10

When Earl Wisdom had been a young man back in Florida, he’d gotten into trouble, spent seven-and-a-half years paying his debt to society in Raiford Correctional, on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. When he got out of there—the stinkingest, hottest, wettest place on earth—he had headed for Santa Fe and the high and dry.

Working odd jobs, cutting wood, painting houses, he’d discovered his big hands had the gift of easing misery. He took a few classes, then hung out his bodywork shingle, and one day in walked this famous actor-director who had a place in Tesuque, just north of town. It wasn’t long after that the word had spread on the celebrity hot line about Earl’s magical hands. The next thing Earl knew he was flying here, flying there, and it wasn’t long before Earl found himself being written about in the magazines.

Right this minute, at his bodywork studio, down a little alleyway off Canyon Road, Earl had his gifted hands full of Stuart Wonder. The New Age guru was lying naked, facedown on Earl’s massage table. Earl said, “Man, you have got yourself worked into some powerful knots.”

“My life has turned to shit, Earl.”

Earl laughed his funny laugh—the man a high-C tenor in a body that looked like a basso profundo’s. Earl was six-foot-two, broad-shouldered, with muscles to burn even at sixty-one. He inched his great powerful digits down Stuart’s backbone, making each vertebra shout hallelujah. Then he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Stuart.”

“I’m way over my head.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Drowning, you want to know the truth.”

“That’s not good.”

“You want to know what my problem is, Earl?”

Earl said, “No, not really. You don’t mind, I’d just as soon you didn’t tell me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Listen, Stuart, in your line, the guru business, folks come to you, spill their guts, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“Mostly women are the ones who want to let their hair down?”

“Mostly.”

“That’s ’cause men, most of them’s not comfortable telling another man what’s on their mind. If they do tell, see, then later, they wish they hadn’t. Embarrassed, they don’t want to see that man anymore. So every time I get a client wants to tell me his most heartfelts, I know I’ve got to hush him up quick, or I just lost a client.”

But talking to women, was that different? Stuart was about to ask, when the door to the massage room pushed wide.

Earl said, “Ma’am, you can’t be coming in here.” He threw a towel over Stuart’s pink butt.

Stuart screwed his head around.

Earl gave the pretty little woman a once-over. She was wearing a black catsuit, not an ounce of flab on her tiny frame.

“Now I’ve got you,” she said to Stuart.

“Deborah, what the hell are you doing here?” Stuart asked.

Earl, backing out, said, “Stuart, you know the little lady? Fine. Y’all holler when you’re done. I’ll be right down the hall.”

Stuart reared up. “Oh, no, you don’t. I’ve paid for a massage. Wife or no wife, I need a massage.”

This darling little woman is Stuart’s wife? Hmmmmmm. Earl watched while Deborah circled around the table a couple of times. Was she looking for an opening? A place to stick her knife in? Earl offered to find her a chair; she said, No, thank you, and leaned over, right in Stuart’s face.

“I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t such a poot. Locked in your bedroom last night, pretending you were asleep when you knew we needed to talk.”

Now, that was interesting, thought Earl. A man like Stuart, spiritual advisor to kings and princes, a multimillionaire, you’d think he could work out the simple stuff. Like, for example, separate bedrooms are not good.

“I told you I’d get back to you when I could,” said Stuart. “I have a lot on my mind.”

Earl watched Deborah’s mouth. When a woman’s lips get tight like that, a smart man steps back.

“Stuart, you said the same thing yesterday and the day before and the day before that. You’ve been saying the same thing for eighteen years.”

“So,” said Stuart, “why should this day be different from any other?”

“I’ll tell you why. Because I had a vision. A vision which told me things were going to change, and soon.”

“You did?” Stuart flipped over on his back. Not a good move, thought Earl, who, for not the first time in his life, thanked the Baby Jesus that he had not been born a white fool. Stuart said, “Let us not forget, Deborah, I’m the one in the vision business. I’m the Wonder Man.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean diddle, Stuart, because you have no faith. All of our blessings, you think they came to us because you’re so slick. But that’s not it, Stuart. There really are miracles.”

“What have you been smoking, Deborah?”

Deborah shook her head. “If people only knew. All those people who think you have a pipeline to the truth, you, Mr. Shuck and Jive.”

“What do you want, Deb? You’re a nonpracticing Jew from the Big Easy. You wouldn’t know faith if it bit you in the ass.”

“I’ve found my faith, Stu.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Deborah nodded. “In Cristo Rey Church. I go there and sit for an hour every afternoon, right after my tap-dancing lesson. Doors have opened to me.”

Earl could really feel himself warming up to this Deborah. He’d always had a soft spot for small wiry women who were a little bit off their nut.

Stuart rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh. You go to this church and then what?”

“I think. I meditate. It’s a good place to sit and be quiet. And I love the smell of incense.” Deborah’s little pear-shaped nostrils widened.

Earl had to put a hand on the wall to steady himself.

“A couple of weeks ago, sitting in church, I had a vision that’s changed my life. Saint Hyacintha came to me. That’s the former Clarice Mariscotti, born 1640, to a noble Italian family. When her parents arranged a marriage for her youngest sister, passing right over Clarice, she had a fit. She nagged her family day and night, until finally they sent her off to a convent, where she was renamed Sister Hyacintha. Okay, she said, she’d be a nun, wear the habit, and live in the drafty old convent, but don’t think she was doing without. No sirree. She had the best of everything brought in.”

“Saint Hyacintha of Bloomingdale’s catalog shopping,” said Stuart. “Sounds like your kind of girl.”

Deborah ignored that. “Eventually, Hyacintha became a super nun. She raised all kinds of money for the poor.”

“Harrumph,” Stuart said, and rolled back onto his tummy.

“It was like she was standing right there.” Deborah pointed toward Earl.

Earl wanted to take that little finger and put it in his mouth.

“I heard her voice clear as anything. She said if I’m ever going to find my path, and help people like she did, I have to divorce you. I talked it over with my daddy, and he said, ‘Good!’ So I’ve filed, Stuart. I signed the papers this morning. Tomorrow, at the latest, I’m moving out.”

“What?” said Stuart.

To where? thought Earl.

“Saint Hyacintha said that I will never find the purpose of my time here on earth if we stay together because you’re too greedy and you don’t work well with people. So I’m leaving you, Stuart.”

Stuart reached for his cell phone and began punching in numbers. “Dr. Morgenstern will get you into Betty Ford; you can chill for a few weeks.”

“I don’t think so, Stuart. You just give me my half of everything. Now, I know that might be a problem because you’ve been very very naughty lately…”

Stuart dropped the phone. “What?”

“Don’t be coy, Stuart. You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Then Deborah turned and sweetly said good-bye to Earl.

Earl wanted to pick her up, carry her out, do something romantic with her. A picnic maybe. Earl could see it in his mind. But he hadn’t gotten past spreading out a tablecloth on the ground, and the little lady was going, going, gone.

*

Now, being as he himself was famous, Earl had quite a few connections, some of which, he was thinking now, he might need to make use of.

The reason for this? Earl had just been hit upside the head by love. Lust. Infatuation. Whatever. Call it what you will, Earl was feeling it for Deborah Wonder, and God Almighty! it felt good.

The flip side, however, was already dawning on him. Caring about Deborah meant worrying about her too. And Earl was plenty worried.

What if Stuart did try to send her to Betty Ford? Or someplace else where they would lock her up and throw away the key? It could happen. Earl had spent enough time around the rich and weird, not to mention his mobster friends in New Orleans, to know that if you had enough juice, you could make people disappear.

Or—and this was more likely, Earl realized—what if Stuart simply screwed Deborah out of every dime? That’s what rich men did; they hid things the instant the word D-I-V-O-R-C-E was in the wind. Earl didn’t want to think of Deborah penniless. Even if she never gave him, Earl, the time of day, he wanted her to have the very best. Saint Deborah of Bloomingdale’s, it had a nice ring.

Then Earl remembered what Deborah had said to Stuart: You’ve been very very naughty lately. The little man had gone pale when she said that. That wasn’t good. The man was up to something; that much was sure. Hadn’t he tried to pour it all out to Earl?

My life has turned to shit, Earl.

I’m way over my head.

Drowning, you want to know the truth.

You didn’t let him spill the beans, but it was better this way, Earl told himself. The man wasn’t going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, anyway. You let him tell his story, his version colors your judgment. Gets in your way.

What Earl was going to have to do was some primary research on Stuart. See what he could come up with. A little leverage. Make sure that Stuart let Deborah go, in style. He was going to get on that right now, he sure was, right after he called that woman his nephew Lavert had asked him to look in on. He had her name here somewhere.