Lullaby road, p.29
Lullaby Road, page 29
I visited their food trailer early in the morning the day before the relay. No other customers were there and as I waited for my order I idly scanned the business cards and flyers posted on the side of the service window. They were all in Spanish—ads for junk hauling, yard care, special meats, car maintenance. There was a grainy Xerox copy of a flyer for a missing girl. I only glanced at it. There were several, all faded and largely ignored by everyone.
The girl was five or six, wearing a red gingham dress and cowboy boots. Her left arm was in a sling and in her hand she held a small, stuffed animal. She wore a beautiful smile, though it was her large black eyes that caught my attention. Tiffany handed me my order and I walked back to my truck and then returned. In the photo the missing girl was standing next to the edge of a faded green trailer. Behind the girl stood a tall woman in a dark dress, visible only from her waist down. The belt the woman wore seemed to be decorated with oblong stones—maybe opals—reminding me of someone.
When I returned the morning of the relay to look again at the flyer of the missing girl, who I had begun to suspect was my Manita, the poster had been taken down. I asked and the ladies all squealed at once. Michaela spoke for all three. “Good news, Ben! She was found!”
Indeed, she had been. The missing girl had been found by maybe the one person left in the world still missing her. I was handed a free celebratory burrito, which I had kept with me untouched all day, afraid to let it out of my sight. Who knows how long that flyer had been up? Weeks? A month or more? Once the right person had seen it there was no longer any reason to keep it up.
The sun felt good on my back as I stared up at that crooked abomination of a sign. It would take me fifteen or twenty minutes to walk back to my truck and then maybe ten minutes more to drive to the potluck. There was even a rumor that Rupert Conway might make a rare appearance, which was beginning to occur more often—with and without his shotgun.
Maybe the biggest surprise, at least to me, was the revelation that somehow Cecil was not the complete asshole everyone thought he was. The girl had a chance because Cecil drew a line between greedy, petty criminal and monster. The dog had belonged to Cecil and those that knew him better than I did wondered what had happened to that huge, mean devoted mongrel that was always with him. I don’t know how he got the girl away from the man, only that he must have been pressed for time, and he judged that maybe there was someone, a local trucker who drove the desert every day, who might take her if he had no choice.
Cecil probably didn’t even know the child was female. He and Pedro were trying to protect a kid. If Cecil didn’t survive, the girl would be returned to Pedro. As it turned out, neither one of them made it. I’ve come to think that the only thing you can count on with people is that they will always be human—good and bad—usually both, and occasionally at the same time.
A car went by on its way into Rockmuse and honked. I recognized the lowered Honda Civic. Hector and his family had decided to stick around for a while. I waved as they passed and he waved back. The Rockmuse City Limits sign caught my eye again, framed against the distant, sprawling red mesa cliffs hovering over the desert. The foil-wrapped burrito felt good against my chest and I guessed it would keep for another day.
I shook my head. If the Roman soldiers who built the cross upon which Jesus was crucified had the same carpentry skills and split a case or two of beer like the boys in the unofficial Rockmuse City Council, Jesus might still be alive today. Maybe things would be different. Maybe not. I wouldn’t know. I just drive a truck.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The process of writing a novel is done in solitude, and if you’re lucky, inside a circle of love. My circle is filled with literary Zen Masters, high priests and priestesses of nature, students of life, and laborers in the fields of ordinary miracles. To all, my sincerest gratitude. First among these is my editor, Nate Roberson, who guided me past each mile marker. Thanks to my immediate family for listening and excusing my hundred-yard stare of inattentiveness. To all the poets, especially Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Ira Sadoff, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Gary Miranda, Steven Huff, Sam Hamill, Michael Simms, Aliki Barnstone, Kathy Fagan, Peter Meinke, Mary Jane White, Henry Carlile, Christopher Merrill, Meg Kearney, Sandra McPherson, Major Jackson, Jonah Bornstein, and Ana Castillo, whose poems were daily companions. To dear friends whose faith never wavered: Bruce Berger, Ann Rittenberg, Jaime Manrique, Lisa Parmenter, Alicia Griffin, Alison McLennan, Gloria Estela Gonzalez, Migs Muldrow, James Cleveland, David Yoo, Joan Macri, Kerry Beckford, Shawn, Tracy, and Ramona Smith, Michael and Elaine DeLalla, Rich and Pam Larsen, and Jon and Dally Ingersoll. A very special thanks to the writers and faculty of the Writers in Paradise Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. To my agent, David Hale Smith, and always to my mentors from the Pine Manor/Solstice MFA Program, Sterling Watson and Sandra Scofield, whose wisdom and stern affection are always present.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES ANDERSON was born in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He is a graduate of Reed College and received his MFA in creative writing from Pine Manor College. His first novel was The Never-Open Desert Diner. His short fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines, including The Bloomsbury Review, New Letters, Solstice Magazine, and others. He currently divides his time between Colorado and Oregon.
1
A red sun was balanced on the horizon when I arrived at The Well-Known Desert Diner. Sunrise shadows were draped around its corners. A full white moon was still visible in the dawn sky. I parked my tractor-trailer rig along the outer perimeter of the gravel parking lot. The “Closed” sign hung on the front door. To the left of the door, as if in mourning for Superman, stood a black metal and glass phone booth. Inside was a real phone with a rotary dial that clicked out the ten white numbers. Unlike the phones in the movies, this one worked—if you had enough nickels.
Curiosity usually wasn’t a problem for me. I treated it like a sleeping junkyard dog. As a general rule I didn’t hop the fence. Jagged scars on my backside reminded me of the few times I had violated that rule. Just because you can’t see the dog doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Sure, I look through the fence once in a while. What I see and think I keep to myself.
On that Monday morning in late May I was dangerously close to the fence. Walt Butterfield, the diner’s owner, was a junkyard Unitarian: he was a congregation of one and his own guard dog. His junkyard was The Well-Known Desert Diner, and he didn’t bark or growl before he tore your throat out. I liked him, and his junkyard. The place was a kind of odd shrine. Over the years the diner had become a regular rest stop for me as well as a source of fascination and idle speculation. It was always my first stop, even when I had nothing to deliver to Walt. Sometimes it was my last stop, too.
Out of habit, I tried the front door. It was locked, as usual. This was Walt’s face to the world. Walt slept in what had been a small storage room attached to the kitchen. Behind the diner, across a wide alleyway of sand and flagstone, was a 50-by-100-foot galvanized steel World War II Quonset hut. This was where Walt really lived, alone with his motorcycles, and tools and grease and canyons of crated parts that reached to the ceiling.
Walt’s motorcycle collection totaled nine of the finest and rarest beasts ever to have graced the roadways of America and Europe. Among them was his first, a 1948 Vincent Black Shadow. It was the same motorcycle he was riding, his new Korean War bride hugging his thin waist, the day he first rode onto the gravel of what was then called The Oasis Café. He was twenty years old. She was sixteen and spoke no English. They bought the place a year later, in 1953.
Walt kept the diner, like everything else in his life, in pristine shape. I peered through the glass door at the lime-green vinyl seats of the six booths and twelve stools. The platoon of glass salt and pepper shakers stood at attention. The trim along the edge of the counter shined its perpetual chrome smile back at me. The brown and ivory linoleum tiles reflected their usual wax and polish. A 1948 Wurlitzer jukebox hunkered against the far wall. Behind the counter, the same order ticket as always hung lifeless from a wire above the stainless steel kitchen pass-through. As far as I knew it was the final ticket from the last meal prepared for a paying guest, probably sometime in the autumn of 1987.
I returned to my truck and off-loaded a heavy carton filled with the usual motorcycle parts and wheeled it to the door of the Quonset hut. On Wednesday of the previous week Walt had received some unusual freight from New York—six boxes, all different sizes. They didn’t have the sloppy heft of motorcycle parts, though that alone wasn’t what got my attention. Each carton had a different return address in New York City, but all of them were from the same sender, someone named Chun-Ja. No last name. They had arrived in pairs, all originating on the same day, each set of two sent through one of the big three corporate carriers—FedEx, UPS, and DHL. By special contract I delivered for FedEx and UPS, but not DHL.
I had set my four next to the two left by the DHL driver. They weren’t gone until Friday morning. That meant they had been left out for two days and two nights, which wasn’t just odd—it had never happened before in all my years of making deliveries to Walt.
There was really only one possible explanation for why Walt failed to bring his freight inside—he had been out of town, except to my knowledge he had no family or friends, and absolutely nowhere else to go. Given his advanced age, the logical assumption would have been that he had died of natural causes and was stretched out stiff as a board somewhere in the recesses of his diner or workshop, or lay broken in the desert after an accident on one of his motorcycles. You had to know Walt to appreciate just how far-fetched such death scenarios were.
I pounded on the door of the Quonset hut. Just once. Walt’s hearing was perfect. At seventy-nine, all of him was damn near perfect, except his attitude toward people. No matter where he was on the property, or what he was doing, he had a sixth sense that told him if someone was around. If he didn’t show himself, he was ignoring you. The smartest and safest action you could take was to leave—the sooner the better. The only thing pounding and yelling did was piss him off. If there was one seventy-nine-year-old man on the planet you didn’t want to piss off, it was Walt Butterfield.
I was probably the only person to have seen the inside of Walt’s Quonset workshop in at least twenty years. These occasional excursions into Walt’s world, always by gruff invitation, never lasted longer than the time it took for me to slip freight off a hand truck.
I left the new box of parts next to the door and did the smart thing. It was a piece of good luck that Walt hadn’t answered my knock. I might have done something stupid, like ask him where he’d been or what was in the six cartons.
I always hoped to catch Walt, or rather have him willing to be caught. On a handful of occasions we sat in the closed diner. Sometimes he talked, though usually not. I always listened when he wanted to talk. A few times he actually fixed and served me breakfast in the diner. He had been around the area longer than anyone, or at least longer than anyone who had a brain that worked and a reliable memory.
I returned to my truck determined not to dwell on the strange freight or Walt’s absence. The really big mysteries in life never troubled me much. How the pyramids were built or whether Cortés was a homosexual didn’t bounce my curiosity needle. On the other hand, Walt’s absence and his odd freight were hard to resist. The diner and I contemplated each other. Like Walt himself, it had a long and colorful past.
U.S. 191 is the main highway north and south out of Price, Utah. North led to Salt Lake City. Due south took you to Green River, and eventually Moab. The turnoff for State Road 117 is about twenty miles from the city limits of Price. Ten miles east, down 117, on the left, surrounded by miles of flat, rugged nothing, you came upon The Well-Known Desert Diner.
From 1955 to 1987 the diner appeared in dozens of B movies. There were the desert horror-thriller movies, the desert biker mayhem movies, and the movies where someone, usually an attractive young woman, drove across the desert alone and some bad shit happened.
Once in a while it’s possible to catch one of these low-budget gems on cable. I always cheered when the diner filled the screen. My personal favorites involved atomic monsters or aliens terrorizing small-town desert locals. The locals eventually triumphed and saved the planet. Their victory was usually accomplished with little more than a car battery, a couple of Winchester rifles, and a visiting college professor who had a crazy theory—and a wild, beautiful daughter.
The diner was originally built in 1929. Its pale gravel driveway, antique glass-bubble gas pumps, white adobe walls, and green trim made it seem familiar, almost like a home you had known all your life but never visited. Even the most hardened, sun-struck driver slowed down and smiled.
Two billboards, one facing 191 South and another facing 191 North, advertised the diner to traffic. “Homemade pie…Cool drinks…Just ahead.” The billboards were aged and faded. Through the years so many people had stopped to find the diner closed that one irate motorist spray-painted the northbound billboard to read: “The Never-Open Desert Diner.” Though this was not entirely true, it was true enough. On that rare occasion when it had not been true, the experience had turned out to be an unfortunate event for those who found the front door unlocked and Walt behind the counter. Though I didn’t know for certain, I’d always suspected that infrequently Walt took down the “Closed” sign and unlocked the door just to lure people in so he could run them off.
I emptied the last drops of coffee from the thermos into my ceramic mug and considered myself lucky, even though business was getting so bad I had been floating my diesel on a Visa card and trying not to wonder if I could survive another month. Still, every morning I got up feeling like I was headed home. To be sure, my luck was often hard luck, but good luck all the same, though lately I had felt more and more like a grown man still living at home with his poverty-stricken, ailing, and peculiar parents—which might have actually been the case if I’d had any.
Under my skin I wasn’t feeling nearly as lucky as I had in times past. Below that was a rising shiver of cold desperation. Things had to change. I wanted them to change. Like most people who said they wanted change, all I wanted was enough change to keep everything the same, only better.
The highway ahead lolled in sunlight. It was mine and it made me happy. It didn’t bother me that it was mine because no one else wanted it. The brakes hissed, and I glanced over at the diner one more time before I pulled out onto 117 to begin the rest of my day.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
James Anderson, Lullaby Road
