The Never-Open Desert Diner

by James Anderson

  He smiled. “I do at that,” he said. “At night I’ve been climbing up to that ridge over there and watching the stars. Television for the desert rat. Couple nights ago I took in the sights of a desert fire. Didn’t last long, though. Beautiful while it lasted, like fireworks.”

  Desert fires are rare and don’t last long. There simply isn’t enough to burn. Unlike a forest fire, desert fires are left alone. Usually a fire is the result of a lightning strike or, once in a while, a careless camper. Campers might have been the cause of the fire Jasper saw. There hadn’t been lightning for over a week.

  “Where did you see the fire?” I asked.

  He pointed north, in the direction of 117. “Out there. Like I said, it didn’t last long. One big flare-up. It blinked for a while. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “Just curious.” I faced north and pointed. “You stood on that ridge up there?”

  Jasper rubbed his face with both hands as if to wake up. He squinted upward and nodded. Dreamily, he said, “Once in a while you can catch a shooting star. The night sky kind of reaches around you up there like a starry bubble.”

  I asked him to sign for the pipe. He scribbled his initials and I gave him his copy. I told him to be safe. Almost as an afterthought, I asked him if he had lived a long time in Utah. His answer surprised me.

  “No,” he said. “Born and raised in Washington State. Lost my job to the digital revolution and my pension to Wall Street. My wife died. I’ve just been moving from place to place. I like it here, though. You?”

  “All my life,” I said. “And probably what comes after.”

  We left it at that. On my way out I slowed near the ridge he had indicated and followed the line of sight due north. There was nothing out there that I knew of, and not an area where you’d expect hikers or campers to go. In fact, there had only been one person out there two nights ago—Josh.

  The next few deliveries went quickly. I wondered about the fire Jasper had seen. Maybe it was just a campfire. Josh would have been cold while he waited for daylight. What concerned me was that for Jasper to see it, it would have had to be one hell of a big campfire and there wasn’t much there for Josh to burn. Jasper’s choice of the word flare-up made me think of flare. Perhaps Josh was attempting a signal fire with the hope of being rescued. Maybe he had been rescued. Jasper only saw it the one night.

  Layers of soft wide clouds were building to the west in front of a late-afternoon sun as I headed my empty trailer back toward home, which for a moment I envisioned not as my duplex in Price, but Desert Home and Claire. My place in Price had never been my home, only where I slept. After two nights with Claire, it seemed as though it wasn’t even that anymore. Dennis might be in Desert Home with Claire, or have been there and gone. Or they were both gone. I wanted to know which it was. At the same time I didn’t want to know. The compromise presented itself as I approached the turnoff to the Lacey brothers’ place. My intention was to occupy myself for a few minutes by checking in on Duncan.

  A red handkerchief twisted in the wind from where it had been anchored to a pile of rocks. Though seldom used, many of my customers put out a brightly colored rag of some description to request me to stop for a pickup, or to place an order.

  Fergus was sitting on one of the plastic crates beside the cable spool table. On the table, partly hanging off the edge, was an oblong package tightly wrapped in black plastic and sealed with silver duct tape. Fergus looked like he was expecting me. There was no way he could have known when I would show up. He didn’t wave or stand. I parked in their turnaround. He sat with his hands folded in his lap and watched me as I climbed down out of the cab.

  There was no use hurrying. It was maybe twenty-five steps to the table. By the twelfth step I knew what lay stretched over the table in front of Fergus. I took the crate across from him and sat down. Neither one of us said anything for a few minutes. We just sat there with the crude body bag between us like a centerpiece at a sad dinner party. Fergus didn’t look at me or the bag that held his brother. He stared south toward 117.

  “When?” I asked.

  Fergus gently rested his hand on the black plastic. “Yesterday.” I waited for him to continue. He began to stroke the plastic. “He was feeling better.”

  Fergus had been sleeping. When he awoke he saw Duncan stringing barbed wire from their old Jeep along a hillside behind their boxcars. The roll of wire was in the back of the Jeep. The end was nailed to a fence post. Duncan stood between the two.

  “He was just standing there, looking back toward me with this silly grin on his face. He sort of waved. I saw the Jeep begin to creep down the hill. He probably didn’t bother to set the emergency brake. He didn’t even try to get free. Maybe Duncan didn’t notice the barbwire tangled around him until it was too late. I didn’t even make it out the door before the barbwire cinched him around the waist like a tourniquet. Damn near cut him in two. He was still alive when I got to him. Not a damn thing I could do, Ben.” He paused. “I keep telling myself it wasn’t a bad way to go. We had a few minutes for our good-byes.”

  “It’s got to be tough to lose a brother,” I said.

  Fergus stopped stroking the plastic and gave it a pat. “Even harder to lose your only son.”

  “Your son?”

  “We wanted it that way. You and the few others we’ve had contact with over the past forty years assumed we were just a couple of crazy brothers living out here. It got easier to sell as we got older. I was only eighteen when he was born. His mother was seventeen. We figured being brothers kept us a little safer.”

  “Safe from what?”

  Fergus needed to think about my question. I let him think. He made his decision. “From the law, Ben. FBI mostly. Our name isn’t Lacey. It’s Tinker. I’m Joe. My son’s name was Teddy. Ted. We’re originally from Baltimore. Showed up out here in the middle of the night. Before that, the closest we ever came to this much sand was the Atlantic shore.”

  It didn’t seem all that important to know why they were wanted men. The bullet scars I’d seen on Duncan’s chest made sense. “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Don’t you want to know why we’ve been hiding out from the law all these years?”

  I told him I didn’t care. I did care, though only a little.

  He wanted to tell me anyway.

  “Teddy and a friend robbed a bank. Only trouble he was ever in. Thought they’d do it just the once. He was only twenty years old. It’s not like he had a brain in his poor little head at that age. His friend shot the guard. Killed him. The guard shot his friend. Toby, his name was. He died where he fell. They’d known each other since they were in kindergarten. A teller emptied his revolver into Teddy. He was half dead when I broke him out of the hospital. We drove for three days. The whole time I was expecting him to die. If he’d lived or died, better with me than in prison or by lethal injection.”

  “What about his mother?”

  “She gave her blessing. Knew we’d never see each other again. And we didn’t.” Fergus, or Joe, smiled up into the sky. “As prisons go, this was a good one. Still a prison.”

  “I saw the putting green,” I said. “Just like the Wall Streeters and bankers.”

  “Yep,” he agreed. “We even supplied our own barbed wire.”

  I didn’t think there was much left to be said. “Give me a hand. We can put him in the refrigerator unit. I’ll take him into the funeral parlor in Price.” Fergus made no move to help me. “Or do you want me to help you bury him here?”

  He sighed. He took his eyes away from Duncan’s body. “There’s something else you should know.” I let him take a moment to find the courage to tell me what I already suspected. “I’m wanted, too. When I took my son I didn’t have much money. It ran out fast. Outside Muncie, Indiana, I robbed a gas station. Then a bank in Trinidad, Colorado.”

  “Anyone hurt or killed?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Probably. I was out of my mind. I’d been driving f
or two days. I didn’t really know how to use a gun. It just seemed to go off by itself. Teddy was lying in the backseat bleeding and unconscious.”

  “You want my sympathy?” I asked.

  “Your understanding, maybe.”

  “Sure,” I said. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  “Take him into Price or Salt Lake. Somewhere he’ll get a decent funeral. That’s it.” He thought a moment more and added, “The boy was so lonely out here. I guess I don’t want him to spend eternity the same way.”

  There was nothing in his tone to suggest that was all he had to say. I just waited on him to get it all out. When he didn’t, I grew impatient and finished for him. “You want to be left out of it?”

  He nodded, and I added, “You think funeral homes have night deposit slots for bodies?”

  “I got lucky with the bank in Trinidad,” he said. “If you want to call it luck. Two hundred thousand and change. I could make it worth your while.”

  “You couldn’t possibly make it worth my while,” I said, with no room in my tone for misunderstanding. The thought of starting a life with Claire that way, with stolen money, wasn’t something I could have lived with.

  “I’ve never taken money for doing something illegal,” I said. In fact, I had never really done anything illegal, for gain or not. At least not something I’d had a chance to think about. “Your money is stolen,” I said. “Even if it weren’t, taking payment might take the fun out of what for me could be considered a crime spree—if I get caught.”

  “You’ll do it, then?”

  “I’m not sure what I’ll do. No promises. I’ll take the body. If I turn you in, either because I want to or I don’t have any other choice, you have to go without trouble. You understand? That’s the best I can offer.”

  He took my offer. We slipped Duncan in over the butter brickle ice cream. “There is one thing you can do for me,” I said. “You have any idea where those boxcars came from?”

  Fergus said he did. “That’s where the railroad left them. We covered up the tracks. This used to be a siding.”

  “You built your house on the tracks?”

  “Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” It wasn’t exactly a question.

  I opened the little inspection cubby on the exterior of the trailer and took a peek in at Duncan in his black plastic sleeping bag. “No,” I said, “not at all. Especially when you compare it to everything else you and your son did.” I closed the inspection door.

  “Didn’t have a choice,” he said.

  I avoided looking at him. “Sure you did.”

  I had no idea what I was going to do with Duncan’s body, or with the unwanted knowledge of what he and his father had done. For a little while I had succeeded in forgetting about Claire and her husband. It was almost a vacation.

  At the turnout for Desert Home, I saw Walt on my left near the top of the hill leading to the archway. He waved me in.

  Before I could get out of the cab he jumped up on the running board. “He’s been down there about an hour. Took his rented SUV down the road across from the diner. On top of everything else, he’s an idiot.”

  He reached to steady himself on a mirror post. I could see the butt of a handgun beneath his short leather jacket. “You think you’re going to need that?” I asked.

  Walt gave my question more thought than I expected. “I hope not,” he said.

  “Don’t shoot anyone accidentally,” I said.

  He jumped down and glared up at me. “I don’t shoot people accidentally,” he said. “I shoot them on purpose.”

  We walked up the hill toward the arch. “An hour’s a long time,” I said.

  Walt’s answer was to the point. “They’ve been married a long time. You probably shouldn’t be here.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “But it doesn’t take an hour to hand over the cello.”

  Walt put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t go down there.”

  I wasn’t going to, and told him so. It wasn’t true—part of me was already starting down the other side.

  “She knows you’re here, right?”

  “She knows,” he said. “She doesn’t need to see me.”

  “Maybe she is your daughter.” It was something that had been playing in the back of my mind for quite a while. I meant it as a kind of joke. As soon as I said it I was filled with regret. Such a comment wouldn’t sit well with Walt. When he didn’t say anything, I looked over at him. He was staring stone-faced down at the house.

  The two of us knelt on the sandy ground just out of sight below the rim of the hill. One of us was praying that there was nothing going on inside the house but talk. Walt could have been hoping for the same thing. I liked to think so. Both of us just wanted to see Dennis come out of the house with the cello and leave, alone.

  “Why don’t you go down there,” I suggested. “Just to make sure everything is okay?”

  Walt glanced over at me with a mixture of understanding and pity on his face. It might have been a mixture of contempt and pity. It was an expression I’d never seen before, not on Walt Butterfield’s face. “She’s with her husband, Ben,” he said quietly. “Unless there’s a sign of trouble brewing, neither one of us belongs there. You can’t change whatever is happening behind those doors. It would be wrong to try.” He rocked back on his heels and stood up. “It’s time for you to go.”

  He walked me back to my truck. “Maybe she’ll stay this time. Maybe not.”

  “I thought this was her first visit,” I said.

  “She showed up on my doorstep one morning about a year ago, right after she and her husband separated. I knew right off who she was. I let her cool her heels, hoping she’d go away. Stubborn girl. She stood outside the door to the diner or sat roasting in her car off and on for most of the day. She knew I was there. And she knew I knew. She wore me down. Late in the afternoon I let her in. She walked straight to Bernice’s booth and sat down, like she’d been doing it all her life. She had her choice of any seat in the diner.

  “All she wanted was for me to tell her about her mother. She knew about everything else. I made us a little something to eat. Before she left she asked for a keepsake, anything that was her mother’s. I gave her those boots she wears. Had them made up special for Bernice just before…” He stopped. “And a little gold locket Bernice wore, with our wedding photograph inside. Then she asked for something to remember me by. Kind of surprised me.”

  I asked him what he gave her.

  “A quilt my mother made for me when I was a kid. She looked it over and put it in a bag. She thanked me and left. Never expected to see her again. Didn’t want to see her again. Claire looks so much like her mother. It was like losing Bernice again. A few months later I wrote to her and told her it would be okay with me if she wanted to phone me or visit again. I gave her the number to the phone booth and said that if I was around I would hear it ring. Two weeks ago it rang. She was calling from New York. She wanted me to come and pick her up at the airport in Denver. I picked her up. She sent some of her belongings ahead. Used her mother’s Korean name instead of her own. Said she had her reasons. I thought maybe it had to do with her husband.”

  Walt looked back over his shoulder toward the archway, as if Claire was standing beneath it.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.

  “Thought you should know since you and Claire are together now.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “There’s something else,” he said, “just between the two of us. Bernice and I had been trying to have children for years. Then those men violated her.” He scuffed at the dirt with his boots. I could tell for a moment he was in the diner again that evening. “She was still in the hospital when we found out she was pregnant. I couldn’t stand the idea. I wanted the doctors to flush the damn thing and send it straight to hell. No matter how I felt, Bernice wanted to keep it. She begged me, but I wasn’t having any of it. We argued. She said she would leave me if I harmed the baby.
It wasn’t just the baby. Those animals broke her all up inside. Carrying the baby and childbirth might kill her. I agreed to let her have the baby, though I didn’t visit her until after it was born. It wasn’t the rape and beating that took away her speech. It was having the baby. A stroke. By the time she recovered, the baby was gone, adopted. Healthy damn kid. I still had Bernice. She hated me as much as I hated those men. Until Claire showed up, and I saw her, I hadn’t realized what I’d done to Bernice. What I’d done to myself.”

  “A second chance?” I ventured.

  Walt nodded.

  “I hope you take it,” I said.

  “Just thought you should know,” he said.

  Walt walked back up the hill. What he really wanted me to know was that he had as much at stake as I did in whatever was going on inside the house, maybe more. Walt had made Bernice give up the baby. He had kept the corpse. Now he was trading back.

  The sun was beginning to set. The wind was gusting, full of sand as it crossed 117. It made the sunlight dirty, like a bandage stretched over the sky. If I didn’t keep my speed down, the sand would take the paint off my truck and trailer right down to the metal.

  The flashing blue and red light bars of the two police units faded in and out of sight behind the windblown sand. They were parked side by side along the shoulder in front of the diner. When the officers saw me coming they got out of their vehicles and motioned me to pull over into the diner’s parking lot. One car was a Utah Highway Patrol cruiser; the other was a Carbon County Sheriff’s unit.

  There was little doubt in my mind they had been waiting for me. I had no idea why, especially the need for two of them.

  I pulled off 117 onto the gravel and inched the nose of my truck forward until it was within a few yards of the two men. They looked a little nervous while they stood their ground. I recognized the highway patrolman. His name was Andy. We’d met on several occasions, none of them seriously official. He was a nice Mormon guy a few years younger than me with short blond hair and an easy way about him.