The Never-Open Desert Diner (4 page)

I
took on fuel and glanced at my delivery schedule to plan my stops. My mind took an unplanned siesta at the turnout to Desert Home and didn't want to go any farther. I roared out of the truck stop and onto 191 determined I wouldn't stop there. The traffic was sparse, and I reached 117 in record time, not that I was in any kind of hurry.

Ahead in the distance I saw John's ten-foot wooden cross bobbing along the shoulder just as my rig wound around the curve. John's appearance meant spring had officially arrived on 117. He was just coming up on the turnout to Desert Home, so I pulled in front of him. With a cold bottle of water in hand, I waited a few minutes for him to arrive. He kept a strict schedule. If he had time he would stop and rest the cross.

Spring through fall John lugged his wooden cross up and down 117. He had a church of sorts in Rockmuse, the First Church of the Desert Cross. Denomination unknown and unimportant. It had once been a True Value hardware store. He left the door open twenty-four hours a day whether or not he was in town. If anyone showed up to sit in one of the few rickety deck chairs, he would deliver a sermon as if the hardware store held a congregation of hundreds.

Early on in his ministry I had attended his church. My attendance was due less to hearing the Word of God and more to needing a half-inch drive socket and being inside the True Value store before I realized it had become a church. Once inside the door, I was too embarrassed to admit my mistake and leave. People generally referred to John as Preach. I always called him by his first name. No last name.

John moved toward my truck at a good steady pace. He had attached a bracket and tire from a wheelbarrow to the road end of his cross. It made the going easier, or as easy as dragging a cross through scorching heat and wind can be. Other than the wheel, John was a stickler for authenticity. The cross was solid wood, rough-hewn from oak, and it was heavy. A small backpack that contained a little food and water and some camping supplies was strapped to the cross and made it even heavier.

John was a tall, lean man, six four or better. He kept his gray hair cut short and let his beard go the way of God. In his late fifties or maybe early sixties, John traveled approximately twelve miles a day. He stopped near sunset at one of his unofficial Stations of the Cross camping sites along 117.

John set his cross down alongside my trailer and took the bottle of water. He thanked Jesus and drank, careful not to drip any precious water into his long beard. When the bottle was empty he raised both hands into the air. “Bless you, Ben.”

We sat down next to each other on the ground in a spot of shade provided by the trailer.

“How 'bout a smoke?” he said, and winked.

“Don't mind if I do,” I answered. “I'm out. You?”

This was a ritual between us. I had quit smoking several years earlier, and John had quit long before that, back when, as he put it, “117 was a dirt road and I was on the expressway to hell.” He had mentioned once that he missed it. So did I. Our ritual began.

“Just so happens I do,” he said, as he reached into his shirt pocket. “Got some new papers.”

He licked the ends of the imaginary papers and pulled out a nonexistent drawstring pouch of tobacco. His fingers went through every motion until the cigarette was rolled and ready for fire. “Got a match?”

We always did it this way. I went through my pockets until I located an imaginary wooden Diamond match. I struck it against my whiskers, which was probably the bigger fantasy. God hadn't given me much of a beard. Imagination is one of the few things a man can count on if he's got the reality to feed it.

The match head popped, and I held the invisible flame under John's cigarette. We could smell the sulfur. He inhaled and handed me the cigarette.

Exhaling, he said, “Haven't seen you in church lately.”

This was also part of the ritual. He had learned long ago why I had wandered into his church, though it didn't matter. There were no accidents or coincidences in John's world. Everything that happened was part of God's plan. Here I was at the turnout to Desert Home, where I had not planned to be. I wasn't sure I believed in God, but when my unspoken desires coincided with his plan I was more inclined to give his existence the benefit of the doubt.

“You know, Ben,” he said, “God has lots of power tools for dealing with sin.”

“Next time I'm in Rockmuse on a Sunday morning,” I said, “I'll check out his inventory.”

My stock answer, since in all my years on 117 I had been in Rockmuse on a Sunday morning exactly twice. Both times because of breakdowns. I took a drag and held on to the cigarette while we watched the smoke curl into the morning air.

“You know, Ben, you are the only person who calls me by name. I've been meaning to thank you for that. A man likes to hear his Christian name once in a while.”

I passed him the cigarette. “What do other people call you?”

“Most people just call me Preach, which I don't mind.”

“Most people call you Preach? No kidding? I thought most people called you Wacko.”

“Not to my face,” he said, with a hint of sadness. “Not that it matters when you're doing God's work.”

It did matter and I knew it.

From where we sat I could see the slope that led up to the iron arch of Desert Home, though the arch was hidden from sight. I was upset with myself because I wanted to see her again. Though I wasn't planning to stop, I had stopped, because of John, which I conveniently told myself was God's plan. I was so close to her. John was getting the tailwind from my frustration.

My thoughts began to drift to the other side of the arch. I wondered if she might let me share some of my newly acquired appreciation of the cello. Thanks to the Internet, like everyone else, I could be an expert on anything in no time at all. I was just another Internet genius. The extent of my knowledge of the cello was next to nothing. I figured I'd picked up enough information to start a conversation. She might surprise me and say something besides
Go away
.

Ginny's comment about upgrading from the likes of her mother came back to me. I didn't really know any more about the woman than I did about cellos. I thought about the opposite of
upgrade
and about my financial situation. I was a truck driver who lived in a run-down rented duplex and was behind on the lease payments on his truck. My thoughts went downhill from there while John and I smoked.

I said, “Have you ever been interested in a woman you knew you shouldn't be interested in?”

“You mean married?”

John passed the cigarette to me for the final drag.

I took the cigarette. “No,” I said, hoping I'd summoned the proper amount of indignation. “Someone who's so completely different from anyone you've ever known. Nothing in common. Out of your league.”

“Every woman I've ever had in my life has been out of my league one way or another. I'm assuming you mean a good woman?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Then the truth is this: a good man can only
aspire
to be worthy of a good woman. She'll always be out of his league in ways he'll never understand. But he'll appreciate what he doesn't understand
—
if he's smart. You got someone in mind?”

“Nope,” I said, even as I revisited her image in my headlights. “Why am I asking you, anyway? What would you know about women?”

I had hurt him. I snuffed out the cigarette in the dirt.

“You can be a mean son of a bitch, Ben.”

There was some truth to that. The meanness seemed to jump out of me when I least expected it. When I was younger it took the form of fighting. Now nearing forty, instead of fighting I had a tendency to use harsh words and say unkind things. With money getting tight, the meanness was showing up more often.

I apologized to John. He looked past me down 117.

“I'm old,” he began. “I live in a vacant hardware store and pull a cross back and forth along a desert highway. But I'm still a man, Ben. Good and bad,” he added as he gazed down the road. “A man.” It was as if he saw something on the roadside and was walking out to meet it. “There was a time before the Lord when I drank and drugged and whored
—
sometimes for years. The Lord gave me a better woman than any man ever deserved. I threw her away.”

Whoever she was, maybe it was her that John saw somewhere on the highway ahead.

To lighten the moment, I said, “Years? You sure you're not bragging?”

He brought his eyes back from the road and put them on me. “Be careful,” he warned. “I'm serious as sin.” He had lost track of the cigarette and forgotten I had already put it out. “You're a better man than you know, Ben. Certainly better than you'll admit.” He inhaled smoke and exhaled. He let the spent butt drop to his side. “It's time,” he said, and stood up.

Without stretching, something he always did after our roadside smokes, John took up his cross and continued down 117 in the direction of Rockmuse. I wanted to say something to him. All I did was watch him go. His pace was slower and his back was more hunched, as if the cross had become heavier. Words to some hymn drifted back to me. He was singing.

J
ohn's singing merged into a thundering throaty growl that could have come from only one machine. I'd heard it several times. The sound was distinctive and unforgettable. Walt was flying down 117 toward me on his Vincent. He passed John, who was going the other way. I heard him gear down and thought he was going to stop. Instead, he revved the engine and picked up speed as he shot by me. He wore a white T-shirt and faded blue jeans. No helmet. A pair of aviator goggles held his flowing snowstorm of hair down against the wind. Out for a morning ride, I guessed.

Walt didn't wave or even look my way. In a second he was gone up the highway, accelerating into the turn with the controlled skill of a veteran rider and a youthful abandon and disregard for life and limb. At the top of the curve he must have exceeded a hundred miles an hour. The V twin-cam of the 998cc hand-built 1948 Vincent had more to give him if he asked. From the sound of the exhaust as he hit the straightaway on the other side, he was asking for everything the Vincent could give. When, or if, Walt Butterfield ever died, it wouldn't be from old age. There wouldn't be enough left of him to pick out of the sand with a pair of tweezers.

I turned and looked up the slope to the hidden arch and got in and out of the cab a few times while I tried to make a decision. Finally I walked to the arch and stood there, though only for a moment. Nothing had changed. Far to the south of Desert Home, on the other side of the tangle of empty streets, was the white shimmering ribbon of heat and glare of what people called a mirage. Since the first desert wanderer dying of thirst, mirages had appeared in the distance, promising water only to deliver more parched earth. The closer you came, the farther the promise retreated. This one looked like a long, cool lake.

The front door of the house opened and she stepped onto the porch. I took a few steps back from the arch. I could still see her. I hoped she couldn't see me. She was wearing the same sleeveless dress she had worn the night before. She was barefoot. In the daylight, even at a good distance, her dark hair caught the sun and sent it back to my eyes in brilliant flashes. She scratched herself like a major-league pitcher on the mound and reached her arms out as if she were about to take flight. She turned slowly in a complete circle, her fingers grasping at the sunlight. I thought for a second she might have seen me. She dropped her arms and went back inside. She returned almost immediately and stood motionless on the porch with her hands behind her back.

I took a deep breath and stepped into view. I waved. She did not return the wave. I shouted my hello, which also wasn't returned. I knew she could see and hear me. I began what seemed like a very long walk down to the house. Twenty yards from the porch I stopped and waited for her to acknowledge me. That was how visitors, friends and strangers alike, approached a residence in the desert. Not just good manners, it also kept the number of shootings down to those that were absolutely necessary.

Calmly, she removed her hands from behind her back. She rested her right hand against her right hip and let the revolver dangle there with its barrel pointed slightly downward yet still aimed in my general direction.

“I'm curious,” she said. “Is this place the only rest stop on your highway?”

I reached up to take off my cap as a respectful gesture. She raised the barrel of the gun a couple inches without moving it off her hip.

It was a very nice hip. It matched the other one perfectly. I'd had guns pointed at me before. I knew she was capable of shooting me where I stood and exactly where she wanted. She had that kind of confidence, even, I suspected, without the gun. I didn't want to be shot, but if I had to be shot by someone, she would have been my first choice.

She kept her chin high. Her nose was wide with tiny brown freckles that disappeared into the skin across prominent cheekbones. I wondered if maybe she was part Native American. Again, her skin was too white. Indoor skin. She was part something, but she was all business.

“I'm sorry about yesterday,” I said. “I didn't even know this place existed.”

“So today you decided you'd just drop by and re-mark your new territory?”

I approached her carefully and put my business card, one of the rare remaining four hundred and eighty or so from the original batch of five hundred, on the lowest porch step. “You can call me if you need anything.” Coming and going I never took my eyes off the gun, or her hips.

“I'll be sure to do that,” she said. “I keep my cell phone right next to my flat-screen television and my laptop.”

This wasn't how I saw our first real meeting taking place.

“So, what do you deliver?”

“Whatever people out here need.”

“What do you think I need?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Strings for your cello?”

Every muscle in her body popped and pulsed beneath her skin. We stood a long time. Through the whole long wait I expected a bullet. Mentioning the cello had been a big mistake.

“Truck driver?” she confirmed.

I nodded. My mouth was getting dry, and the sun was broiling the back of my neck.

She sat down on the porch. We baked in the sun a little longer until the sweat was pouring down my face and chest. There was something familiar about her. Maybe, after standing and looking at her and her gun for so long, she was just beginning to seem familiar.

Finally, she said, “Mr. Truck Driver, don't ever spy on me again. Do you understand?”

I croaked out an affirmative, then managed to add, “My name is Ben.”

“Ben,” she said, after a long pause, “I just left my husband. He's probably looking for me. I would really prefer you protect my privacy until I decide what to do. Will you do that?”

I said I would.

“Do you know who owns this property?” she asked.

When I said I didn't, all she said was, “Good.” She took a quick glance at my card. “If I need anything, I'll let you know.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“Claire,” she offered, though still as professional as a customer-service operator. “I'll consider that our understanding. You will not mention me or this place to anyone. One more thing. Consider it an addendum to our agreement. This is a difficult time for me. Don't try to deliver anything I do not ask for.”

Her meanings, all of them, were clear. I didn't say anything.

“Thanks for not trying to charm me with chitchat. You're not one for chitchat, though, are you?”

“Yes.” I hesitated and began again. “No, Claire, I'm all for talk. For the last forty-five minutes or so I've been talking like crazy
—
to myself.”

“You know what they say about talking to yourself?”

“What's that?”

“It's fine as long as you don't answer. You don't answer, do you, Ben?”

“I would,” I said, “if I knew what to say.”

I mentioned the phone booth at the diner a few miles west. “Take some change,” I advised her. “Believe it or not, that one still takes nickels.”

“Nickels. Got it.”

It seemed like I should probably warn her about Walt. “If you go to the diner, you might want to steer clear of the old man who owns the place. He doesn't like visitors. Keeps to himself more than most around here. To tell you the truth, he's a bit of an asshole.”

The marvel of her smile was watching it travel toward her mouth, like a freight train picking up speed as it dropped down a mountain grade. It began with a slight wrinkle high on her forehead and then spread into her dark eyes. From there the smile descended to her lips, where it burst into full view with all the momentum of her body behind it.

“Really? An asshole who doesn't like visitors? The two of us should get along just fine.”

“He's not a bad guy. Just old and set in his ways.”

“Are you two friends?”

“I consider him a friend. I can't speak for him.”

For the first time she lowered the revolver completely and seemed to relax. “Okay, then. We have an agreement.”

The meeting had been adjourned. I had been dismissed and I was eager to be on my way. Halfway up the hill she called after me. “Ben!”

I stopped and turned in her direction.

“I scream,” she shouted.

“What?”

She repeated herself. This time I understood. “Ice cream.”

“Okay,” I shouted back.

I didn't know what I had expected. I had a vague idea of what I'd hoped for, and that wasn't a woman running from her husband. The gun didn't bother me, not that I liked having it pointed at me. I was glad she had one and seemed to know how to use it.

The husband was another matter. There had been a time in my life when I had drunk from that tainted water. It was simple then: I was thirsty and there was water in front of me. Or maybe I found an attractive body of water and it made me thirsty. Perhaps I had grown up. Maybe it was just a matter of being able to see the consequences, not just for me, but also for everyone else involved. When a spouse was cheating, or worse, when both spouses were cheating, the list of the injured was always long. What had begun as a provisional warning to myself had gradually evolved into a rule.

In this case I didn't need the rule to tell me what to do. Claire, if that was really her name, had made herself clear. I admired her for that. Even though she didn't know me from Adam, she had told me her situation and how she felt. Directness, however unwelcome, is appreciated.
Mr. Truck Driver, you may deliver ice cream.
Claire hadn't specified a flavor. It just so happened that I had several cases of butter brickle in the small refrigerated cubicle that had been custom-installed at the front of my trailer.

Dan and Maureen McCauley had gotten pregnant again. The child would have been their fourth, but she miscarried. During Maureen's first pregnancy she went through several half gallons of various flavors, which I delivered one at a time along with other things they needed for their family and the reptile refuge they ran several miles outside Rockmuse. She was still experimenting with flavors during the second pregnancy, but she quickly developed a taste for butter brickle. The news of her third pregnancy was announced not by a home pregnancy kit or a doctor, but by a sudden craving for butter brickle ice cream. Dan had a big grin on his face when he told me it was time to start delivering butter brickle again. I congratulated him. The next day I thought I'd corner the butter brickle market. The bulk discount increased my profit margin.

Then the miscarriage. I couldn't return the ice cream to the wholesaler. I didn't have the heart to ask the McCauleys to pay and take the ice cream, or even bring the subject up. For the past two months $225 worth of butter brickle ice cream had been sitting in the fridge unit.

That $225 would buy a lot of diesel. It also happened to be exactly a quarter of a month's lease payment on my rig
—
I was currently in arrears on almost three months. Or two thirds of a month's rent on my shabby duplex
—
I was one month behind on that. Or one-tenth of my Visa balance. Or…I hoped to hell Claire liked butter brickle ice cream. It would be ideal if she considered it an essential food group. If that happened I might quit asking God to please help the McCauleys get a new bun in the oven.

As I hiked down from the arch, I saw Walt on the other side of 117, arms folded, leaning against his Vincent. His goggles were up on his forehead. He might have seen me walking down the hill from the arch. I couldn't tell for sure if he had or hadn't. He was directly across from my tractor-trailer, which might have blocked his view.

I walked straight to my cab and opened the door. I had made a promise to the woman. If he had seen me and asked me what I was doing, I wasn't sure what I would tell him. My best bet was to just keep walking. I had planned on getting the ice cream and taking it straight back to the woman. Walt's appearance made me rethink that. It wasn't like Walt to stop and want to talk. Or ask questions.