“Not anymore,” Davy replied somberly. “I guess I must be getting old.” He paused. “So are things all right at home? With Mom and Dad, I mean?”
“Sure,” Lani said. “Mom’s getting ready to start another book, and Dad’s still cutting up wood like mad.”
“And how about you?” Davy added. “How are things going with the new job?”
“It’s great,” Lani answered. “There’s that hour in the morning, between shifts . . .” She stopped. “Hey, maybe when you’re back here, you could come over to the museum in the afternoons sometimes. I can get you in for free. The two of us could spend the afternoon there together, just like we used to, with Nana
“I’d like that,
“Mr. Walker?”
Quentin Walker, slouched in front of a beer on his customary stool, was drinking his way toward the end of Happy Hour at El Gato Loco, a dive of a workingman’s bar just east of the freeway on West Grant Road in Tucson. At the sound of his own name, one Quentin didn’t necessarily bandy about among the tough customers of El Gato, Quentin swung around on his stool and studied the newcomer over the rim of his draft beer.
“Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm. “That’s me.”
“Long time no see.”
Quentin was more than moderately drunk. He had been sitting at the smoke-filled bar since five, working his way through his usual TGIF routine—shots of bourbon with beer chasers. He squinted up at the newcomer, a tall, spare man who, even in the shadowy gloom of the nighttime bar, still wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. Only when the man finally reached up and removed the sunglasses did recognition finally dawn.
“Why, Mitch Johnson!” Quentin exclaimed. “How the hell are you?”
“I’m out, same as you,” Mitch answered with a grin as he settled on the next stool. “Which means I’m fine. You?”
Quentin shrugged. “Okay, I guess. What’ll you have to drink?”
“A beer,” Mitch said. “Bud’s okay.”
Quentin signaled the bartender, who brought two beers and another shot as well. When Mitch paid for all three drinks, Quentin nodded his thanks. He hadn’t really planned on another. By the time Happy Hour finished at seven, he was usually juiced enough that he could stagger the three blocks up the street to his grubby apartment. There, if he was lucky and drunk enough both, he’d fall into bed and sleep through the night. Maybe it was just the geography of it, of being back so near to where it had all happened. Whatever the cause, in the months since he’d left prison and returned to Tucson, sleep without the benefit of booze was a virtual impossibility. He went to bed more or less drunk every night. That was the only thing that held his particular set of demons at bay.
“I heard about Andy,” Quentin said. “Read about it in the paper, that he died, I mean. It’s too bad . . .”
“I’m sure he was more than ready to go,” Mitch replied. “He’d been sick for a long time. He was in a lot of pain. I think he had suffered enough.”
Quentin cast a bleary, questioning stare at the man seated next to him. Mitch had seen that look before and understood it. He had seen it on the faces of countless guards and fellow prisoners. They were all searching his face for signs of the awful lesions that had made Andrew Carlisle’s grotesque face that much worse toward the end. Everyone was waiting to see when the same visible marks of AIDS—symptoms of his impending death—would show up on Mitch’s body as well. For all of them—guards and prisoners alike—it was a foregone conclusion that the telltale marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma would inevitably appear.
Mitch alone knew that those conclusions were wrong. He and Andy Carlisle had been cell mates and friends for seven and a half celibate years. Although the rest of the prison population may have thought otherwise, their relationship had been intellectual rather than sexual. Originally there had been some of the trappings of teacher and student, but eventually that had evolved into one of fully equal co-conspirators—with the two of them aligned against the universe.
Their long-term interdependence and mutual interests had merged into a closeness that, outside prison, might well have been mistaken for a kind of love. And in a way, it was. It had been a private joke between them that the universal presumption of physical intimacy between them had given Mitch Johnson a certain kind of protection from attack that he had very much appreciated. Originally that physical security had meant far more to Mitch than Andrew Carlisle’s promised monetary legacy. Once the former professor was in the picture, no one ever again attempted to mess with Mitch Johnson, no one at all.
“Believe it or not, still no symptoms, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Mitch said, answering Quentin’s unasked question.
Embarrassed, Quentin’s eyes dodged away from Mitch’s unflinching gaze. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
“It’s okay,” Mitch said.
For a time the two men were silent while Quentin stared moodily into his beer. “I didn’t mean to insult you . . .”
“Forget it,” Mitch said. “It’s nothing. I’m used to it by now.”
Quentin shook his head. “You two were the only ones up there who ever helped me, you know,” he muttered. “You and Andy. And of all the people there, you two should have been the very last ones. I mean, with everything my family did to you . . .”
“It’s all water under the bridge, Quentin,” Mitch reassured him. “That was then, and this is now.”
“But you don’t know how bad it was for me,” Quentin continued, undeterred. “That first year after I got sent up was a nightmare. I was young and stupid and the son of a sheriff, for God’s sake, and I thought I was so tough. But I wasn’t, not nearly tough enough. Everybody in the joint was after my ass, or worse. Those guys had me six ways to Sunday. They turned me into nothing but a piece of meat.” He shuddered, remembering.
“If you and Andy hadn’t taken me under your wings, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I’d probably be dead by now.”
