She was the last client of his day.  Dr. Freeman stared at his wristwatch, a nervous tick, translated gotta be, out of here, ciao.  He had dinner reservations and the traffic was a bumperfest.  He felt the weight when she started to cry.  No way he was going to meet his date on time now.  He wanted to charge more when they broke down.  For making him carry their burden. Tears lined her cheeks, her skin the color of a lab’s fluorescence.  They reached simultaneously for the tissue.  Their hands collided.  If not for the seriousness of her situation, he would have laughed at this silly act.  The caps of her teeth reminded him of hominy floating in water.

The University paid her bill.  He was in their HMO.  A female social worker would have been better.  All those therapies with the beefy acronyms: EMDR, CBT–but her insurance required a MD.

It was her word against her assailant.  No witnesses.  He’d read the police report.  Not a scratch or a welt, nor bruising, busted clasp or DNA.

Her shoulders heaved like a marionette’s.  She twirled her hair.  She uncrossed prim unshaven legs.  She had notched calves like a runner.  A galaxy of freckles spanned her nose.  Her frame was compact, her breasts pyramidal: the shape under which pharaohs and Michael Jackson had once slept.  She asked for Ambien. Terrible nightmares, she complained.  She awoke drenched in sweat, her heart a caged hummingbird.  He wrote a prescription for eszopiclone.  Detecting a suicidal risk, he limited her to seven pills, no refills.  He scheduled another appointment.  She signed a contract promising not to hurt herself and to see him in a week which was about as reliable as most guarantees these days.

*

Over the years Dr. Freeman had heard many tales from his patients: CIA implants in molars, aliens beaming up bodies to prod their orifices.  He understood positive emotional regard.  How listening could make a difference.  He had studied Jung, Freud, Rogers and Skinner.  But no theory could explain why his clients washed their hands until the skin peeled off in suppurating lesions, found it necessary to burn their clothes in the bathtub or bury their false teeth under the house.  There were so many phobias, a few stood out: the saturnine teen who refused to write the letter F; the magistrate’s housewife who spent fifteen hours digging crud from under her fingernails; a cousin stockbroker addicted to baby oil enemas.  Really.

Finally, with close to three million in savings, he’d escaped the city and moved to the mountains where his practice entailed little more than scribbling the latest synaptic breakthrough for patients in a seven county catchment.

He loved rural psychiatry.  He worked in blue jeans and flannel shirts.  Had five day weekends if he wanted.  He’d resumed hiking and had begun to get in shape for a seventy mile trip along the Trail: forty pound backpack, orienting himself to the knee pain, and the body dynamic, cardiovascular and pulmonary pistons synchronized.  His flaccid belly started to harden.  Still he overheated, lungs pressured by air that had the heft of sand, unlike his youth when he could trek twenty miles and never break a sweat.

It was while training one morning that Dr. Freeman heard a sound, a tintinnabulation  among the throaty warbles of the orioles, the laconic cries of the jays.  He paused at a gap, an exposed overlook of granite grooved by glaciers in the Ice Age, a break in a Star-Spangle sea of blue spruce, loblolly pines, and stalagmite red oaks, though he never saw red, a mild protanopia.  He scanned the horizon.  A hawk floated on the wind, searching for prey.

*

The next week Jane arrived early, waited in his anteroom, hands pressed between her knees.  She wore perfume, unusual for one suffering from depression, its sandalwood aroma suffusing the office like a genie.  Her sweater swamped her frame.  Wire rim spectacles augmented her ghastly pallor.  Mud caked her boots even though it hadn’t rained in weeks.

“Despite being in a crowded dorm you didn’t yell?”

“No.  I felt guilty.  It brought back memories of my father.”

She squeezed out the sentence.  He thought of the suffering an oyster must endure to produce a pearl.  How prospectors spent their lifetimes, hunched over, panning for just such a nugget.

*

Dr. Freeman covered his eyes, captured the tree line.  His search for the sound reminded him of his favorite childhood puzzles: picking out hidden objects from a crowded background.

The thrumming resumed, intense, metallic, a dissonance distilled, undulating as the winds shifted.  The path wove north, four miles until a bend, a former Forest Service road.  He’d hiked this way before.  He calculated his heartbeat, fingers onto carotid, fibrillation, the yin yang pulse.  Thirty-six beats times three, getting better, he thought.  Only a smattering of perspiration covered his forehead.

He saw a glint among the trees.  He stepped off the path: grabbing limbs, roots, sod, controlling his descent, boots digging in like crampons.  Leaning back, the backpack determined to topple him, he arrived at a saddle-shaped pass, the wind whistling through the gap forlorn and distal.

The hutch was camouflaged.  Limbs split, half-height logs covered with detritus, leaves, branches, pine straw, and mud smoothed into the wall.  Quite an accomplishment to hide the den.  Behind the facade someone scurried, crunching dried leaves.  He sensed eyes prodding, dissecting him.

“I’m sorry I disturbed you.  I thought there might be some distress,” he said.

His heart rushed to his ears.  Don’t panic, he told himself.  He carried no weapon.  He eased towards the perimeter, dirt packed into hardpan.  The hovel reminded him of a beaver’s den, the way the sticks stuck out at all angles.  He heard a screech, the extension of a spring, then a blur.  A bearded man in camouflage fatigues sprinted out and disappeared, captured by forest.

He started to shout but it was pointless.  The hermit was racing through the woods.  Dr. Freeman edged closer to his home.  He noticed a notch on a pine, on several trees, chiseled into the bark at eye level.  Beneath a red alder the ground softened.  He kneeled and scrutinized how the leaves congregated.  He swept off the pile and found a board.  He worked his fingers under the wood.  The sodded board gave way, held by springs, the opening smaller than a manhole but square.  He propped the door with a stick, removed his pocket flashlight and peered into the tunnel: straight down, the sides reinforced by crosscuts and then a right angle turn, trussed and bracketed—the access to the hovel.

*

“What happened with your father?”

Jane shuddered.  This intimacy invaded.  Too quick, he thought.  But there was only so much time.  The insurance had not panned out.  She had withdrawn from school.  Would pay him what she could, which meant he was probably taking the case gratis.  She hugged her knees and drew breaths like inhaling shards.  Her bottom lip trembled.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked.

“Please.”

*

Staring at the entrance, Dr. Freeman shivered.  Once, while snorkeling off the coast of Cancun, the sea became turgid with millions of tetras and he lost sight of the surface.  Terrified, he fought to regain his tether to the vertical world.  Now, he felt a similar suffocation.  He had no business entering the abode.

He retraced his steps; a monk practicing Tai Chi couldn’t have tiptoed any better, disturbing as little as possible.  He wound his way up the slope.  He felt watched, a spying shadow, such that when he turned, it went behind him.  He was relieved to find at the turn-in his Jeep Cherokee undisturbed.

He stopped at the Ranger’s Station, a white trailer with a fire tower behind it.  Absalom, the Ranger, greeted Dr. Freeman with an offer of coffee.  He was round-faced with an unruly beard.  A stout beer belly. The inside was crammed with maps, surveying equipment, turnouts, rubber overalls, axes and gear.  “You haven’t started spring cleaning,” Dr. Freeman noted.

“In due time.”  Absalom smiled, a recluse, but hospitable with the right company.  Dr. Freeman smelled his friend’s sulfide odor.  The local streams contained some of the most sulfurous water on the Trail.  Despite the element, it was potable, once the intestines got accustomed.

“I found a tunnel,” Dr. Freeman said.  He could interpret the best poker faces. “You know of him, don’t you?”

“Where?” the Ranger asked.

“About a half mile below the pass, in a run of ponderosa.”

“Another veteran.”

“Another?”

“We get our share.  Living in the woods.  Surely, you’ve worked with them?”

“Occasionally.  The VA makes referrals.  I handle the pharmacological side of things.”

“I’ll report him, but he’s probably already broken camp.”

“Already?” Dr. Freeman asked.

“They never stay.  Not after they’ve been discovered.”

*

He perceived her defensiveness: arms and legs crossed, jaw tight, the glances behind his head at the window.  He was forcing it.  He would have referred her to the local mental health center but they’d come too far.  He had to hang with the moment, suture as best he could, cut his losses.  She was dissolving before his eyes; sometimes therapy was nothing but a crude crucible for the soul.

“I should have fought.  I offered no resistance.  I acted as if I deserved it.”

The breaking down was easy.  It was the rebuilding, the individuating, that demanded his skill.

“That happens when the abuser is family.  One longs for love and yet all one gets is confusion and pain.”

“I was talking about Tom, the Sigma Chi, not my father.”

The alarm on his watch unleashed an angry hive as if hit by a stick and fallen to the ground.  He didn’t want to let her go.  But there were others.  Always others.

“Next week?” he asked.

“Okay.”  Her voice quavered.

*

He re-hiked the slope, refreshed with coffee and relieved of two bowls of oatmeal and a bran muffin.  The air was pure, the sun cresting over the mountains, conductive.  Static clung to his body.  Rubbing his hand across his stubble, his cheeks stood at attention.  At such times he wished for a partner to share the pristine air, the melancholy expanses that even John Muir would have appreciated.  Having placed medicine first, two divorces had been his toll.  But except when camping, Dr. Freeman didn’t regret it.

Nearing the crest, he studied his footprints, molded by the sun that had burned off the dew.  He slipped his backpack from his shoulders.  He wished to enter the campsite empty- handed, harmless, vulnerable.  The veterans he treated were prone to paranoia.  He never stared into their eyes.

The trap door had been pulled back, propped and exposed.  Dr. Freeman remembered closing it before he left.  The Ranger was right.  The vet had bolted.

Dr. Freeman crouched at the entrance.  He peered inside, sniffed the earth, mordant, wet, and the sock sweat detritus.  I have harmed this man, he realized.  Now I must curate what was his. 

He settled one foot on the upper truss and then another, lowering himself on the cross beams.  Claustrophobia asserted itself.  He gulped mouthfuls of air as if his life depended on it, as if he might have to hold his breath somewhere along the line.  He looked up for the security of the sky.  He suspected the tunnel might be booby-trapped.  Flashing his light, he checked the walls for trip wires, razor blades, and spikes.

He slid feet first, on his haunches; his breath tightened, the walls enclosing.  He was through before he knew it.  The area was no larger than an igloo.  Being six foot two he had to squat.  The roof was a canopy of leaves and sticks hooked onto some type of netting that let in dappled light.  The rainfly had been torn from the foundation leaving tattered plastic.  It smelled rancid like a meat locker.

He surveyed: a wooden stool, a beaver pelt; an ash pit of pencil-thin bones and burnt papers; a coffee pot, a pair of dirty socks, ingots of corrugated solder; a scorched postcard.  He picked the postcard out of the ashes and shook it.  Only the first two words were legible, “Dear Dad.”  The vet was a father.  On the front was the charred picture of a beachfront hotel.  Dr. Freeman unfurled his handkerchief and wrapped the postcard.  The vet must have counted it as a memento.  But why had he torched it?  Why was it so important to keep it from falling into enemy hands?  And make no mistake about it: to this vet, Dr. Freeman was the enemy.

Dr. Freeman felt guilty about invading the home.  He wished he’d never heard the banging, never seen the flash of steel.  He carried the card home and stored it in his safety deposit box.

*

“What’s the point in blaming yourself?” he asked, concluding the session.

“That’s just it.  There is no point.”

She paid him cash, doling out two hundred dollars in tens and twenties.

“It’s not necessary,” he said.  But she was out in a burst.  He was calling in the next patient when he heard the tires squeal, then a thud.  He found her face down in the street.  A crowd had formed, keeping their distance.  Blood hemorrhaged out of her ears and mouth creating a lurid mural on the pavement.  He wanted to turn her over just to be sure.  But it wasn’t necessary.  Of course, it was her.

*

Dr. Freeman never completed his seventy mile hike.  The psychiatrist at the Regional VA got called to active duty.  The Director asked Dr. Freeman to take over his therapy group.

“I’m not much of a therapist,” he replied.

“Please.  Psychiatrists are rare in these parts,” he said.

Facing the circle of traumatized warriors, their timid eyes and guarded feelings, he no longer tried to confront their defenses and functional neuroses or force them to see things with conventional, sane eyes.  When he spoke, he measured his words having learned not to enter the tunnel of their minds without invitation.  Instead, he waited until the fear had drained from their faces and they trusted him, and he knew they wouldn’t run.

Duke Stewart, a retired mental health clinician, has published or has work forthcoming in many magazines including Cimarron Review, Puerto Del Sol, Story Sanctum, Penmen Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. Honors include an award from the Kansas Arts Council for Best Fiction, a “Rising Star” grant through the Georgia Council for the Arts , and the latest 2025 Pushcart nomination from Jet Fuel.