The Never-Open Desert Diner (6 page)

A
fternoon had slipped into early evening when I pulled into the turnout of Desert Home to deliver Claire's ice cream. I grabbed a half gallon of butter brickle out of the fridge unit and trudged up to the arch and stood there for a moment.

A storm was moving in. The sweet smell of rain came to me in a soft breeze. It might be a light rain or a hard rain that was coming, though in the desert the rain usually came down hard and all at once on parched earth that couldn't absorb so much rain so quickly. Arroyos filled with fast, churning water and mud following any gentle slope, gaining speed and volume until it was a raging torrent sweeping everything in its path to nowhere. That was how people got into trouble. Maybe they heard lightning and thunder a long way away and figured, well, it's raining over there, but not here. They didn't know they were in trouble until it was too late. I thought about the schoolteacher, Carrie, somewhere out in the desert on her mountain bike. I hoped she had sense enough to pedal like hell for higher ground.

Claire stepped out onto the porch, again with her hands behind her back. She seemed to be able to sense when I was nearby. I held the half-gallon carton above my head. She waved me forward with her left hand. She was wearing a man's checkered short-sleeved shirt and a long old-fashioned dress made from blue denim.

The air was still warm, but it was cooling fast. This was a delivery I wanted to make quickly, a courtesy, and get back on the road before the sky opened up.

Spring through fall, stretches of 117 became flooded and impassable for several hours at a time. For no good reason, I was eager to get to my weekend accounting, which had been filling most of my thoughts throughout the day, interspersed with visions of Walt dancing in his diner. I knew the numbers were bad. Now I was filled with a morbid curiosity to know just how bad they were, to the penny.

Again, about twenty feet from the porch, I stopped and held out the carton of ice cream. “Ma'am,” I said. “Your order.”

Her right hand swung out from behind her back and the sunlight glinted off metal. I stumbled backward, instinctively closing my eyes. Somewhere inside a part of me welcomed a bullet from the crazy bitch.

When I heard her laughter I dared to open my eyes. She was holding a tablespoon. “Ben, Ben.” She repeated my name several times before adding, “I'm so sorry!”

I wasn't laughing. That didn't stop her, though I could tell she was working on controlling herself. I thought I might laugh later, in a year or so. Her laughter. It was the answer to the age-old question, what attracts you most to someone? It was a question I hadn't considered much. I enjoyed Claire's laugh, even at my expense. I doubted there was ever just one thing about someone. For me her smile and her laughter highlighted everything else about her, set everything else on fire
—
her dark, slightly slanted eyes, the curve of her throat, the way she held her shoulders back with a gentle pride that made her breasts confident and understated at the same time.

Aware of the way I was looking at her, I dropped my gaze to her feet, still bare. They definitely weren't elegant. They were wide, strong feet, with short toes
—
sturdy, beautiful feet built for balance.

“I've been waiting all day for this ice cream,” she said.

I handed her the carton and backed up a few steps. She held the carton in one hand and the spoon in the other. “How much do I owe you?”

Without hesitation, I said, “Twenty thousand dollars.” More or less it was the figure that had been bouncing around in my head all day. Probably more. It was what I needed to come even, and the sound of such an amount coming from my mouth almost hurt. It had the weight of “good-bye” behind it.

“Yikes!” she said. “That seems a little high, even for delivery in the desert.”

“It's butter brickle. Plain vanilla is only ten thousand.”

She sat down on the top step. “I guess I'll have a couple hundred worth. I only have one spoon to my name. If you don't have any trucker diseases, you can join me.”

I told her I had all the usual trucker diseases. None of them was contagious. “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. “I have a rule against eating ice cream with married women. Especially married women whose jealous husbands are probably looking for them.”

“You have a lot of rules, do you?” she asked.

“Not that many,” I answered. “Just enough to remind me how complicated life can get when you don't have any.”

She dug the spoon into the open carton. “Oh-o-o,” she said, her mouth full. “Twenty thousand suddenly seems like a fair price. I could get used to this stuff.”

“That would be good news,” I said, “since I happen to have several cases of it.”

“Please,” she said, nodding to the space next to her on the step. “I can't keep this frozen and I can't eat it all by myself.” She took another bite. “Well, not in one sitting.”

I declined again and took some pleasure watching her shovel the ice cream into her mouth. For a few seconds it was so enjoyable I forgot about my troubles. “A rule is a rule,” I said.

“It's just ice cream,” she said.

“It's just a rule,” I said. “In my experience it could be coffee or a banana daiquiri. Husbands tend to get violent. Ice cream really tends to put a match to their fuses.”

“Dennis doesn't have a violent bone in his body.”

I assumed Dennis was the husband.

“He's a musician. An artist. As far as jealousy goes, I don't think so.”

“You might be surprised how quickly such bones can grow,” I said. “Some of the most violent fights I've ever seen were between men who would have told you they weren't violent just before they bashed someone's skull in. It's in all of us, men and women alike.”

“You, too?”

“Except me,” I said, and tried to smile.

“You're right, I guess,” she said. “Thanks for the ice cream.”

I told her she was welcome and turned to leave.

“How much, really?”

“This one is on the house,” I said. “I'm like a heroin dealer. The first butter brickle fix is free. Once you get hooked, the sky's the limit.”

“I'm hooked,” she said. “When can I get another fix?”

“Monday,” I answered. “I usually don't work weekends.”

T
he rain started before I got back to my truck, just a few huge, round drops that cratered the sand and dirt with loud plops. As is often the case in the desert, the sky directly over my head was blue and clear. The heavy clouds, what there were of them, hugged the rim line of some distant hills. No thunder or lightning. These drops were the scouts, dispersed by wind, announcing the deluge that would arrive shortly. It took less time than I anticipated. A few minutes later the rain pelting my truck sounded like firecrackers. My wipers couldn't move the water off my windshield fast enough to allow me to drive more than thirty miles an hour.

This was the desert, everything all at once, whether it was needed or not. What survived had learned to save, live carefully, and keep a low profile, even appear to be dead for long periods. Perseverance and patience.

The rain subsided. I was picking up speed as I passed the diner. Walt's place looked as it always looked: perfect and closed, with no sign that anything out of the ordinary was going on. That was exactly what passers-by said in June 1972 when they learned that Bernice, Walt's wife, was being beaten and raped by three men inside the diner.

Though Walt's wife was Korean, she'd chosen to go by Bernice. The word that was used then was
savaged
. Bernice had been savaged by three men, though no one knew for sure if all three were involved, or if there might have been four. If only one had been involved and the others just watched from the sidelines, she was still savaged by all of them.

I'd first heard the story when I was a teenager. By then it had been handed down by at least one generation and embroidered. Now, forty years later, it was both transformed and forgotten in the way terrible events often are.

The last time I'd heard it mentioned the event had supposedly taken place in the 1950s, a hundred miles away at a small trading post at the summit of Soldier Pass. In that incarnation both the proprietor and his wife had been killed, and the murderers, escaped convicts with long prison records, recaptured and brought to justice. Maybe that was true, too. History has a way of chasing gravity just like water, feeding into other parts of itself to become something else, something larger and grander, until the one pure thing it was no longer exists.

The only eyewitness account of Bernice's rape, or at least part of it, came from a high school kid Walt had hired to clean up and wash dishes. What the kid saw came out in disjointed parts, like a jigsaw puzzle missing a lot of important pieces. There was a beginning of sorts, and an end, and just enough pieces of the middle to allow a good guess at what the middle had looked like.

Walt had driven into Price that afternoon to run some errands, leaving the high school kid and Bernice alone at the diner. She was cooking and waitressing, and the kid filled in where he could. There had been a dinnertime rush. Near sunset the place had cleared out. Dirty plates and utensils and half-empty cups and glasses were left on the tables and on the counter.

A fairly new Chevrolet Biscayne sedan pulled up to the pumps, and the kid went out to pump gas and clean the windshield. He later swore there were four men in the car. While he filled up the tank they went inside the diner, where Bernice was cleaning up.

How long did it take to pump fifteen or twenty gallons from one of those old glass pumps? Five minutes? Ten? It wasn't until he was finished with the gas and cleaning the windshield that he went inside. Only then did he hear Bernice's screams.

At least two of the men, all average-looking guys around thirty years old, had Bernice on the floor of the diner. Her white blouse had been ripped off and was already covered in blood from her head wounds. Her blue skirt was nowhere in sight. She was naked from the waist down. That was the last thing the kid saw until he came to behind the counter, paper napkins stuffed in his mouth, his right arm broken so badly the bones jutted out from the skin in two places. He could only see out of one eye. A butter knife had been jabbed into the other.

When he opened his one good eye he saw Walt kneeling over him and he could still hear Bernice screaming and what sounded like grunts
—
and laughter. Walt had come in, as usual, through the back entrance into the kitchen. He gently stroked the side of the kid's head with his hand. The kid said later that Walt kissed his forehead, maybe because he thought the boy was dead, or soon would be.

There might have been four men, but there were only three bodies. Maybe one got away and ran into the desert. Maybe he died there. Maybe he'd been living for years in someplace like Petaluma, California, with his wife and visited his grandchildren twice a year in Denver. No one knew. Maybe Walt knew, but he never said a word about what happened next
—
not to the highway patrol, not to the sheriff, not to the county attorney, not to anyone.

Bernice's screams stopped. Everything was silent. The kid heard something like a drain becoming unclogged, a gurgling. Somehow, with the knife still in his eye, he crawled on the floor around the end of the counter, dragging his broken arm behind him. A ragged bloodstain on the linoleum tiles marked his path.

One of the men, the man nearest the kid, was just standing there, his back to the kid. A steak knife stuck out from the base of his skull. The gurgling sound came from a man on the floor. His throat had been cut. Walt stood over him with a butcher knife. The third man was on top of Bernice. He had his head turned and was looking up at Walt. The fourth man, if there was one, was sitting in one of the booths. The kid didn't see him but claimed he saw the man's shadow thrown across the floor by the setting sun coming through the front windows.

The kid passed out and survived. He probably lived somewhere with the memory of that evening. He'd be around fifty-seven or fifty-eight. Walt thrust the butcher knife so deep between the shoulder blades of the man on top of Bernice that it came out the man's chest and punctured Bernice's left lung. What had been up until then a stealthy and disciplined attack must have finally turned to wild rage.

Walt was experienced enough from his stint with the Marines in Korea not to try to remove the knife from the kid's eye. If he had, the boy would have bled to death within a few minutes.

Walt scooped up the boy and Bernice and put them in the back of the 1964 Willys station wagon they owned. He drove them to the hospital in Price. He called the boy's parents but through what had to have been a long, worried night he didn't call the authorities. The police learned about it early the next morning from a hysterical tourist calling from the phone booth outside the diner.

I can't imagine what that tourist saw when he or she walked into The Well-Known Desert Diner that morning. I've heard it said that some things are best left to the imagination. That might be true. Then again, maybe there are some things that shouldn't be.

No charges were ever filed against Walt, though for a time the families of the men were trying to stir up the county prosecutor. All of the men had been attacked from behind.

And these men, these three, or four, men, were they escaped convicts? Desperate men on a crime spree? Men with long, violent criminal histories? Crazy Vietnam vets, as was the fashion for blame in those days. Druggies? Charles Manson disciples or wannabes? People just wanted an explanation that would make sense, even if it made no sense.

The public got all there was. They were men with wives and families, upstanding citizens with mortgages and car payments. No criminal records of any kind. They were shoe salesmen, at least the three who were found, returning to Salt Lake City from a sales conference in Denver.

There were a few idiots who tried to say that Bernice had somehow provoked them, or wanted what she got. There were theories that Walt knew the men and there was bad blood, as if that would explain anything or even begin to justify what they did to Bernice. There were those who simply maintained that Walt had no right to kill the men no matter what they had done. All I ever pondered was the maybe ten minutes between a Chevy full of shoe salesmen saying, “Fill 'er up” to a young pump jockey, and a free-for-all on a defenseless thirty-five-year-old Korean waitress. Ten minutes. Tops.

Two events occurred in 1987. Either one of them might have signaled the end of the Well-Known Desert Diner, though together they sealed its fate. Bernice died, though almost everyone would have said she died a long time before that. And Lee Marvin, the actor, died. He had been Walt's closest friend since their Marine Corps days in Korea. The two deaths took place within a week of each other. The month before, the exteriors were shot for the last film ever to use the diner. Oddly enough, it was different from every other film to feature the diner
—
it was a love story.

All of that had been way before my time on 117.

Bernice spent over two months in the hospital in Price recovering from the attack. There were some injuries the doctors couldn't repair. From the hospital she went to a sanitarium outside Logan, where she spent the next eight months. When she returned to Walt, she looked fine, but she never spoke another word. She sat in the end booth nearest the jukebox with a vacant smile on her face. She spent all day every day from 1974 until the day she died looking out the window across the road into the desert, her hands cradling a cup of coffee she never drank. Walt ran the diner with some help. There was always a red plastic placard on Bernice's table that said, “Reserved.” It was still there the last time I was in the diner.

I didn't doubt any of this information, though I didn't hear it from Walt. Bernice died sitting in that booth. The diner stayed closed after that, even during those rare times when it was open.

If Walt had been dancing with a woman, I couldn't help but wonder if the woman the schoolteacher saw was Bernice. Knowing Walt the way I did, a ghost was the only thing that made sense to me. I would sooner believe a ghost than a live woman. If Walt were seeing a woman from around Price, I would have heard about it.

Not far down the road from the diner was the runaway wife, Claire, except she was way too young. And married. I was pretty sure she was just squatting at the model home. Perhaps she had found Desert Home the same way I had, by accident. It was a safe place for her because she didn't know anyone. If she knew someone in the area, it sure as hell wouldn't be Walt Butterfield. No one really knew Walt anyway, even me. We only really knew
of
Walt. That was a fact and it hurt to admit it.

On Monday, or the week after, I expected to show up at Desert Home and find Claire gone. I would stand on the porch or sit on the chair and wish her well. Maybe I would hear the silent cello. She would become just another one of the mysteries I had to leave alone. She might become one of the mysteries I would find myself leaving alone for the rest of my life.