The Never-Open Desert Diner
Page 6
At least two of the men, all average-looking guys around thirty years old, had Bernice on the floor of the diner. Her white blouse had been ripped off and was already covered in blood from her head wounds. Her blue skirt was nowhere in sight. She was naked from the waist down. That was the last thing the kid saw until he came to behind the counter, paper napkins stuffed in his mouth, his right arm broken so badly the bones jutted out from the skin in two places. He could only see out of one eye. A butter knife had been jabbed into the other.
When he opened his one good eye he saw Walt kneeling over him and he could still hear Bernice screaming and what sounded like grunts—and laughter. Walt had come in, as usual, through the back entrance into the kitchen. He gently stroked the side of the kid’s head with his hand. The kid said later that Walt kissed his forehead, maybe because he thought the boy was dead, or soon would be.
There might have been four men, but there were only three bodies. Maybe one got away and ran into the desert. Maybe he died there. Maybe he’d been living for years in someplace like Petaluma, California, with his wife and visited his grandchildren twice a year in Denver. No one knew. Maybe Walt knew, but he never said a word about what happened next—not to the highway patrol, not to the sheriff, not to the county attorney, not to anyone.
Bernice’s screams stopped. Everything was silent. The kid heard something like a drain becoming unclogged, a gurgling. Somehow, with the knife still in his eye, he crawled on the floor around the end of the counter, dragging his broken arm behind him. A ragged bloodstain on the linoleum tiles marked his path.
One of the men, the man nearest the kid, was just standing there, his back to the kid. A steak knife stuck out from the base of his skull. The gurgling sound came from a man on the floor. His throat had been cut. Walt stood over him with a butcher knife. The third man was on top of Bernice. He had his head turned and was looking up at Walt. The fourth man, if there was one, was sitting in one of the booths. The kid didn’t see him but claimed he saw the man’s shadow thrown across the floor by the setting sun coming through the front windows.
The kid passed out and survived. He probably lived somewhere with the memory of that evening. He’d be around fifty-seven or fifty-eight. Walt thrust the butcher knife so deep between the shoulder blades of the man on top of Bernice that it came out the man’s chest and punctured Bernice’s left lung. What had been up until then a stealthy and disciplined attack must have finally turned to wild rage.
Walt was experienced enough from his stint with the Marines in Korea not to try to remove the knife from the kid’s eye. If he had, the boy would have bled to death within a few minutes.
Walt scooped up the boy and Bernice and put them in the back of the 1964 Willys station wagon they owned. He drove them to the hospital in Price. He called the boy’s parents but through what had to have been a long, worried night he didn’t call the authorities. The police learned about it early the next morning from a hysterical tourist calling from the phone booth outside the diner.
I can’t imagine what that tourist saw when he or she walked into The Well-Known Desert Diner that morning. I’ve heard it said that some things are best left to the imagination. That might be true. Then again, maybe there are some things that shouldn’t be.
No charges were ever filed against Walt, though for a time the families of the men were trying to stir up the county prosecutor. All of the men had been attacked from behind.
And these men, these three, or four, men, were they escaped convicts? Desperate men on a crime spree? Men with long, violent criminal histories? Crazy Vietnam vets, as was the fashion for blame in those days. Druggies? Charles Manson disciples or wannabes? People just wanted an explanation that would make sense, even if it made no sense.
The public got all there was. They were men with wives and families, upstanding citizens with mortgages and car payments. No criminal records of any kind. They were shoe salesmen, at least the three who were found, returning to Salt Lake City from a sales conference in Denver.
There were a few idiots who tried to say that Bernice had somehow provoked them, or wanted what she got. There were theories that Walt knew the men and there was bad blood, as if that would explain anything or even begin to justify what they did to Bernice. There were those who simply maintained that Walt had no right to kill the men no matter what they had done. All I ever pondered was the maybe ten minutes between a Chevy full of shoe salesmen saying, “Fill ’er up” to a young pump jockey, and a free-for-all on a defenseless thirty-five-year-old Korean waitress. Ten minutes. Tops.
Two events occurred in 1987. Either one of them might have signaled the end of the Well-Known Desert Diner, though together they sealed its fate. Bernice died, though almost everyone would have said she died a long time before that. And Lee Marvin, the actor, died. He had been Walt’s closest friend since their Marine Corps days in Korea. The two deaths took place within a week of each other. The month before, the exteriors were shot for the last film ever to use the diner. Oddly enough, it was different from every other film to feature the diner—it was a love story.
All of that had been way before my time on 117.
Bernice spent over two months in the hospital in Price recovering from the attack. There were some injuries the doctors couldn’t repair. From the hospital she went to a sanitarium outside Logan, where she spent the next eight months. When she returned to Walt, she looked fine, but she never spoke another word. She sat in the end booth nearest the jukebox with a vacant smile on her face. She spent all day every day from 1974 until the day she died looking out the window across the road into the desert, her hands cradling a cup of coffee she never drank. Walt ran the diner with some help. There was always a red plastic placard on Bernice’s table that said, “Reserved.” It was still there the last time I was in the diner.
I didn’t doubt any of this information, though I didn’t hear it from Walt. Bernice died sitting in that booth. The diner stayed closed after that, even during those rare times when it was open.
If Walt had been dancing with a woman, I couldn’t help but wonder if the woman the schoolteacher saw was Bernice. Knowing Walt the way I did, a ghost was the only thing that made sense to me. I would sooner believe a ghost than a live woman. If Walt were seeing a woman from around Price, I would have heard about it.
Not far down the road from the diner was the runaway wife, Claire, except she was way too young. And married. I was pretty sure she was just squatting at the model home. Perhaps she had found Desert Home the same way I had, by accident. It was a safe place for her because she didn’t know anyone. If she knew someone in the area, it sure as hell wouldn’t be Walt Butterfield. No one really knew Walt anyway, even me. We only really knew of Walt. That was a fact and it hurt to admit it.
On Monday, or the week after, I expected to show up at Desert Home and find Claire gone. I would stand on the porch or sit on the chair and wish her well. Maybe I would hear the silent cello. She would become just another one of the mysteries I had to leave alone. She might become one of the mysteries I would find myself leaving alone for the rest of my life.
The rain hadn’t slowed me down much. I arrived at the transfer station near the Price airport earlier than usual and parked my empty rig against the cyclone fence alongside the UPS trucks and vans. I returned tired waves from some of the guys I knew, including the one I had caught with Nadine. He’d been married and divorced twice since Nadine. No mystery there.
My hand was on the door handle of my pickup when my name came over the yard speaker telling me to come to the station supervisor’s office. The last time a supervisor had called me to his office, some higher-ups had decided I should start paying a monthly fee to park my rig inside the secure gates of the transfer station. There was a good chance they had come up with a new fee to charge me. There was no chance I was going to pay it.
End-of-workday spirits were high as I walked past the drivers’ lounge. It was one of the women, a day driver, who asked me about playi
ng Boy Scout that morning on 191. Her route was clear on the other side of Price. I leaned inside the doorway. Mildly curious, I wanted to know how she knew what I was doing at that hour.
“1K Larry,” she said. There was a round of laughter from the other drivers. “Everyone within a hundred miles heard about it. A nature girl.” The way she said it you could almost hear her teeth grinding. “Healthy living. Mountain bike. It’s not like you to stop, Ben. You must be getting lonely. Or was she really in trouble or something?”
“Or something.”
Another voice, this one male, had joined in from behind the main group. His comment brought forth another round of laughter. He was a big guy with a handlebar mustache. I don’t mind joking around with people I know. I didn’t know him.
“Who in the hell are you?” I asked.
The lounge became quiet. All the noise—diesel engines, voices, and the faint roar of a jet landing on a nearby runway—seeped in from the open loading docks down the hallway. Everyone had developed a sudden interest in the floor of the lounge while they waited for what might come next. I stepped inside in the doorway.
When he didn’t say anything, I said to no one in particular, “I stopped for a stranded motorist. That’s all there was to it. If anyone else has a comment, I’d be happy to hear it—outside.”
Another page with my name filled the silence.
The handlebar mustache stepped through the other drivers and extended his hand. “I’d be happy to step outside. First I’d like to make my apology here and now.” He introduced himself as Howard Purvis. “I started last year.” I let his right hand hang in the air. He was maybe forty with a shaved head and biceps roughly the size of a hindquarter of beef. “I was out of line. I apologize. I’d like to be here next year. My wife and kids would like me to be here, too, bringing home a paycheck.”
I shook his hand. The room began to breathe again. “Ben Jones,” I said. “I’d like to be here next year, too.” It occurred to me that probably wasn’t in the cards.
“Can we step into the hallway?” Purvis asked.
We stepped into the hall. He rested his big shoulders against the wall. “About five thirty this morning I was headed south on 191. A quick side run to a ranch. That same woman was outside her car talking on a cell phone. I could tell from the exhaust the car was running. She didn’t have her hood up or her flashers on, or I would have called the highway patrol. Like I said, she had a cell phone.”
“So what?” I said.
“So I’d seen her yesterday. No disrespect intended, but yesterday she wasn’t any nature girl.”
“What was she?”
Some drivers filed by out of the lounge trying not to look at us. Purvis waited until they were out of earshot before he answered. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “I think she was waiting for you.”
He let what he’d said sink in for a moment before he continued.
“Yesterday afternoon I saw her walk into Joe’s Sporting Goods in the mall. I was making a delivery a few doors down. Joe’s was my next stop. She was a blonde yesterday. Short dress. Red heels high enough to give you a nosebleed. Enough cleavage showing that old Joe saw them on their way toward his place and ran to the door to open it for her. She walked past him like she’d never opened a door for herself in her life.” He let go of a small laugh. “To her Joe was nothing more than an automatic door opener.”
“You sure? Same woman?”
“Same woman,” he said. “Again, no disrespect intended, but she looked to me like a divorce that hadn’t found a courtroom yet. You married?”
I shook my head. “Why would she be waiting for me?” I thought about how she had practically stepped into the highway to flag me down.
“Maybe she wasn’t,” he said. “Just seemed that way to me. When I got to Joe’s he was way too busy with her to sign for his packages. I had to wait. She bought everything she was wearing this morning. Including the mountain bike and the bike rack. Paid cash. And I can tell you, she didn’t know a mountain bike from a tricycle. She didn’t seem to care. Boom boom,” he said quietly. “Seemed strange to me then. Seemed even stranger to me this morning when I saw her decked out on the side of 191 looking like she just escaped from a granola commercial.” He pushed himself away from the wall. “That’s all I meant by ‘or something.’ Not suggesting anything, Mr. Jones. None of my business. I should have let it stay that way.”
I put my hand out and he took it. “Normally, Mr. Purvis, I’d say it wasn’t any of your business. But I’m glad you mentioned it. I’m obliged. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Hijack?” he ventured.
“Or just setting up the groundwork for one,” I said. “What else? Except the most expensive piece of freight I’ve hauled in twenty years was the jawbone of a T. rex from a dig site off 117.”
“Maybe they know of something coming your way worth jacking?” We both thought about that for a moment before he pointed out the obvious. “You’re way out there on 117.”
“Maybe. But I won’t be stopping for her again. Or anyone else.”
I thanked him again and continued on through the maze of hallways to the supervisor’s office, thinking about a lot of things, her transformation mostly. From there I began to consider her story about seeing the diner open and Walt dancing with a woman. What in the hell did that have to do with anything? She said she had just arrived from Salt Lake City. If that was true, what was she doing on 117 the night before?
Whatever that schoolteacher was up to, I didn’t plan to attend any more classes.
The station supervisor was a young guy with a salesman’s smile that had so far served him well. Price was his second stop in two years on his way up the corporate ladder. When I walked into his outer office, his receptionist was paging me for the third time. She told me to go right inside his office even though I was already standing in front of his gleaming glass desk. He was on the phone and motioned for me to take a seat.
There were only three objects on his desk. Of the three, what interested me least was a photograph of him shaking hands with the president of the company. The photograph wasn’t for him to look at; it was intended for me, and anyone else sitting in his office. The frame was strategically angled outward, away from where he sat. The second dealt with the unlikely prospect that anyone might forget his name and title; it was engraved in brass and stood guard next to the photograph. “Robert A. Fulwiler, Station Supervisor.” He was a yes-man. All he said into the phone as I waited was, “Yes.” He said it at least five times, each time with more conviction than the time before.
He was out of breath from all his yes-ing when he hung up and flashed his whitened smile at me. I was about to buy something I didn’t need or want.
“Ben,” he said, “I just have a quick question for you. I know you’ve been having a tough time of it and a certain opportunity for someone has come up. Interested?”
“No,” I said, and lifted myself out of the chair. “But thanks for the thought. I’m doing good.”
His smile only got larger. “You sure? It means some extra money. You wouldn’t have to do anything you’re not already doing.”
I kept standing and told him again I wasn’t interested.
“Close the door, Ben.” When I didn’t, he closed it himself. He sat down in the chair next to me. We were just two guys, two friends, equals having an equals chat. “Please sit down, Ben.”
I sat down. He got straight to the point, or rather the on-ramp that merged onto the road that led to his point. “So you’re doing good?” He glanced over his shoulder at the third thing on his desk, a white envelope with my name printed on it. He made no move to pick it up. “Do you know who that was on the phone just now?”
“Well,” I said, “you’re the station supervisor. My first guess would be Jesus.”
He shook his head as if my answer had both offended and amused him. He polished his teeth with his tongue.
I took another guess. “God?”
“Who was on the phone?”
He perked up. I had been dangerously close in my guess. He couldn’t wait to tell me whom he had been talking to. “That was the executive vice president for communications and public relations at corporate in Atlanta.” He couldn’t resist taking a peek at the phone on his desk. There was the chance that some of the power of the caller was still lingering there and could be snatched out of the air and stored for later, or simply inhaled. “We’ve spoken twice this afternoon.”
“Wow,” I said. “Twice.” I folded the envelope and stuffed it into the back pocket of my jeans.
“You’re not reading that because you know what it is,” he said. “Ben, let’s not waste any more time. I know what it says. The two men from the leasing company who dropped it by for you told me. It’s a final thirty-day repossession notice on your truck and trailer.”
“Well,” I said, as if it weren’t that big a deal, “times are a little lean for everyone. This is only my first final thirty-day repossession notice.”
“They also served me with a property right-of-way release signed by a judge that allows them to come onto the property to take your rig. I can help you, Ben. If you’ll let me.” Any moment I expected him to put one of his delicate pink hands on my knee. “At least listen.”
I listened and kept a close eye on his hands. If I’d had any money in my wallet I would have taken it out and put it in my boots. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. He didn’t specify whose lifetime.
A television producer wanted to come and ride with a driver for a few days. If it worked out, he would come back with a small crew. They were willing to pay five hundred dollars. “That’s just for starters,” he said absently, as if imagining the hundred-dollar bills being counted out one by one into his palm instead of mine. “They’re thinking of doing a cable TV series that would run every week next fall. If it works out, the drivers they use will get up to five thousand apiece.”