The Never-Open Desert Diner (12 page)

T
hursday morning was overcast and cold. A heavy dew rested everywhere around the silent yard. It wasn't until I got behind the wheel that I saw the white envelope beneath my wipers. I reached around and grabbed it and threw it on the passenger seat. I figured it was the final payment from Josh, though I had pretty much come to the conclusion during a long, sleepless night that his name probably wasn't Josh and he sure as hell wasn't a television producer any more than Carrie was a schoolteacher. He seemed too young to be Claire's searching husband. He probably worked for the husband. I didn't know if Bob was in on the bullshit. Every time I was about to fall asleep I'd see or hear something, like the cello, or Josh's fingers twitching. I was fifteen hundred dollars to the good and none the worse for it.

The envelope hadn't felt like it contained cash. Maybe the son of a bitch had written me a reader, the kind of check that was only good for reading. I opened the envelope. Inside were a short handwritten note and a photo. The note said:
Wednesday morning. 10:16 a.m. Returning the costume to Joe's. HP.
A Walmart receipt for two four-by-six prints was taped to the back of the photo: one for me and one for him, just in case.

Howard Purvis had done what I had asked him to do. I was grateful. The photo had been taken at a distance. It was clear enough. There was no mistaking that she was the schoolteacher who had waved me down on 191. Her hair was the same and that was about all. She was buffed and polished. In her high heels she towered over the mountain bike she was wheeling into the front door of Joe's Sporting Goods. Joe was holding the door open, and he didn't look happy. She was happy enough, though. She was gazing past Joe at her reflection in the door glass.

I put the note back into the envelope and the photo in my wallet. On a hunch, I opened the glove box. Then the center console. I checked the CD player and the floor. One of the CDs was gone. I didn't need to guess which one it was.

At the truck stop I assumed I wouldn't see another cash payment from Josh. I decided to use my Visa card. The little gray screen flashed its message while I thought about all the freight I had been letting back up during my two days with Josh. It was going to be a long, full day.

The message on the screen meant more than it said.
Declined.
I canceled the transaction and tried again.
Declined.
I went inside to pay in cash. This had happened before, but not often. There was something about that word that sucked the self-respect out of your soul. This time it sucked out all my hope as well.

I had sixteen deliveries to make. I started driving, and my thoughts took over. The road time and the miles ticked off until I had reached the end of 117 with no memory of anything between the truck stop and the mesa wall a few hundred yards ahead of me. It was only the second time I had driven to the end of the road.

For a long time I sat inside the cab and stared up through the windshield at the red-flaked wall. It was after eleven. I needed a plan and to start lining up possibilities for a new job, maybe working for a big OTR interstate outfit. Independents went under all the time. I wasn't going to be the first, and I wouldn't be the last to have to live his life at cents on the mile. As much as that prospect bothered me, it wasn't what bothered me most. Highway 117 had been my life and as much a calling as John's was to haul his cross, not that either of us was going to make the cover of
Time
. When John got too old or died, who would miss him? Who would miss me?

I turned around and began what would be the first leg of my farewell tour. Ben's Desert Moon Delivery Service would survive through Monday. Maybe into the middle of the following week. Certainly not beyond that.

My tractor-trailer crept down the hot empty main street of Rockmuse, idling at the two stoplights. Everything I saw was sharp and etched with the bright enamel of nostalgia. I took in the few shops
—
the grocery, where Mildred Danner, owner of the Rock Dock Bed-and-Breakfast, was unloading a cart into the back of her battered old Dodge minivan. Two young boys in dark blue Cub Scout shirts with yellow scarves drank cans of Coca-Cola with their legs wrapped around parking meters in front of John's True Value First Church of the Desert Cross storefront. An old man whose name I never knew sat in a canvas chair on the sidewalk and watched me like I was a one-man parade on a national holiday.

When the mine closed, things had gotten bad; then the economy slumped, sending things further downhill. Still, it was home to these folks, and they found a way to hang on, though they were hanging on to less and less.

At the second light a brown ball of tumbleweed bounced through the intersection and came to a stop in front of me. As my truck moved forward, so did the tumbleweed. I followed it out of town past the Rockmuse Shell, where it finally slipped beneath my front bumper. In my sideview mirror I watched as it disappeared behind me.

Midway through my deliveries I took the turn to the Lacey brothers' place to check on Duncan. I waited in the turnout for a few minutes before deciding to walk around to the deck. The sliding door was open, and I peeked inside. They were both on their beds asleep in their underwear. A piece of thin cord was stretched between them, the ends tied to their wrists.

Fergus had cleaned up Duncan. The blisters had been dressed, and his raw fingertips and feet were bandaged. His matted red and gray chest hair rose and fell with his breathing. From where I stood I could see several circular white scars exposed through his chest hair. They could have been caused by any number of objects. I could think of just one: bullets. I had a matching scar just below my rib cage on my left side. Duncan had at least six.

Outside I knelt on the cool putting green and felt a smile form on my lips. The smell of the grass in the sunlight made me sleepy. It was all I could do to get myself up and moving. The sun was high above the awning, leaving the grass partly shaded. The low desert hills rolled northward into a brown horizon that married itself to a deep blue sky.

Duncan would heal. I was sure of that. I wasn't sure if he would survive whatever else was wrong with him, or if Fergus would survive long without Duncan.

I passed the turnout to Desert Home and thought of Walt and the Lacey brothers, Claire and her cello. It was a relief, almost a pleasant distraction, to think of them. Maybe I was attached to them a little, like a satellite was attached to Earth by gravity.

Whatever their problems were, they weren't really mine. Soon even my small attachment would be severed without as much as a nod to mark my exit from their lives. Earth's gravity was a necessity; without gravity everything spins out into emptiness.

At the transfer station I got into my Toyota pickup no longer caring what Josh and the woman were up to. It wasn't a hijack, though a part of me wished it were. I had given my word to Claire not to mention her, and I had honored my word. If Josh and his lady friend wanted to find Claire through me, then they had failed.

Claire was just part of another little nasty domestic mess that filled hospitals, drunk tanks, and courtrooms every day all over the world. Maybe she and her husband would kiss and make up, until the next time. When he finally found her, maybe she would be happy to be found. Maybe instead of hearing the cello, I'd hear her moaning softly beneath him.

I fell asleep thinking about what I was going to do next, and the painful details of how the last days of Ben's Desert Moon Delivery Service were going to play out.

W
ell after midnight I awoke to a gentle tapping on my bedroom window. In my sleep a woodpecker was searching for insects in the dark-grained wood of Claire's cello. I lay in bed and listened to the
tap-tap-tap
, a pause, and then more tapping on the glass. The window was open a few inches, enough to let in a loud whisper.

“Ben,” the voice said. “Ben. Open up.”

I went to the window, drowsy with sleep, without thinking about who might be calling my name from the alley. The voice was female. It had been a long time since I'd heard a female voice at my bedroom window in the middle of the night. In fact, never.

“Is that you, Ginny?”

Ginny's head popped up on the other side of the glass. “Who else would it be?”

“I don't know,” I whispered. “It shouldn't even be you.”

I opened the window. The night breeze slipped over my bare chest. We argued a minute about why she was there and why she wanted me to let her in. I told her I would come to the front door.

A hand came through the window and slapped at my bare legs. A few inches higher and the hand would have slapped something more important. It suddenly seemed like a lucky coincidence that I was wearing boxer shorts.

“No!” she said, straining to keep her voice low. “Stay away from the front door. And don't turn on the lights. I'm coming in. It's important.”

When you're a single, thirty-eight-year-old man and a pregnant teenage girl arrives at your house after midnight, wanting to crawl through your bedroom window, you should take a moment to think about it. I took a moment and said, “The hell you are.”

“Please, Ben,” she begged.

I asked her if she was in trouble. She said that was a funny question considering the condition she was in. “No,” she hissed, “you are. Now let me in!”

I took a couple of steps back. The bottom of the window was probably only three feet at most above the alleyway. Ginny was at least five foot six. She threw her arms over the sill and tried to hoist herself through.

While Ginny struggled I was reminded of a cat the Joneses had when I was a boy. For a year I had watched the big female tabby jump effortlessly from the floor onto the kitchen counter. She had put on weight, and Mrs. Jones informed me that the cat was “expecting.” The cat made the leap as always until one day she jumped and hung suspended in the air well short of the counter. Cats aren't supposed to fall. The tabby fell. In that split second, the cat wore the same startled expression I saw on Ginny's face. Ginny realized she was no longer a scrappy little girl. She had been transformed midair into a heavy, awkward, pregnant young woman. There were tears in her eyes as I reached down and helped her swollen belly clear the windowsill.

She lay on the floor beneath the window huffing like a little steam locomotive that had jumped its tracks. I returned to the end of my bed and stood there.

“What's so important?” I asked.

Ginny rolled to her knees and used the windowsill to pull herself upright. She stuck her head out the window and looked both ways down the alley. Apparently satisfied, she pushed the window shut and drew the shade. Without moonlight, the bedroom was almost totally dark. She closed my bedroom door. I switched on the night lamp.

“Okay,” she said, leaning against my dresser.

“Okay,” I said. “What's so important?”

The carpet was still covered with white balls of ruled paper and adding-machine tape from my attempts to plumb the depths of my financial coffin. Ginny kicked a ball of paper with the side of her foot and watched it roll to my bare feet. She slowly raised her eyes from the floor and gave me a shamelessly obvious appraisal.

“Gee, Ben,” she said, “not bad for an old guy. You're buff. No tattoos?”

“No,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“Really? Not even one?”

“Not a one! Get to it, kid.”

She laughed softly. “You're a disgrace to your profession. Do you work out?”

Annoyed, I said, “Yes, Ginny, I work out. I get up every morning and go out to work.” I grabbed the red blanket and wrapped it around myself.

She began in earnest. “I think you're in deep shit. A cop and some old guy paid me a visit at work last night. They asked me all kinds of questions about you. The old guy did most of the asking.”

What was old to Ginny might not be old to anyone else over the age of twenty-one. I thought immediately of Josh. “Describe him,” I said.

“Under six feet, kind of a gut. Has this skinny little mustache. Oh, yeah, and he wore these tiny round glasses. He acted like he was all nice but he wasn't, not really. He creeped me out.”

I sat down on the bed, and Ginny came over and sat next to me. She was still sweating heavily. After a couple of false starts she got the story out.

The night manager had called her into the break room. She thought she was going to be fired. The only thing the cop did was instruct her to cooperate. The man first asked her when the baby was due and made a big deal about what an exciting time it was for her. He showed her photos of his daughter and grandson. She started to relax. Then he asked if she knew Ben Jones. When she said she didn't, he showed her a blurred photo from a Walmart parking lot surveillance camera. It was clear enough to show Ginny sitting next to me in my pickup.

Ginny nibbled at her lip, or around the metal ring in her lip. “They had already gone back and reviewed the surveillance by the time they came to talk to me. No biggie. So I told him I really didn't know you, just that you had dated my mom a long time ago. He pulls out another picture of me! On your porch the other night! I thought I was going into labor, Ben.”

I asked her what she had said.

“I told him the truth.”

“Good girl,” I said.

“I told them you had said you'd check around and see if you could find me a second job. I went to see you because your phone is disconnected.”

“My phone is disconnected?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Didn't you know?”

I shook my head. I didn't know. I wasn't surprised. It never did ring all that much. I just thought no one was calling. “Was that it?”

“You wish,” she said. “He wanted to know what you were after in the store.” She shrugged. “At that point, I told him you wanted a CD of cello music. Since we didn't have any, I went on the Internet and downloaded some and burned you a CD. That's what we were doing in your pickup.” Ginny rested her head on my shoulder. “Ben, you're the nicest guy my mother ever went with, but…”

“But what?”

“But I think you're mixed up in something bad. Maybe you don't even know it. But you are, aren't you?”

I told her I didn't think I was. Even as I said what I thought was the truth, the wisdom of her words, that maybe I didn't even know about it, began to sink in. “If they come back, tell them the truth,” I said. “You haven't done anything wrong.”

“The man told me it might be best to stay away from you.”

“Good advice,” I said. “Take it.”

“What if he knows I'm here tonight?”

“Tell him the truth.”

Ginny nodded and stood up. She kicked at the balls of wadded paper again. “What is all this on the floor? Looks like it's been raining Hostess Snow Balls. Maybe I'm just hungry. I'm always hungry. Could you sneak into the kitchen and make me a sandwich?”

“In the dark?”

“Yeah.” Ginny reached around me and switched off the lamp. “And hurry. I'm double-parked.”

For reasons unknown to me I began to crawl toward the door, shedding the blanket as I went. “What do you mean you're double-parked?”

“I thought they might be watching me. I borrowed a bicycle from my friend Lalo in the display assembly department.”

I was beginning to love that kid. “You rode a bicycle?”

Even in the dark she might have seen me smiling as I crawled into the kitchen. Eight months pregnant, and she rode a bicycle through the dark streets of Price to warn me. It was two or three miles each way, at least.

She must have thought I was dawdling. “Hurry,” she whispered. “I have to be back to work in half an hour.”

Life always brings new challenges. Making a sandwich in the dark, however useful a skill it might be, was not a learning curve worth much to a soon-to-be unemployed truck driver. I grabbed a knife, the loaf of bread, butter, and peanut butter while coming to the conclusion I was not going to skulk around my own house on all fours like a dog. Arms loaded, I walked upright and, with as much dignity as I could muster in my underwear, back into the bedroom.

Ginny approved of my solution. She made herself a quick sandwich for the road. With her mouth full, she asked, “So what is the deal with all the paper on the floor?”

I wanted to tell her to mind her own business. Instead I told her how I had spent the previous weekend and about the imminent demise of my little company. She would have found out sooner or later. Besides, I needed practice telling people Ben's Desert Moon Delivery Service was belly-up.

“Sorry,” she said. “How about getting a smaller truck?” she suggested.

“How much do you know about men?” I asked.

Ginny patted her big stomach, leaving a tan streak of peanut butter across her dark sweater. “Not much,” she replied. “But I'm learning.”

“Then here's a lesson. No man ever wants a smaller truck.”

In the middle of a chew she managed a garbled “Ha-ha.” In two more bites the sandwich was gone, and she announced her imminent departure with a loud belch. She lifted the shade and then the window.

“What was the name of the guy who questioned you?”

“He said his name was Doc something. No last name I can remember.”

I said that was okay, and reminded her to tell him anything he asked if she saw him again.

I was still convinced that whoever he was he had to be working with Josh, and Carrie the schoolteacher. That meant there were three. There might be more. What wife is worth that kind of payroll? I kissed Ginny's forehead and thanked her.

“You know what that asshole asked me? He was being all nicey-nice and then he says, ‘Is Jones the baby's father?' ”

That question angered me. Her having to answer that question made me even angrier. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“I flipped the fucker off. I told him next time he went to the toilet he should wipe his ass with the photos of his grandson. He just smiled. I think he's been told that before.”

“Go,” I said. “Be careful. You're riding for two.”

I eased her out the window to the ground.

“Ben,” she said, “do you mind if I come back and take a look at your business records? I'm taking a business class at the University of Utah extension and I have to do a final term project. You could be my project.”

“I thought you were
my
project?” I said.

She said please, and I figured it couldn't hurt, though I knew it wouldn't help either. I told her where I kept the file. “You're welcome to whatever is on the floor, or in the cupboards. You know where the door is.” I added, “And the window.”

I watched her take off wobbling down the dim alley. She looked like a black pumpkin riding a kid's bike. Working at Walmart. Pregnant. Alone. Broke. Homeless. And taking a college class. Half the parents in America would have killed to have a daughter with her kind of sand. I felt like a lucky son of a bitch just to have her as a friend.

After twenty minutes or so of sitting on my bed in the dark, I turned on the lamp again. I got dressed and turned on every light in my duplex, including the porch light. I scanned the street from one end to the other. I wasn't shy about what I was doing. The street was dark and empty, or looked dark and empty. I couldn't be sure that I wasn't being watched. I made some coffee, went back out to my porch, and sat on the steps for a long time in the cool night air.