Lullaby Road, page 28
Walt was in a rehab facility not far from downtown Price. The doctors had told me the week before that he remained unresponsive, even though his most serious injuries had healed. By that they meant he wasn’t talking much, though he seemed to understand the questions of the police and doctors just fine. My weekly visits there were almost the same as my twenty years of visits to him at the diner. Unresponsive was pretty much how he had always been. The medical staff just didn’t know it.
Walt was changed, thinner, gaunt-faced, his pale eyes always fixed on some private world as he sat in the wheelchair in the dining hall. We didn’t speak of that night. The cops tried and got nothing but grunts, and it wasn’t for some time that I remembered the man saying he was Walt’s son. When I asked him about it, he was extremely unresponsive.
There were lots of things I remembered later, and the more I remembered, the more I questioned how accurate those memories were. Like so much of my life and the lives of people I knew, living and dead, I kept most of it to myself. None of it really mattered anyway.
The question of who ran John down remained a local mystery and curiosity eventually went the way of the wind. What happened at the diner and in the desert came and went so quickly in the news and disappeared as a topic of local conversation that, as usual with tragedy, only those with scars cared, and like Walt, we gradually became unresponsive, except perhaps in our dreams.
I saw the cross in my side mirror, bobbing toward me along the shoulder a hundred yards away. I got out of my truck. It seemed to me I had forgotten something and then I remembered the burrito. I wasn’t ready to eat it, but I was far from ready to leave it behind.
John said he was just fine with leaving the cross on the side of 117. The unofficial Rockmuse City Council wanted it moved off the road, and it would be several months at least until John was strong enough on his new leg to even attempt to haul the cross into town. I’d offered to transport it in my trailer and he was adamant that the cross should never leave the ground. It had to be carried.
There was the implication that hell was a possibility if his wish was ignored, and, publicly at least, that suggestion brought some laughter, except from the few of us that knew a bit of hell firsthand. We could have lied to him—in fact, the consensus was to lie—but when it came right down to it, no one wanted to be a party to lying to a preacher, especially John. A relay of volunteers became the only solution, followed by a community potluck dinner at John’s True Value First Church of the Desert Cross.
The squeak of the wheelbarrow axle signaled the impending arrival of the couple who had the leg of the relay ahead of me. I recognized them as the two who had come upon the accident and had gone up ahead and sent Andy.
The relay had begun at dawn and it hadn’t taken long for folks to realize that hauling that cross was more strenuous and weighty labor than anyone anticipated. Roy solved the problem, as he solved all problems, by fashioning a yoke of sorts out of a used tire. With some foam rubber and an old quilt for padding, two people could harness up and carry the cross for the prescribed mile. To my knowledge no one had been able to carry the cross alone.
Roy had mended well and quickly. He never saw who shot him, or the dog. He did see the snake—after it had struck him, and would have struck again if the girl hadn’t come out of nowhere and grabbed the snake and thrown it back into the mountain of tires. For a week or two after he returned to his garage, people from Rockmuse, including Phyllis, brought him food. He must have liked her food because little by little he began taking his meals at her place, where, as rumor has it, he now occasionally eats breakfast. The two of them shared an early leg of the relay.
The couple, perspiring heavily, huffed up to me and I put the burrito inside my shirt and hefted the cross on my shoulder. The makeshift yoke dangled behind me. I thought I was big enough and strong enough to carry the cross all by myself and declined offers of a partner. Less than a hundred yards later, when it was too late, I reassessed that glowing estimation of myself and increased my admiration of John—and Jesus, in that order.
The bullet the surgeon dug out of me had not penetrated very far, slowed considerably by first passing through the girl. It had lodged in the dense muscle of my neck, barely missing the carotid artery. If it had hit the artery, someone else would be carrying the cross in my place. The pressure of the cross brought back the pain, and as I walked I switched the weight back and forth between shoulders. It didn’t help that much and my mile stretched out endlessly ahead. I knew if I stopped to rest I might never get going again and I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, my eyes on my boots, and willing myself not to look too far down the road. My relief was to meet me at the Rockmuse City Limits sign.
Ginny and Annabelle were coming to the potluck, which surprised me. She would be late and moving fast, as usual. Two days went by after their return before she knocked on my door. I needed those two days. The distance from my bed to my front door seemed as far as the night’s journey searching for Manita, and a lot less fun. I assumed my visitor was Ginny and made the effort. She just stood there for a moment looking at me, unable to disguise the shock. When she recovered she said, “I see you’ve started dating again.”
Annabelle was napping and I invited her inside. She stood while I gently lowered myself into my tattered old recliner. I didn’t ask her why she had returned. I could guess. Besides, talking was painful. I was just glad she and Annabelle were back. She volunteered that it hadn’t taken long for Rod to discover the truth about her mother, and the truth about Belle’s real father.
“Rod even told me I could stay. He gave me the money to come back to Price. Said to say hello.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a $50 bill. “Rod told me to give you this to repair your screen door.” I took the fifty.
“After Rod got a clue, it was all downhill in a hurry from there,” Ginny said. “I said goodbye to her at the coffee shop at the Reno Greyhound bus station. She wasn’t even listening. She was batting her eyes at some guy a few tables over. My guess is she got on something after I left, and it wasn’t a bus.”
After a long pause, she concluded by telling me that Belle missed me. I asked her if Belle was talking now. Ginny went to the door and wiggled her pierced eyebrow. “Better than you.”
A few days after her visit, Ginny took me for a follow-up visit at the hospital. On the way back I asked if she’d stop by the Price cemetery. She stayed in the car with Annabelle while I did something I hadn’t ever done: say “Thank you” to the childless old Mormon couple who had adopted me when I was six. They loved me as best they knew how, and I didn’t make it easy. More important, they kept me safe. My visit didn’t take long. Saying thanks never does. It’s the excuses that eat up time.
50
The potluck had two guests of honor, John and Trooper Smith, who was attending in a wheelchair, along with his wife and two kids. Andy survived the ordeal less well than John and me and had only recently been released from the hospital in Salt Lake City. I’d visited him there several times and each time it hurt me to see him so broken.
Only minutes before I arrived at the diner that night he’d been badly beaten with the tire iron and dragged into the desert and shot twice, once in the chest and once in the face. The Kevlar vest absorbed most of the chest shot, but the shot to his face took a big chunk of his left cheek and ear. He had months, if not years, of plastic surgery ahead of him, and his wife began crying when she told me he was planning to return to the Highway Patrol. For her sake, I hoped he changed his mind, though a lot of people, me included, would miss him.
Every time I saw Andy in the hospital I concluded our visit by looking him in the eye and saying, “Thank you.” He always replied, “Jones, try not to do anything stupid today.”
I was trying harder than he knew. What I said was, “That would put you out of work, wouldn’t it?”
His was a busted, contorted smile, and the pain it caused him was obvious. That smile tore at my heart and mended it a little at the same time. If he hadn’t been a Mormon, he would have told me to go fuck myself. But he was thinking it. I knew he was.
The last time I’d visited Andy was a few days before the relay. I’d brought him a present—a new Smokey the Bear Utah State Trooper hat to replace the one he’d lost in the tunnel at Dan Brew’s. The Cop Shop refused to sell it to me until I told them why I wanted it. When I did, they insisted I take it free of charge. With all the care I could muster, I set it gently on his shaved head. It slipped to an angle over the missing ear. He asked me how he looked and I searched for a few seconds for an honest response. Andy seemed pleased with my answer: “Like a good cop,” I said, and meant every damn word.
I was surprised to see who was taking the next leg of the cross relay. The good news was George was not carrying a gun. I hadn’t seen him or Ginger since that afternoon at the theater. As far as I knew, she was still living with him out in the desert.
I waved and said hello, straightened my back and forced myself to control my labored breathing, doing my damned level best as a member of the “This Is Killing Me But I’ll Never Let It Show” Club. I carried the cross past the City Limits sign and lowered it right at their feet.
George said hello. I returned his hello.
Ginger glared at me and I offered her a friendly, measured “Ginger.”
I helped them yoke up and then stood back out of their way. Ginger whipped her gray-and-red pigtails around and said, “I don’t much like you, Ben Jones.”
I didn’t say anything, though there were days I agreed with her.
George chewed on his lip whiskers and lowered his head. Off they went. I waited until they were a good fifty feet away before turning and walking, sprightly, I thought, back up the highway. I didn’t make it far before I collapsed on the roadside and drug my hand across my sweaty face and scalp and gulped for air.
Some folks had volunteered to drive others back to their vehicles after they’d completed their leg of the relay. When mine showed up, I waved them away, telling them I would walk the mile back to my rig. They shouted for me to suit myself and I returned to gulping air like a drowning victim.
When I finally stood the sun was at my back and I was facing the newly revamped and installed Rockmuse City Limits sign. It hurt my eyes just to look at it. The posts were uneven, one side sloping toward the shoulder. To correct this imperfection they had raised the upper right-hand corner of the sign even higher. Only a drunk could look at it and not become disoriented. I wasn’t drunk and hoped I never would be, at least not that drunk.
The boys had added a new metal strip to the bottom of the sign, aligned crooked, with its tip overlapping the sign above it as if trying to compensate for its own imperfection. It read: “Gateway to.” Maybe they hadn’t yet decided exactly what Rockmuse was the gateway to. Or maybe there had been another strip of sign that completed the declaration and had been blown away by the wind and was now vacationing somewhere south. Maybe they thought if the sign asked a question sooner or later someone might provide a good answer. I hoped not. I kind of preferred the idea that motorists and residents alike could routinely continue to fill in the blank with whatever they wanted.
I turned my head north and took in the desert view, the mesa cliffs tapering off to a point in the distance and the horizon clear all the way to the Wyoming border.
I’d shown the authorities where the battered trailer was before I’d even been released from the hospital. I was driven there in a Utah Highway Patrol Suburban, my jaw wired shut and my head aching so badly I could hardly sit up straight. They took the route I had come with Roy and the girl, across the desert, the SUV bumping and slamming into every hole and over every rock every foot of the way.
In fairness, they’d tried several times by helicopter to spot the upended trailer that had held the children. The rugged terrain and weather always interfered. When we reached the area I knew why. The trailer had caught or likely been set on fire and had burned to a puddle of melted aluminum. Crime-scene investigators, aided by volunteers and Explorer Scouts, combed ten square miles on and off for weeks and found no trace of the children except a few small bones and articles of clothing.
I was told to stay in the vehicle and I got out anyway. Though the area was littered with used tires, this was the place once known as Red Heaven. Back then a small pink river had bubbled out of the mesa and across the desert where it joined with the Price River. Crystals tinged with radium that had washed out of the mesa lined the sandy riverbed and gave the water its pink glow. At the turn of the previous century it was known as one of the most beautiful spots in Utah, with a hot springs, a couple tree-lined streets, houses, and the finest hotel south of Salt Lake City.
Then gold was discovered. The rush didn’t last long and the brief mining operation, hydraulic mostly, bored into the mesa and tore up the land, eventually diverting the fragile river deep underground. The place dried up and blew away, except for a few small ranches that survived into the 1970s, until they were abandoned.
The man, who called himself Manita’s father, must have been born on one of those ranches, a place Walt had visited when a young wife’s husband was away at war, and while Bernice was waitressing and going to night school and trying to make the development of Desert Home a reality. I thought I might have met the woman’s husband, one of Bernice’s rapists, during the previous summer. He was a corpse by then, hanging from the wall above the commode in the tiny restroom of Walt’s Quonset hut. Only Walt knew if that was him or not, and he was more unresponsive than ever—with more reason than ever. Walt’s past had begun coming home and the fortress he had built to keep it at bay, his perfect, closed desert diner, was beginning to crumble.
I haven’t had a reason to go back to The Well-Known Desert Diner, or the area of Red Heaven. Walt will eventually return to his diner and when he does, I expect he’ll commence ordering motorcycle parts again, and I will deliver them. The diner had lost its allure for me. It had become a home to loss—the loss of Claire, the loss of the girl, and maybe a lot more I don’t know about and hope I never will. The same goes for Red Heaven, a place of beauty once, and now just a dry riverbed that glows pink at night from the crystals, those that aren’t hidden beneath used tires.
When the cops arrived at the diner, the cab-over was gone. There was no trace of the man or the girl. A week later the truck was found at a huge truck stop in Toole, Utah, maybe 150 miles away at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. He’s somewhere in the top ten Most Wanted, with little doubt that he murdered Cecil and Pedro, and no doubt at all that he beat Walt and me nearly to death and beat and shot a State Trooper. There were official and strongly worded press releases for a while that they would get their man and bring him to justice. I didn’t think so. I liked to think justice had already found him and no one and nothing would ever find him again.
I had visited John in the hospital not long before he was released and the subject of vengeance came up. John, predictably, quoted the Bible. “Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if Walt’s son had met the end I had to imagine. “But wouldn’t it be nice if once in a while the Lord let us be there to see it?”
Andy told me the investigation uncovered records at Cecil’s home itemizing a tire-smuggling operation bringing counterfeit rubber in from Mexico that was sold at the Stop ‘n’ Gone Truck Stop and others in the west. Cecil was even greedier and also pocketed the fees collected to dispose of the used tires at recycling plants and dumped them at Red Heaven. Somewhere along the line, Walt’s son added children to his tire smuggling. Or maybe the other way around. That was their working theory and they were sticking to it. For all I cared, it made as much sense to me as all the other senseless shit in the world.
I took another look at the City Limits sign and couldn’t help myself—I began to laugh. Laughter had not made an appearance in my world for a long time and I hadn’t seemed to miss it. The burrito in my shirt made me laugh too. That burrito was evidence of a sort—proof of life, the life that mattered most—and proof the cops could look for the man until hell had frozen over. They conveniently, at least publicly, hadn’t got around to addressing how Andy and I ended up in the Quonset, or the anonymous call that sent them out to the diner. They didn’t know. I knew. There was only one reason why all three of us were still alive and not murdered—and it wasn’t because Walt’s son, if that’s really who he was, got scared off and ran with the girl.
When I was first released from the hospital I was a little crazy, consumed with pain and memories of Manita and that night. I’d begged Lenny to drive me to Los Ojos Negros. While Lenny stayed in the car I told the women I knew, for whatever reason, it was them in the desert behind the diner. I never really saw or heard them, or the other women I assumed were present that night, who rose up out of the shadows and sand in their long dresses like a crowd of vengeful feminine spirits. The ladies were sweet and sympathetic and listened to me, shook their heads and spoke to each other in that secret unspoken language of theirs.
All I really wanted to know was what they did with the body of the girl. I had no way of knowing for certain Manita had died, but I couldn’t imagine her surviving what had come so close to killing me, and would have if not for her small body shielding me. In my grief I wanted to bury Manita with Claire, the cello, and Bernice in the grotto graveyard of Desert Home. I wanted Manita with them, with me. The ladies sent me away with food and quick kisses and sad expressions on their faces.
My visits continued and as time passed eventually I gave up and convinced myself I was wrong, that I had imagined it all, conjured it from the dark desert, the screams of the girl and the pain and certainty of death. If they had taken her body, she was in good and loving care, and that was enough for me, though the sadness dogged my days and nights.
