The Never-Open Desert Diner

by James Anderson

  What could be the grim business of searching for Josh reminded me that I had needed a motorcycle to lose him. A motorcycle might be helpful in finding him.

  The hastily mended door to Walt’s shop was easy to open. I did it quietly without turning on a light. Taking the Victor without his permission would come with some sort of penalty—later. If I ended up finding Josh sooner and alive, whatever the penalty, it would be worth it.

  I pushed the Victor around the corner of the diner as Trooper Smith was getting out of a white highway patrol 4×4 pickup. He’d left the engine running and the lights on. There was a nod of approval, and between us we easily lifted the Victor into the bed of his pickup.

  Inside the truck, Andy asked, “Does Butterfield know you’re taking one of his children?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’ve borrowed it before.”

  “Is that the story behind your face?”

  “Actually,” I said, “it is. Different child.”

  Andy put the pickup in gear. “He ever let you borrow the Vincent?”

  I didn’t answer. I realized the Vincent hadn’t been in the workshop. There was only one reason it wouldn’t be with its siblings: Walt wasn’t back. I didn’t want to think about what could be keeping him. I began to slip from my perch on top of the world.

  “Where to?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” I said. “We’ll have to feel our way around in the dark for a while.” I told him to keep driving 117 east toward Rockmuse.

  The starlight helped, though not as much as daylight would have. Several times I had Andy slow and take side roads that led nowhere. Once, if not for the four-wheel drive, we would have been stuck in the mud.

  I hardly recognized the right road even when we found it. The ruts had widened and deepened to the point that they were impassable even with four-wheel drive. Many were the size of miniature canyons, still brimming with black water. Andy expertly avoided them by detouring out into the desert and paralleling the road. It was slow going. The Victor bounced hard against the fender wells in the bed of the pickup. It occurred to me I might have to use my blanket money to buy Walt a new Victor—if he let me live.

  After a particularly ugly jolt, the nose of the pickup took a steep dive forward and the front bumper buried itself into a wash still half full of runoff. We had to get out and dig to free the tires. We were both caked with mud when we got back inside the cab.

  “He followed you out here?”

  I didn’t answer.

  A few minutes later we were moving again and rejoined the road. Andy finished his thought, as I knew he would. “You led him out here on purpose, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t answer that question either. Somehow we made it to the burned-out ranch. Andy killed the engine. We sat for a few minutes in the darkness, listening to the pickup’s engine cool.

  “Consider this,” Andy said. “If that man is badly hurt or dead, you’re going to have to live with what you’ve done. You pointed this desert at him like a gun. Why wouldn’t you just get out of your truck and tell him to get lost all by himself? You’d phrase it differently. I’m sure of that.”

  “Coulda-woulda-shoulda,” I said. “The captain tell you about the cello and maybe some bad men?”

  “Every law enforcement agency in the area has an eye out.”

  “Maybe Josh ran afoul of them? You think of that? Maybe there’s another explanation that doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “You just keeping telling yourself what you need to hear, Ben. You might get lucky. For the record, you’re a better man than the one who did this.”

  I didn’t feel like a better man. I was thinking of Walt and the missing Vincent. And Claire. The money, even Ginny’s return, couldn’t elevate my mood.

  The Victor refused to start. Its exhaust sputtered a rich gasoline haze in the turnaround. We put it back in the bed of the pickup. Andy and I started walking east about a hundred feet apart. Each of us had a pack with flares and a medical kit. There was a search grid in my head. About a half mile out I still smelled the burned gas and oil of the Victor. After maybe another quarter of a mile the odor had taken on a bitterness that I knew was not from the motorcycle: it was the acrid stench of burning rubber. There was one other odor that was like that. Burning flesh. What I smelled could have been a little of both.

  Andy was the first to come upon the charred wreckage of the Jeep. It had hit one of the domes of rocks that sprouted up at random, and then rolled a short distance down an embankment and landed on its passenger side, where it had caught fire. The ragtop had been burned away along with the dashboard. Andy shone his flashlight into what was left of the driver’s seat. It was empty.

  “That might be good news,” he said.

  We moved in expanding circles away from the crash site. Josh had made it several hundred feet from the Jeep. We followed articles of burned clothing. He had crawled to high ground and was crumpled beneath a scrub pine wearing only his underwear and socks.

  He was unconscious and on the living side of death. Probably not by much. Andy and I worked quickly to cover him with thermal blankets and check him for obvious injuries. His pulse was weak. The broken leg was obvious. A thick stream of blood had pooled at the base of his skull. It was still three hours or more until dawn. Andy set splints around Josh’s neck, back, and leg. All of the splints had to be improvised from scrub pine. I lit flares and watched Andy take off in the direction of the highway patrol pickup to see if he could radio dispatch to send help. If not, he would have to drive to the diner to use the phone.

  Josh moaned. I knelt beside him, patting his lips and face with water from the canteen I carried.

  He opened his eyes and tried to speak. After I got a little water down his throat, he tried again and began to cough. I thought he’d lost consciousness again when he said with a hoarse whisper, “I knew you’d come back.”

  “Sure,” I said. “The world can’t afford to lose even one luthier.” I said luthier, but I was thinking father and husband.

  “You know?”

  “I had the displeasure of meeting your father-in-law.” I asked Josh not to talk and reassured him he was going to be fine. With any luck he was reassured. I wasn’t. Beneath the dirt on his face he was badly burned, and not from the sun. There were also burns on his chest, arms, and legs. Internal bleeding and head trauma were both possibilities.

  He took a few more sips of water. “This is water, isn’t it?”

  “What else would it be?”

  “The sweat off your balls.” His weak laugh turned into a cough that spewed blood down his chin.

  The headlights of the highway patrol pickup swept the dark sky above our heads. Andy parked at the edge of the embankment and made his way carefully over the uneven ground toward us. The look on his face told me he hadn’t had any luck raising the dispatcher.

  “It might take too much time to drive to the diner to call Life Flight,” he said. “We’ll have to risk taking him with us.”

  We dumped the Victor over the side of the pickup and replaced it with Josh, who had lost consciousness again. During the long, slow ride back to the diner I stayed in the bed with Josh. I was there to keep his body stabilized and as comfortable as possible. It was all I could do to keep us both from bouncing out of the truck.

  Just before dawn the Life Flight helicopter landed in the middle of 117 in front of the diner. Andy had been forced to use the pay phone. 117 had lived up to its reputation for spitefulness when it came to modern communications. Andy and I watched its flashing lights approach in the clear predawn sky. Shortly after it landed, Captain Dunphy arrived in a cruiser. He had his blue and white light bar going but had dispensed with the siren. Welper was with him.

  Welper hovered over Josh as the paramedics transferred him from the pickup to a gurney. Josh was semiconscious. That didn’t stop Welper from swearing at him, calling him a stupid son of a bitch. I was standing nearby. Welper suddenly turned and rushed me, s
winging wildly. He was easily blocked. I slapped him hard and he staggered backward. Dunphy put himself between us. Welper had already lost his taste to continue, at least with his fists. His mouth was still at it.

  “I told you what would happen if any harm came to my son-in-law.”

  Dunphy told him to shut up.

  “You know where to find me,” I said.

  Welper turned on Dunphy. “You, too,” he said. “You won’t be able to protect him. This wouldn’t have happened if you’d done your job in the interrogation room.”

  Dunphy dismissed Welper as easily as I had the wild swings.

  One of the medics shouted over the rhythmic beating of the chopper blades. He waved me to come over. I leaned inside the open door. He pulled the oxygen away from Josh’s face. With my ear next to his lips, I could barely hear what Josh said. The medic replaced the mask. I shouted for Welper. Once he was inside, the chopper took off. The three of us watched it speed across the horizon as the first yellow rays of daybreak rose behind us.

  Dunphy was the first to break the new silence. “What was that all about?”

  “Josh wanted to tell me something,” I said. The captain waited for me to say more. I obliged him. “Nothing much. Sort of a thank-you, I guess.”

  Andy shook his head. “I hope he makes it.” Andy and the captain both had the same thought and looked at the diner. Andy said, “With all this racket in his front yard I can’t believe Butterfield hasn’t come out.”

  Dunphy said, “Let’s get out of here before he does.”

  We all got in our vehicles. The captain and Trooper Smith churned up the gravel and were gone. I sat in my pickup waiting for the heater to give me some warm air and prayed, or whatever nonbelievers do, that Josh would survive. I did like him. I looked out my window into the empty sky and smiled. Josh’s parting, but I hoped not final, words to me were, “At least I’m not swinging from a cargo net.”

  I wanted nothing more than to see Walt walk out of the diner. I knew he wouldn’t. He wasn’t there. In case I was wrong and he had returned, I went to the Quonset to see if the Vincent was there. It wasn’t.

  Though it made no sense, I searched the workshop, halfheartedly checking such unlikely places for a motorcycle as beneath his workbench, among the crates of motorcycle parts, even in the tiny restroom where the corpse over the commode grinned at me as if it knew where the Vincent and Walt were. We stared each other down for a long minute. The corpse won.

  I stood outside the restroom and glanced at some of the boxes I had delivered a few weeks earlier, plus another one that had been delivered by DHL more recently. They had been set apart and stacked in the rear of the Quonset. There had been more.

  The names on the return addresses caught my attention. All were Chun-Ja. I knew who Chun-Ja was now. The cartons had to be how Claire had managed to get the cello out of New York to Utah, except none of them were big enough to hold a cello. Welper was right. She couldn’t have just put something that size in an envelope and mailed it to herself. It wasn’t as if she could buy carrier insurance to cover a twenty-million-dollar cello. It didn’t really matter. The cello was on its way back to New York. Whatever was in the remaining cartons wasn’t any of my business.

  The trail across the road from the diner was a muddy, slippery mess from the rains. So was I. Partway down I stopped and watched the sun begin to rise over Claire’s house. I wanted it to still be Claire’s house. Patience might be the better part of virtue; I no longer cared about either. From where I stood I couldn’t see the front of the house where Dennis’s compact SUV had been parked. I made my way down the slippery trail past Bernice’s grave and stayed high on the hillside until I got a good view of the house.

  The SUV was gone. There was no sign of Walt or Claire. One or both would know I was nearby. I waited for a couple minutes and approached the house. The green metal chair sat on the front porch.

  The front door was open wide to the sunrise. Inside was quiet and cool. My mind raced trying to come up with logical and trivial explanations for Claire’s absence, and Walt’s. Perhaps they were on the Vincent together. I saw one of Claire’s turquoise cowboy boots. It lay off to the side of the bare living room floor not far from where I’d first seen Claire teasing her silent music out of the red light.

  Something crunched under my boots—a few large splinters of dark wood. I picked them up and rolled them between my fingers. I held the boot in my other hand. I returned to the kitchen, hearing my own footsteps echo behind me as if someone were following. I was alone.

  I stood at the kitchen window where Claire had first seen me. The happiness didn’t last. My eyes lifted toward the southern horizon, where the new sun sliced through strands of deep shadows hugging the brown desert floor, probably mud from the night’s hard rain.

  It was just a blink, a shimmering glint of metal that disappeared as quickly as it appeared. I placed the boot and the splinters on the counter, walked outside, and stood beneath the kitchen window with my back to the wall. When I saw the metal again I began running toward it, stopping to resight and adjust my route before running again. It appeared so close. Each time I stopped it seemed to get farther away. The sun was rising quickly. I ran faster, knowing the changing angle of the light could extinguish the reflection at any moment.

  I came to an abrupt stop at the edge of the reservoir. I tried to catch my breath and bent over. When I looked up it was gone. I closed and opened my eyes and imagined the location where the reflection had last appeared, between two rocky peaks, to the left of an alluvial fan, to the right of some scrub brush. I jogged faster, my lungs burning, my eyes focused on what I couldn’t see.

  A quarter of a mile up a muddy wash, the gouge in the desert deepened until the walls were above my head. It was possible I could have passed by and never seen the small strip of chrome caught between rocks above my head. It looked like a strip of car window molding.

  Farther up, the wash forked. Always staying to my right, following the downslope of the watershed, the wash divided itself into a labyrinth of cavernous scars. I sloshed through the shallow water. The high sun beat down on the desert floor several feet above me.

  The SUV stood improbably balanced on its grille, the hood half buried in the mud and its ass end pointed to the sky like it had been dropped from a great height. It was disguised as a large mound of wet dirt and debris. From ten feet away it would have been impossible to identify. From the rim it would have been impossible to even see. The driver’s-side window was open. A lifeless hand dangled from its edge. I reached down and felt for a pulse. There was no one around to introduce me to what had been Claire’s husband.

  The inside of the SUV was filled to its headliner with oozing mud and rocks. His neck was enclosed in muck, along with most of his face. There were finger-shaped gouges in the thick mud near his chest. Someone had tried to dig him out. I continued down the wash for several hundred feet shouting Claire’s name. That was when I saw Walt, encased in mud. His body was embedded upright in the side of the arroyo wall. He faced forward as if he were emerging from a door beneath the desert.

  I dropped to my knees. His eyes opened, their sockets white and expressionless holes. Moments passed as I carved him out with my hands. I jerked him free from his tomb. We tumbled together into the shallow water. Fine silt bubbled from between his lips. Walt coughed. His mouth erupted with the stink of bloody water and mud. His lips moved to form my name.

  I looked up and down the arroyo. Claire had to be nearby. I could almost feel her. Walt groaned and coughed up more darkness. The flash flood must have been like being caught in a churning wall of water, rocks, and mud. It had to have been Walt who tried to save Dennis, digging wildly with his fingers even as the second wave of water rushed toward him. If Claire was nearby, she probably hadn’t survived, but I couldn’t be sure. I left Walt and slogged up the muddy arroyo searching for her. I didn’t want to stop, but Walt was still alive, and if I got him out he might stay that way. I returned to Walt.<
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  He was old but as densely packed with muscle as a young man. I hoisted him over my shoulder and stumbled back the way I had come. As we passed the SUV I heard a faint voice cry for help. It sounded like Claire. In that moment any voice I heard would have sounded like Claire’s. Between my failing strength and my hurry to locate Claire, I could have been more delicate in shedding Walt’s weight. He grunted when he hit the ground. I shouted her name as I scrambled across the wash to the SUV.

  It wasn’t Claire. It was Dennis. “Where is she?” I demanded.

  His unfocused eyes rolled. “Help me. Please.”

  I slapped him and asked again. I got the same answer. I put my lips so close to his face I got sand in my mouth. “Tell me where she is or I will let you die.”

  He either didn’t know or was too injured to understand my question. Or he didn’t want to answer. Behind me Walt vomited again and rolled onto his side. I couldn’t try to save them both. My guess was that Dennis wasn’t going to make it no matter what I did.

  No sooner had I begun to lift Walt to my shoulders than Dennis spoke again, clearly and with purpose. I lowered Walt, this time with more care. I stood at the window. “I’ll make you more comfortable if you tell me where Claire is. That’s the best I can do.”

  He replied with two words. “The cello.”

  “What about it?”

  “Save the cello,” he said.

  Disgusted, I said, “Save it yourself.”

  His next words surprised me. “Are you Ben?”

  “Yes,” I said. There was only one person who could have told him about me.

  I wanted his final words to say something, anything about Claire. That wasn’t what I got. He was dying and confused. What little he said was more than I could stand to hear. His last words were to her: “You shouldn’t have done it, Claire.”

  He choked, and his last breath escaped from him.

  Getting Walt to the rim of the wash was a struggle. When I finally succeeded, I saw the Vincent a hundred yards away, flat on its side near the edge of the meandering arroyo. I used my belt to strap Walt in front of me and fought a constant battle to shift gears and balance his dead weight as we made the long, rough journey back.