bottom mooned the peeling, Tudor-beamed walls.
Neither girl wore anything below the waist. They held hands and Caledonia clasped their linked fingers between her sturdy palms.
"Let the healing calm move through you . . . from those cold, tense toes ... let the blood flow freely, easily up your legs . . . relax the muscles as the warmth rises higher ..."
Judy's gooped gluteal cleft squeezed.
"Now those poor muscles have far too much heat. Let that bunched energy distribute itself. Nothing in excess. Let the ache and sting disperse with the blood and the lymph fluid as they go back to their normal business. Those capillary cells need to concentrate on repair, not on panicing the rest of the body."
Caledonia's consciousness moved actively through the two pledges' nervous systems. She'd already had their brains release endorphin pain blockers. Now she encouraged each autonomic nervous network to rebalance its damage controls.
A touch of her mind eased the constricted tummy muscles and helped the girls breathe smoothly, freely.
Judy blotted at her nose with the Kleenex. "I guess I picked the wrong plaster statue to kick ass on."
"That's on the Bad Word list," Mona torpidly reminded, "with and without 'hole'."
The other girl flinched. "I guess I'll have to report that. And get paddled. Dividend week, too."
"Two swats from our guardian angels in private for each one awarded in public." Mona's mouth looked as if she'd just licked pond scum. "I won't be able to zip on a pair of jeans till after Christmas, I bet. But Nora's still right-the denim rule is dumb."
Caledonia gave a shrug and an earth-motherly smile. "She's correct, but unless the revolution's worth the cost in wear and tear, stick with the system."
Judy looked at her, puzzled. "What about the Eisenhower conformity and all that?"
"That mindset collapsed from its own internal contradictions-to crib a line." The minister gently extracted her psyche from their healing bodies. "The late, dear Grady McMurtry used to expound on the diversion theory of government."
"The academic senate forbids denim pants and tops to distract us from the tuition costs and from some reading lists that haven't been updated since Jimmy Carter?" Judy's whey-colored brows lifted.
"I'm glad you've been following that controversy. Yes, Morse Peckham goes on to point out that the movers and shakers sincerely wish to create a world where brushfire terrorism doesn't need to occur, and where mid-level executives don't blow their high-five figure incomes and minds on cocaine smuggled by dictators we arm."
While Caledonia talked, she watched the long, blistery welts fade to a paler color as the girls' bodies worked. "But those movers and shakers can't.
"So, to discharge the trust they've been given to make the world a tidier place, they turn to regulating sexual behavior irrelevant to major economic purposes.
"Instead of chasing crack-running high school kids, cops bust massage parlors for massaging body parts that feel just great when they're massaged. Pressure lobbies who can't stop the spread of AIDS or AFDC get nasty pictures of shameless ladies yanked from 7-ll Stores and Waldenbooks."
Caledonia raised an open palm. "That gives a feeling of accomplishment you just can't get by trying to tackle carcinogenic waste clean-ups without raising taxes." Her other hand squeezed snugly.
Mona's mauve eyes sparked. "So Sigma can't recruit enough pledges to pay its bills-but it can break me of saying 'shit.' "
"I guess my buns won't be alone come Bad Word board time." Judy peeked over her shoulder at her friend's sore, salved bottom. The cheeks quivered in sudden self-consciousness.
"Susie never got around to that extra, either," Mona gulped. Her bare pink toes curled tightly.
"Wear loose skirts and very stretchable panties for the next couple of weeks," Caledonia suggested.
Nora Quincannon rose on the escalator from the underground transit station and walked past the California Street cable car terminus. Her cane-bitten sit-upons flared at each step. She held an even pace as she strolled by the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Night had arrived. San Francisco's festival of light reflected back from the low overcast sky.
Nora entered the Embarcadero Three complex. Four city blocks of retail shops supported four tall, narrow office highrises.
She passed the Cinnabon sticky bun store and took another escalator up to the open air. The lighted office buildings stretched toward the pearly night clouds like a radiant science-fiction city from the 1930's frontiers of imagination.
"... this is a legendary land, a fabled city like Oz or Camelot ..." Broken blue veins enlarged the nose on a square-faced man in a blazer. White hair poked from under his bowler hat. He leaned forward onto a small metal table, while a woman with heavy Manchu features poured more Rainier ale into his glass. Her Russian sable coat drooped over the back of her white aluminum chair.
Nora nodded. Her bottom tormented her every inch of the way up the stairs to the rampway crossing over the street to Embarcadero Two. Pain had a cleansing quality. Over and done. Paid up, paid out, paid off. Go on fresh.
She considered wandering into the Holding Company. She could drink with the singles crowd while standing. It had been an interesting place to be . . . before Scott . . . before Ken.
Instead, she drifted to the escalator by the McDonald's. Women laden with booty from the boutiques and men nursing attache cases scarfed salted-and-sugared fast food. Perhaps a cup of coffee . . . but not there.
She rode down to street level. A B. Dalton's stayed open, merchandising print to a video society.
Deciding, she stepped out to the curb to catch the 41 Union trackless trolley. The Coffee Cantata could offer something hot and friendly with enough alcohol to blunt the sting.
Christmas buying had already started. Places would be open. The Enchanted Crystal with its blown glass art and rock crystal fantasies . . . Silk Route's Aladdin's treasure cave of Afghani rugs and Turkoman jewelry . . . The gallery windows with Erte's gold-stamped graphics and Icart's boneless, murky women . . . Nora loved Union Street's shopping district.
She thought of phoning Hester. No . . . Hes lived across the Bay. Besides, enough sisterhood for an evening. She could use the solitary meditation her buttocks' pain brought her. Forget stupid denim dress codes; bury soured memories in the compost heap and grow some fresh, healthy experiences from their sadness.
Her hinds throbbed as she stepped on board an electric bus and flashed her transit pass. A harried mother flopped into the last remaining seat and roundly scolded her squinting, teary daughter for dawdling while they shopped. Packages festooned the woman's lap.
"Now you'll just have to stand all the way home! I told you the bus'd be full!"
The girl looked nine and shamed to her bones.
Nora held onto a chromed steel pole and set her feet for the long, hilly ride. A razor-cut Brooks Brothers type gave her the eye. He started to rise, pointing at his molded plastic seat.
She shook her head firmly. No chance, guy.
Not until the last twinge of regret and the last yellowed bruise fades from my too-tender tail. Then . . .
Then: watch out, you rootless nomad hunks! Nora's back on the prowl, and she's getting her life in battle station-ready order.
"Gustavus, I'm glad you're available." Caledonia walked widdershins, twisting the phone cord as she talked. "I've sent Mona and Judy back to Sigma for evening prayers after practicing unlicensed medicine ... I noted traces of your presence before me, easing the physical shock.
"I called because Delinda Humphrey mentioned something in passing today, after our interview, that makes me believe my son has done something incredibly selfish . . . Yes, I'd feel blessed to have your help in teaching the overgrown snot the lesson I obviously failed to convey.
"My fondest to Miss Merydith, you fortunate hound . . . Oh, just tell her I can hear her heavy, passion-struck breath as she licks your neck ... I thought she would."
A peal of swamp-bred laughter from the receiver blended with her belly chuckles.
End of Autumn Scandals The Sigma Cycle, Volume II Watch for Spring Fevers