The Never-Open Desert Diner (17 page)

“Did someone ask you to give up something you love?” I asked.

“Kind of. Dennis created a situation where I had to, or thought I did.” She hesitated and pulled up the one sock that had almost come off her foot. “Yes,” she said, as if she had just that minute decided. “He did. He had passion for his music, for the cello. I quit college to work so he didn't have to. Not that he ever tried. He just let me do it. Maybe he didn't come out and ask me to give up the cello, but it amounted to the same thing. He should have stopped me. Told me not to do it. We could have worked it out. There's a lesson in that, Ben. If someone you love asks you to give up something you love, don't do it.”

It sounded like good advice: advice that I would take, except going out of business wasn't a choice for me. I didn't really want to talk about Dennis. That wasn't a choice either.

“He must still love you,” I said. “He's going through a lot of time and expense to find you and get you back.” I wanted to ask her what she was going to do. Instead I just let my words hang in the air between us and hoped she answered the question I couldn't bring myself to ask.

She answered quickly. It wasn't something she needed to think about. “It doesn't matter if Dennis loves me. He doesn't, though. What he loves is that cello. He isn't searching for me. No one is really searching for me.”

Recalling my last attempt to mention the cello, I knew I was on dangerous ground. “The cello?”

It was no longer dangerous. I was relieved. She simply nodded. “Our divorce is almost final. I shouldn't have taken it. The cello was our only community property that meant anything to him. Turned out there was more community involved than I knew about.”

“Another woman?”

“Yes,” she said, without sadness. “I don't care. I don't even care about the cello, really. Not
that
cello. Not anymore. I'm going to call him and tell him to come and get it. Just him, though. I won't give it to her or her family.” She obviously knew the other woman's name and wouldn't use it. Claire needed to call the woman “her.” Even if Claire no longer loved her husband, using the other woman's name would bestow a dignity and power she couldn't bear.

Claire brightened. “I wonder if what you need is a good bookkeeper?”

“Are you interested in the job?”

“I'm pretty sure I've already submitted my application.”

“Then it's yours.”

“Slow down, mister. I'll have to think about it. I've been out of the job market for a while. I'm kind of enjoying the interviews. I have concerns.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Lots of things. Job security for one.”

I told her I understood. “What else?”

Claire lifted herself up and straddled me. We faced each other. “Then of course there is the compensation package.”

I groaned.

She might have been small but she was no feather, and I was a busted perch. She pushed me backward onto the porch floor and leaned over me. Her breasts skimmed my chest. Her long black hair fell around my shoulders. She began to move her hips. “Sir, I'm ready for my next interview.”

“You'd have great job security, ma'am,” I said. “But, frankly, I'm a little concerned about the compensation package.”

Claire kissed me and gathered her hair behind her back. “That's what negotiations are all about. I'm sure if you try you can come up with something that meets my requirements.”

It took awhile. Sure enough, I managed another interview.

O
n the way back to the diner I stopped at Bernice's grave. Several pieces of red flagstone had been set in the ground as a stairway up to an area that had been cut back into the hillside, almost a grotto. There were fresh flowers next to the marker.
Bernice Chun-Ja Butterfield Beloved Wife 1936–1972–1987.
The way Walt had done the dates didn't even wrinkle my brow. In a way, I would have been surprised if he hadn't memorialized the year of the rape, the year she really died to herself and to Walt, and the year Desert Home ended.

Claire had been in the bathtub when I left. I'd carried and heated the water for her. I needed to take a shower, several of them, and put on clean clothes. There was no sense doing the first until I had the clean clothes. She shouted from the bathroom that she was going to call Dennis from the pay phone at the diner sometime later in the day.

The walk back up the trail to the diner was slow and could barely have been described as walking. If Claire hadn't been such an effective painkiller it could have rightfully been called a death march. I stepped between the mounds of earth, and the white adobe diner shimmered under the noonday sun.

The booth we had sat in during dinner lined up directly with the entrance to Desert Home. I wondered if that was what Bernice had been staring at over her untouched coffee all those years. Maybe she saw the future there, of Claire and me, and it gave her some peace. As I stood on the trail staring across 117 at the diner, I could almost see Bernice Butterfield staring back at me through the window.

The Victor was right where I had left it against the Quonset. As usual, Walt knew I was on the property before I did. He stepped out of the doorway of the Quonset with only a few telltale signs of our fight. A butterfly bandage held his torn lip in place. There was nothing in his movements that hinted at anything but a good night's sleep. It was disheartening. I looked and felt like hell and I was pretty sure I'd won. Walt didn't toss me a hello, not that I expected one. He didn't take a swing at me either, which I found a welcome and reassuring sign.

He pointed to the Victor. “Clean it up the way it was when you took it. Then bring it in.”

I sighed loudly.

I got the hose and turned the water on. Walt opened the door just long enough to put out a bucket of soapy water and soft rags. It might have been entertaining to watch as I tried to wash and polish the Victor, the kneeling, the tight work with my fingers to get off all the dirt and blow out the sand from around the engine. It would have been like watching a surgeon try to operate with an Erector Set for hands.

Walt came out just once and inspected. He grunted and pointed to some spots I had missed. Without a word he returned inside. When I was finally done, or prayed that I was done to Walt's satisfaction, I held the hose over my head just to feel the cool water on a battered face that had now been burned by the afternoon sun.

I knocked on the door of the Quonset. Walt barked at me to come in, which I did, pushing the Victor. He was sitting at his workbench, hunched over some small part that he was either assembling or disassembling. A bare lightbulb hung a few feet above his head. The rest of his workshop was in shadow. Without looking up, he said, “Put it back in line. I'll finish cleaning it later.”

He didn't even inspect my work. He just wanted to tell me I hadn't done a good enough job, meaning the job he could do, that he always did,
the
Walt Butterfield your-baby-could-eat-off-my-exhaust-pipe standard. I jockeyed the Victor back into its place and took a few more minutes to shine up the chrome and catch a water drip or two.

I stood next to him at his workbench. “Thank you,” I said. I gave him a minute or two to say something back to me. Of course, he didn't. I had been drinking water from the hose and had to relieve myself. I asked Walt if the back door to the diner was open so I could use the bathroom.

He paused in his work and looked me over, almost smiling. “No need,” he said, and tipped his head toward the rear of the Quonset. He returned his attention to whatever he was fiddling with on the bench. “Use the one back there. But be careful of my objet d'art.”

I told myself that Walt and I were making progress. He'd never let me use the workshop toilet before. I hadn't even known there was one.

I carefully made my way to the rear of the workshop, twisting and turning through the maze of crates. It was no use asking Walt to turn on a light or two, just to be courteous. Two stacks of large boxes sat so close to the door that I had to turn sideways to get it open. The restroom seemed like an afterthought, narrow and put up out of rough plywood. The flimsy spring-loaded door snapped shut behind me while I batted at the air trying to find the pull string for the light. Little restrooms like that rarely had a switch.

The stench of urine was overpowering in the closed room. It wasn't like Walt to have a room, even a restroom, that wasn't clean and smelling fresh. I found the light cord and pulled it. It didn't catch the first time and I had to pull it again. When it came on it wasn't much of a light, no more than forty watts.

I wondered what Walt meant when he told me to be careful of his objet d'art. To my knowledge Walt didn't collect art, unless you considered his motorcycle collection art. Most men probably would. There were never even any stills from the movie days on the walls of the diner like might be expected. Just inside the door on my left, tacked to the wall, was a photograph. I reached up and directed the bare bulb at the photo so I could get a better look.

I recognized the two men. I guessed who the woman was. It wasn't much of a guess. All three were laughing. One of the men was a young Walt. The other was Lee Marvin. The three of them were standing on a boat dock somewhere tropical, the blue ocean in the distance, serene and eternal. Bernice was between the two men next to a fish, a sailfish or marlin, hanging from a block and tackle. The fish dwarfed all three of them, but none more than Bernice. The men were turned toward her. She was bent over with her laughter, her happy face to the camera, and what could have been tears on her brown cheeks. If only from this photograph, I would have known Claire was her daughter.

I moved the light closer. Small print at the bottom of the photograph identified it as
Property of MGM
. It noted the photographer and the date
—
1962. The caption read:
Co-star Lee Marvin and friends on the set of
Donovan's Reef
. Island of Kauai, Hawaii. Directed and produced by John Ford.

Maybe the photograph wasn't art, though I understood why Walt had kept it all these years. What I couldn't understand was why he kept it tacked to a wall near a toilet in a small, windowless restroom that stank of urine and mold way in the back of his workshop. It was the only picture of Bernice I had ever seen, with or without Walt. I figured Walt had reasons that made sense to him even if they wouldn't make sense to anyone else.

I let go of the bulb. It swung gently back and forth. I looked down at the sparkling white toilet bowl and floor. Then I glanced at the wall in front of me.

It took a few seconds to focus my eyes through the shifting shadows made by the swinging of the bare bulb. The face of the corpse was contorted in its dark, shrunken skin. Its hair flowed long and stringy out from under a cap that read,
Da Nang AFB 1969
. The clothes, a fatigue jacket and jeans, still clung to the shriveled body that had been nailed with long spikes through its shoulder blades into the plywood behind it. The legs were draped on either side of the commode as if it were riding the toilet. The urine smell was not coming from the toilet. It came from the corpse.

I fell more than backed out of the restroom, gasping for air, crashing through the narrow door and into the crates of motorcycle parts. Pieces of metal burst from the crates and rolled in all directions across the workshop floor. I stumbled toward the front of the Quonset, dodging Walt's chevron of cycles, my eyes on the thin lines of sunlight spilling from around the edges of the door. I didn't open the door; I kicked at it with my boots using all the strength I had. The door shattered and flew off its hinges. I rushed through, my hands clutching for fresh air and the sliver of open ground between the diner and the Quonset.

I was still gasping for air when I returned to the workshop a minute later. Walt hadn't moved. He sat on a stool hunched over his project. He didn't look at me. “I thought you might like to meet your potential father-in-law. One of them, anyway.”

I stood behind him quivering. “Goddamn it, Walt!” I shouted. When he didn't respond I stepped into the pool of light over his bench and slapped off the crap in front of him onto the floor. “You crazy fucker!”

Walt's eyes narrowed as his project scattered across the concrete floor. “Watch your mouth, Ben. There's more where last night came from.” Calmly, he got up from his stool and retrieved his project and returned it to his workbench. He sat down on the stool and began to work again. “This is an Amal carburetor. They're rare and nasty little things to rebuild.”

I tried to gather myself. “Walt, you're crazy.”

He must have succeeded in doing something to the carburetor. “There we go,” he said to himself. Turning the part over and over in his fingers, he said, “You think so?”

“Yes,” I said, whispering between my teeth, “I do.” I thought about the corpse for a minute. “Did you kill him?”

“No, Ben, I didn't. I didn't save him either. He was the one who ran off into the desert. I couldn't go after him. I had to get Bernice and Bobby to the hospital. It took some time out there. I'm not in the saving business. That's the preacher's job. And apparently yours.”

I said out loud what came to mind. “The fourth man.”

“No,” Walt said. “The first man. He was pulling up his jeans when I came through the back door.” Walt paused and looked up at the bulb above his head. “The next one had already started on Bernice. The other two were waiting for their turns. One of them couldn't even wait. He was masturbating while he watched.

“You know, Ben,” he said, “Lee and I were just kids in Korea. We thought we'd seen it all. The real horror of war is always waiting for you at home. It's waiting, I tell you. We were so damned happy when we got back. We'd made it. We survived. But it's always waiting. Waiting. You let down your guard. And there it is. You can't ever let up. Give up.”

I wasn't sure what Walt was talking about. I was pretty sure I didn't want to know. A few days after the rape, he'd come back to the diner to clean up and change clothes. Just to relax, he went for a ride. Several miles down 117 toward Rockmuse he saw a figure crawling just north of the highway. “I knew it was him before I ever saw his face. He damn sure knew who I was. What he didn't know was how much I'd seen.”

Here it was, the story that had never been told. I waited for Walt to tell me what had really happened. Why it had happened. But he didn't know why. “Soon as he saw me he started wailing from his knees, pulling at me. His tongue was swollen from thirst. I could make out his words well enough. He begged me to understand he had nothing to do with what happened to Bernice. Said he'd tried to stop the others. I stood out there in the desert for an hour or better. Just let him waste what little time he had left. The only new bit of information I learned was that the man had been hitchhiking. The other three had picked him up outside Rifle, Colorado.”

“Do you remember his name?”

Walt gave me a grim smile. “Ben, why in the hell would I care what his name was?”

“He might have had people somewhere,” I said.

Walt swiveled around on his stool until he faced the rear of the workshop and the restroom. He spoke toward the room with its corpse. “If he did, they're better off without him. If Jesus himself had done what that man did, I'd have his bony ass riding bareback on my privy.”