The Last Chance Texaco

THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO

By

Brent Hartinger

PUBLISHED BY:

Buddha Kitty, Inc.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Brent Hartinger

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For Michael Jensen

The person I call home

And for Jennifer DeChiara

Who is always welcome to visit

The door was locked, and I sure as hell didn't have the key.

I was standing on a front porch, and the door before me was tall and wide and arched, with a fancy black iron handle and hinges, like the door to a church or a haunted house. I should know--I'd been dragged into a whole lot of different churches over the years, and while none of the many houses I'd lived in had actually been haunted, most of them had been plenty scary.

But this wasn't the door to a church or a house like any I'd been in before. No, it was the entrance to this big mother of a mansion looking out over the bay. Years ago, back when this place was the home of Mr. Rich Bastard, Esquire, and his wife, Greedula, the house had probably even had a name. I'm-So-Impressed Manor, or something like that.

But that had been a long time ago, and the door had taken its share of scratches and scuffs since then. The rest of the house had pretty much gone to the dogs too, with peeling paint and crooked gutters and a shaggy yard where all the plants seemed to be overgrown and dying at exactly the same time. So now the place had a different name. Kindle Home. It had a different purpose too, about as far as you could get from the one it had been built for, which was to house filthy-rich people and impress the neighbors. Now it was a group home for teenagers in "state custodial care." Orphans and shit. It also happened to be my new home.

Why am I spending so much time describing this house and its damn front door? Because this is partly the story of that house, and I figured I should start at the very beginning. And unless you break in through a window, which I've been known to do, you first enter a house through its front door. Which, as I've already told you, in this case was locked.

"It's not locked," Leon said. "Sometimes you just need to give it a good kick."

Leon was the guy standing behind me on the front porch. He was the Kindle Home counselor who'd picked me up at my former group home that morning to bring me here. He was a little like the house itself, because he hadn't been what I was expecting at all. For one thing, he was Native American. "Lucy Pitt?" he'd said to me thirty minutes earlier, in the front room of my old group home. "I'm Leon Dogman." In group homes, the best way to tell the difference between the kids and the counselors is usually the color of their skin, and just for the record, it's not the counselors who are black and brown and red. Leon was also younger than most counselors, probably still in his twenties, and he had a scraggly black beard and a pierced eyebrow and three visible tattoos.

But even if Leon didn't look like the other group home counselors I'd seen, I knew he'd act just like them. I'd been in the foster care system since I was seven years old--a grand total of eight years--and I knew how the adults operated. The first few times I'd screwed up, back when I was seven or eight years old, everyone had said I'd just been upset over the death of my parents. But I was fifteen now, past the Point of No Return, and no counselor or therapist or foster parent had the time or energy to spend on a lost cause like me.

Leon had said to give that front door a lack, so I gave it a swift one, and what do you know, it opened. Being in foster care as long as I had, I guess I d learned a lot about swift kicks.

"What'd I tell you?" Leon said. "That's the thing about a big old house like this. Everything is one-of-a-kind. When something breaks, you can't just run over to the hardware store and replace it. So you learn to live with things the way they are." He grinned a little and kind of rolled his eyes. "There's hardly anything in Kindle Home that isn't broken somehow."

I nodded once, trying hard not to look too interested, and pushed my way inside.

I found myself in a front room that led off into other rooms--a foyer, I guess they're called. Directly in front of us was this giant carved stairway that flowed down from a landing halfway to the second floor like a great river of wood.

Leon was still right behind me. "Well, this is it," he said. "Welcome to Kindle Home." He didn't overdo it with the phony enthusiasm, which I appreciated.

I glanced around. There were holes in the walls and burns in the carpet, and the smell of Pine-Sol and burned popcorn in the air. What the hell is it about group homes and burned popcorn? But that staircase was pretty cool. And there was this explosion of a chandelier hanging from the ceiling way over our heads. A few of the bulbs were burned out and it was dusty, but the crystal jingly things still sort of sparkled, and I don't think I'd been that close to anything like it in my life.

"Come on, I'll show you around," Leon said. He looked over at my backpack. "You wanna set that down for a second? We won't go far."

"No," I said. It was heavy, but when everything you own fits into one bag, you learn to keep a pretty good grip on it.

I followed Leon across the foyer. "That was the library," he said, pointing to the door to the right of the front door. "Now it's the office and therapist's room. And there's the kitchen." He gestured to the open doorway to the right of the staircase, and I caught a glimpse of beige linoleum and stainless steel.

Finally, we came to the double doorway to the left of the stairway. It led into an enormous living room that connected to a dining room almost as big, and that, in turn, must have connected back up with the kitchen. The style of furnishing was Classic Group Home: sagging thrift-store sofas, no sharp edges or anything breakable anywhere, and absolutely nothing that anyone could possibly turn into a weapon. It was as close as you could get to a padded cell and still have chairs. But at the same time, there were reminders of the days before the house had become a dumping ground for teenage rejects. Faded gold velvet curtains. A fireplace with a carved wooden mantel that matched the stairway and was almost tall enough to stand upright in. And big sweeping pic!ture windows, which must have once looked down on the water before trees had grown up to block the view.

"Well?" Leon said. "How do you like your new home?" New home? Was he trying to be funny? "Brief rest stop" was more like it. But Leon didn't look like he was being sarcastic. No, his face looked open--warm, even. Either he was a moron or he hadn't read my file yet.

A cat stepped out from behind the couch. He must have been sleeping on the heating duct, because he stretched like he'd just woken up. He was really skinny, with brown tiger stripes, and was pretty mangy too. He was missing a lot of fur, but it was all on the lower half of his body, like he'd licked it off himself. I wasn't surprised. Group home cats were usually just as messed up as the kids.

"That's Oliver," Leon said. "You know, Oliver Twist?"

I looked at him blankly, even though I knew that Oliver Twist was a famous orphan from a book. No need to let Leon know I wasn't a moron.

"Where is everyone?" I asked.

"Upstairs," Leon said. "And I think Ben took some kids to the park."

I nodded, and we both fell silent, watching Oliver saunter out toward the kitchen. I knew that Leon probably wanted me to ask him about the house, that he had what he thought was some great story to tell. But I also knew that if I waited until a few weeks later to start acting chummy, he'd be much more grateful, and I'd get a lot more out of him.

"There's an interesting story about this house," Leon said.

I had to fight to keep from rolling my eyes. Counselors were so incredibly easy to read. But at the same time, I decided to throw this one a bone. "Yeah?" I said.

"It was built by a man named Howard Kindle back in the nineteen-thirties. He was this big timber baron, really rich and really ruthless. But when he died in the nineteen-sixties, he left a will that gave this house to our program, saying we should use it for kids with no homes. As far as we know, he'd never talked to anyone from the program, and he'd never given much money to charity either, so no one could figure out why he'd done what he did. Then, a year after Kindle died, one of our workers was clearing the last of his junk out of the basement, and he made a very interesting discovery."

That he'd been an orphan himself, I thought to myself. Give me a break. This was the oldest story in the book.

"Turns out he'd been murdering people and burying them in the crawl space," Leon said.

"What?" I said. "You're kidding!"

Leon grinned, all teeth and whiskers and dimples. "Yeah. Just wanna see if you're paying attention. Actually, no one knows why he gave his house to us. But boy, his kids sure were pissed. They still live around here, and every couple of years, they try to reopen the case and fight that will all over again. Fact is, I don't care why Kindle did it. I'm just glad he did. There's no other group home like it in the state."

Leon was right about Kindle Home looking different from Bradley Home and Ryden Home and Haply House and the other three group homes I'd lived in. And I hope it goes without saying that none of the four foster families I'd lived with had lived in anything like a mansion, even a run-down, child-proofed mansion like this one. It felt different too. Solid. You could feel it under your feet. The doors stuck, and things might be cracked and dusty, but the underlying structure was sound.

But even if it looked and felt different from the other houses I'd lived in over the years, I knew it wasn't really. Leon hadn't told me the real story behind Kindle Home, the one that mattered to me. He hadn't needed to. Every kid in my foster care district already knew it. To us, Kindle Home was known as the Last Chance Texaco. The name came from those gas stations on long stretches of empty highway, the ones that have signs that say they're the "last chance" to get gas or have repair work for a whole bunch of miles, like right before a big, barren desert.

Kindle Home became a group home in the 1960s. And from the start, it was the group home for the kids who'd screwed up again and again, but who supposedly still had one last shot to turn things around. It wasn't a big, barren desert that came after our Last Chance Texaco--it was a high-security facility for teenagers called Eat-Their-Young Island, the place for the foster care system's truly hopeless cases.

Eat-Their-Young Island was located on a real island, but that wasn't its real name. It was really called Rabbit Island, but some kid had renamed it too, I guess because rabbits sometimes eat their young. Basically, it was a prison for kids. Surveillance cameras. Locks on all the doors, and sometimes restraints on the beds at night. Therapists and counselors could call Rabbit Island a "treatment center" all they wanted, but no one ever got better from their "treatment," and the only way anyone ever got out was by turning eighteen.

I knew I'd be there soon enough. It had taken me eight long years to work my way through The System, but now here I was, at the head of the line. It was only a matter of time before it was my turn to take the ride, only it wasn't a roller coaster we were talking about--not the fun kind, anyway. The counselors here all knew it too, or they would soon enough, once they'd read my file. Their job was to keep me waiting in line until it was my time to ride the Rabbit Island roller coaster.

Standing in the doorway to the living room at Kindle Home, Leon was still looking at me, waiting for me to react to his little story about Howard Kindle.

But I just turned toward the stairway and said, as flatly as I could, "Can I see my room now?" I was tired of talking. Besides, my backpack was heavy and cutting into my shoulders.