The Never-Open Desert Diner (3 page)

I
drove west, homeward, into a fiery late-afternoon sun. I cranked down my window and gulped at the clean desert air that had already begun to cool in anticipation of a spring evening.

No other vehicles appeared in either direction for almost an hour. I searched the road ahead for the turnout to Desert Home, unable to decide if I was going to stop. It wasn't until I'd parked and set the brake and listened to the engine relax that I began to wonder why I had stopped where I was so clearly unwelcome
—
the famous “scene of the crime.” My wondering was short lived. I knew from experience that if you're about to do something you probably shouldn't do, the best advice you can give yourself is not to think about it too long. It ruins the surprise when the worst happens.

The wind picked up in ferocious gusts that roared in my ears and partially obscured my view of the model home. I hiked down the slope. Blowing sand burrowed inside my clothes and forced me to squint. Well away from the porch, I threw my “hello” toward the house. The chair was gone. I shouted several more times, gradually moving closer each time. With each step the wind scooped up my voice with the sand and sent them both to parts unknown. I knocked on the door. The wind took that, too.

The front windows were now covered with blankets from the inside. Newspaper had been taped across the picture window on the north side. Two of the sheets didn't completely overlap and allowed the sliver of a view. I pushed my cap back on my forehead and cupped my hands to shield my eyes from the blowing sand.

The woman sat on the green chair that had been on the porch. She was alone. The chair was the only piece of furniture in the empty room. Her bare left shoulder angled toward my window. A skylight directly overhead encircled her with a narrow stream of honeyed light. The rest of her body drifted in shadow. My eyes adjusted. Her raised left elbow revealed the soft curve of a breast. She appeared to be vaguely Asian, though her skin looked too white. She was clearly naked. Her fingers moved rhythmically along the slender neck of a musical instrument.

The wind died. Silence took its place. I held my breath. What was about to happen was rare, though I had experienced it a few times in my years on 117.

The setting sun burned into a layer of advancing high red clouds that swirled with sand. Propelled by the wind, the clouds picked up speed and rushed across the flatlands, where they broke against the mesa cliffs and splintered like a giant wave. The backwash of wind roared toward me across the miles of desert shore driving sand ahead of it. My hands glowed from the intense approaching light.

I was caught in a blinding red flash. The air around me crackled with electricity. I fought the impulse to close my eyes. The skylight above the woman filled the room with a pulsing pink glow like the inside of a beating heart. In the unnatural light, the fingertips of her left hand flew over the absent strings. Her right hand grasped nothing as it sawed the air. The soundless instrument rocked side to side with music only she could hear and I could only imagine.

The light in the room transformed into deepening shades of the spectrum. I tried to recall the name of the instrument the woman played. Its name was lost in the curve of her bare shoulder and half oval of breast, seamless yet distinct against the instrument. The woman and the instrument were a cameo in the empty room.

She stopped playing. I felt shame. I had no right to be there. It was wrong.

Too late, I realized the light had slipped behind me. A misshapen silhouette of my head was cast through the newspaper and across the floor in front of her. She turned toward the window where I stood. She returned her attention to her instrument. Her chin dropped to her chest. She was lost again in her private music. I felt shame but was helpless to turn away. I continued to listen.

The sun dropped below the mountains. It only took a few minutes. She played on until I could no longer separate her from the darkness. I walked from the house into the dusk and remembered the name of the instrument
—
a cello. I sat in the cab with the engine idling and thought about the woman and the cello and the red room and the haunting music I didn't hear. I whispered to myself, “Go home, Ben.”

The headlights wrangled the soft darkness in front of me. I stared but didn't see. She might have been standing there for some time. The sleeveless flowered print dress she now wore was loose fitting and fell to her knees. A slight wind fluttered its hemline. Her coal eyes were intent upon me. She moved only to push wild strands of her long dark hair away from her face. There was little chance she could see me with the headlights shining in her eyes, though I felt as if she could. Maybe I wanted her to see me through glass the way I had seen her.

I opened the door and slid out from behind the wheel until I felt the chrome running board under my boots. The interior lights flashed on and off. She reached up again and brushed the hair from her face. I stepped out in front of the headlights. She took a step backward to the very edge of light.

She didn't shout. Her voice lifted itself without effort over the rise and fall of the gently fluctuating rpms of the Detroit diesel.

“Are you a music lover or just a pervert?” she asked.

There were only two ways to answer that question. I wasn't pleased that the question so precisely limited my response. “Are those my only choices?” I asked. When she didn't say anything, I said, “I guess I'm a music lover.”

“Go ahead, then,” she said, her voice breaking this time. “Take it and go.”

“Take what and go?” I asked.

Instead of answering me she turned and disappeared into the darkness. The faint sound of her footsteps stopped. From out of sight, she asked, “Did the owner send you?”

I didn't know what she was talking about. “No one sent me,” I answered, aiming my voice up and out into the night.

“Then why are you here?”

“I just wanted to apologize again for what happened this morning.”

Her own laughter caught her by surprise. It erupted from her throat in choking hiccups before it exploded into a brief howl. A coyote answered her call. She howled back in a long, high-pitched response that made me shiver. I tossed my head back and let loose a howl of my own. My effort fetched only silence.

There was no way for me to know if she was still nearby.

“I'm a truck driver,” I said. I turned back to the cab and stepped up on the running board. I stood there high and small beneath the first shy desert stars. “I'm sorry I bothered you, ma'am,” I said. “Thanks for the loan of the wall.”

I already had one leg inside the cab when her clear voice drifted down out of the darkness: “You're welcome.”

I listened hard for more and wished for another hiccup of laughter or a tender howl. All I could hear was the rhythmic fall of her shoes on sand that told me she was moving farther away up the slope. The coyote let loose again while I was closing the door.

As I backed up to turn around, my headlights rose slowly toward the entrance. She stood on top of the hill beneath the arch, her arms wrapped around herself against the chilly breeze. In the desert, the line between what is dead and what is alive often gets blurred. She appeared to me as a vaporous feminine spirit guarding the gate of a cemetery. I confess, as my headlights aimed toward Price, there was an odd sting of homesickness inside me, though for what exactly, I couldn't have said.

I
felt the comfort of moonlight on my face. The glow from a small digital clock next to my bed marked the long moments of waiting for sleep, moments thinking of her face and the questions that came and went unanswered, questions and answers that were none of my business. Who was she? Where did she come from? How had she come to an abandoned housing development with a cello
—
a cello without strings? What was she doing for food? Water? Was she alone? How long would she stay, or was she already gone? Did she need my help? I remembered a definition of chivalry I'd heard once: a man protecting a woman against every man but himself.

Using my toes, I manipulated the moonlight to make shadow puppets on the wall. As entertaining as this exercise was, I had another option.

After midnight I pulled my ancient Toyota 4×4 pickup onto the asphalt ranchlands of Walmart parking. I was determined to find a CD of cello music, though part of me actually preferred the phantom music the woman had shared with me in silence. Price had just one Walmart and it was open 24/7. During most of the day it was a popular place. The next nearest Walmart was a hundred miles west through the mountains, in Spanish Fork, a sprawling satellite of Salt Lake City along the I-15 corridor. Somewhere in the endless aisles of car batteries, tank tops, and Hostess Twinkies there had to be a CD of cello music. I wasn't convinced of this, merely hopeful.

The night-shift workers were busy restocking the shelves under the high artificial lights. No one paid any attention to me as I made my way through the maze of products that filled the aisles. In an ocean of busy blue vests I heard little English or anything else being spoken. Lost in this desert, I was Moses searching for the Promised Land. I located it in a far corner behind a wall of technology.

A plump young woman in a blue vest with a silver ring in her nose dozed peacefully as she leaned against a display rack of last season's DVDs. I didn't want to wake her. She looked like she could use all the sleep she could get. Her face appeared almost childlike.

The CDs were neatly arranged in categories, each category divided by artist and each artist divided alphabetically. About the only thing that seemed familiar to me was the alphabet. There was no category for cello. There was a category for classical that held only five CDs, four of which were compilations beginning with
The Best of
. I had my choice of the best of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Chopin. The fifth CD was
Johnny Mathis Sings the Classics
.

“Hi, Ben.”

I was startled to hear my name. I turned to see that the young woman had awakened. She exhumed a tired smile. She wore an unborn child around her waist that had previously escaped my notice.

She placed her hands on her hips and stretched backward. “You don't remember me, do you?”

I subtracted the nose ring and the heavy bags beneath her violet eyes. Then I took away the pregnancy and finally the orange streaks in her short black hair. What was left was the daughter of a woman I had dated maybe five or six years before. She had been just a little girl then
—
just a girl now, even with the nose ring and the rest of life's additions. The ring in her nose was the only ring in sight.

“Ginny,” I said, pleased to see her again, or as pleased as I could be given the circumstances. “You've grown up.” Innocently, though not sincerely, I inquired after her mother.

“My mom is a piece of shit.”

“I wouldn't go that far.”

“C'mon, Ben. After what she did to you? You're disagreeing with me? Or are we just deciding on the size of the piece?”

This was the kind of conversation made worse by the glare of indirect lighting and the time of night, the bright floors, sterile air-conditioning, and minimum-wage work. Was she seventeen? Eighteen? Maybe it had been closer to ten years since I'd last seen Ginny and Nadine, her mother.

“Let it go, Ginny,” I said. “Please?”

“Fine,” she said. Among the few constants in life is the certainty that when a female uses the word
fine
to a man, things are about as far from fine as they can get. “What brings you to Walmart in the middle of the night?”

I told her what I wanted. She stepped around me and surveyed the bins of CDs. “Cello?” she asked, as if maybe she had misunderstood me.

“Cello,” I repeated.

“I can look, I guess. Unless George Strait or some rapper has taken up the cello, it's a waste of time.”

I thanked her.

She asked me if I had an MP3 player, and the look on my face answered her question. “Same Ben, huh? No cell phone or GPS, either, I'll bet.”

“I have a computer now,” I said proudly.

“If that's true,” she said, “which I doubt, I'm guessing it was made before I was born. Maybe before
you
were born.” She was just messing with me now, and we were both enjoying the change-up. “I've got a break coming. Let me see what I can do.”

We agreed to meet at my pickup before her break was over.

When my passenger door opened I knew I had fallen asleep. In a couple of hours I would be at the transfer warehouse beginning my day. Ginny sat in the passenger seat and handed me two silver-colored CDs. “You do have a CD player, don't you?”

I nodded. It came with the new truck. I left out the part about never having actually used it.

Satisfied her time wasn't wasted, she said, “I downloaded some random stuff off the Internet, mostly Yo-Yo Ma, and used my laptop to burn you a CD. My break is over. I got in a hurry. I'm not sure which one has what you want. One is probably some mix left over from my youth. Most people my age are pretty digital these days.”

I saw no trace of humor on her face. To her way of thinking, her youth was over and all she had now were souvenirs.

“So who's the woman, Ben?”

I was still half asleep. “Woman?”

“Yeah,” she said, “woman. Maybe I'm only seventeen and knocked up, but I'm not an idiot.”

I saw the sharp, playful little girl I remembered, so wise beyond her years, and now years beyond her wisdom. I also saw a silver stud in her tongue.

“It's the middle of the night at the Walmart in Price, Utah. A truck driver I haven't seen in years walks in and asks for cello music. Yeah, woman. If she's into the cello, then I already know you've upgraded from the likes of my mom. I've always figured you for a romantic.”

“That's not saying much,” I said. “These days anyone who believes the sun will rise in the morning could qualify as a romantic.”

I thanked her again for the CDs.

“When's the baby due?”

This was my clever way of changing the subject. It worked perfectly. Ginny burst into tears.

The simple answer, the one I expected but wasn't all that interested in, was one, maybe two months, give or take. Between sobs and in quick order I also learned that the baby's father was thirty-eight and her mother's unemployed live-in boyfriend. He said he loved Ginny. When she could no longer hide the pregnancy, she confessed both the pregnancy and their “bad love” to her mother. The boyfriend denied his love and everything else. Her mother responded by kicking her out and telling Ginny she had gotten herself into this mess and she could damn well get herself out. The mother and the boyfriend moved to Salt Lake City to start over. That had been four months ago. Since then Ginny had quit high school and got her GED and had been living with friends and in her car. She concluded by asking me for a job, a second job, so she could afford her own place when the baby came.

I hated to disappoint her. I explained that I was pretty much a one-man operation. It then occurred to me that there was a third thing a man alone in bed can do and if I'd done that instead, maybe I would be alone and asleep and not sitting next to a distraught pregnant teenager in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of the night.

When Ginny reached for the door handle, I said, “Let me ask around. Maybe I can find something for you.”

She leaned over and kissed my cheek. The nose ring felt strange and cold against my skin. She struggled with her bulk and cursed my worn seat before she managed to get out of the truck.

Before she closed the door, I said, “I think we've settled that question about your mother. She is a piece of shit. A big piece.”

The night had slipped away. At home I took a long hot shower and had a good sad laugh about Nadine.

Nadine and I had only been together a few months when I surprised her and a UPS driver late one night. They were inside the cab of my tractor-trailer that I was allowed to park behind a locked gate with the UPS vehicles. I asked them what in the hell they thought they were doing. Stupid, since clearly there wasn't any thinking going on. Besides, an answer was out of the question. Both their mouths were full. Quite an amazing bit of circus contortionism considering the confines of my truck cab. Had the event taken place another time in another place with other people, I might have broken into well-deserved applause.

A woman I met in a bar once told me she might have taken her husband back after he cheated with a neighbor, if only he hadn't done the deed in her kitchen
—
her room, the center of her family. For her, the kitchen was a more sacred place than their bedroom. My guess was she hadn't seen the inside of either one for quite some time. She had been making slow and steady progress toward emptying a bottle of Seagram's and filling an ashtray.

After I settled down, I discovered that the only true anger that remained came not from the cheating but from where Nadine chose to do it
—
the cab of my truck. Sometimes the smallest things are so damn unforgivable. Maybe because they aren't small
—
they only seem that way to someone else. You never know what someone holds sacred until it's too late.

Loading up at the transfer warehouse went quickly. I used the extra time on the dispatch office computer to search for information about cellos and cello music. The woman and the cello were linked in my mind in a way I couldn't explain. Knowing something about cellos seemed like the only way to get to know the woman. And, given the opportunity, however unlikely, for her to get to know me. It seemed an innocent enough way to pass a little bit of time. Maybe a little pathetic. After all, I had told her I was a music lover.

When my time was up, I still didn't know much about cellos or the people who played them. The cello was just an overgrown violin. In Italian
cello
meant “violin for the leg.” From its origin in the late 1500s, the cello had become more and more popular. Someone once said that the sound of a cello was closer to the voice of a human male than any other musical instrument. Remembering the woman playing the cello, I tried to imagine a man's voice, singing maybe, just below the wail of the wind and blowing sand. But it wasn't a man's voice I heard
—
it was her voice.

The most expensive musical instrument ever sold was a cello
—
over eighteen million dollars. It was made by someone named del Gesù in the 1700s. A window popped up. It asked me if I wanted additional information about that cello. Another pop-up offered me the chance to be put on a mailing list or to join a chamber music appreciation club. I have never willingly consented to be on anyone's mailing list. The woman with the cello was the only club I was interested in joining, and the odds of being asked seemed depressingly small, even if I were a luthier, one who, so the Internet informed me, made stringed instruments like violins and cellos.