The orphanage was also a school, because kids six and up often had to live there until they were eighteen. The sisters who served as teachers were superb imparters of knowledge, and the kids knew better than to resist being educated. If you didn’t live up to your potential, you would spend a lot of time washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and doing laundry, none of which was a task assigned to you if you were a diligent learner.
The students of Mater Misericordi? School always won city and state spelling bees, debate club matches, and science fair prizes. As a consequence, many of us were beaten up by some of the state’s most accomplished young intellectuals.
Generous supporters of the sisters provided college and trade school scholarships to those who wanted them, of which I wasn’t one. I aspired to be a writer. Profound intuition told me that the wrong university creative-writing program might hammer out of me anything original about my style and convert me into a litbot.
Sister Agnes Mary managed the placement office for those who weren’t submitting to higher education. When I turned seventeen and a half, she used samples of my writing to snare a job for me with the publisher of Arizona!, a magazine about the wonders of the state and its people. I wasn’t yet trusted to write about contemporary citizens, who were far more easily offended than were dead folks. Instead, I was assigned to research and write about interesting figures and places from the state’s storied past, as long as I avoided brothels and bandits.
On my eighteenth birthday, after just six months of successful employment, I was able to afford a studio apartment and move out of the orphanage. After eighteen months at the magazine, I made a fateful mistake and have been in flight from dark forces ever since.
I find it eerie that, within a day of making that mistake, a full week before the consequences of it became clear, I had my first episode of what, for a while, I came to call “strange magnetism,” as if someone was writing my life—not the story of my life, but my life itself—someone who knew the time was coming when I would need a substantial amount of cash in order to escape capture.
This was a Friday in early May. Having completed my assignments for the week, I took the day off, intending to avoid exercise, load up on wicked carbs, and stream old Alien and Terminator movies until my eyes began to bleed. Instead, I grew restless before I’d eaten a single chocolate-covered doughnut, and I felt strangely compelled to get in my vintage Toyota and test the bald tires by driving out of the city, into the desert. I distinctly remember saying to myself, “What am I doing? Where am I going?” Then I stopped asking because I realized that if I spoke in a slightly different voice and answered with a destination, I might be a case of multiple personality, something to which I never aspired.
Where I was going turned out to be not a ghost town, but a sort of ghost crossroads, not from the days of cowboys and prospectors in the nineteenth century, but from the 1950s. A section of a state highway had been made superfluous by an interstate. A Texaco service station, a restaurant, and a large Quonset hut of indeterminable purpose were left to be worried into ruins by merciless desert sun, wind, insects, and time. I’d been there once before, six months earlier, getting the flavor of the place to write a little mood piece about it for Arizona! magazine.
The big sign mounted on the roof of the restaurant had been faded by decades of fierce solar rays and had been shot full of holes by good old boys who thought that mixing strong drink and firearms was an entertaining way to pass an evening on little-traveled back roads. Generally speaking, they had no wives to object and no girlfriends to offer more appealing distractions. Research had taught me that the restaurant had been called Santinello’s Roadside Grill.
I parked on the fissured, sun-paled blacktop, took a flashlight from the glove box, got out of my car, and approached Santinello’s. The windows had been broken out long ago, and the front door had rotted off its hinges.
Inside, lances of sunlight slashed through east-facing windows, forcing the shadows to retreat to the west side of the dining room, where they gathered as if conspiring. The booths, tables, and chairs had been sold off in 1956, along with the kitchen equipment. Wind had blown debris and decades of dust inside.
No herpetologist I queried had been able to explain to me why a couple of dozen snakes had slithered here to die, mostly rattlers. When I had come exploring on the previous occasion, I’d freaked out until I realized they were air-dried, fossilized, lifeless.
Nevertheless, on this return visit, I stepped carefully among them and went into what had been the kitchen. Although everything of value had long been stripped away, splintered wooden crates that had once held oranges and other produce were heaped against one wall, along with all manner of empty food tins.