The Never-Open Desert Diner (9 page)

“Ben,” she shouted. “I'll pay you a special delivery charge if you can bring me some ice cream on Saturday.”

I shouted back that I would try. No promises.

“Ben,” she called out again. “Don't make me go to your competitors.”

I didn't respond to that. She shouted my name again.

When Claire was certain I was looking at her, she raised her arms wide as if to embrace the approaching evening. She was a small and indistinct figure, equal parts body and shadow, standing at the edge of the porch.

“Children of the night,” she shouted in a terrible imitation of Bela Lugosi's
Dracula
. Her voice echoed across the sandy streets. “Children of the night, I love you little fuckers!”

The diner was dark when I drove by. There was no dancing going on, and I had begun to doubt there ever had been.

J
osh Arrons was waiting for me when I arrived the next morning. I didn't have any idea what I thought a television producer would look like, but certainly over thirty, which he couldn't have been. His blond hair was combed straight back in a way that highlighted his diamond stud earrings and dark sunglasses. A wispy little goatee dangled from his chin. He was impossibly slender but appeared fit. My first impulse was to ask him where Scooby-Doo was these days, except he was dressed like he'd been Dumpster diving behind the local Eddie Bauer outlet store.

We took care of the release and the agreement. He counted out the $750 in fifties and I signed a receipt. Bob the Station Supervisor hovered over his shoulder, grinning.

“Climb in,” I said. “We'll be on our way.”

Bob, for some unknown reason, repeated exactly what I had just said.

“Are you going, too, Bob?” I asked. “If you are, the price just tripled.”

He grinned at me. “No,” he said, as if for a moment he had been considering it. “Just glad we all worked through the details.” He slapped Josh on the back. “It was touch-and-go there, right, Josh?”

“Right, Bob,” Josh answered. He glanced at Bob's hand on his shoulder. “But the touching part is over. This man has work to do.”

Suddenly I was in danger of liking Josh.

Josh didn't say a word and sat in the cab while I fueled. I got the cash discount on top of the one I got with my CDL card. It wasn't until we had turned off 191 onto 117 that he reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone. “Mind if I take some notes?” he asked.

I answered that I didn't mind. He spoke into his cell phone for about five minutes. The date and time we left, the address of the transfer station, taking on diesel, even our average speed and the approximate time we turned onto 117. He ended with, “Driver, Ben Jones, owner and operator of Ben's Desert Moon Delivery Service, Price, Utah.”

I admired his thoroughness.

As we passed the diner, he said, “That's an interesting place. Ever stop there?”

“When I have to,” I said.

“It looks familiar.”

I laughed. I figured there was no harm in telling him about the movie years. But that was all I told him, nothing about Walt, Bernice, or the motorcycles. He listened and, I noticed, so did his cell phone, which he had pointed discreetly in my direction.

“Any chance you might introduce me to the owner?”

“Nope,” I said. “Even if I tried, he might not open his door. No story there. Just a cranky old man.”

Josh wanted to know how old Walt was. I knew exactly how old Walt was but I took my time answering. “Somewhere between eighty and a hundred.”

“Bet he has some stories to tell.”

“Maybe,” I said, “except no one will ever hear them. I expect his memory isn't too sharp. I wouldn't be surprised if he kicked off pretty soon.”

Josh stuck to the letter of our deal. He didn't ask many questions and I answered even fewer.

The long miles ticked off through the desert while he made notes into his cell phone about things I had long since stopped noticing, like how the ground seems to reach outward in evenly spaced swells from the mesa to the Wasatch Range. He picked up on the fact that at a certain point the milepost markers disappeared and there were no telephone wires or utility poles along the shoulder. He was alert every minute of every mile. The few times we stopped to make a delivery, he not only stayed inside the cab, he pushed himself back in the seat so it would have been hard for anyone on the ground to see him.

Toward the end of our morning Josh stared out his window for a long time. From time to time he would shake his head. I could tell something was gnawing at him.

“What do you see out there?” I asked.

“It's what I don't see.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Ask.”

“No road signs. No utility poles. And
—
”

I finished for him. “No mailboxes.”

Josh nodded. “Isn't there mail service out here?”

He was an observant little bastard. “Yes,” I answered, “there is. All the way from Rockmuse to the junction with U.S. 191. But no one uses it. Or wants it.”

“No one?”

“A few, close to Rockmuse. None that I can think of this far out.”

“Why is that?”

There wasn't any harm in explaining, though what I could provide was far from an explanation.

People on 117 needed me. And I needed them. That was simple enough. What wasn't simple was exactly why they felt they needed me when a lot of what I delivered, at a fair but significant expense, could be obtained free or at a much lower cost through the U.S. Postal Service.

I shrugged. “No one knows why.”

“There has to be a reason,” Josh said.

“You would think so,” I said. “It must make a kind of sense to them, if not to anyone else. It's like they're all related, which they aren't. They do share a stubborn nature and a perverse distrust of any and all government institutions.”

“You mean they're anti-government?”

I laughed. “Hell, no. They don't even talk to one another. They sure as hell don't agree on anything except a desire to be left alone. They're anti-everything.”

“There's got to be more to it,” Josh said.

“If there is more I don't know what it is,” I said. “It's best just to say they prefer it that way and try to leave it at that. Every damn one of them steadfastly refuses to put up a mailbox of any size or description. Without a mailbox the U.S. Postal Service will not, cannot by law, deliver mail.”

Josh was convinced I was playing with him. “Come on, Mr. Jones,” he said. “I'm not falling for it.”

“Then don't,” I said. “Of course, there is general delivery.”

“I thought so.”

“Think again,” I said.

Josh listened, periodically shaking his head. I might have done the same thing if I hadn't long ago accepted things as they were.

General delivery mail was held by name at the small post office in Rockmuse. Predictably, if irrationally, such mail was only infrequently claimed. The infrequency had, in some cases, stretched to decades, even when the postmaster knew the recipient was alive because he or she walked or drove by the post office, sometimes several times a year.

Though I didn't tell Josh, this preference, or game, if that's what it was, included Walt Butterfield. The Well-Known Desert Diner was forced to have an address for the business license, which Walt faithfully and inexplicably renewed annually and displayed on the wall of the diner. No mailbox or mail slot in the door. The diner had a Rockmuse address despite the fact that it was closer to Price than to Rockmuse.

“Maybe,” I continued, “in some dark, desert past, there was a good reason for such nonsense. No one knows or remembers what that reason is anymore. Like a lot of things in the world that defy explanation, if they go on long enough, you just give up and accept it. Out here we acknowledge such a mystery by referring to it as a ‘tradition.' ” I winked at Josh. “The desert is lousy with traditions.” I added, “And here's a bit of free advice: don't ever screw with traditions. Especially out here.”

Josh didn't ask any more questions about mail service. He did appear to go on thinking about it. Every few minutes for the next hour he would stare out his window, slowly shake his head, and smile. For my part, I did what I could to make his day as boring as possible. Eventually I realized that I didn't have to work so hard at it. To most people my days were boring. Sometimes they bored me.

At three thirty we were already on our way back to Price.

“You never asked me how I got my start,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, looking out the window. He made no move to get out his cell phone to record my story. “How did you get your start?”

“Showing is better than telling. I'll do both,” I answered. “In a few miles we'll pull over and I'll give you the grand tour. You should be ready to stretch your legs.”

“I wouldn't know,” he said. “I lost the feeling in them about ten this morning.”

I eased the truck and trailer along the narrow shoulder, careful not to grab too much ditch in the process. There was barely enough room to park safely. Josh waited for my nod and hopped out of the cab. The wind blew some sagebrush to his feet, where it attached itself to the laces of his fancy new hiking boots. He stood there as if a wild but loving animal were harassing him.

“This is where you got your start as a desert trucker?”

I asked him to follow me. Every few steps he paused and tried to shake the sagebrush loose. “Right there.” I pointed to a cross sticking up out of a pile of rocks.

“Someone died here?” he asked.

“Two men died here.” For the sake of accuracy, I added, “They died over there.” I pointed ahead of us to the northeast. “About a half mile away, on an access road that doesn't access a damn thing except a steep ditch and a hundred miles of nothing.”

I explained that Rockmuse had once been a viable little town until the coal mine shut down. “Fresh out of high school, I drove back and forth from Price to Rockmuse for Utah Express Provisioners. I did that for about five years. Every day, five days a week. I hauled everything from a baby mule to a wedding cake. When the mine closed, the trucking company pulled out and let me go. People on 117 would phone me or flag me down and ask me to deliver this or that. I used my little Toyota pickup and pulled a small trailer
—
mostly on weekends for about six months.”

“The men who died were truck drivers?” Josh asked.

“Not exactly,” I said. “One drove for UPS and the other for FedEx. They got lost in a snowstorm the December after the mine closed. When they couldn't find anything else they managed to find each other. They froze to death in each other's arms in the UPS van. It took search and rescue over a month to find them.”

“That seems like a long time.”

“Think so?” I asked. “Look at your phone. Got a signal?”

Josh checked and shook his head.

“Spotty reception at best. GPS and homing beacons aren't much better. Same with radios. Even satellite phones. This desert is like a Bermuda Triangle of sand and rock. I heard once it had something to do with the mesa and a weird magnetic iron content. Someone else told me it was sunspots. Personally, I think aliens have a secret base out here somewhere, and they jam everything.”

Josh nodded, caught himself, and smiled sideways at me. “Makes sense to me.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else in this world,” I said. “All I know is I've gotten along okay with nothing more than common sense and a lucky star. Almost twenty years now.

“Those two Mormon boys couldn't be thawed so they could be separated. It was minus ten degrees the afternoon search and rescue located them. It was night by the time the Guard helicopter came. They had to be airlifted in one piece suspended from a cargo net like an ice-blue statue of reconciling lovers. A lot of folks in Price still remember that night, seeing the copter coming in low over town with its grisly cargo swinging in front of a full moon.”

Josh cringed. “God, that's terrible.”

I couldn't help smiling. “Except for one thing,” I said. “There wasn't any moon that night. You can't argue when tragedy collides with a bored population's power of imagination. Around Price it's like JFK's assassination or 9/11. People can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they saw that copter. One more thing.”

Josh glanced at me. “What?”

“The copter never flew over Price at all. It landed at the small airfield outside of town. The bodies were thawed in a hangar and taken separately in ambulances to the hospital morgue
—
two days later.”

I started to laugh. Josh joined in. “Crazy. Is that behind the logo on your truck?”