The Never-Open Desert Diner

by James Anderson

  “And what do you get?” I asked.

  “Me?” He acted as if he had totally forgotten he was in the room. “Oh, me? I don’t get anything. The company would get a lot of free publicity. It’s going to happen, Ben. With or without you.”

  “Just a ride-along?”

  “That’s it.”

  “When would I get paid?”

  “The day the producer climbs into your cab.”

  I reminded him that ride-alongs were expressly prohibited by insurance carriers.

  “We’d take care of that,” he assured me. “A full release, even covering gross negligence.”

  “The company vouches for him? This all checks out?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  I couldn’t keep myself from asking, “Why me? I’m not even really an employee. I’m a contractor, remember? And don’t tell me it’s because you like me and want to help me out.”

  Time for the earnest puppy. I had to resist looking at his ass to see if his tail was wagging.

  “No one does quite what you do, Ben.” He paused for effect and repeated, “No one.”

  I put on my best aw-shucks face.

  “There isn’t another place in the country with a driver who has the unique relationship you have with us, or you have with your customers. And I am thinking of you. Everyone here is on salary, except you.” He knew he had me, or thought he did, and decided to toss all he had into the pot. “Your contract comes up for renewal next year, doesn’t it?”

  He knew damn well it did.

  “If this goes well it might make renewing your contract a lock. Possibly get you a better contract. If you don’t want the opportunity, just say so.” He lowered his head and clasped his hands. “Hell, Ben, this will help all of us. You’re all alone out there on 117.”

  That was the second time I’d heard that since entering the building. It made me think.

  I waited. Better than Broadway. This was the big production finale. He raised his head and lowered his voice. “You and I both know there’s a good chance you won’t survive financially until the end of the year unless you get a miracle. Maybe not until the end of the month.”

  In case I might have forgotten, he reminded me I was about to lose my rig back to the leasing company.

  “Here’s your miracle, Ben. All you have to say right now is yes.”

  “No,” I said, not quite believing what I heard coming out of my mouth.

  He was so certain he had persuaded me, my refusal caught him in midsmile with his hand already reaching for mine to seal the deal. “What?”

  “Let me think about it over the weekend. When do you have to know?”

  “He’ll be here Monday, but—”

  “Then I’ll let you know on Monday morning.”

  He stood up and walked back behind his desk. “Never mind. I’ll just get someone else.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, not moving from my chair. I let him examine my teeth for a change. “If they wanted someone else, you would have already talked to that person by now. Your headquarters VP asked for me, didn’t he? You didn’t have anything to do with it. I’ll bet you tried to sell them on every driver but me. Right, Bob? It’s okay to call you Bob now, isn’t it?”

  “You want more money?”

  “No,” I said. “I need more money. Five hundred won’t save my ass. I won’t do it for just a piece of a life raft. Let me tell you what I think. These television people want lonely roads and colorful characters with goddamn purple sagebrush and sunsets because they’ve done the amber waves of grain and ice roads to fucking death. Maybe the company volunteered me because I’m expendable. I can embarrass myself without embarrassing the company. If I don’t play well they can say, he’s not us. So, Bob, I need to think about it until at least Monday before deciding if I’m going to open up myself and all my customers to reality television—that’s what we’re talking about. Right, Bob? Parading us in front of America for some cheap laughs and cheaper tears.”

  The appearance of the woman on the highway started to make sense. Those perfect fingernails said something about her. What they said had nothing to do with dinosaurs and mountain biking. “And tell that television woman she better not step in front of my truck again,” I said. “See you on Monday, Bob.”

  He dropped his ass into his ergonomically designed leather chair.

  “On second thought,” I added, “I’ll call you. Just say yes, Bob.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it your way. Stupid and stubborn. Just think about what you have to gain—and lose. You and 117 were made for each other.”

  While that might have been true, it wasn’t what he meant. “Monday, then,” I said, and headed toward the door.

  “One more thing,” he said. “Corporate sent in some IT guys. Were you on the company computer a few mornings ago? The one in dispatch?”

  For the first time in our conversation, I raised my voice. “Don’t start with me about the fucking computer, Bob. I can use it. It’s in my contract.”

  He pushed his chair backward and raised his open palms. “Whoa, Ben. Take it easy. The IT guys were here. They were curious. I said I’d ask you. That system was installed five years ago. You’ve used it maybe twice before. I was just wondering if someone else had logged in with your user name and password. That’s all.”

  “I was checking the weather report,” I said. It was the first thing I thought of. I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him I had developed a passing interest in cellos that had already passed. Everyone would get a laugh out of that. “This time of year 117 can wash out,” I said. “Simple. That okay with you, Bob?”

  When he didn’t say anything, I walked out the door and breezed by the receptionist. The look on her prissy little face told me she was two digits into dialing 911.

  I was halfway down the hall. Bob shouted after me, “What woman?”

  I walked by the drivers’ lounge just as the handlebar mustache was coming out. “Do me a favor, Howard?”

  He asked me what.

  “You got a cell phone with a camera?”

  He nodded. “Sure,” he said.

  “You see that woman again, will you take her picture?”

  “Without her knowing? I guess I could do that. Why?”

  “I think I have an idea what she was up to this morning. In case it’s more serious than that, and something happens to me out on 117, show that photo to the highway patrol and tell them what we talked about.”

  He agreed.

  We walked out into the transfer yard together without any further conversation.

  It was dark by the time I reached my duplex. It had been a dark drive. The inside of my duplex was dark. If I had ever locked the place it would have been tough to find the keyhole. I’d lost the keys years before, back when I used to drink. Back then I couldn’t get the key into the lock under a searchlight. I tried to remember the last time I had paid the electric bill. I held my breath while I fumbled for the light switch.

  She was stretched out in my La-Z-Boy recliner snoring softly. The leg rest was up as high as it would go. There were small irregular holes on the worn bottoms of her pink high-top Converse Chuck Taylors. I concentrated on the shoes. I didn’t care to extend my sight to her dark skirt, which was unfastened and hiked up in a bunch at her waist. The white tub of her belly was suspended beneath it. Below that were her laced fingers.

  I covered her up with an old red Indian blanket off my bed and opened the refrigerator to see if the food fairy had stopped by. It hadn’t. What few containers there were inside had reached the age of consent. I closed the door. She snuggled deeper under the blanket with a contented whimper.

  The kitchen counter was littered with the signs of Ginny’s foraging. She had gone through a mostly full jar of peanut butter and a whole box of saltines, and a cube of butter. My eyes followed the trail of white crumbs from the counter across the shabby carpet to the La-Z-Boy.

  The last time that blanket had covered a baby, I was the i
nfant. My mother abandoned me wrapped in that blanket at the clinic on the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon. It was the only possession I’d had my whole life, and it had held up well over the years, through two foster homes until I was six years old, then stayed with me when I was adopted. Now it covered two babies, one inside the other.

  My living room, dining room, and kitchen were all one room. I took out a ruled tablet and hunted down a pencil before grabbing the cheap accordion folder with all my bills, past due notices, and accounts receivable. It was a thick, disorganized file. I reached into the folder and withdrew a random handful of papers and dropped them on the little kitchen table. Aces and eights. There was one unopened envelope from the IRS requesting payment for the last two quarters of estimated income tax, plus three threatening letters from the leasing company about my truck. I took the envelope I had received from Robert A. Fulwiler, Station Supervisor, and tossed it onto the pile. A busted flush.

  Ginny moaned in her sleep. Her hands moved under the blanket, probably trying to lift her stomach for a little relief from the weight. That blanket, as far as I knew, hadn’t been cleaned since it was made. I couldn’t even guess when that had been. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the older, childless couple who adopted me, had been savvy enough to never touch the blanket.

  The subject of cleaning the blanket came up only once, at dinner a year or so after the adoption was final. Mrs. Jones said she would like to have my blanket cleaned for me. I told her something bad would happen to her if she ever touched that blanket. The two of them just nodded. A threat from a seven-year-old was serious if not dangerous. I asked them if they were Indians, too. Mrs. Jones said she wasn’t, that she was just an old woman. Mr. Jones, a quiet man who rarely spoke and never raised his voice, volunteered that it wasn’t a question he ever thought about one way or the other.

  They asked me if I thought about it much, being Indian. I don’t think I had, at least until I left the reservation school and came to live with them in Utah. In no uncertain terms I told them never to forget I was an Indian. Something I thought only because I had been with Indians at an Indian school, though without any tribal affiliation. Not having a tribe, and with no parents, I was an outcast.

  Years later, in my early twenties, I tried to find out something about my birth parents. A retired nurse’s aide I’d reached by phone in Seattle told me she was at the clinic the morning they discovered me. There was no note. She did remember that someone thought they had seen a young female, a Jewish social worker or college student, on the porch early that morning. The young woman had been volunteering at a reservation mental health clinic several miles away.

  The nurse’s aide said, “One of the bucks probably had at her. Poor thing.”

  I asked her if anyone had ever tried to locate the young woman.

  “No,” she said, in a hurry to end the conversation. “Or if they did, I didn’t know about it. No one kept real records of volunteers on the reservation in those days. Every young person and their bleeding-heart brother wanted to help the noble savages.”

  “So, you don’t really know if I’m Indian or not?”

  “There are no Indians anymore, Mr. Jones. Just Native Americans. You had a head of thick coarse black hair and black eyes and reddish skin. You were a big newborn. Over thirteen pounds as I recall. If your mother gave birth to you alone, as I suspect she did, she had a tough go of it. That’s all I can tell you.”

  She hung up without saying good-bye or wishing me luck.

  That was all I ever knew. Maybe my father was Indian and maybe my mother was Jewish, which I guessed meant white. Over the years my hair turned dark brown, though it was still coarse and thick, and my skin darkened into a perpetual tan. I grew to six foot three, an unnatural height for either Native American or Jew. To my way of thinking, the only thing left that made me an Indian, or Native American, was that red blanket, and it was, if only in that way, just an old red blanket to me. After that conversation with the retired nurse’s aide, I just let it all alone.

  Ginny was looking at me through one sleepy eye. “Sorry, Ben. Don’t be mad at me, please?”

  I told her I wasn’t mad, but she couldn’t stay with me. No discussion. I winked at her, and added, “But that kid of yours is going to be mad. Don’t be surprised if he, or she, bears a strong resemblance to a Reese’s peanut butter cup.”

  She opened both eyes and stretched. “What time is it?”

  I told her it was about eight. “When do you have to be at work?”

  She yawned and closed her eyes. “Pretty soon. Did you have a chance to talk to anyone about a second job for me?”

  Before I could answer she was snoring again.

  When she left for work I was asleep, my head on a pillow of papers strewn over the dining table. It was three o’clock in the morning and I was hungry enough to wish I’d kept some of the Lacey brothers’ jalapeño corn bread birthday cake. Out of habit I opened the refrigerator door again, not expecting anything to be different. But it was. The food fairy had come after all, the pregnant teenage food fairy. While I had slept Ginny must have made a run to a grocery store. I had bread and eggs and four new cubes of butter. On the clean counter was a new jar of peanut butter and a bag of ground coffee. The saltine crumbs were nowhere to be seen, the knife was washed and put away, the sink scoured, and the empty jar of peanut butter thrown in the trash.

  I turned and looked at the empty recliner. “I don’t care,” I said. “You can’t stay here.” Then I noticed the red blanket was gone. I found it in the bedroom, folded in thirds across the end of my bed. Within a minute I was also folded across the bed, still dressed and still hungry, but filled with the pleasant anticipation of a hot breakfast when I woke up, which I hoped wouldn’t be for a long time. The appointment with the truck shop wasn’t until ten a.m.

  Almost all of Thursday was eaten up in the lounge of the shop as the mechanic divided his time between my maintenance job and the drop-ins with quick-fix emergencies. I drank coffee and thumbed through years’-old issues of Vanity Fair, Guns & Ammo, Esquire, Easyriders, and People. They all covered topics of great interest to someone else who had way more money than I ever would. Usually I spent my time stewing over my finances, which is mostly what I thought about all day Friday as I made deliveries along 117.

  I left the duplex only twice during the weekend; once on Saturday to get a new pencil and once on Sunday to buy a cheap digital calculator. The first pencil hadn’t been working for me. I did pretty well in my math classes in high school, but the figures that kept coming up didn’t make any sense.

  The calculator didn’t help. The numbers only got worse. If everyone who owed me money paid me, I was still over $30,000 in debt: $32,963.18 by pencil; $33,102.03 by calculator. I needed over $22,000 just to come current. Strips of adding-machine tape and balls of wadded-up paper lay everywhere from the dining room to the bedroom. A few had even made it into the bathroom.

  There was nothing I could do but give Robert A. Fulwiler his yes. It was like grabbing onto a life preserver that was attached to an anchor. The thought of sharing my life and the lives of the people on 117 with a film crew and a television audience made me ill. I couldn’t do it. I had to. My customers wouldn’t stand for it either. Most of them didn’t own television sets or computers, though that wouldn’t matter to them. They lived where they did and the way they did because they liked it that way. Whatever trust we shared would disappear the moment they saw a camera. I was calling from the phone booth outside the diner. “Let me put you on speakerphone,” Bob said. “Mr. Arrons is here with me. Did I hear you say you’ll do it?”

  “Josh Arrons here.” The voice sounded like it was coming from the other end of a tunnel. “We have a deal, then?”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t have shit.”

  “Then why are we talking?”

  “You can do the ride-along. With a signed release. And a thousand—a day. In cash.”

  “Can’t do it, Mr. Jones.”

 
Bob broke in. “Jesus, Ben. A thousand a day to sit in your damn truck?”

  “No, Bob,” I answered. “It’s only a hundred a day to ride in my truck. But it’s nine hundred to be sitting next to me while I drive it.”

  “Okay, Mr. Jones,” the distant voice said, “I’ll pay fifty for your truck and seven hundred for you. Take it or leave it.”

  I thought it over. “Okay,” I said.

  “Now do we have a deal?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet. Three-day minimum. Four-day maximum. You stay inside the cab when I make my deliveries. You don’t talk to my customers. You don’t take anyone’s photo but mine. But I’d prefer you didn’t. You violate our agreement in any way, or just piss me off, I’ll dump your television ass in the desert without so much as the sweat off my balls to drink.”

  No one said anything for several seconds. “All right,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I’ll agree.”

  “Then write it up just like we agreed,” I said. “Meet me at the transfer station at five a.m. tomorrow morning. If you’re one minute late, I’ll oil-spot you.”

  Mr. Arrons wanted clarification from Bob on what “oil-spotting” meant.

  “That means if you’re late he’ll leave you behind like an oil spot.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “Have you worked in television before?” He laughed immediately and Bob joined him.

  I didn’t know why Mr. Josh Arrons was laughing, and I would have bet that Robert A. Fulwiler, Station Supervisor, didn’t either. It didn’t matter to Bob that he didn’t know what he was laughing at.

  It mattered to me. I hung up.

  I hadn’t sold my soul. I had just agreed to accept a down payment for a test drive. No commitment. No promises. In all those stories about people who sold their souls to the devil, I never quite understood why the devil was the bad guy, or why it was okay to screw him out of his soul. They got what they wanted: fame, money, love, whatever—though usually it turned out not to be what they really wanted or expected. Was that the devil’s fault? I never thought so. Like John Wayne said, “Life is tough. It’s even tougher when you’re stupid.”