The Never-Open Desert Diner

by James Anderson

  In his room I lowered him onto his bed. I noticed long furrows through the dried dirt on his face. Tears. After a couple of attempts to speak, he said, “I fell asleep.”

  To Walt Butterfield those few words had to have been the most painful he had ever uttered. They were a revelation and admission that he was, as I long suspected and he feared, human after all. It didn’t matter that he was an old man, or that he had spent hours in the sun and wind, and more hours in darkness with the wind and blinding rain as he looked down on the house and Claire. In the case of Bernice it was bad timing. Still unacceptable, but not this. He had simply fallen asleep as any tired human being might have done hours earlier. He had failed. In Walt’s world there was no greater failure than a man’s inability to protect those he loved. There were no excuses, no pardons. I had no doubt in my mind that he loved Claire, even if she wasn’t his daughter.

  I asked Walt if he wanted me to take him to the hospital or call an ambulance. He shook his head. He knew his decision might result in his death. It was a decision I was bound to honor. I didn’t agree, though I understood. Death might be what he wanted, even what he had longed for since that evening at the diner so many years ago.

  The sun was already low in the sky when I headed back to the SUV in my pickup. I didn’t hold out much hope of finding Claire, alive or dead, but I had to try. My only other reason for returning was to mark its location for the highway patrol and search and rescue. If I didn’t get there before dark it might be weeks before search teams found the site. My exhaustion was complete. I begged God for a miracle, even though two miracles had already been granted. Claire might still be alive.

  Only a couple hours of direct sunlight remained by the time I arrived. I used an hour of it searching for Claire before I finally gave up. I tied red grease rags to nearby scrubs that clung to the top of the arroyo and finished just as I heard the first rumble of thunder and saw clouds building to the east. From where I stood above the SUV, I thought I saw the tuning pegs of the cello jutting up above the mud-filled rear cargo area of the vehicle. Dennis had told me to save the cello. I wondered if I should. Along with the desert night the new threat of rain meant the possibility the SUV would be swept away again. It might be lost forever or completely destroy the cello.

  I took the tire iron from my pickup and labored to pry open the exposed back hatch door of the SUV. There was too much inside pressure from the mud. In a fit of foolishness, I braced my back against the embankment and used my legs to push the vehicle upright onto its tires. Dennis’s head slumped through the open window.

  In a rush against time, I swung the tire iron as hard as I could against the rear cargo window. The broken window released the pressure with an explosion of mud, and the tailgate popped open. The mud flowed out and exposed the back of the cello. I carefully dug the cello loose from the rocks and mud. The cello should have been freed enough to be pulled out. Something held it in place. I tried lifting it straight up. It came loose from the mud with a sucking sound. The something that had been holding it down was a turquoise boot. The boot was still lodged in the hole it had made. Claire, in a rage, must have driven its pointed toe into the delicate face of the cello. Beneath the cello was Claire.

  I stared at her face in the dark oozing interior of the SUV. The cello had shielded her enough that most of her upper body was clear of dirt and water. A needle of sunlight moved across her eyes. She blinked and took a full, painful breath.

  “Ben,” she whispered.

  I pushed the cello out of the way. Her breath was irregular. She exhaled air in shallow gasps. The cello had kept her alive but I feared the tremendous weight of mud and rock had crushed her chest and heart. I dug furiously with my fingers to free her, and as gently as possible lifted her out of the cargo compartment and carried her into the cool shadow of the arroyo. It took all my strength and balance to run up the slippery embankment with Claire cradled in my arms. We reached the top just as the first new trickles of water began to fill the arroyo in advance of another flash flood.

  I slid her light body across the front seat of my pickup. I still held the turquoise boot in one hand. I let it drop to the floorboard. Claire reached for my face. “Take me home,” she said.

  Thunder and lightning chased us as I sped across the desert, dodging rocks and gashes cut by the rains. Her body slumped against mine. I wrapped my right arm around her to lessen the blows to her body. The pickup shook and rattled as I raced toward Desert Home and 117.

  The setting sun pushed through a thin layer of pink clouds to the west as the desert in front of us began to sink into shades of yellow. The rain clouds disappeared and the eastern sky opened. Claire’s body relaxed against mine. Rounding the edge of the reservoir, I pulled her closer and kissed her black hair.

  I slowed down then and drove slowly until we stopped in front of the porch.

  “We’re home,” I said, gazing out through the dusk at the dark porch. “You know,” I said, “the first thing I notice about a house, any house, is its windows. Then its porch—whether it has one and what direction it faces. I am partial to east. Any desert dweller will tell you, the true beauty of a desert sunset can only be appreciated by looking in the opposite direction.”

  My eyes settled for a moment on the single green metal chair. “It’s nice if there is a comfortable chair on the porch. The last thing that might catch my eye is the roof. I don’t like a roof that’s too pitched. If I want a hat I’ll buy a hat. A sharp-pitched roof has always put me off for some reason. How about you?”

  I buried Claire next to her mother.

  It was a rare, cool afternoon in August, ten weeks to the day since Claire died. I sat on the porch of the house in Desert Home. In my hand I held a small, unopened package posted to Walt from New York, from Chun-Ja. I also held a letter I had read several times. It was from a law firm and had been sent to Chun-Ja in care of Walter Butterfield. Both had been sent by U.S. mail, where they waited patiently at the post office for Walt.

  I’d picked up the two custom headstones I had ordered weeks earlier and spent the morning installing them over the graves. My plan was to bury the package and envelope beneath Claire’s headstone. When the time came I changed my mind.

  I expected Preach to appear beneath the archway. On my way into Price the previous evening I had spotted him at the junction of U.S. 191 making camp for the night. I asked him if he’d drop by and perform a little religious service for me. He said he would. I drew him a map.

  The discovery and sale of my blanket was big news in Price and, to a lesser extent, Utah and nationally. For a town the size of Price with only one small newspaper, the word of big money spreads faster than the Word of God, which has pretty much always been the case everywhere. It was big money, more than anyone expected, especially Ginny and me.

  I’d sold it to a museum in Taos for $153,000. It wasn’t the highest offer, but it was an Indian-run museum. The curator, an old Pueblo man, told me up front I’d have to carry a loan for about $50,000 until they could raise the rest of the money. He said he’d draw up the paperwork. I told him we could just shake on it. I’d trust him. He nodded his gratitude.

  Maybe it was less an issue of trust than the fact that the blanket was, in a way, going home. That and maybe taking something on faith eased my guilt about selling my mother’s only gift. Except, given the circumstances, she might have thought giving me up was a gift of sorts.

  For a brief time the news of the blanket and my story brought idiots out of the woodwork. I received several letters from men and women claiming to be either my father or mother. One of them may well have been telling the truth. I never answered any of them.

  Hollywood called after I got my phone turned back on. A man identifying himself as a reality show producer said he wanted to do a show following me as I tracked down my parents. “The Native American angle will really sell it,” he said. That was a while ago. His ears were probably still ringing from my well-considered two-word response.

&nb
sp; I used a chunk of the money to buy the headstones, one for Claire and one for Duncan Lacey, even though I knew Duncan wasn’t his real name. Neither was the name on Claire’s headstone.

  Captain Dunphy had been tipped off by an anonymous caller about the two Laceys with hints they might have a criminal past. By the time highway patrol got out to the Lacey place, what with Josh in the hospital and the cello madness, Fergus had killed himself. They found him hanging from a steel crossbeam in his boxcar home. Shortly after that the full story of the Laceys came out—their true identities and what they had done. It wasn’t even serious news by then. The newspaper printed the story in a single column next to a big advertisement for fresh cherries and beef brisket. Afterward no one cared what I did with Duncan. I’d more or less promised to give him a decent burial. I intended to do just that. He had company. Good company.

  Claire was another story. No one knew what had happened to her or the cello. That suited me just fine. I had notified the highway patrol of where I had seen the SUV. After two days of rains and flash floods, it took them a couple of weeks to finally relocate it. The animals and weather, combined with the constant friction against rock, had removed most of Dennis from the driver’s seat. The body might just as well have gone through a hundred wash cycles with a load of gravel.

  The cello, or what was left of it, was still in the back, broken and caked in mud. Ralph Welper was a happy man, though only for a week. The cello in the back of the SUV turned out not to be the del Gesù cello. It was a good copy that Claire had commissioned in the two months she was playing nice with Dennis.

  John waved to me from the archway. I waved back and watched him walk down the hill toward me, his back slightly hunched as if he were still pulling his cross. He hadn’t asked me what kind of religious service it would be. He just solemnly replied that he would be there. If he’d known it was a funeral service he might have asked the name of the departed. Maybe not. He knew Duncan’s body had been released to me. He knew nothing about Claire, and the name on the headstone wouldn’t change that.

  I placed the letter and the package on the porch. We shook hands, and I led him behind the house up the trail to the little grotto. “Here they are,” I said. “Could you say a few words?”

  The big man took his time reading the headstones. He started on the far right and worked his way left. First he read the worn words from Bernice’s stone. He sounded out the Korean slowly. “Chun-Ja.” Next came “Yun-Ja, Beloved Daughter.” I was prepared to tell him that Chun-Ja was Korean for Spring Girl and Yun-Ja meant Flower Girl. He didn’t ask. Claire would have liked the name I gave her.

  He smiled when he saw Duncan Lacey’s stone. “Beloved son,” he read. “Yes, he was,” he added. “Thanks for doing this, Ben.” He looked back and forth between Duncan and Yun-Ja. “No dates of birth or death?”

  I changed the subject rather than answer his question. “I assume you were just trying to get Duncan some medical attention when you made the call to the highway patrol.”

  He answered without taking his eyes off Duncan’s headstone. “It doesn’t matter, but how did you know?”

  “I guessed,” I said. “That day on the highway when I stopped to find you with Duncan, you said he’d been coming to church. Later I figured he might have told you about his past. After the episode on the highway, you probably wrestled with your conscience and decided on what you had to do.”

  “You going to tell me about Yun-Ja?”

  “Someday,” I said. “Not now. She has family where she is. I hope that’s enough.”

  The reverend began. I thought he might end with the usual ashes to ashes. He had made a different choice of scripture.

  “The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to their works. Lord, I commend these souls to your keeping. Amen.”

  We walked back down the trail and sat on the stairs in the shade of the porch. I asked John if he cared for a smoke. He said he would. We began the usual imaginary rolling and lighting ritual.

  He inhaled first. “This is Walt’s place, isn’t it?”

  I answered that it was, though Walt had sort of put it in my care while he was convalescing.

  “I heard he took a bad spill on his motorcycle a couple months ago. How’s he doing?”

  Until the week before I would have been unable to answer John’s question in the positive. Walt had long ago mended from a broken collarbone, a dislocated elbow, and probably a concussion, as well as a laundry list of lesser breaks, all of which I ached to claim credit for as having occurred during our fight. He took his sweet time going into the hospital. He waited almost a week. I didn’t coach him about what to say.

  He’d managed to get himself there on the Vincent. It was all his idea to say he’d fallen off his motorcycle, which must have hurt more for him to say than any part of the truth of that night above Desert Home.

  Walt and I had an unspoken gentleman’s agreement. Neither of us had said one word about any of it, not to anyone and certainly not to each other. He’d kept more to himself than usual, if that was possible.

  The weekend before, as I was working on the house, I heard the growl of the Vincent coming down the trail behind the house. He idled for a few seconds at the graves before continuing. I was busy cleaning the windows. He stopped just long enough to tell me that I was doing a lousy job and that some of the siding had come loose on the north side. He politely, for Walt, suggested I take care of it immediately and try not to fuck it up. Then he roared off into the desert. I knew the house had come to me.

  John passed me the cigarette. “Nice place. You should live here,” he said.

  I answered that I might someday. I picked up the small package and turned it over and over in my hands. The truth was, I already lived there. I just slept somewhere else. The blanket money paid for Ginny and her new baby girl to move into the recently vacated duplex adjoining mine. Sometimes I heard the baby crying at night. I complained, but I liked hearing her through the wall. It was comforting and helped me sleep.

  “You get a package?”

  “Walt did,” I said.

  I explained that I had been in Rockmuse and picked up Walt’s mail. Something he hadn’t bothered to do for months. The postmaster gave it to me because he heard about Walt’s accident.

  “Don’t suppose he needed it very badly. Wonder what it is?”

  “I know what it is,” I said. “Strings.” I pulled out the letter. “Same thing in this.”

  The preacher wisely left it at that.

  Claire had sent the cello strings by U.S. mail without knowing that Walt, like most of 117’s residents, avoided the post office. There were two other pieces of mail. One was the business license renewal for the diner. The other was the letter from a law firm in New York. Both the package and the letter were addressed to Chun-Ja in care of Walt Butterfield. I opened them without shame.

  The letter confirmed a phone conversation and gave Claire a summary of a DNA test. All the hair samples submitted for analysis were from a male subject who was statistically a match for her biological father. Strands that I guessed she got when she innocently requested a keepsake from Walt. She must have suspected, or at least hoped, Bernice had been pregnant when she was raped. There was a chance that Bernice herself might have known. Maybe not. Maybe the trauma robbed her of that knowledge.

  It didn’t seem at all strange to me that Claire wouldn’t have told Walt she had proof she was his daughter. She wanted him to claim her as his own without any more proof than his own gut. Given enough time, he might have done just that. Only afterward would she have shown him the letter. Maybe never. I liked to think that by the time they began dancing in the diner Walt had already begun to sense she was his biological daughter.

  I kept the letter and package with the strings and didn’t give them to Walt. All I gave him was the business license renewal for the diner. Learning after Claire’s death that she was his daughte
r would only have killed what little was left of him. I didn’t want that. Though we didn’t speak of her, she had once been ours, was still ours. Each of us held the knowledge of our relationship with her. There was no one else.

  John and I passed the cigarette back and forth in silence for a few minutes.

  “When are you coming to church again?” he asked.

  “Next time I need a new wrench,” I answered.

  “I’m thinking of getting an altar. And maybe a new heater. One that works in the winter.”

  “Sounds fine,” I said.

  “Last month the church got an anonymous gift of three thousand dollars.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “Good for the Lord’s work,” he replied.

  John put the cigarette out in the sand. “Gotta go,” he said. He gave me a sunburned wink and added, “I left my cross double-parked.” He stood up and took a few steps and turned. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Ben, I think you’re spending too much time alone.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said. “You think spending more time with people will change that?”

  He didn’t have anything else to say. I watched him walk up the hill and disappear on the other side of the arch.

  Once, during one of our roadside smokes, the reverend had said that most people associate the desert with what is missing—water and people. “They never think of the one thing the desert has more of—light,” he said. “So much light.”

  All the light in the world won’t help a blind man see what’s right under his feet. Not Ralph Welper anyway, or those like him. Two weeks earlier he had marched down the road from the archway. I was tidying up the graves and watched him make his way to the house. He must have seen my rig in the turnout.