Quicksilver(2)
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.
On my first visit, I had stirred through that flotsam, hoping that something in it would give me a hook for a poignant paragraph about how the Santinello’s ship had run aground on the jagged rocks of progress, their lifelong work and dreams for a better future having been pirated from them. In those early days of my magazine career, I was as enthusiastic as a puppy, capable of a rare but embarrassing mixed metaphor in my earnest efforts to shake readers into an emotional response. That was long ago, and I am much more mature now that, as I write this, I’ve spent a year struggling to stay alive while gradually uncovering and adjusting to the true nature of the world.
Anyway, on that initial exploration, as I’d stirred the flotsam in the kitchen, something bright had reflected my flashlight beam and caught my eye. When I reached to pluck a scrap of yellowing paper off the object to fully reveal it, a disturbed tarantula erupted out of the debris and scampered up my arm. I knew the creature wasn’t poisonous, that it wouldn’t bite, that its kind were said to be gentle, that it was supposed to be the Mohandas Gandhi of arachnids. But when a hairy spider the size of a soccer ball—or so it seemed—is coming for your face, the fight-or-flight response kicks in big-time. I staggered backward, managed to knock the beast off my arm, and lost all interest in whatever bauble had glittered in the trash.
Now, inexplicably, I was back, searching with my flashlight not for the tarantula, to which I didn’t feel the need to apologize, but for the item from which the spider had frightened me away. I found it: a very old coin—judging by its sheen, pure gold.