Baptism at the Mission San Luis Rey

Stefan knew he would make his cousin’s wedding the following morning, despite the pilot’s announcement over the PA system that the flight had entered a holding pattern to avoid the storm. Things always tended to work themselves out for the best. The man seated next to him didn’t take the news so well. Uggghhh, he sighed, and then grunted for good measure—Humph. 

A rumble of turbulence jostled their seats. A young stewardess in her twenties was knocked forward a full seat length. Affrighted, she yelped as she regained balance.

“Stewardess,” he said, “how far inland is Tropical Storm Tomas?”

“Oh, I don’t have that information, but I’m sure it won’t be long. We will just loop around until air traffic control can redirect us.”

“If you don’t know the weather report, then how do you know how long it will be,” he barked back at her.

“Please remain seated sir and fasten your seatbelt until the light is turned off.”

An hour went by, while Stefan read his book and intermittently watched on the in-flight entertainment screen, with amusement, as the plane re-traced the route between Tortilla Flats and Scottsdale. The man seated next to him grew increasingly exasperated and muttered to himself, “Just my luck. I knew I should have flown Delta.”

“I’m just thankful to have some time to get some reading in,” Stefan said—receiving no response from the other man.

Stefan, a history teacher by trade, stroked his necklace with the coat of arms pendant, which was striped blue and red with an eagle at the crest, and kept on reading Alta California, a book of essays about Spanish and Mexican Settlers in the Spanish Borderlands. The essay he was reading presently focused on the life of Pablo Tac, a Luiseno Indian, who despite dying at age nineteen, was a prolific writer and missionary whose extensive writings were the only surviving accounts of the Luiseno language and culture and one of the most studied reports of missionary life on the frontier. 

The man next to Stefan asked him to get up so he could get something out of his bag in the overheads. When he sat back down with a laptop, he had a stack of medical reports in hand. Stefan saw the name and location on the header: “Dr. Carl Kellog, M.D., Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,” and he spotted a reference to someone named Sal—. Carl said, “I have an appointment to keep. I’ll be damned if I am going to miss it. The next thing they’re going to tell us is the flight is diverted to Goddamn Phoenix.”

The pilot came back over the PA to inform the passengers that the flight was, indeed, being grounded in Phoenix for the night and that the airline would arrange for replacement transportation, but given the lateness of the hour, it would have to be the following day—those that did not wish to sleep in the airport would have a room comped nearby.

The man seated next to Stefan became apoplectic, hands in a rigid set position on his knees and eyes trained forward like lasers. “I have an important appointment in the morning in San Diego. I can’t be late. I just can’t.”  Carl said all of this more to himself than to anyone else.

Stefan put his hand on Carl’s shoulder and said, “We will figure this out.”

* * *

“So, you are saying we will split the cost of a rental, and take a road trip through the storm—around the storm—and drive through the night to San Diego? Are you nuts?”

“You said you’d be damned if you were going to miss your appointment, didn’t you,” Stefan asked. “I promised I’d get you there.”

And so, the two men tossed their luggage in the back of a silver Toyota Tacoma 4-door and hit the road.

“I saw on the paperwork you had on you that you are a Doctor?”

“A Surgeon,” Carl said. “What about you?”

“I am a history teacher, college level, up at Cornell. My research relates to sojourners, missionaries, pilgrims, crusaders—all manner of settlers and travelers—anyone uprooted from their home, or those that never had one and yet somehow find the courage to make a home in a foreign land for a time. I find those kinds of stories fascinating.”

“That book you were reading—it was about one of those?”

“Pablo Tac.”

“Who?”

“A young missionary boy who grew up in the Mission San Luis Rey, which is the place I am headed for my cousin’s wedding.”

“And what makes him so special?”

“Pablo Tac? Well, for one, he had a motto: Siempre adelante y nunca para atrás. Move forward and never turn back. It was more than a saying—it was a creed. He died young. But he left a mark in California.”

“The world is a dangerous place and life is fragile—he’s lucky he made it that long—out on the frontier.”

“Not just the frontier. Pablo studied in Rome to be a priest. He set off from Mexico to get there. Then, once he returned, he lived off the land in California for years after up until his death. I think he wrote two full books and who knows how many essays. It is one of the best sources we have of life in that time.  He made a record of nearly his whole life. Imagine covering that much ground by nineteen?”

“And how did he die, if I might ask?”

“Smallpox.”

“There you go. The boy devotes himself to God, and boom—clapping his hands for effect—he’s snuffed out like a match in between God’s bloodthirsty fingers.”

“I think it was a gift, that God allowed him to finish his mission early—I see it as a glorious and hopeful story—if Pablo Tac could see the whole world, and leave behind a legacy at nineteen—then there’s hope for a couple of middle-aged codgers like us, don’t you think?”

“All I see is a promising man mowed down in the prime of life. A victim of callous and fickle odds. Stomped under heel by a dictator.”

“So, you believe that there can be no purpose to a man’s suffering? Nothing to be gained by it? That we are defined by how we end?”

“I’m an oncologist.”

“You cure the sick!”

“Cure? Oh, no. I specialize in Pancreatic Cancer. The five-year survival rate is twelve percent. My nickname among my colleagues is the ‘Grim Reaper.’ So, no, I wouldn’t exactly say that I ‘cure the sick.’ More like I chaperone them to death’s doorstep. I’m a butcher with dull blades—just an order taker at a meat counter—my patients’ diagnoses are like those number dispenser tags in a Supermarket—you know those red machines with the Garvey pull-off tags—I call their numbers and deliver the meat to the morgue.”

“Aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” Stefan said—and both men laughed.

“What is that pendant you were playing with on the plane?”

“Oh, this. It is the De Santis family crest. It was a gift from my father. I live in New York now, but I was raised out by the Mission San Luis Rey by my foster family. I consider myself a De Santis, but my birthname is Stefan Daskalov.”

“That is a foreign sounding name, if I ever heard one. Where are you from, originally?”

“I was born in Bulgaria, in the year of the Jubilee.”

“And what was that like, growing up in Eastern Europe?”

“I wouldn’t really know. My mother and I left when I was eight.”

“Was there something going on there you had to get away from?”

“You could say that. We were Turks, which is not such a good thing if you were living in Bulgaria at the time. There was a national campaign to rename all Turks and erase our ethnicity—the treatment of the Native Americans in this country was similar, I think. My father was an enthusiast for the resistance against the ruling Communist Party and they pulled him from our home one morning and took him to a labor camp on the island of Belene on the Danube—he died there that same year—but we never even learned how. My mother and I emigrated to Turkey to escape persecution, and eventually she put me on a boat headed to California.  She never was able to save up enough for both of us, and I never saw her again. Some years ago, I travelled back to Turkey and found the town where she was buried. It is strange—it seems like another world—one that I barely knew.”

“Jesus! That is one hell of a way to start out in life.”

* * *

Travelling west along I-8, the two men drank tall coffees and looked out on the vast desert with massive sand dunes under a purple sky full of dark black clouds from the storm. Stefan took a wrong turn before Yuma and they came to a stop at a rickety bridge the GPS said was the McPhaul Bridge and which provided a path over the Gila River toward the coastal mountains. The GPS had glitched and was telling them to go across, but the sign read “BRIDGE CLOSED.” Graffiti on the guard rails read, “BRIDGE TO NOWHERE.”

“We’ll have to backtrack and find another way through,” Stefan said.

“I guess we’ve come to the end of the road,” Carl said, belting out an uncharacteristic laugh.

“Oh, so you’re an adventurer now, are you doctor?”

“I’ll admit, I’m getting into the mood.”

“Look up there,” Stefan said, pointing at two figures walking across the McPhaul Bridge toward them carrying canvas sacks. 

Under the purple clouds the bushes and cactuses accented the barren landscape with the resilient whit of life persisting on vapors.

There was a sudden knock on the window. They were two young boys.

Stefan rolled down his window. 

“I’m Bobo and this is my friend Amix. We are headed to California. It’s been a long journey and the storm is coming in. Do you think we could tag along until you get to Yuma? We can help you navigate in the desert. We know the way.”

Stefan looked over at Carl, who nodded his approval.

“Jump in,” Stefan said.

“The safest way is to backtrack to I-8 and take that all the way down.”

“We are in a hurry—is there a faster route,” Carl asked.

“Well, you could take the Camino Del Diablo, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“What is that in English? The Devil’s Highway?”

Bobo nodded.

Carl let out a hearty laugh.

Turning to Stefan, he said, “How could we refuse?”

* * *

Bobo was a skeletal man, not more than 5’3”. His khaki anuks shirt hugged his body, making him appear in the dark like a human shadow. Bobo’s eyes were deep black wells, perfectly still pools of water, in which Stefan could see his own reflection.