seen him for twenty years. In the mid-fifties, she had gone to San Xavier for a Saint Francis feast and run into him by accident not realizing that after years in California, he had transferred back to the Papago.
Unaware she was awake, Father John's beads cocked quietly in liver-spotted hands as he intoned a whispered rosary in her behalf Silently, she examined every minute detail of him-parchment-like skin stretched across bony knuckles, sparse hair white now rather than the color of dried grass. Like his hands, the bald place on his head was dotted with large brown spots. Underneath the brown cassock, he was precariously thin.
He's old now, too, Rita thought. Were both old. She said, 'Are you still trying to save my soul?'
Father John's head jerked up at the sound of her voice.
'And mine,' he answered quietly. 'Yours and mine.'
She turned her face to the wall, surprised that after all this time unbidden tears still sprang to her eyes at the mere sound of his voice.
What was he doing here in the hospital room with her? How had he found her? She had never asked for his help. Who had called him?
'Your sister called me,' he said, answering the unspoken question.
'After what happened to Gina years ago, I asked Juanita to let me know if anything...'
'Go away,' Rita said, refusing to turn and face him again.
'But ...
'Go away,' she insisted.
She heard the heavy swish of his robe as he rose to his feet. Beads rattled when he dropped them into a pocket.
'If there's ever anything I can do ...
Still she didn't look at him.
'Ni-gm hu wabsh oan,' he began. 'Forgive me. Dancing Quail, please forgive me.'
Rita didn't answer. Father John left, closing the door gently behind him. Afterward, Rita tried to blot him from her mind, but he wouldn't leave. He was there, walking around in her soul, not as he was now, old and liverspotted, but young again, tall and straight, with a headful of palomino-colored hair.
Before he visited the storage locker, Andrew Carlisle stopped at Woolworth's and bought himself a long blond wig, a selection of makeup, and some suitable women's clothing, including a frilly blouse, an obscenely padded bra, and a pair of thongs. He had concluded it would probably be best if a woman showed up at the locker, and the clothing would come in handy for his private fund-raising program later on in the day.
The wig served a dual purpose. It concealed his newly achieved baldness, and it also protected the tender, underexposed skin from the glaring June sun. The few minutes he'd spent outside at Picacho Peak had given him a good start on a painful sunburn.
He used a discreet stop at a gas station to change clothes.
He went into the men's room as a man and came out as a woman.
Fortunately, no one was watching, but when he arrived at U-Stor-It-Here off Fort Lowell and Alvernon, Andrew Carlisle almost laughed aloud at his having taken such elaborate precautions. The woman in the RV-turned office waved him through the open gate without a second glance, no questions asked.
Carlisle enjoyed the anonymity of being a nameless, faceless woman as he sorted through the locker and inventoried his own equipment. It was almost as if he were someone else checking through a stranger's possessions.
The survival gear was all there. He opened the hasp held lid on the metal fifty-five-gallon drum and looked through the freeze-dried food he kept there as well as the water-purification equipment and tablets.
He had no intention of allowing the adventure of a lifetime to be short-circuited by a raging case of diarrhea brought on by drinking giardia-contaminated water.
Other than noticing his survival equipment and commenting on it, his mother hadn't messed with any of it. Carlisle was grateful for that.
Good for My ma Louise. Maybe she was actually getting a little smarter with age, although he 'doubted it.
Andrew had always been a bright boy-he took after his father, Howard, in the brains department. He aced his way through every private school in which his ambitious grandmother had enrolled him. He knew he was smart, and he knew equally well that his mother wasn't. Her overwhelming stupidity was always both a shameful burden and a mystery to him.
While still a child, he wondered how his father had ever become involved with fifteen-year-old Myrna Louise in the first place. Only in adulthood did he finally conclude that basic good looks and raw sex appeal were his mother's main assets. Were in the past and remained so in certain geriatric quarters. After all, she had reeled Jake Spaulding in without the least difficulty. Myrna Louise's big problem was always keeping a man once she got him.
In addition to stupidity, that was Myrna Louise's major flaw--she had never learned the meaning of power or how to use it. Her son had, certainly not in his undergraduate days at Southern Cal and not in the rarefied and surprisingly easy Ph.D. program at Harvard, either, a school where he once again took top honors. No, Andrew Carlisle learned the basics of power, about the granting and withholding of favors, about exploiting both the weak and the powerful, during his years in prison at Florence, during his post-Ph.D. program, as he called it.
Nobody really expected that he'd be sent to prison. That didn't usually happen to educated white men no matter what their crime, but go to prison he did. He left the courthouse with the searing image of an awkwardly pregnant but triumphant Diana Ladd burned into his memory.
If she had dropped it, if she hadn't kept pressing the cops and the prosecutors, no one would have given a damn about Gina Antone. Diana Ladd was the one person who had cost him those precious years out of his life. He would see that she paid dearly for it.
