You see the signs welcoming you to Aliento, a town you’ve never heard of before. You pull the car into Pumping Jack’s gas station. Take some advice, friend. Try to look like you know exactly where you are, or the attendant will jack it up to the turismo price. But if you don’t mind parting with an extra buck, you can ask for directions to eating establishments. If you’re cradling your dimes, go for the real belly filling joints like Starvin’ Marvin’s where the food serves the purpose, but the service isn’t pretty.

As you go through the quarters, the town strikes you as peculiar. Neighborhoods don’t seem to fit together, an assembly of pieces from other places you’ve seen, a patchwork of Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans but with none of the appeal of those cities. The sections that should have been left out or leveled are here condensed into a small wispy town. The strange thing is how on a cloudy day, you might even find something beautiful and out of place, like St. Genesius’s Chapel in the Grace Quarter, a reprieve amidst weary houses and warehouses of smashed windows.

People never plan to settle in Aliento. They get stuck here. A broken down car, a debt, a vendetta, a hope for something more---the reasons seem arbitrary. They get stuck here just the same. Fly paper doesn’t just catch flies; it indiscriminately gets a hold of moths, bees, hornets, junebugs and mosquitoes. And so it goes in Aliento, the old and the young, the blacks and the browns and the sunburnt, the depraved, the mobsters and the decent common folk all trying the odds for a little more life. Keep your wits about you, friend, as you explore the town where, more often than not, the best way to earn a living is to take someone else’s.