The Bavarian Gate By John Dalmas

“Nothing different than usual: Greece, Italy, Sicily, southern France … But one thing is real: Division sent a team of officers somewhere to set things up. Probably the place we’ll invade from.”

Macurdy stared. The man’s broad back was to him, but it was a back he knew, and the bull neck was familiar. Both went with the voice.

“Anybody else hurt since I left?” Keith asked.

“Not bad. What does the doc say about getting out of here?”

“Four more weeks, then rehab. I’ll be as good as new” Macurdy interrupted. “Damn it, Keith! I wish you’d get a pretty girl visitor, instead of a big mean Indian logger from Oregon.”

Roy Klaplanahoo spun and stared. “Macurdy!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

The next twenty minutes was a three-way conversation that ended with Keith and Macurdy knowing one another much better than they might have without Klaplanahoo’s presence. All three had been loggers, Keith mainly a pulper and tie hack from Upper Michigan; it added a bond between the two patients.

“Macurdy is a healer,” Klaplanahoo told him. “I seen him heal a bad cut a guy got in a knife fight. In a hobo jungle outside Miles City, Montana. And a couple guys that got shot in a logging camp. He does it like a shaman, except he don’t use a drum.” He turned to Macurdy. “I’ll bet you been working on that leg.”

Macurdy grinned, and lowered his voice for privacy. “They told me I’d be here at least two months. I gave myself ten days at most.”

Keith looked intensely at him, and lowered his voice too. “They’ll never believe it. They’ll keep you two months regardless.”

“Maybe I’ll get a little help from my friends. Maybe a hacksaw.”

“There’s no bars on the windows here.”

“To get this cast off. A saw will go through it like nothing. Then I can break it off.”

Keith’s gaze went out of focus; he was thinking. “You serious?” he asked.

“Damn right.”

“I could get a hacksaw,” Klaplanahoo murmured.

And that just about finished the conversation. All three men had something to think about. Macurdy decided to give more time to his leg. Ten days had been a guess. Maybe he could shorten that a few days.

Later that day Keith murmured to him: “Macurdy, I’m worried my outfit will leave me behind. Can you really heal people? Broken legs?”

“I guarantee it.”

“Guarantee is a pretty strong word.” Macurdy nodded.

“How about healing me?”

“As tong as you’re willing.”

“How do you go about it?”

“If I can’t reach it with my hands, I do it with my eyes.” Keith looked doubtfully at him. “Show me.”

Macurdy put his attention on the aura around the elevated leg, then the good one, then the broken one again, and began to manipulate the thread-like energy lines, working on them for several minutes with eyes and intention. The lines tended to slip back the way they’d been, but when they did, he simply readjusted them. After ten minutes they were behaving pretty well, and he could sense Keith’s body cooperating.

It’s as if, he told himself, the energy threads make a kind of template, an energy skeleton for the body–flesh, bones, uts and all. Fix the template, and the rest of it goes along. At east it acted that way. He wasn’t going to ask the doctors what they thought of the idea though.

“That’s enough for now,” he said. “I’ll work more on it after a while.”

Keith regarded the leg uncertainly. It seemed to him he could feel a difference. By God, he told himself hopefully, maybe this’ll work. It just might.

A number of times on each of the next several days, Macurdy worked both on his own leg and Keith’s for about ten minutes each. Already on the second day, Keith felt enthused, certain he could feel it working. At the end of a week, Macurdy felt sure that either of them could get up and walk, but he knew the medics wouldn’t hear of it.

Meanwhile all he had for clothes was a ridiculous little green hospital gown with his bare ass hanging out. By then he’d had visitors himself-the battalion didn’t train the time– and when Cavalieri and Luoma showed up that evening, he asked them to smuggle a set of his class A khakis to him.

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