The Never-Open Desert Diner (2 page)

A
ll the coffee caught up with me a few miles down the road from the diner. I searched for any spot large enough to allow me to safely pull over my twenty-eight-foot tractor-trailer rig. A narrow turnout appeared ahead. It was almost hidden at the bottom of a slight hill that came at the end of a long gentle curve. It wasn't a turnout at all
—
it was a road, though I didn't realize that until I had stopped and climbed down out of the cab. Dirt and sand have a special feel under your boots. This ground had a contoured hardness to it.

I scuffed at the sandy surface with a boot tip and stood there amazed at what I had uncovered
—
a slab of white concrete. I followed the concrete about fifty yards up a gentle slope. At the crest of the hill were two brick pillars connected by an iron arch. Inside the arch, in cursive metal script, were the words “Desert Home.”

It seemed strange to me that I had never noticed the entrance before. I'd driven by it twice a day, five days a week, for twenty years. A car sped by on the highway below. The pillars were just high enough and far enough from the road they couldn't be easily seen, even if you were looking for them. Given the height of my cab and the level of the sloping highway, the entrance was nearly impossible to spot from 117.

For a moment I reflected on what had once been a grand entrance. It was somebody's dream gone sour and lost
—
probably a ranch. When I lowered my gaze a bit, the distance came into focus and I could make out a series of shallow, dry creek beds carved into the sands, all intertwined and attached.

It took a minute for the truth of the scene to register. They were not creek beds at all, but lanes and cul-de-sacs that had never made good on their promise of homes, except one, probably a model, that stuck out like a sturdy tooth on an empty gum. It was down the hill a couple blocks on my right.

A gust of wind kicked up a miniature twister of dust at my feet. My discomfort returned. Relieving yourself in a wind can be tricky business. The abiding loneliness of what lay ahead seemed to beckon, and the one-story model house offered a chance to get out of the wind. I had no idea I might be hopping any sort of fence.

Walking down the hill toward the house, I could almost hear the sounds of children playing and the happy drone of families enjoying weekend barbecues. It was a ghost town without the town and without the ghosts, since no one had actually ever lived there. I imagined ghosts of ghosts, less than ghosts, and I felt oddly welcomed into their company.

The model house had held up exceptionally well through the however many years it had been sitting there abandoned to the elements.

Maybe, like most orphans, I thought too much about houses. I'd never owned or lived in one as an adult. I had strong opinions and a tendency to evaluate houses in a particular way
—
windows first, placement mostly. Then the porch, whether it had one and what direction it faced. I liked porches and I've always been partial to those that were eastward facing. Finally, the roof. I've never liked a roof that's too pitched. If I wanted a hat I'd buy a hat. A sharp-pitched roof always seemed to put me off for some reason.

The house was alone in a bed of sand and the windows were unbroken and clean, and placed slightly lower for the cooler morning air. The porch faced east toward the sparkling mica-flaked mesa about fifty miles away. Any desert dweller will tell you the true beauty of a desert sunset can be best appreciated by looking in that unlikely direction, the east, away from the sun. A single faded green metal lawn chair relaxed on the porch. Someone would have been happy sitting there on a fine cool evening. The roof had a graceful, easy pitch that welcomed instead of threatened the sky.

I walked around the house. There was no sign anyone lived there, or had ever lived there. In the backyard I paused and took in the unhindered view all the way west to the Wasatch Mountains. The south side had the least wind. I stepped up close and rested my forehead on the shady wall just beneath a clean window. In the freedom of the moment and the beauty of the setting, I unbuckled my belt so I could fully abandon myself to the long-anticipated event.

It was almost quiet in the shade. Wind made a high whistling complaint as it slipped in and out of the eaves above me. When I looked up at the whistling, my sight traveled past the window
—
a kitchen window, I guessed. In that fraction of an instant my eyes glided over the disapproving face of a woman.

A good many bad behaviors have been honestly attributed to me over the years. Most of them I have just as honestly and sometimes even cheerfully acknowledged. Pissing on the side of someone's house, however modest or isolated, had never been among them. Such a breach surpassed bad manners and marched straight into the territory of criminally stupid. In the Utah desert it is likely to get you shot.

In my haste to retreat, my jeans slipped to my knees. I stumbled backward and over. Despite my best efforts, the flow continued undeterred while I thrashed around on my backside. It occurred to me at that moment I might have borne a striking similarity to a cheap Walmart lawn sprinkler. All that was missing were a couple of brats in swimsuits jumping over me
—
and, of course, the lawn.

By the time I got control of the floodgates and up on my feet again, the face in the window was gone. But I had seen her. I was certain of it. I walked around to the front of the house to check again for signs of a resident. There were no tracks, human or machine. There was no evidence of any kind that would have warned me I was trespassing. I expressed my apology to the porch. I waited. I announced myself again, this time a little louder. Only the wind answered me. A block away, as I headed up the slope to the arch, I heard a woman's voice tell me to go away. She didn't need to tell me twice
—
or even once.

Under the arch I turned and squinted back down at the model home with all the glass in the windows and the chair on the eastern-facing porch. At my truck I looked up toward the archway and realized it was just high enough on the hill and far enough away that it couldn't be seen from the highway. I wondered if it had been designed that way.

My next stop was the Lacey brothers' place. I spent the thirty miles convincing myself to forget what had just happened. I could not be an unrepentant house-pisser. There was also her face, which I easily remembered and then struggled to forget. Maybe it wasn't exactly a beautiful face in the popular way of advertisements and magazine covers. The face was oddly striking, with a high forehead and a wide nose and no-nonsense lips, all framed in thick black hair that lightly settled upon her shoulders. It was a face with staying power.

M
y company, Ben's Desert Moon Delivery Service, consisted of one truck, one trailer, and one driver: me, Ben Jones. Several years earlier, as the result of a serendipitous tragedy, I was given exclusive contracts to deliver for FedEx and UPS. My route on 117 took me back and forth across a particularly remote hundred-mile stretch of Utah's high desert. The highway dead-ended up against the granite face of a towering mesa just outside the small former coal-mining town of Rockmuse, population 1,344. I also trucked whatever else was freight-forwarded through various shippers. My bread and butter, which had become mostly bread and damn little of that, came from the scattered locals who lived out in the desert and placed orders directly with me for whatever they needed.

I delivered to lonely cattle ranches along the way and sometimes to the odd desert rats holed up in their aluminum trailers that rose shimmering out of the brown distance like so much tinfoil pinned against the horizon. Rancher or crazy old sun rat, all had chosen to tuck themselves away in the rolling dirt, sand, and tumbleweed miles down rutted side roads that had no names.

Such folks were a special breed. I knew every one of them, though the sum total of every word ever exchanged between us might not equal what could be squeezed onto the back of a drugstore postcard. Entire life histories were swapped in three or four words with a narrow squint or a wave thrown in for punctuation. Between hello and good-bye was a thick slice of silence that told a story you couldn't forget even if you wanted to. Conversation in the high desert was parceled out like water and often with less enthusiasm, each drop cherished for the life it represented.

The Lacey brothers, Fergus and Duncan, lived a mile off 117 in two sand-scoured red boxcars that had been welded together and placed on top of a foundation of gray cinder blocks. I didn't know how long the brothers had lived there or where they had come from, or their ages, or what they did, if anything, outside of running a scrawny bunch of cattle and horses. They never offered and I never inquired. How boxcars got out in the middle of the desert when there were no train tracks within seventy-five miles was a bit of a mystery. I mused upon it when it occurred to me, which was probably too often.

Fergus had seen me for several minutes as I made my way over dips and bends accompanied by squeaks and rattles across the ruts and holes of their nameless road. When I pulled into their dusty turnaround, he was half sitting, half leaning on a large wooden spool that had once held heavy-gauge cable. Nearby were two gray plastic milk crates that served as chairs, which I had never seen the brothers use. This was their yard furniture, reserved for entertaining guests that might have included the lost coyote or buzzard and not much else.

The Lacey brothers were small and scrappy, raw-boned men who wore their years in the desert like leather armor. What had once been red steel-wool hair had become a calico with short tufts of orange popping out between patches of white from the backs and sides of the dirty Stetson hats they rarely removed. Lopsided boot heels made them look as if they were always fighting a strong crosswind, and the wind was losing. Even in winter they wore T-shirts with jeans held up by red suspenders. Their clear, ice-blue eyes further identified them as brothers. Never blinking, those eyes did all the work for their beard-stubbled faces.

Fergus lowered the brim of his sweat-stained hat an inch or two by way of a hello. Together we unloaded three rolls of barbed wire and ten cases of Hormel chili. As usual, we stacked everything against the side of the boxcars. He signed for his goods and paid me in cash. My delivery completed, I turned to leave.

Fergus hoisted a work glove. “Hold up, Ben.”

Duncan stepped out of the boxcars holding a shallow pie tin. “Birthday cake,” he shouted.

“Which one of you old farts is having a birthday?” I asked.

Duncan set the cake, which was not actually a cake, down on the wooden spool table. The two brothers looked at each other and then at me.

Duncan said, “It's your birthday, asshole.”

They both laughed.

I lifted my cap and dragged the back of my wrist over my wet brow. “I guess it is,” I said. It wasn't.

Something passed between the two brothers, an unspoken thought, which I supposed was not uncommon between brothers. Duncan muttered a curse under his breath and disappeared inside.

Fergus shook his head. “Appreciate it, Ben. Duncan is having strange spells these days. For some damn reason he's convinced it's your birthday. It isn't, is it?”

“Nope,” I said.

Fergus sniffed the air. “It don't matter to me, Ben,” he said, “but I think you might have pissed yourself.”

I didn't feel like explaining. I ignored his observation.

Sounds of rooting and banging came from inside the boxcars. Fergus released a slow, good-natured sigh. “I'll go help him.”

A short while later they reappeared. After all my years of driving a truck I knew a road flare when I saw one. Duncan held one in his hand. Fergus carried three cans of beer. We met at the table.

Duncan admired the cake for a moment. “It's jalapeño corn bread,” he said. “Made the frosting out of Velveeta cheese.” Judging from the pride in his voice, he considered the Velveeta frosting an inspired invention on the order of penicillin and toilet paper.

The charred letter
B
floated upon the cheese lake of orange frosting. Fergus added, “It was my idea to make your initial out of bacon.”

I nodded and tried to exhibit the appropriate amount of insincere admiration.

Duncan pulled the strike cap off the flare and struck the ignition end with the cap still in his teeth. The flare burst to life and spewed a bright flame into the already warm air. “Let's see you blow this out.”

With a flourish worthy of a pile driver, Duncan jammed the lit flare into the center of the corn bread. The two of them sang “Happy Birthday” to me. They let the flare burn a few seconds. Suddenly Duncan threw his hands into the air and danced an animated but nonetheless pitiful jig around the table.

It didn't taste half bad. It was all bad. Whatever the recommended daily allowance of phosphorus was, after a few bites there was enough of it in our systems to meet that requirement for a lifetime and well into whatever came next. The beer was surprisingly cold, and not just welcome but medicinally necessary.

A very short time later I pulled through the turnaround. The remains of the cake sat next to me on the seat. Burn holes still smoldered in the Velveeta icing. My side mirrors caught the flare blazing behind me in the dirt where Fergus had thrown it. Fergus and Duncan were acting like two little boys, scuffing up a fine dusty haze into the air as they kicked the dying flare like a soccer ball back and forth between them.

It wasn't my birthday, but it was a birthday I'd remember until the day I died, which at the moment had never seemed closer.

A courteous distance down the road, well out of sight of the boxcars, I pulled over and buried the cake in a shallow grave. There was a big chunk of sandstone nearby. I used it to seal the tomb. Some poor scavenging desert creature might thank me.

If it was true that it's the thought that counts, I didn't want to know what Duncan Lacey was thinking when he made that cake. On the other hand, the ten cases of canned Hormel chili and other foodstuffs I regularly brought them needed no explanation. I took some solace in the fact that, though it wasn't my birthday, God willing, it wouldn't be my birthday again for another year.