The Never-Open Desert Diner (5 page)

The roadway was quiet. We were only fifty feet apart. Without moving from his motorcycle, Walt asked me if I had broken down.

I got into the cab. Through the open window, I shouted, “No. You?”

He answered that he hadn't.

I checked my mirrors and put my truck in gear. Walt hadn't moved an inch. I shouted at him above the engine. “You like butter brickle ice cream?”

“What?”

The truck crept forward onto 117. Walt started to walk across the highway. I revved the engine, double-clicked through two gears, and left him behind in a haze of diesel exhaust. A minute later I was cresting the hill. Walt was standing in the middle of the road staring after me.

The morning was half over and I hadn't even made my first delivery. My trailer held, in addition to the ice cream, a crated John Deere tractor engine, twenty-seven five-gallon containers of DuPont Santa Fe red paint, forty coloring books, fifteen packages of crayons, a new windshield for the one and only Rockmuse postal vehicle, and ten cases
—
one thousand to a case
—
of Trojan condoms for the vending machine in the men's room at the Rockmuse Shell station, a quantity I thought was overly optimistic on Hal's part. Other freight included a metal carport kit, a Craftmatic adjustable bed, and a huge black plastic tub from a women's apparel manufacturing company in St. Louis. The contents of the tub were identified as “Imaginative Clothing.” It weighed 253 pounds, which I thought was an obscene amount of imagination. The recipient was the middle-aged owner of the Rockmuse Collision Repair Center. Maybe there was a connection between the ten thousand prophylactics and the imaginative clothing, if I cared to think about it. I didn't. Leave the mysteries alone. The only mystery I couldn't ignore was how Ben's Desert Moon Delivery Service was going to survive.

I
t was well into evening by the time I reached the turnout to Desert Home. Too late to deliver the ice cream. I didn't arrive back at the transfer station until nearly ten. By eleven I was asleep on my bed with my jeans and boots still on.

At 4:30 a.m. I began another long day, to be followed by a long Thursday of downtime getting some long overdue engine maintenance. Even though I wouldn't have the tractor much longer, I still didn't want it to break down somewhere on 117. The loss of a day would make Friday even longer and that would begin an excruciatingly full weekend going over my accounts and trying to come up with a way to make ends meet. Or at least get them into the same time zone.

Pulling the grade out of Price, I saw a new Ford sedan parked on the other side of 191, pointed west, toward town. The man inside was talking on his cell phone with his head turned away. The sunrise light flashed back to me off something in his ear. Probably an earring. He didn't look like he was in trouble. I didn't care if he was, especially since the outskirts of Price and a couple of gas stations were within fairly easy walking distance.

Truckers I've talked with think their bad press started with the movie
Thelma and Louise
. My opinion was it started long before that; the movie only confirmed what the public thought they knew
—
all truckers were menacing, violent degenerates and sexual predators. This didn't register with me until I came upon a disabled minivan ten years ago.

Four young children were playing dangerously close to the shoulder. Mom was behind the wheel and Dad had his head under the hood. It was 106 degrees. I never found out what the trouble was, or even got a chance to ask. No sooner had I pulled over and jumped down out of the cab, on a steep uphill grade no less, to see if I could lend them a hand than Mom let out a scream I could hear a hundred yards away. She kept screaming until the kids scrambled back into the van. I couldn't help but notice that Dad beat the kids into the van.

A good fifty miles from the nearest services, 106 degrees, and they sat behind locked doors and closed windows and watched me hike to their van. I felt sorry for them. One look at their frightened faces told me there was nothing I could do, nothing they would let me do. The other truth was I felt a bit sorry for myself that I did an honest job and people who didn't even know me were willing to die of heatstroke just to avoid me. After that incident, unless I recognized the vehicle or the driver, I passed by distressed motorists and hoped one of my good-hearted degenerate brethren with a radio or cell phone alerted the highway patrol.

At the bottom of the grade, the highway dropped onto a long straight stretch. I saw a car with its hood up. This one had its emergency flashers on. The driver was cute as a button, not that I have ever given buttons much thought. This button had a mountain bike hanging from the trunk of her car and was dressed in hiking shorts and a tight mesh athletic top. I wasn't going to stop. She, too, was within a healthy walk of Price, or a quick ride if she used her bicycle. She waved. When I didn't slow, she stepped up near the shoulder and waved again. She was so close to the shoulder a small, unexpected gust of wind might have resulted in a button tragedy. I passed her and then pulled over and set the brakes and turned on the emergency lights.

She was walking toward me as I walked toward her. When we were still a good way apart, she threw me a golly-gee-whiz smile and said, “I was afraid you weren't going to stop. Thank you.”

A tanker honked as it passed us. Probably no one I knew. There isn't a lot of crossover between the over-the-roaders and short-haulers.

I asked her what the problem was as we walked to her car. She shrugged and paraded a pair of helpless blue eyes. “I'm a schoolteacher,” she said. “Elementary. Science. I know about dinosaurs and head lice. When it comes to cars, I know about gas, dinosaurs, and head lice.” She had a pretty little laugh. “I just filled up back at the Conoco. This is a rental. I just got in from Salt Lake City.”

When she made the remark about dinosaurs, I knew what had brought her out to my part of Utah. Some of the most important finds in the last century had been made in this desert, which had once been a huge freshwater lake before it became a swamp that reached from the mesa to the Wasatch Range. There were fossils almost everywhere. Just down the road she could have excavated Walt.

I got in and turned the key. All the lights and gauges jumped to attention. The tank was full. The engine didn't turn over. Nothing but the irritating seat-belt buzzer.

“I just pulled over for a few minutes to check my map,” she volunteered. “When I went to start the car
—
this.”

I told her I didn't know a lot about new cars. Or dinosaurs. Though I did know a good home remedy for head lice. Another trucker honked. She turned her head, and the rising sun lit her mesh top in a distracting way. I knew him a little, or rather I knew all I wanted to know.

There are Christian truckers, Muslim truckers, lesbian truckers, married-couple truckers, opposite-sex and same-sex. I don't know how it used to be. Now about every race and religion, age, and whatever else was represented on the roadways of America. As a group, they were probably more honest and morally upright than what you'd find in Congress or on Wall Street.

Then there was Larry. Some called him 1K Larry. All I really knew was why he was called 1K Larry. He was proud of his nickname. Every thousand miles he had to get his pipes tuned and he didn't care who or what tuned them: animal, vegetable, or mineral. I only saw him every couple of months, usually just in passing, at the truck stop I used outside Price. He hauled for a big OTR outfit that kept him between Salt Lake City and Chicago.

Larry thought everyone wanted to hear about his latest tune-up. In fact, very few did. Hero T-shirts were fairly popular, each made with a different photo. One driver had a photo of a small boy with no hair. The kid was his son who had been fighting cancer for two years. Larry often wore a T-shirt with a picture of Bill Clinton and the caption “My Hero.” The last time I saw Larry I wondered if the former president had the same T-shirt with Larry's photo.

“You seem to have a lot of friends,” she said. “You must drive this highway a lot.”

“Not really. Just this short stretch,” I said. “I drive State 117. Down the road at the next junction.”

I first wiggled the automatic shifter to make certain it was in park and pressed my foot down hard on the brake. I turned the key again. The engine came to life. “Transmission in Park and Foot on Brake” was the automobile industry's answer to unintended acceleration. My old Toyota pickup had a difficult time accelerating even when it was intentional.

She was thrilled and so was I. “You did it!”

I was thrilled to be able to get on my way.

She thanked me twice as I extracted myself from her little rental.

“Can I buy you breakfast?” she asked. “Maybe you can recommend some good mountain biking trails?” She extended her hand. The fingers were slender and delicate. Her fingernails were manicured
—
long and shaped, with a fresh coat of red polish. “I'm Carrie.”

I didn't know any mountain biking trails, good or otherwise, and my lack of knowledge wasn't going to change, and neither was my schedule, or my mood. I told her the only place to have breakfast was either ninety miles ahead in Green River or ten miles behind her back in Price.

She pointed up the road to the sign for The Well-Known Desert Diner. “How about there?” It was the south billboard, the one without the graffiti. I couldn't help but laugh.

“Did I say something funny?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It's just that diner is really never open anymore.”

“It was open last night.”

This was surprising news, and it must have shown on my face.

“Honest,” she said. “It was. The lights were all on and I could see a man and a woman behind the blinds. They were dancing.”

I couldn't help myself and forgot my manners. “No shit?” Maybe I didn't know Walt Butterfield quite as well as I thought. Strange cargo from New York. A trip out of town. The lights on at night. A woman. Dancing. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes.” There was an earnest schoolteacher clip to her answer. “I even drove my car into the lot. The man pointed to the ‘Closed' sign. I didn't get out of my car. It was pretty late. His wife or girlfriend must have switched off the lights. The place went dark. I could still hear the music playing. It must be open now. So, what do you say? Breakfast?”

At that moment I was so shocked I couldn't have said anything. I stared at the sign. It was a mystery I knew I would have a problem leaving alone. I smiled, thinking of Walt and the mystery woman dancing in the diner that had been in lockdown for so long.

She took the smile for a yes. “I'll just follow you,” she said.

Before I could say anything, another truck slowed but did not blow its horn. Some trucks were equipped with a microphone and an external speaker, for safety reasons I guessed. I didn't have one. Even if I hadn't seen the turban and beard, I would have known the driver by his voice and greeting. The truck crept by. The loudspeaker screeched, the Indian accent unmistakable. “Truth is timeless being. Greetings to you, my brother, Ben. Tell me. Here are you in discomfort?”

“Truth is timeless being,” I shouted back to him. “No discomfort. Just helping this lady.”

“Very good. Very good.” Manjit's tractor-trailer gradually picked up speed and merged back onto the highway.

If I ever decided to have a hero T-shirt made, I might use his photograph, with his turban and dense white beard. I'd been behind him on 191 several years back as a whole line of trucks were tiptoeing over an icy downgrade through blowing snow. The driver in front of Manjit lost control of his tractor-trailer and began a slow-motion jackknife.

Maybe one driver in a hundred could have avoided the skidding truck and kept us all from piling up. Manjit managed it with skill and lightning reflexes. He remained calm and threaded his double trailer around the jackknife without allowing himself to be forced into oncoming traffic. I didn't know much about the Sikh religion or what they believed. I didn't really care. If Manjit was an example, I had a good idea of how they lived
—
clean, tolerant, hardworking
—
which tells you a hell of a lot more about a man than knowing his religion.

“Who was that?”

“Manjit,” I said. “He's a Sikh.”

“A what?”

“An Indian,” I answered, hoping to cut the discussion short.

“You mean Native American, don't you?”

I picked up a trace of condescension.

“Sure,” I said. “Native American.”

She got into her rental. “Well, we're off. I'm right behind you.”

“I have to get going,” I said.

“Just coffee, then?”

“No. Sorry.”

She was persistent. “Maybe later, then?”

I knelt down by her open window. “Ma'am, I've already had coffee, with my wife. And tonight I'll have dinner with her and our three children.”

More than anything she seemed startled. It wasn't the rejection. She appeared totally unprepared for the news of a wife and children. “Oh?” She glanced at my left hand. “Sorry. No ring.”

“There's a ring, all right,” I said. “She's having it engraved for our twentieth wedding anniversary.”

With not much of a good-bye, and another quick thank-you, she sped back onto the highway. I sat in my cab a few minutes while my little lie worked on me. It had nothing to do with her. Saying I had a wife and kids at home almost made them a reality, and I missed them. I could imagine kids getting ready for school and running out the door of a place that was a lot like the model house. The happy voices disappeared into the empty, sand-covered streets of Desert Home.