The Never-Open Desert Diner Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by James Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published by Caravel Books, New York, in 2015.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. for permission to reprint “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” Copyright © 1973 by Richard Hugo, from Making Certain It Goes On: Collected Poems of Richard Hugo by Richard Hugo. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101906521

  eBook ISBN 9781101906538

  Cover design by Will Staehle

  Cover photograph: inigocia/Shutterstock

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgments

  For BRUCE BERGER, for his love of deserts, and JAMES A. LAWSON, for his love of the cello

  Dedicated in memoriam to the following authors for creating characters who became some of the best friends I’ve ever had, real or imaginary:

  ROSS MACDONALD (1915–1983) for Lew Archer (California)

  JOHN D. MACDONALD (1916–1986) for Travis McGee (Florida)

  JAMES CRUMLEY (1939–2008) for Milo Milodragovitch (Montana)

  ROBERT B. PARKER (1932–2010) for Spenser (Boston)

  STEPHEN J. CANNELL (1941–2010) for James Rockford (California)

  & very special thanks to STERLING WATSON, who kept those friendships from being forgotten

  Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat so accurate, the church bell simply seems a pure announcement: ring and no one comes? Don’t empty houses ring?

  —RICHARD HUGO, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”

  A red sun was balanced on the horizon when I arrived at The Well-Known Desert Diner. Sunrise shadows were draped around its corners. A full white moon was still visible in the dawn sky. I parked my tractor-trailer rig along the outer perimeter of the gravel parking lot. The “Closed” sign hung on the front door. To the left of the door, as if in mourning for Superman, stood a black metal and glass phone booth. Inside was a real phone with a rotary dial that clicked out the ten white numbers. Unlike the phones in the movies, this one worked—if you had enough nickels.

  Curiosity usually wasn’t a problem for me. I treated it like a sleeping junkyard dog. As a general rule I didn’t hop the fence. Jagged scars on my backside reminded me of the few times I had violated that rule. Just because you can’t see the dog doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Sure, I look through the fence once in a while. What I see and think I keep to myself.

  On that Monday morning in late May I was dangerously close to the fence. Walt Butterfield, the diner’s owner, was a junkyard Unitarian: he was a congregation of one and his own guard dog. His junkyard was The Well-Known Desert Diner, and he didn’t bark or growl before he tore your throat out. I liked him, and his junkyard. The place was a kind of odd shrine. Over the years the diner had become a regular rest stop for me as well as a source of fascination and idle speculation. It was always my first stop, even when I had nothing to deliver to Walt. Sometimes it was my last stop, too.

  Out of habit, I tried the front door. It was locked, as usual. This was Walt’s face to the world. Walt slept in what had been a small storage room attached to the kitchen. Behind the diner, across a wide alleyway of sand and flagstone, was a 50-by-100-foot galvanized steel World War II Quonset hut. This was where Walt really lived, alone with his motorcycles, and tools and grease and canyons of crated parts that reached to the ceiling.

  Walt’s motorcycle collection totaled nine of the finest and rarest beasts ever to have graced the roadways of America and Europe. Among them was his first, a 1948 Vincent Black Shadow. It was the same motorcycle he was riding, his new Korean War bride hugging his thin waist, the day he first rode onto the gravel of what was then called The Oasis Café. He was twenty years old. She was sixteen and spoke no English. They bought the place a year later, in 1953.

  Walt kept the diner, like everything else in his life, in pristine shape. I peered through the glass door at the lime-green vinyl seats of the six booths and twelve stools. The platoon of glass salt and pepper shakers stood at attention. The trim along the edge of the counter shined its perpetual chrome smile back at me. The brown and ivory linoleum tiles reflected their usual wax and polish. A 1948 Wurlitzer jukebox hunkered against the far wall. Behind the counter, the same order ticket as always hung lifeless from a wire above the stainless steel kitchen pass-through. As far as I knew it was the final ticket from the last meal prepared for a paying guest, probably sometime in the autumn of 1987.

  I returned to my truck and off-loaded a heavy carton filled with the usual motorcycle parts and wheeled it to the door of the Quonset hut. On Wednesday of the previous week Walt had received some unusual freight from New York—six boxes, all different sizes. They didn’t have the sloppy heft of motorcycle parts, though that alone wasn’t what got my attention. Each carton had a different return address in New York City, but all of them were from the same sender, someone named Chun-Ja. No last name. They had arrived in pairs, all originating on the same day, each set of two sent through one of the big three corporate carriers—FedEx, UPS, and DHL. By special contract I delivered for FedEx and UPS, but not DHL.

  I had set my four next to the two left by the DHL driver. They weren’t gone until Friday morning. That meant they had been left out for two days and two nights, which wasn’t just odd—it had never happened before in all my years of making deliveries to Walt.

  There was really only one possible explanation for why Walt failed to bring his freight inside—he had been out of town, except to my knowledge he had no family or friends, and absolutely nowhere else to go. Given his advanced age, the logical assumption would have been that he had died of natural causes and was stretched out stiff as a board somew
here in the recesses of his diner or workshop, or lay broken in the desert after an accident on one of his motorcycles. You had to know Walt to appreciate just how far-fetched such death scenarios were.

  I pounded on the door of the Quonset hut. Just once. Walt’s hearing was perfect. At seventy-nine, all of him was damn near perfect, except his attitude toward people. No matter where he was on the property, or what he was doing, he had a sixth sense that told him if someone was around. If he didn’t show himself, he was ignoring you. The smartest and safest action you could take was to leave—the sooner the better. The only thing pounding and yelling did was piss him off. If there was one seventy-nine-year-old man on the planet you didn’t want to piss off, it was Walt Butterfield.

  I was probably the only person to have seen the inside of Walt’s Quonset workshop in at least twenty years. These occasional excursions into Walt’s world, always by gruff invitation, never lasted longer than the time it took for me to slip freight off a hand truck.

  I left the new box of parts next to the door and did the smart thing. It was a piece of good luck that Walt hadn’t answered my knock. I might have done something stupid, like ask him where he’d been or what was in the six cartons.

  I always hoped to catch Walt, or rather have him willing to be caught. On a handful of occasions we sat in the closed diner. Sometimes he talked, though usually not. I always listened when he wanted to talk. A few times he actually fixed and served me breakfast in the diner. He had been around the area longer than anyone, or at least longer than anyone who had a brain that worked and a reliable memory.

  I returned to my truck determined not to dwell on the strange freight or Walt’s absence. The really big mysteries in life never troubled me much. How the pyramids were built or whether Cortés was a homosexual didn’t bounce my curiosity needle. On the other hand, Walt’s absence and his odd freight were hard to resist. The diner and I contemplated each other. Like Walt himself, it had a long and colorful past.

  U.S. 191 is the main highway north and south out of Price, Utah. North led to Salt Lake City. Due south took you to Green River, and eventually Moab. The turnoff for State Road 117 is about twenty miles from the city limits of Price. Ten miles east, down 117, on the left, surrounded by miles of flat, rugged nothing, you came upon The Well-Known Desert Diner.

  From 1955 to 1987 the diner appeared in dozens of B movies. There were the desert horror-thriller movies, the desert biker mayhem movies, and the movies where someone, usually an attractive young woman, drove across the desert alone and some bad shit happened.

  Once in a while it’s possible to catch one of these low-budget gems on cable. I always cheered when the diner filled the screen. My personal favorites involved atomic monsters or aliens terrorizing small-town desert locals. The locals eventually triumphed and saved the planet. Their victory was usually accomplished with little more than a car battery, a couple of Winchester rifles, and a visiting college professor who had a crazy theory—and a wild, beautiful daughter.

  The diner was originally built in 1929. Its pale gravel driveway, antique glass-bubble gas pumps, white adobe walls, and green trim made it seem familiar, almost like a home you had known all your life but never visited. Even the most hardened, sun-struck driver slowed down and smiled.

  Two billboards, one facing 191 South and another facing 191 North, advertised the diner to traffic. “Homemade pie…Cool drinks…Just ahead.” The billboards were aged and faded. Through the years so many people had stopped to find the diner closed that one irate motorist spray-painted the northbound billboard to read: “The Never-Open Desert Diner.” Though this was not entirely true, it was true enough. On that rare occasion when it had not been true, the experience had turned out to be an unfortunate event for those who found the front door unlocked and Walt behind the counter. Though I didn’t know for certain, I’d always suspected that infrequently Walt took down the “Closed” sign and unlocked the door just to lure people in so he could run them off.

  I emptied the last drops of coffee from the thermos into my ceramic mug and considered myself lucky, even though business was getting so bad I had been floating my diesel on a Visa card and trying not to wonder if I could survive another month. Still, every morning I got up feeling like I was headed home. To be sure, my luck was often hard luck, but good luck all the same, though lately I had felt more and more like a grown man still living at home with his poverty-stricken, ailing, and peculiar parents—which might have actually been the case if I’d had any.

  Under my skin I wasn’t feeling nearly as lucky as I had in times past. Below that was a rising shiver of cold desperation. Things had to change. I wanted them to change. Like most people who said they wanted change, all I wanted was enough change to keep everything the same, only better.

  The highway ahead lolled in sunlight. It was mine and it made me happy. It didn’t bother me that it was mine because no one else wanted it. The brakes hissed, and I glanced over at the diner one more time before I pulled out onto 117 to begin the rest of my day.

  All the coffee caught up with me a few miles down the road from the diner. I searched for any spot large enough to allow me to safely pull over my twenty-eight-foot tractor-trailer rig. A narrow turnout appeared ahead. It was almost hidden at the bottom of a slight hill that came at the end of a long gentle curve. It wasn’t a turnout at all—it was a road, though I didn’t realize that until I had stopped and climbed down out of the cab. Dirt and sand have a special feel under your boots. This ground had a contoured hardness to it.

  I scuffed at the sandy surface with a boot tip and stood there amazed at what I had uncovered—a slab of white concrete. I followed the concrete about fifty yards up a gentle slope. At the crest of the hill were two brick pillars connected by an iron arch. Inside the arch, in cursive metal script, were the words “Desert Home.”

  It seemed strange to me that I had never noticed the entrance before. I’d driven by it twice a day, five days a week, for twenty years. A car sped by on the highway below. The pillars were just high enough and far enough from the road they couldn’t be easily seen, even if you were looking for them. Given the height of my cab and the level of the sloping highway, the entrance was nearly impossible to spot from 117.

  For a moment I reflected on what had once been a grand entrance. It was somebody’s dream gone sour and lost—probably a ranch. When I lowered my gaze a bit, the distance came into focus and I could make out a series of shallow, dry creek beds carved into the sands, all intertwined and attached.

  It took a minute for the truth of the scene to register. They were not creek beds at all, but lanes and cul-de-sacs that had never made good on their promise of homes, except one, probably a model, that stuck out like a sturdy tooth on an empty gum. It was down the hill a couple blocks on my right.

  A gust of wind kicked up a miniature twister of dust at my feet. My discomfort returned. Relieving yourself in a wind can be tricky business. The abiding loneliness of what lay ahead seemed to beckon, and the one-story model house offered a chance to get out of the wind. I had no idea I might be hopping any sort of fence.

  Walking down the hill toward the house, I could almost hear the sounds of children playing and the happy drone of families enjoying weekend barbecues. It was a ghost town without the town and without the ghosts, since no one had actually ever lived there. I imagined ghosts of ghosts, less than ghosts, and I felt oddly welcomed into their company.

  The model house had held up exceptionally well through the however many years it had been sitting there abandoned to the elements.

  Maybe, like most orphans, I thought too much about houses. I’d never owned or lived in one as an adult. I had strong opinions and a tendency to evaluate houses in a particular way—windows first, placement mostly. Then the porch, whether it had one and what direction it faced. I liked porches and I’ve always been partial to those that were eastward facing. Finally, the roof. I’ve never liked a roof that’s too pitched. If I wanted a hat I’d buy a hat
. A sharp-pitched roof always seemed to put me off for some reason.

  The house was alone in a bed of sand and the windows were unbroken and clean, and placed slightly lower for the cooler morning air. The porch faced east toward the sparkling mica-flaked mesa about fifty miles away. Any desert dweller will tell you the true beauty of a desert sunset can be best appreciated by looking in that unlikely direction, the east, away from the sun. A single faded green metal lawn chair relaxed on the porch. Someone would have been happy sitting there on a fine cool evening. The roof had a graceful, easy pitch that welcomed instead of threatened the sky.

  I walked around the house. There was no sign anyone lived there, or had ever lived there. In the backyard I paused and took in the unhindered view all the way west to the Wasatch Mountains. The south side had the least wind. I stepped up close and rested my forehead on the shady wall just beneath a clean window. In the freedom of the moment and the beauty of the setting, I unbuckled my belt so I could fully abandon myself to the long-anticipated event.

  It was almost quiet in the shade. Wind made a high whistling complaint as it slipped in and out of the eaves above me. When I looked up at the whistling, my sight traveled past the window—a kitchen window, I guessed. In that fraction of an instant my eyes glided over the disapproving face of a woman.

  A good many bad behaviors have been honestly attributed to me over the years. Most of them I have just as honestly and sometimes even cheerfully acknowledged. Pissing on the side of someone’s house, however modest or isolated, had never been among them. Such a breach surpassed bad manners and marched straight into the territory of criminally stupid. In the Utah desert it is likely to get you shot.