CALVIN BURNED MILES between himself and the North Rim. There he would find a spine of granite that humped out of the pines like the back of some huge leviathan, swimming through time and earth instead of the sea. He would hike through blue tree shadow and gray dust until he reached the end of that outcropping. He would camp on the red rock, above its shadow, and watch the stars. Far from other humans, he would confront his own inner workings, regain control and find peace. Under the orders of his superior, John Calvin would get himself together, then travel north and murder a man. The pavement roared beneath his tires.
The sun scorched across the sky as Calvin slid through vast expanses of open rock, dotted with sage and cacti. He veered onto highway 89 at Wickenburg—an agglomeration of fast food restaurants, gas stations and a mall—and the digital dashboard compass swung from NW to NE. Every twenty miles or so he would pass through a town—Pebbles Valley, Prescott, Cottonwood. Outside of Sedona, he pulled the Mountaineer into an empty rest stop that fronted a huge wall of umber rock. Under the noon sun, the rock seemed to pull at the light, absorb it. Calvin drank a bottle of water from the cooler and ate a tuna sandwich while staring at the cliff face. It was hot outside the air conditioned car, but the sweat disappeared off his brow as soon as his skin could push it out. In the evening, the red monolith would release that light, glow like something radioactive. Calvin wasn’t sure how he knew that. It just made sense. Furnace, he thought, and got back into the S.U.V.
After Sedona, the road began to climb into mountains covered with deep, secret forest; dark pine hallways stretched away in his peripheral vision. Flagstaff was the next big town. According to his map, it offered decent skiing in Winter and the best Sushi in the Southwest. Calvin drove through as fast as he could without risking a traffic stop by any of the local deputy dawgs. He emerged at the terminal edge of a ponderosa forest. Great columnar trees, their gold bark tinged with red, gave way to hardpan scoured into alien shapes. For a few miles, even the scrub and cacti ceded to the patient rock. Calvin spent the rest of the afternoon rolling through a blasted plain, broken by intrusive igneous formations and dry gorges that led away from the road like paths to nowhere.
It reminded him of Detroit. Here those dry canyons could lead a person deep into the waste, like walking a battlefield trench dug by a regiment of psychotics. Detroit had whole districts, crisscrossed by alleys and streets, that led into demilitarized zones where the police never went, always quiet until someone opened fire or screamed. Calvin had grown up in those urban arroyos, sleeping in burned-out warehouses, stealing, sometimes turning a trick or two to get something to eat.
He was ten years old when he had run down his first canyon, away from the last of many foster homes, cauldrons boiling with abuse. He’d been more of a government check to his foster parents than a child. When he wasn’t on his hands and knees, he had been a target for shouts and fists. One foster home after another, one new family after another. Nothing had ever changed. It had all been a matter of degree.
The first year on the street had been the hardest. Calvin had survived by living like a rat—hiding, thinking and moving quickly. He stayed away from people as much as was possible in a city. It was a simple lesson: people equaled pain. If they were stronger than he was, and almost everyone was, they took what he had or tried to take him. If he faltered and they found him, a little boy with dirty cheeks and shining eyes, he was meat. Looking back, Calvin supposed he’d been somewhat lucky to have learned never to trust anyone before he had hit the street. Had he run down the canyon into the waste without that knowledge he never would have survived. After a night in a drafty warehouse, the first chicken hawk to have crooned at him from an open van would have been young Johnny’s end.
But he had been smart and fast. He had learned the rules. Stay down during the day, forage and steal at night. Never talk to strangers. Everyone is a stranger, no matter how well you know him. If someone turns his back, take him for everything you can. Fight or run, never ask questions. By the end of his second year in the Detroit wastes, Johnny Calvin had become formidable. People had begun to extend respect to the strange boy with the long, dreadlocked hair and shiny eyes. No one learns faster than a child, and so perhaps no one on the street understood how to survive as well as he had, even at twelve. There had been hordes of homeless, junkies, crazies and the like, all living on the street. But Johnny Calvin had become a part of the street itself, losing his humanity to the concrete in exchange for the ability to merge with it. By the time he was fifteen, Johnny had become an expert, a graduate of the Academy of Survival. Perhaps that was why the street chose that year to kill him.
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