Jim’s sunburnt and wind-abraded face was stiffening. Like a mask.
That evening, they prepared dinner together. At the kitchen sink,
Father Geary cleaned lettuce, celery, and tomatoes for a salad. Jim set
the table opened a bottle of cheap Chianti to let it breathe, then
sliced canned mushrooms into a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove.
They worked in a comfortable mutual silence, and Jim wondered about the
curious relationship that had evolved between them. There had been a
dreamlike quality to the past couple of days, as if he had not merely
found refuge in a small desert town but in a place of peace outside the
real world a town in the Twilight Zone. The priest had stopped asking
questions In fact, it now seemed to Jim that Father Geary had never been
half probing or insistent as the circumstances warranted. And he
suspected that the priest’s Christian hospitality did not usually extend
to the sheltering of injured and suspicious strangers. Why he should
receive special consideration at Geary’s hands was a mystery to him, but
he was grateful for it.
When he had sliced half the mushrooms in the can, he suddenly s “Life
line.”
Father Geary turned from the sink, a stalk of celery in hand.
“Pardon me?”
A chill swept through Jim, and he almost dropped the knife into the
sauce. He put it on the counter.
“Jim?”
Shivering, he turned to the priest and said, “I’ve got to get to an
airport.”
“An airport?”
“Right away, Father.”
The priest’s plump face dimpled with perplexing, wrinkling his tanned
forehead far past his long-vanished hairline. “But there’s no airport
here.”
“How far to the nearest one?” Jim asked urgently.
“Well. . . two hours by car. All the way to Las Vegas.”
“You’ve got to drive me there.”
“What? Now?”
“Right now,” Jim said.
“But”
“I have to get to Boston.”
“But you’ve been ill”
“I’m better now.”
“Your face–”
“It hurts, and it looks like hell, but it’s not fatal. Father, I have
to get to Boston.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, then decided on a degree of revelation. “If I don’t get
to Boston, someone there is going to be killed. Someone who shouldn’t
die.”
“Who? Who’s going to die?”
Jim licked his peeling lips. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“But I will when I get there.”
Father Geary stared at him for a long time. At last he said, “Jim,
you’re the strangest man I’ve ever known.”
Jim nodded. “I’m the strangest man I’ve ever known.”
When they set out from the rectory in the priest’s six-year-old Toyota,
an hour of light remained in the long August day, although the sun was
hidden behind clouds the color of fresh bruises.
They had been on the road only half an hour when lightning shattered the
bleak sky and danced on jagged legs across the somber desert horizon.
Flash after flash erupted, sharper and brighter in the pure Mojave air
than Jim had ever seen lightning elsewhere. Ten minutes later, the sky
grew darker and lower, and rain fell in silvery cataracts the equal of
anything that Noah had witnessed while hurrying to complete his ark.
“Summer storms are rare here,” Father Geary said, switching on the
windshield wipers.
“We can’t let it delay us,” Jim said worriedly.
“I’ll get you there,” the priest assured him.
“There can’t be that many flights east from Vegas at night. They’d
mostly leave during the day. I can’t miss out and wait till morning.
I’ve got to be in Boston tomorrow” The parched sand soaked up the
deluge. But some areas were rocky or hard-packed from months of
blistering sun, and in those places the water spilled off slopes,
forming rivulets in every shallow declivity. Rivulets became streams,
and streams grew swiftly into rivers, until every bridged arroyo they
passed over was soon filled with roiling, churning torrents on which
were borne clumps of uprooted desert bunch-grass, fragments of dead
tumbleweed, driftwood, and dirty white foam.
Father Geary had two favorite cassette tapes, which he kept in the car:
a collection of rock-‘n’-roll golden oldies, and an Elton John best-of
He put on Elton. They moved through the storm-hammered day then through