The Never-Open Desert Diner

by James Anderson

  Whoever she was, maybe it was her that John saw somewhere on the highway ahead.

  To lighten the moment, I said, “Years? You sure you’re not bragging?”

  He brought his eyes back from the road and put them on me. “Be careful,” he warned. “I’m serious as sin.” He had lost track of the cigarette and forgotten I had already put it out. “You’re a better man than you know, Ben. Certainly better than you’ll admit.” He inhaled smoke and exhaled. He let the spent butt drop to his side. “It’s time,” he said, and stood up.

  Without stretching, something he always did after our roadside smokes, John took up his cross and continued down 117 in the direction of Rockmuse. I wanted to say something to him. All I did was watch him go. His pace was slower and his back was more hunched, as if the cross had become heavier. Words to some hymn drifted back to me. He was singing.

  John’s singing merged into a thundering throaty growl that could have come from only one machine. I’d heard it several times. The sound was distinctive and unforgettable. Walt was flying down 117 toward me on his Vincent. He passed John, who was going the other way. I heard him gear down and thought he was going to stop. Instead, he revved the engine and picked up speed as he shot by me. He wore a white T-shirt and faded blue jeans. No helmet. A pair of aviator goggles held his flowing snowstorm of hair down against the wind. Out for a morning ride, I guessed.

  Walt didn’t wave or even look my way. In a second he was gone up the highway, accelerating into the turn with the controlled skill of a veteran rider and a youthful abandon and disregard for life and limb. At the top of the curve he must have exceeded a hundred miles an hour. The V twin-cam of the 998cc hand-built 1948 Vincent had more to give him if he asked. From the sound of the exhaust as he hit the straightaway on the other side, he was asking for everything the Vincent could give. When, or if, Walt Butterfield ever died, it wouldn’t be from old age. There wouldn’t be enough left of him to pick out of the sand with a pair of tweezers.

  I turned and looked up the slope to the hidden arch and got in and out of the cab a few times while I tried to make a decision. Finally I walked to the arch and stood there, though only for a moment. Nothing had changed. Far to the south of Desert Home, on the other side of the tangle of empty streets, was the white shimmering ribbon of heat and glare of what people called a mirage. Since the first desert wanderer dying of thirst, mirages had appeared in the distance, promising water only to deliver more parched earth. The closer you came, the farther the promise retreated. This one looked like a long, cool lake.

  The front door of the house opened and she stepped onto the porch. I took a few steps back from the arch. I could still see her. I hoped she couldn’t see me. She was wearing the same sleeveless dress she had worn the night before. She was barefoot. In the daylight, even at a good distance, her dark hair caught the sun and sent it back to my eyes in brilliant flashes. She scratched herself like a major-league pitcher on the mound and reached her arms out as if she were about to take flight. She turned slowly in a complete circle, her fingers grasping at the sunlight. I thought for a second she might have seen me. She dropped her arms and went back inside. She returned almost immediately and stood motionless on the porch with her hands behind her back.

  I took a deep breath and stepped into view. I waved. She did not return the wave. I shouted my hello, which also wasn’t returned. I knew she could see and hear me. I began what seemed like a very long walk down to the house. Twenty yards from the porch I stopped and waited for her to acknowledge me. That was how visitors, friends and strangers alike, approached a residence in the desert. Not just good manners, it also kept the number of shootings down to those that were absolutely necessary.

  Calmly, she removed her hands from behind her back. She rested her right hand against her right hip and let the revolver dangle there with its barrel pointed slightly downward yet still aimed in my general direction.

  “I’m curious,” she said. “Is this place the only rest stop on your highway?”

  I reached up to take off my cap as a respectful gesture. She raised the barrel of the gun a couple inches without moving it off her hip.

  It was a very nice hip. It matched the other one perfectly. I’d had guns pointed at me before. I knew she was capable of shooting me where I stood and exactly where she wanted. She had that kind of confidence, even, I suspected, without the gun. I didn’t want to be shot, but if I had to be shot by someone, she would have been my first choice.

  She kept her chin high. Her nose was wide with tiny brown freckles that disappeared into the skin across prominent cheekbones. I wondered if maybe she was part Native American. Again, her skin was too white. Indoor skin. She was part something, but she was all business.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” I said. “I didn’t even know this place existed.”

  “So today you decided you’d just drop by and re-mark your new territory?”

  I approached her carefully and put my business card, one of the rare remaining four hundred and eighty or so from the original batch of five hundred, on the lowest porch step. “You can call me if you need anything.” Coming and going I never took my eyes off the gun, or her hips.

  “I’ll be sure to do that,” she said. “I keep my cell phone right next to my flat-screen television and my laptop.”

  This wasn’t how I saw our first real meeting taking place.

  “So, what do you deliver?”

  “Whatever people out here need.”

  “What do you think I need?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Strings for your cello?”

  Every muscle in her body popped and pulsed beneath her skin. We stood a long time. Through the whole long wait I expected a bullet. Mentioning the cello had been a big mistake.

  “Truck driver?” she confirmed.

  I nodded. My mouth was getting dry, and the sun was broiling the back of my neck.

  She sat down on the porch. We baked in the sun a little longer until the sweat was pouring down my face and chest. There was something familiar about her. Maybe, after standing and looking at her and her gun for so long, she was just beginning to seem familiar.

  Finally, she said, “Mr. Truck Driver, don’t ever spy on me again. Do you understand?”

  I croaked out an affirmative, then managed to add, “My name is Ben.”

  “Ben,” she said, after a long pause, “I just left my husband. He’s probably looking for me. I would really prefer you protect my privacy until I decide what to do. Will you do that?”

  I said I would.

  “Do you know who owns this property?” she asked.

  When I said I didn’t, all she said was, “Good.” She took a quick glance at my card. “If I need anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Claire,” she offered, though still as professional as a customer-service operator. “I’ll consider that our understanding. You will not mention me or this place to anyone. One more thing. Consider it an addendum to our agreement. This is a difficult time for me. Don’t try to deliver anything I do not ask for.”

  Her meanings, all of them, were clear. I didn’t say anything.

  “Thanks for not trying to charm me with chitchat. You’re not one for chitchat, though, are you?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated and began again. “No, Claire, I’m all for talk. For the last forty-five minutes or so I’ve been talking like crazy—to myself.”

  “You know what they say about talking to yourself?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s fine as long as you don’t answer. You don’t answer, do you, Ben?”

  “I would,” I said, “if I knew what to say.”

  I mentioned the phone booth at the diner a few miles west. “Take some change,” I advised her. “Believe it or not, that one still takes nickels.”

  “Nickels. Got it.”

  It seemed like I should probably warn her about Walt. “If you go to the diner, you might wa
nt to steer clear of the old man who owns the place. He doesn’t like visitors. Keeps to himself more than most around here. To tell you the truth, he’s a bit of an asshole.”

  The marvel of her smile was watching it travel toward her mouth, like a freight train picking up speed as it dropped down a mountain grade. It began with a slight wrinkle high on her forehead and then spread into her dark eyes. From there the smile descended to her lips, where it burst into full view with all the momentum of her body behind it.

  “Really? An asshole who doesn’t like visitors? The two of us should get along just fine.”

  “He’s not a bad guy. Just old and set in his ways.”

  “Are you two friends?”

  “I consider him a friend. I can’t speak for him.”

  For the first time she lowered the revolver completely and seemed to relax. “Okay, then. We have an agreement.”

  The meeting had been adjourned. I had been dismissed and I was eager to be on my way. Halfway up the hill she called after me. “Ben!”

  I stopped and turned in her direction.

  “I scream,” she shouted.

  “What?”

  She repeated herself. This time I understood. “Ice cream.”

  “Okay,” I shouted back.

  —

  I didn’t know what I had expected. I had a vague idea of what I’d hoped for, and that wasn’t a woman running from her husband. The gun didn’t bother me, not that I liked having it pointed at me. I was glad she had one and seemed to know how to use it.

  The husband was another matter. There had been a time in my life when I had drunk from that tainted water. It was simple then: I was thirsty and there was water in front of me. Or maybe I found an attractive body of water and it made me thirsty. Perhaps I had grown up. Maybe it was just a matter of being able to see the consequences, not just for me, but also for everyone else involved. When a spouse was cheating, or worse, when both spouses were cheating, the list of the injured was always long. What had begun as a provisional warning to myself had gradually evolved into a rule.

  In this case I didn’t need the rule to tell me what to do. Claire, if that was really her name, had made herself clear. I admired her for that. Even though she didn’t know me from Adam, she had told me her situation and how she felt. Directness, however unwelcome, is appreciated. Mr. Truck Driver, you may deliver ice cream. Claire hadn’t specified a flavor. It just so happened that I had several cases of butter brickle in the small refrigerated cubicle that had been custom-installed at the front of my trailer.

  Dan and Maureen McCauley had gotten pregnant again. The child would have been their fourth, but she miscarried. During Maureen’s first pregnancy she went through several half gallons of various flavors, which I delivered one at a time along with other things they needed for their family and the reptile refuge they ran several miles outside Rockmuse. She was still experimenting with flavors during the second pregnancy, but she quickly developed a taste for butter brickle. The news of her third pregnancy was announced not by a home pregnancy kit or a doctor, but by a sudden craving for butter brickle ice cream. Dan had a big grin on his face when he told me it was time to start delivering butter brickle again. I congratulated him. The next day I thought I’d corner the butter brickle market. The bulk discount increased my profit margin.

  Then the miscarriage. I couldn’t return the ice cream to the wholesaler. I didn’t have the heart to ask the McCauleys to pay and take the ice cream, or even bring the subject up. For the past two months $225 worth of butter brickle ice cream had been sitting in the fridge unit.

  That $225 would buy a lot of diesel. It also happened to be exactly a quarter of a month’s lease payment on my rig—I was currently in arrears on almost three months. Or two thirds of a month’s rent on my shabby duplex—I was one month behind on that. Or one-tenth of my Visa balance. Or…I hoped to hell Claire liked butter brickle ice cream. It would be ideal if she considered it an essential food group. If that happened I might quit asking God to please help the McCauleys get a new bun in the oven.

  As I hiked down from the arch, I saw Walt on the other side of 117, arms folded, leaning against his Vincent. His goggles were up on his forehead. He might have seen me walking down the hill from the arch. I couldn’t tell for sure if he had or hadn’t. He was directly across from my tractor-trailer, which might have blocked his view.

  I walked straight to my cab and opened the door. I had made a promise to the woman. If he had seen me and asked me what I was doing, I wasn’t sure what I would tell him. My best bet was to just keep walking. I had planned on getting the ice cream and taking it straight back to the woman. Walt’s appearance made me rethink that. It wasn’t like Walt to stop and want to talk. Or ask questions.

  The roadway was quiet. We were only fifty feet apart. Without moving from his motorcycle, Walt asked me if I had broken down.

  I got into the cab. Through the open window, I shouted, “No. You?”

  He answered that he hadn’t.

  I checked my mirrors and put my truck in gear. Walt hadn’t moved an inch. I shouted at him above the engine. “You like butter brickle ice cream?”

  “What?”

  The truck crept forward onto 117. Walt started to walk across the highway. I revved the engine, double-clicked through two gears, and left him behind in a haze of diesel exhaust. A minute later I was cresting the hill. Walt was standing in the middle of the road staring after me.

  The morning was half over and I hadn’t even made my first delivery. My trailer held, in addition to the ice cream, a crated John Deere tractor engine, twenty-seven five-gallon containers of DuPont Santa Fe red paint, forty coloring books, fifteen packages of crayons, a new windshield for the one and only Rockmuse postal vehicle, and ten cases—one thousand to a case—of Trojan condoms for the vending machine in the men’s room at the Rockmuse Shell station, a quantity I thought was overly optimistic on Hal’s part. Other freight included a metal carport kit, a Craftmatic adjustable bed, and a huge black plastic tub from a women’s apparel manufacturing company in St. Louis. The contents of the tub were identified as “Imaginative Clothing.” It weighed 253 pounds, which I thought was an obscene amount of imagination. The recipient was the middle-aged owner of the Rockmuse Collision Repair Center. Maybe there was a connection between the ten thousand prophylactics and the imaginative clothing, if I cared to think about it. I didn’t. Leave the mysteries alone. The only mystery I couldn’t ignore was how Ben’s Desert Moon Delivery Service was going to survive.

  It was well into evening by the time I reached the turnout to Desert Home. Too late to deliver the ice cream. I didn’t arrive back at the transfer station until nearly ten. By eleven I was asleep on my bed with my jeans and boots still on.

  At 4:30 a.m. I began another long day, to be followed by a long Thursday of downtime getting some long overdue engine maintenance. Even though I wouldn’t have the tractor much longer, I still didn’t want it to break down somewhere on 117. The loss of a day would make Friday even longer and that would begin an excruciatingly full weekend going over my accounts and trying to come up with a way to make ends meet. Or at least get them into the same time zone.

  Pulling the grade out of Price, I saw a new Ford sedan parked on the other side of 191, pointed west, toward town. The man inside was talking on his cell phone with his head turned away. The sunrise light flashed back to me off something in his ear. Probably an earring. He didn’t look like he was in trouble. I didn’t care if he was, especially since the outskirts of Price and a couple of gas stations were within fairly easy walking distance.

  Truckers I’ve talked with think their bad press started with the movie Thelma and Louise. My opinion was it started long before that; the movie only confirmed what the public thought they knew—all truckers were menacing, violent degenerates and sexual predators. This didn’t register with me until I came upon a disabled minivan ten years ago.

  Four young children were playing dangerously close to the sh
oulder. Mom was behind the wheel and Dad had his head under the hood. It was 106 degrees. I never found out what the trouble was, or even got a chance to ask. No sooner had I pulled over and jumped down out of the cab, on a steep uphill grade no less, to see if I could lend them a hand than Mom let out a scream I could hear a hundred yards away. She kept screaming until the kids scrambled back into the van. I couldn’t help but notice that Dad beat the kids into the van.

  A good fifty miles from the nearest services, 106 degrees, and they sat behind locked doors and closed windows and watched me hike to their van. I felt sorry for them. One look at their frightened faces told me there was nothing I could do, nothing they would let me do. The other truth was I felt a bit sorry for myself that I did an honest job and people who didn’t even know me were willing to die of heatstroke just to avoid me. After that incident, unless I recognized the vehicle or the driver, I passed by distressed motorists and hoped one of my good-hearted degenerate brethren with a radio or cell phone alerted the highway patrol.

  At the bottom of the grade, the highway dropped onto a long straight stretch. I saw a car with its hood up. This one had its emergency flashers on. The driver was cute as a button, not that I have ever given buttons much thought. This button had a mountain bike hanging from the trunk of her car and was dressed in hiking shorts and a tight mesh athletic top. I wasn’t going to stop. She, too, was within a healthy walk of Price, or a quick ride if she used her bicycle. She waved. When I didn’t slow, she stepped up near the shoulder and waved again. She was so close to the shoulder a small, unexpected gust of wind might have resulted in a button tragedy. I passed her and then pulled over and set the brakes and turned on the emergency lights.

  She was walking toward me as I walked toward her. When we were still a good way apart, she threw me a golly-gee-whiz smile and said, “I was afraid you weren’t going to stop. Thank you.”