Lullaby Road, page 3
If Walt was still Walt he’d been up for hours and was already tending to his collection of vintage motorcycles in the 50 × 100-foot Quonset hut behind the diner. He knew I had arrived. Even at eighty years old that extra sense of his that alerted him to the presence of visitors was just as keen as ever, which only served to give him warning there was someone around who might require ignoring, or dismissal. It occurred to me on the drive, during a moment of irresponsible cowardice and desperation, to ask Walt if he would take care of Belle for the day. Most likely I wouldn’t, no matter what excuses I came up with. The probability Walt would say yes was the textbook definition of a long shot. Walt could be full of surprises and there was always a chance he might surprise me and not be an asshole.
With Belle swinging from her car seat and the diaper bag slung over my shoulder I walked across the gravel toward the diner. A little gust of wind kicked up and fluttered the spiderweb and swept some dry snow off the roof. Call it habit or superstition, I always peered through the window for the little taste of reassurance or, since Claire died, the sad welcome, provided by the interior of the diner.
It was all there in its timeless glory, as it must have been when the diner was first built in 1929. Back then it was the Oasis Café. Walt and Bernice, his Korean War bride, bought the place in 1953 and changed the name. She chose the name Bernice. He was only twenty. She was just sixteen and spoke no English.
I let my eyes wander and linger over the spit-polished linoleum tiles and chrome-lined counter, lime-green vinyl chairs, and stools. My heart missed a beat or two as my eyes settled on the old Wurlitzer jukebox against the far wall. Only a handful of months earlier, on a spring evening in late May, I’d come upon Walt and Claire dancing in front of that jukebox. I just stood there as I had that night and watched them dance the tender never-ending dance between a father and daughter, though neither one ever acknowledged that blood connection.
For me, the diner held them unchanged just as surely as it enfolded the tables and chairs, the lone ticket from the last meal prepared for a paying guest in 1987 and, I supposed, also Claire’s mother, Bernice, her rape and gradual mute death along with Walt’s grisly vengeance. In its own way, The Never-Open Desert Diner was always open, if only to memories and ghosts.
I’d seen Walt the previous day, a Sunday and the last day of September. I was working at the solitary house in Desert Home and tending to the graves in the little grotto nestled into the hillside behind the house. It was still summer and hot, with no sign cold had ever touched the parched ground or that it ever would again. The sky was a deep yawning blue and cloudless all the way to the red mesa.
Desert Home was an abandoned housing development a mile down the road from the diner. It had once been Bernice’s dream, and that dream died with her in 1972. The modest model home was the only structure ever built in Desert Home, though the empty, sand-swept streets were there and continued to make promises. Walt had given the house to Claire and me when he thought, and I hoped, we would be married. After Claire died I began maintaining it even though no one lived there and probably never would.
I worked hard all day on the house and graves with the sun pounding me. When I took a break to wipe the sweat from my eyes I searched the horizon for the imaginary sound of Claire’s cello or her smile and listened for her voice calling after me as I trudged up the slope toward the arched entrance. I sometimes sat on the porch in the green chair and squinted at the wind in the eaves of the house and heard only what one ghost might whisper to another.
Late in the afternoon I stood with my back to the grotto and watched as the trail of dust and sand cut like a rusty scratch across the roadless beige expanse to the south. No sound, only the bleeding powdery line that marked the motorcycle’s steady path toward me. I knew Walt would veer away at the last moment just as he had for the past few months. It wasn’t just me he was avoiding; it was the house and the graves—Claire’s grave, Bernice’s grave. He might have dodged the desert itself, the desert all three of them loved, if he could have. Eventually, he angled away and took the back way to Utah 117 and his eternally closed roadside diner. How long I stood there afterward I couldn’t have said. Walt had long since disappeared when the iron shadows of approaching dusk began their creeping journey across the desert floor.
Belle began to squirm in her car seat to remind me she was there. The powdery snow had been swept off the wide flagstone patio separating the rear of the diner from the Quonset. I knocked on the Quonset door only once. Knocking twice was overdoing it in Walt’s opinion. My jaw still ached on occasion from the last time he expressed his opinion. If he wanted to come to the door he would come to the door. Belle and I waited as the cold continued its work.
When I turned to leave I saw something I’d never seen before. The back door to the diner was ajar. The sight startled me. A lot of things were possible. The one thing that wasn’t possible was that Walt had simply forgotten to close it. That door led to the kitchen. I tightened my grip on the car seat and slowly shouldered the door until it swung open enough to allow us through. The kitchen was in shadow and from what I could see nothing was out of place. It was church quiet. Walt’s tiny bedroom, which had once been used for storage, was just to my right. That door was ajar as well. I used the toe of my boot to inch it open.
5
It wasn’t that I expected to find Walt dead. He was the healthiest eighty-year-old on the planet, tall and ramrod straight, a head of thick white hair and the lean muscle of a young man. Of course, I knew Walt had to die one day, even if he didn’t, but none of us youngers would probably live long enough to see it. What I couldn’t understand was what kept him going, day in and night out, all alone with a life to remember that most people would choose to forget if they could. For that matter, I sometimes wondered what kept any of us going. It was a line of thought I didn’t want to follow too far.
Walt lay fully clothed on top of the single bed, his arms folded behind his head, with just a little light from the one high small window on the outer wall. I couldn’t tell if Walt’s eyes were open or closed.
“Did you think I missed your knock?”
I told him I didn’t. “The back door was open.”
“You think an open door is an invitation to enter a man’s home?”
Walt had made no effort to move. It was cold enough in the small room our words sent small bursts of white breath into the air. I didn’t answer his question, mostly because we both knew the answer and I sure as hell wasn’t going to say I was concerned about him. He might acknowledge my concern with his opinion.
“What the hell, Ben. Are you driving a school bus now?”
“Ginny stuck me with her baby today. An emergency.”
Walt lay motionless with his arms still behind his head while I waited for him to speak and the room began to lighten as the sun found the back of the diner. Ginny and Walt had met briefly and only once not long after Claire died. He knew who she was and I had mentioned her a few times, about the baby and college, and renting her the other side of my duplex at a greatly reduced price in exchange for bookkeeping. The two hadn’t said a word to each other and the conversation that passed between them was more like two fighters circling each other in the ring. If those two ever got into it I wouldn’t know who to bet on.
Walt swung his long legs off the bed and set the soles of his steel-toed boots on the bare floor. “I know whose baby that is.” He nodded in my direction, downward to my right.
The boy Juan had gotten out of the truck and stood just beside me. The dog pushed his big nose forward between the boy and my leg. There wasn’t any use in being upset. The truth was I had forgotten about him.
“It’s a long story,” I said, though it wasn’t. “Jesus, Walt, it’s freezing in here.”
Walt ignored my observation. “Well, I’m sure you’ll find someone who wants to hear it,” he said as he stood.
The revolver had been on the nightstand. In the dusky room I hadn’t seen it until he picked it up. The boy grabbed my leg and when I looked down at him he had that same strange grin, though his eyes told a different story. That poor little kid had seen a gun before and knew what it could do and had enough sense to be frightened. I was pretty sure Walt wasn’t going to shoot us, though with Walt you couldn’t be certain of anything. Some relationships are like that. For one thing, he was cradling the gun in his cupped palms, like water, or a wounded bird. It was an odd moment. It was the same revolver he had given to Claire to protect herself from wild animals, though we all knew he meant the kind of animals that walked on two feet—and the same gun she had returned to him the day before Dennis, her ex-husband, strangled her and took off across the desert.
Staring at the gun in his hands, Walt said, “I wonder sometimes if Claire had kept this if she’d be alive today.”
It wasn’t a question I could answer. Neither one of us were there. Probably not. It must have happened so quickly, and Claire returned it not because she was afraid of her former husband—she returned it because she was afraid of herself, her temper. She was so convinced Dennis wasn’t the violent type. I knew better. Walt knew better. Every type was the violent type given the right provocation and moment, maybe especially the ones who believed they weren’t the violent kind. Except for Walt and me, no one knew what had happened to Claire, or her cello, and up until that moment, though several months had passed, neither one of us had spoken to the other about her or even mentioned her name.
Walt put the gun back on the nightstand and took the two short steps to where I stood. Both the dog and the boy backed up. He carefully pulled the blanket back from Belle’s face and the two of them were blue eyes to blue eyes. It was almost a whisper. “You’re a fool, Ben.”
The words were out of my mouth before I knew I’d said them. “I had no choice.”
Walt didn’t respond, not that he needed to. He glanced at the boy and the dog and said, “The furnace is broken.” He pushed by us and out the back door. I heard the door to the Quonset open and close.
The furnace kicked on and blew warm air on us from a vent above our heads. I marched my little parade out of the diner and left the door open and paused for a few seconds near the door of the Quonset and considered the man behind it, the gun, the diner and the obviously functioning furnace. A few seconds was too damn long. Walt was still a mystery and some mysteries didn’t need solving, couldn’t ever be solved, and the best thing you could do was just accept them.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the dog was also staring at the Quonset door. I gently mussed Juan’s hair with my free hand and said to the dog, “You sure backed your furry ass up in a hurry.” For a moment it seemed to me the dog wore a slightly embarrassed expression before he lowered his head.
Walt and I had an unspoken agreement never to speak of Claire. That had changed and I didn’t know how I felt about it except that I didn’t want to think about it. We shared her and our loss in silence, bound by memories only the two of us had of her, and of her misleading headstone on the grave next to her mother, Bernice, less than a half mile away. Walt calling me a fool could cover a lot of territory. For years he’d been telling me driving a truck to deliver necessities to the desert rats and eccentric exiles who lived along Highway 117 was nothing more than suckling losers. Of course, there was never any mention of the fact that The Well-Known Desert Diner and Walt himself lived on 117. He was the King of 117 and the Emperor of Solitude, a man apart in ways even I couldn’t understand—and maybe in a desert of losers, depending on what was lost, he was the undisputed champion.
Once I got Belle’s car seat belted back into place I motioned for Juan and the dog to climb inside the cab. The dog complied. Juan pointed to his crotch. Clear enough. He had to pee. The way the morning had gone so far had cut down on my usual coffee consumption but I still needed to water the desert myself. I walked across the empty highway and motioned to Juan and the dog to follow.
The dog sniffed at a scrub juniper and then got down to business. Juan looked up at me and then at the dog and pulled down his jeans while I made a note to myself to find him a coat or a sweater somewhere. Though I was standing several feet from Juan I respectfully turned away and began to unbuckle while I enjoyed the southern vista.
It was the first time I had heard the dog make any sound and the two sharp barks echoed across the desert floor. Juan was squatting and my first thought was that I had misunderstood what he had meant. The dog barked again and the pee began to cascade to the frozen ground in a cloud of steam. What was happening still took a moment to register. When it did I instinctively averted my eyes—Juan was a little girl. Juan was a little girl? I didn’t know much about women and even less about little girls, but I knew enough to run across the road to the truck to grab some toilet tissue. I handed it to her with my head turned. Not much had changed, and I felt as if everything had changed.
I didn’t know how long she had been holding it. Judging from the steady stream I heard it had to have been quite a while. Babysitting a little boy was one thing and somehow babysitting a little girl, the daughter of a stranger, was something else entirely. Maybe women felt the same way. I didn’t know.
She brought me the roll of toilet paper and held out the damp piece between her thumb and forefinger in an almost ladylike gesture. I scuffed up a little hole in the gravel and after she dropped in the used tissue, I covered it over while she watched.
Lowering myself on one knee, I softly asked her name. The dog was sitting next to her, his head almost even with hers. Maybe this was all news to him as well, though I couldn’t imagine why. She didn’t answer and simply turned her large dark eyes out toward the desert.
She began walking at a fast pace down the rutted trail, a shortcut that led to the graves and the model home. The dog did not follow her. She was sure-footed and quick and gathered speed until it was almost a run, each step taken with purpose as if she had made the hike all her life and knew exactly where she was headed, which of course she couldn’t have. There was nothing down that way but a dead dream and forty years of memories that had nothing to do with her.
In a few strides I caught up to her and gently lifted her into my arms and carried her back up the trail and across 117 to the truck.
I knew damn well I hadn’t misread Pedro’s note—it had said “son.” Juan—a boy’s name. And now I was well down a road in the middle of nowhere on my way to no place with a little girl. Pedro had said “bad trouble” and I couldn’t begin to imagine the level of shitstorm it would take to leave your little daughter alone in the hands of a stranger—a male stranger at that. I was reasonably certain I wasn’t a pervert and marginally if not reliably responsible, but Pedro couldn’t have known that. It was a toss-up between anger and fear and when the anger subsided I knew I would be left with only fear—for the girl, and with enough extra for Pedro as well.
6
My next stop, about twenty-five miles down 117 from the diner, was Dan Brew’s place, which had originally been a dirt house, or a sod house, as they were called on the prairies, dug out of the ground with a roof of wild grass. Dan’s had been made by a settler before the turn of the last century and he hadn’t added much except a metal carport and a cheap solar array. He had tunneled back into a rocky hillside to add a couple rooms.
No indoor facilities, which meant an outdoor privy and no running water. He kept a cistern to catch rainwater. There had once been a seasonal well but it had gone dry over a year ago. Cool in the summer and warm in the winter, a dirt house was about as basic as you could get in the desert. There was smoke chugging out of his chimney pipe that I could see for most of the half mile of rutted road that wound itself around two low hills before ending up at his front door.
Like most people who lived off 117, Dan probably wouldn’t notice or care much if the world ended. He’d been married and divorced several times since I had first met him, and last I knew he was working on number seven, or maybe eight. He was the kind of man who seemed to prefer to share his loneliness with a partner and while there apparently was a never-ending supply of women, usually from big cities, who saw a certain romance in the beauty and solitude of his lifestyle, sooner or later the daily diet of beauty and silence always wore thin. It usually started with the missus wanting to go to town more often and ended one day when she went to town and failed to return.
I knew more about Dan than most of the people I delivered to on 117. In fact, I knew more than I cared to know, courtesy of accidentally coming upon a meeting of the Dan Brew ex-wives club. I had heard that a few liked the area enough they wanted to stick around the desert, though just not around Dan’s Happy Acres. There were three of them, ranging in age from late thirties to late forties, sitting around an outside table at a restaurant on a sunny weekend in downtown Price. Unfortunately, I happened to walk by. I hesitated to accept their invitation to join them, and after I did I knew why and wished like hell I had kept walking. Every sentence began with “I loved Dan, but—”
Years before in a bar I’d heard a WWII vet who had been in the Normandy invasion describing what a grand thing it was and how proud he was to be an American and what a bloody mess it was. When he finally ran out of war stories he finished with “It was a million-dollar experience that I wouldn’t pay a nickel to do again.” Each one of the wives had survived Normandy, and listening to those three for five minutes was the longest day of my life. Somehow I managed to feel sorry for all of them, including Dan and his dirt house. Dan might not have been a Nazi, but at least for those three women sharing his life in the Utah desert, it was a beachhead of sorts.
