Chapter 11
The story ends the way it started. I am driving across the desert on my way to join my family in the East. The same preacher is even on the radio again.
No, it wasn't all a dream. Everything I've told you really happened.
But don't get the idea for a second that I'm the same person I was before Gila Flats. The three months I spent imprisoned there changed all that. Simmering under my placid, middle-class exterior for the first time was a real woman.
However, I'm getting ahead of myself. First you need to know that I was completing my long-delayed trip East courtesy of the FBI.
After Dan reported me missing, they were the ones who finally traced me to Gila Flats. When the agents started coming around and asking questions about me, Uncle Roy panicked that the lid might be blown off his operation.
"You've got to go," he told me.
"But I don't want to," I protested. The gang bang in the junk yard had turned the tide for me. After that I knew the only way I could reach my potential as a woman was to be a whore. The life of a respectable, middle-class housewife now seemed the real imprisonment to me.
"Gotta go," he reiterated. However, his voice was not gruff but gentle.
"Please, Uncle Roy," I pleaded.
"No, it has to be this way," he stood firm, even though I could sense he didn't like it any better than I did. "You're the best whore I've ever had, but I can't let down the whole town over one piece of ass."
"But what about the rest of it?" I wailed. I had been living with him as his mistress, as well as being a hooker, and I'd thought maybe there was a kind of love developing between us.
"Forget it for now and go back to your husband," he said with some difficulty.
I argued with him some more, but it was no use. I had to go back home.
Before the FBI could blow my cover, Uncle Roy got in touch with Dan and told him a story we'd concocted about me being in an automobile accident near Gila Flats and having amnesia. Supposedly all my identification was destroyed in the fire of my car.
"Well, is she all right now?" Dan wanted to know.
Yes, I'd finally regained my memory after three months in the Gila Flats hospital. Dan could talk to me now.
I got on the phone and said hello to my husband for the first time in four months. He was so bowled over by hearing my voice that it was easy for me to convincingly tell he after he. Had I explained that I'd been on Mars, he'd have believed it.
Uncle Roy arranged for me to get another car and all too soon I was getting ready to leave. Of course I knew that now no matter how far away I went, some piece of me would always be in Gila Flats.