The Never-Open Desert Diner Page 3

  The night-shift workers were busy restocking the shelves under the high artificial lights. No one paid any attention to me as I made my way through the maze of products that filled the aisles. In an ocean of busy blue vests I heard little English or anything else being spoken. Lost in this desert, I was Moses searching for the Promised Land. I located it in a far corner behind a wall of technology.

  A plump young woman in a blue vest with a silver ring in her nose dozed peacefully as she leaned against a display rack of last season’s DVDs. I didn’t want to wake her. She looked like she could use all the sleep she could get. Her face appeared almost childlike.

  The CDs were neatly arranged in categories, each category divided by artist and each artist divided alphabetically. About the only thing that seemed familiar to me was the alphabet. There was no category for cello. There was a category for classical that held only five CDs, four of which were compilations beginning with The Best of. I had my choice of the best of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Chopin. The fifth CD was Johnny Mathis Sings the Classics.

  “Hi, Ben.”

  I was startled to hear my name. I turned to see that the young woman had awakened. She exhumed a tired smile. She wore an unborn child around her waist that had previously escaped my notice.

  She placed her hands on her hips and stretched backward. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  I subtracted the nose ring and the heavy bags beneath her violet eyes. Then I took away the pregnancy and finally the orange streaks in her short black hair. What was left was the daughter of a woman I had dated maybe five or six years before. She had been just a little girl then—just a girl now, even with the nose ring and the rest of life’s additions. The ring in her nose was the only ring in sight.

  “Ginny,” I said, pleased to see her again, or as pleased as I could be given the circumstances. “You’ve grown up.” Innocently, though not sincerely, I inquired after her mother.

  “My mom is a piece of shit.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “C’mon, Ben. After what she did to you? You’re disagreeing with me? Or are we just deciding on the size of the piece?”

  This was the kind of conversation made worse by the glare of indirect lighting and the time of night, the bright floors, sterile air-conditioning, and minimum-wage work. Was she seventeen? Eighteen? Maybe it had been closer to ten years since I’d last seen Ginny and Nadine, her mother.

  “Let it go, Ginny,” I said. “Please?”

  “Fine,” she said. Among the few constants in life is the certainty that when a female uses the word fine to a man, things are about as far from fine as they can get. “What brings you to Walmart in the middle of the night?”

  I told her what I wanted. She stepped around me and surveyed the bins of CDs. “Cello?” she asked, as if maybe she had misunderstood me.

  “Cello,” I repeated.

  “I can look, I guess. Unless George Strait or some rapper has taken up the cello, it’s a waste of time.”

  I thanked her.

  She asked me if I had an MP3 player, and the look on my face answered her question. “Same Ben, huh? No cell phone or GPS, either, I’ll bet.”

  “I have a computer now,” I said proudly.

  “If that’s true,” she said, “which I doubt, I’m guessing it was made before I was born. Maybe before you were born.” She was just messing with me now, and we were both enjoying the change-up. “I’ve got a break coming. Let me see what I can do.”

  We agreed to meet at my pickup before her break was over.

  When my passenger door opened I knew I had fallen asleep. In a couple of hours I would be at the transfer warehouse beginning my day. Ginny sat in the passenger seat and handed me two silver-colored CDs. “You do have a CD player, don’t you?”

  I nodded. It came with the new truck. I left out the part about never having actually used it.

  Satisfied her time wasn’t wasted, she said, “I downloaded some random stuff off the Internet, mostly Yo-Yo Ma, and used my laptop to burn you a CD. My break is over. I got in a hurry. I’m not sure which one has what you want. One is probably some mix left over from my youth. Most people my age are pretty digital these days.”

  I saw no trace of humor on her face. To her way of thinking, her youth was over and all she had now were souvenirs.

  “So who’s the woman, Ben?”

  I was still half asleep. “Woman?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “woman. Maybe I’m only seventeen and knocked up, but I’m not an idiot.”

  I saw the sharp, playful little girl I remembered, so wise beyond her years, and now years beyond her wisdom. I also saw a silver stud in her tongue.

  “It’s the middle of the night at the Walmart in Price, Utah. A truck driver I haven’t seen in years walks in and asks for cello music. Yeah, woman. If she’s into the cello, then I already know you’ve upgraded from the likes of my mom. I’ve always figured you for a romantic.”

  “That’s not saying much,” I said. “These days anyone who believes the sun will rise in the morning could qualify as a romantic.”

  I thanked her again for the CDs.

  “When’s the baby due?”

  This was my clever way of changing the subject. It worked perfectly. Ginny burst into tears.

  The simple answer, the one I expected but wasn’t all that interested in, was one, maybe two months, give or take. Between sobs and in quick order I also learned that the baby’s father was thirty-eight and her mother’s unemployed live-in boyfriend. He said he loved Ginny. When she could no longer hide the pregnancy, she confessed both the pregnancy and their “bad love” to her mother. The boyfriend denied his love and everything else. Her mother responded by kicking her out and telling Ginny she had gotten herself into this mess and she could damn well get herself out. The mother and the boyfriend moved to Salt Lake City to start over. That had been four months ago. Since then Ginny had quit high school and got her GED and had been living with friends and in her car. She concluded by asking me for a job, a second job, so she could afford her own place when the baby came.

  I hated to disappoint her. I explained that I was pretty much a one-man operation. It then occurred to me that there was a third thing a man alone in bed can do and if I’d done that instead, maybe I would be alone and asleep and not sitting next to a distraught pregnant teenager in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of the night.

  When Ginny reached for the door handle, I said, “Let me ask around. Maybe I can find something for you.”

  She leaned over and kissed my cheek. The nose ring felt strange and cold against my skin. She struggled with her bulk and cursed my worn seat before she managed to get out of the truck.

  Before she closed the door, I said, “I think we’ve settled that question about your mother. She is a piece of shit. A big piece.”

  The night had slipped away. At home I took a long hot shower and had a good sad laugh about Nadine.

  Nadine and I had only been together a few months when I surprised her and a UPS driver late one night. They were inside the cab of my tractor-trailer that I was allowed to park behind a locked gate with the UPS vehicles. I asked them what in the hell they thought they were doing. Stupid, since clearly there wasn’t any thinking going on. Besides, an answer was out of the question. Both their mouths were full. Quite an amazing bit of circus contortionism considering the confines of my truck cab. Had the event taken place another time in another place with other people, I might have broken into well-deserved applause.

  A woman I met in a bar once told me she might have taken her husband back after he cheated with a neighbor, if only he hadn’t done the deed in her kitchen—her room, the center of her family. For her, the kitchen was a more sacred place than their bedroom. My guess was she hadn’t seen the inside of either one for quite some time. She had been making slow and steady progress toward emptying a bottle of Seagram’s and filling an ashtray.

  After I settled down, I discovered that the o
nly true anger that remained came not from the cheating but from where Nadine chose to do it—the cab of my truck. Sometimes the smallest things are so damn unforgivable. Maybe because they aren’t small—they only seem that way to someone else. You never know what someone holds sacred until it’s too late.

  Loading up at the transfer warehouse went quickly. I used the extra time on the dispatch office computer to search for information about cellos and cello music. The woman and the cello were linked in my mind in a way I couldn’t explain. Knowing something about cellos seemed like the only way to get to know the woman. And, given the opportunity, however unlikely, for her to get to know me. It seemed an innocent enough way to pass a little bit of time. Maybe a little pathetic. After all, I had told her I was a music lover.

  When my time was up, I still didn’t know much about cellos or the people who played them. The cello was just an overgrown violin. In Italian cello meant “violin for the leg.” From its origin in the late 1500s, the cello had become more and more popular. Someone once said that the sound of a cello was closer to the voice of a human male than any other musical instrument. Remembering the woman playing the cello, I tried to imagine a man’s voice, singing maybe, just below the wail of the wind and blowing sand. But it wasn’t a man’s voice I heard—it was her voice.

  The most expensive musical instrument ever sold was a cello—over eighteen million dollars. It was made by someone named del Gesù in the 1700s. A window popped up. It asked me if I wanted additional information about that cello. Another pop-up offered me the chance to be put on a mailing list or to join a chamber music appreciation club. I have never willingly consented to be on anyone’s mailing list. The woman with the cello was the only club I was interested in joining, and the odds of being asked seemed depressingly small, even if I were a luthier, one who, so the Internet informed me, made stringed instruments like violins and cellos.

  I took on fuel and glanced at my delivery schedule to plan my stops. My mind took an unplanned siesta at the turnout to Desert Home and didn’t want to go any farther. I roared out of the truck stop and onto 191 determined I wouldn’t stop there. The traffic was sparse, and I reached 117 in record time, not that I was in any kind of hurry.

  Ahead in the distance I saw John’s ten-foot wooden cross bobbing along the shoulder just as my rig wound around the curve. John’s appearance meant spring had officially arrived on 117. He was just coming up on the turnout to Desert Home, so I pulled in front of him. With a cold bottle of water in hand, I waited a few minutes for him to arrive. He kept a strict schedule. If he had time he would stop and rest the cross.

  Spring through fall John lugged his wooden cross up and down 117. He had a church of sorts in Rockmuse, the First Church of the Desert Cross. Denomination unknown and unimportant. It had once been a True Value hardware store. He left the door open twenty-four hours a day whether or not he was in town. If anyone showed up to sit in one of the few rickety deck chairs, he would deliver a sermon as if the hardware store held a congregation of hundreds.

  Early on in his ministry I had attended his church. My attendance was due less to hearing the Word of God and more to needing a half-inch drive socket and being inside the True Value store before I realized it had become a church. Once inside the door, I was too embarrassed to admit my mistake and leave. People generally referred to John as Preach. I always called him by his first name. No last name.

  John moved toward my truck at a good steady pace. He had attached a bracket and tire from a wheelbarrow to the road end of his cross. It made the going easier, or as easy as dragging a cross through scorching heat and wind can be. Other than the wheel, John was a stickler for authenticity. The cross was solid wood, rough-hewn from oak, and it was heavy. A small backpack that contained a little food and water and some camping supplies was strapped to the cross and made it even heavier.

  John was a tall, lean man, six four or better. He kept his gray hair cut short and let his beard go the way of God. In his late fifties or maybe early sixties, John traveled approximately twelve miles a day. He stopped near sunset at one of his unofficial Stations of the Cross camping sites along 117.

  John set his cross down alongside my trailer and took the bottle of water. He thanked Jesus and drank, careful not to drip any precious water into his long beard. When the bottle was empty he raised both hands into the air. “Bless you, Ben.”

  We sat down next to each other on the ground in a spot of shade provided by the trailer.

  “How ’bout a smoke?” he said, and winked.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” I answered. “I’m out. You?”

  This was a ritual between us. I had quit smoking several years earlier, and John had quit long before that, back when, as he put it, “117 was a dirt road and I was on the expressway to hell.” He had mentioned once that he missed it. So did I. Our ritual began.

  “Just so happens I do,” he said, as he reached into his shirt pocket. “Got some new papers.”

  He licked the ends of the imaginary papers and pulled out a nonexistent drawstring pouch of tobacco. His fingers went through every motion until the cigarette was rolled and ready for fire. “Got a match?”

  We always did it this way. I went through my pockets until I located an imaginary wooden Diamond match. I struck it against my whiskers, which was probably the bigger fantasy. God hadn’t given me much of a beard. Imagination is one of the few things a man can count on if he’s got the reality to feed it.

  The match head popped, and I held the invisible flame under John’s cigarette. We could smell the sulfur. He inhaled and handed me the cigarette.

  Exhaling, he said, “Haven’t seen you in church lately.”

  This was also part of the ritual. He had learned long ago why I had wandered into his church, though it didn’t matter. There were no accidents or coincidences in John’s world. Everything that happened was part of God’s plan. Here I was at the turnout to Desert Home, where I had not planned to be. I wasn’t sure I believed in God, but when my unspoken desires coincided with his plan I was more inclined to give his existence the benefit of the doubt.

  “You know, Ben,” he said, “God has lots of power tools for dealing with sin.”

  “Next time I’m in Rockmuse on a Sunday morning,” I said, “I’ll check out his inventory.”

  My stock answer, since in all my years on 117 I had been in Rockmuse on a Sunday morning exactly twice. Both times because of breakdowns. I took a drag and held on to the cigarette while we watched the smoke curl into the morning air.

  “You know, Ben, you are the only person who calls me by name. I’ve been meaning to thank you for that. A man likes to hear his Christian name once in a while.”

  I passed him the cigarette. “What do other people call you?”

  “Most people just call me Preach, which I don’t mind.”

  “Most people call you Preach? No kidding? I thought most people called you Wacko.”

  “Not to my face,” he said, with a hint of sadness. “Not that it matters when you’re doing God’s work.”

  It did matter and I knew it.

  From where we sat I could see the slope that led up to the iron arch of Desert Home, though the arch was hidden from sight. I was upset with myself because I wanted to see her again. Though I wasn’t planning to stop, I had stopped, because of John, which I conveniently told myself was God’s plan. I was so close to her. John was getting the tailwind from my frustration.

  My thoughts began to drift to the other side of the arch. I wondered if she might let me share some of my newly acquired appreciation of the cello. Thanks to the Internet, like everyone else, I could be an expert on anything in no time at all. I was just another Internet genius. The extent of my knowledge of the cello was next to nothing. I figured I’d picked up enough information to start a conversation. She might surprise me and say something besides Go away.

  Ginny’s comment about upgrading from the likes of her mother came back to me. I didn’t really know any more
about the woman than I did about cellos. I thought about the opposite of upgrade and about my financial situation. I was a truck driver who lived in a run-down rented duplex and was behind on the lease payments on his truck. My thoughts went downhill from there while John and I smoked.

  I said, “Have you ever been interested in a woman you knew you shouldn’t be interested in?”

  “You mean married?”

  John passed the cigarette to me for the final drag.

  I took the cigarette. “No,” I said, hoping I’d summoned the proper amount of indignation. “Someone who’s so completely different from anyone you’ve ever known. Nothing in common. Out of your league.”

  “Every woman I’ve ever had in my life has been out of my league one way or another. I’m assuming you mean a good woman?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Then the truth is this: a good man can only aspire to be worthy of a good woman. She’ll always be out of his league in ways he’ll never understand. But he’ll appreciate what he doesn’t understand—if he’s smart. You got someone in mind?”

  “Nope,” I said, even as I revisited her image in my headlights. “Why am I asking you, anyway? What would you know about women?”

  I had hurt him. I snuffed out the cigarette in the dirt.

  “You can be a mean son of a bitch, Ben.”

  There was some truth to that. The meanness seemed to jump out of me when I least expected it. When I was younger it took the form of fighting. Now nearing forty, instead of fighting I had a tendency to use harsh words and say unkind things. With money getting tight, the meanness was showing up more often.

  I apologized to John. He looked past me down 117.

  “I’m old,” he began. “I live in a vacant hardware store and pull a cross back and forth along a desert highway. But I’m still a man, Ben. Good and bad,” he added as he gazed down the road. “A man.” It was as if he saw something on the roadside and was walking out to meet it. “There was a time before the Lord when I drank and drugged and whored—sometimes for years. The Lord gave me a better woman than any man ever deserved. I threw her away.”