I went about my deliveries knowing Josh was nearby, if not close enough to see. He did a respectably good job staying out of sight. The motorcycle was always in my way. Walt was right. Even in silence it was a heavy, cumbersome pain in the ass. Over the course of the morning I lost track of how often I had to unfasten it and move it out of the way and then tie it down and cover it again. I wasn’t ready to fire up the Victor yet, assuming it would start. Josh’s extreme desert adventure wouldn’t begin until I was ready, which wasn’t until late afternoon.

Oddly, I was looking forward to dinner with Walt. I needed to, though I didn’t particularly want to, tell him about my impending retirement from suckling the losers on 117. He’d predicted as much for years. That he didn’t consider himself a loser wasn’t surprising.

For one thing, Walt owned a business, even though it was closed most of the time. For another, his place was the closest to Price—to his way of thinking, closest to civilization, though every few months he went into Rockmuse to pick up his mail. He even shopped there once in a while. Walt also seemed to have a pretty good income. The diner had done well for a long time. The company that handled Lee Marvin’s investments had managed Walt’s movie dollars. The number one reason, though, was raw-assed pride.

Walt Butterfield was the Walt Butterfield the same way his café was the Well-Known Desert Diner. To hear him tell it, he had never failed, though from time to time, he’d had to wait longer or work harder before he succeeded. The single biggest burden everyone else suffered from was that none of them was Walt Butterfield. Sometimes I had to agree, though only to myself. It also crossed my mind that Walt Butterfield’s single greatest failing was that he was the Walt Butterfield. He was vital and strong, and when he got ready to die, he would tell God when, not the other way around.

Once in a while I even wondered, especially after Bernice died, why he hadn’t put God on notice. Beyond his motorcycle collection, I couldn’t guess what kept him going, except for a determination not to fail in, at, or because of life, even if most of that life was gone.

I made my deliveries. It was a fine morning and a fine afternoon. A peacefulness came over me once I accepted that a part of my life was about to end. From that peace came strength to finally just stare down the tracks as the train approached. Everywhere I made a delivery I gave out a free half gallon of butter brickle. I got a few thank-yous. Usually I got a nod, and the icy container went immediately against a sunburned cheek or to the back of a neck.

My fit of ice cream charity hardly put a dent in my supply. I couldn’t bring myself to tell any of the folks that I wouldn’t be seeing them much longer. Not to give them notice wasn’t fair, but given who they were, and the lives they had chosen to lead, fair wasn’t a word in the vocabulary of 117.

Josh and his red Jeep were on my mind as I headed west on 117. My trailer, thanks to several bags of feed, a brace of Schedule 40 galvanized pipe, and other odds and ends—including a portable cement mixer—was still a third full. Maybe I’d deliver on Sunday, or just hold off until Monday, when I could make it another full load.

At three o’clock sharp I pulled off on the shoulder and took a nap. Josh had to be parked somewhere behind me. I knew he was baking in his red metal Jeep with the high sun beating down on him and no air-conditioning. I thought of it as a kind of aging process, like what was done to gourmet steaks in fancy restaurants.

While he aged he’d drink the little water he had brought with him, if he’d thought to bring any at all. He’d sweat, and wait, and pray, and finally curse me to start moving again. His mouth would be so dry he couldn’t produce a thimble full of spit. Maybe he would run his engine just to feel the fan stir up the hot, stagnant air in his face. Maybe he would use more gas than he should. Sometime after that, I would get on the move.

I checked my mirrors for any sign of the red Jeep. About four thirty I released the brake and crept along the shoulder for a mile. As I crested a small rise, I was pretty sure I saw the Jeep behind me, keeping a steady distance between us.

I remembered a side road. It was deceptive. It began like a smooth macadam and gradually changed and worsened as it wound its way north toward an abandoned ranch. By the time the rotting timbers over the ranch entrance appeared, the road had become deeply rutted with nasty horizontal slashes up to a foot or more deep caused by years of erosion from spring washouts. In five or six places the road forked into different directions. Two of them dead-ended in arroyos. At least one piddled out into the sands. Where and how the others ended was a mystery to me. From the entrance onward to the burned-out ranch house, the road was a wide trail.

Early on, when I was working for Utah Express Provisioners, I had made deliveries there. One day I showed up and the place had burned to the ground, its charred rock chimney leaning like a drunk against a lone cottonwood tree. Belongings lay scattered everywhere—a broken table, miscellaneous clothing. No sign of the old couple who had lived there.

I parked in the ranch turnaround and stood on the running board scanning the horizon back the way I had come. I didn’t see the Jeep, but I saw a wisp of dust. When and if Josh got back onto the road it would be a dark and treacherous drive. My guess was that he would run out of gas long before that, even if he used the five-gallon emergency can all the rental Jeeps sported on their rear bumpers. Taking my time, I unloaded the Victor and buttoned up the truck in case some drunken coyotes decided to take it for a joy ride.

The Victor started right up. I idled it around the debris in the ranch yard and in and out of surviving outbuildings to get the feel of it, and it me. About the time I estimated Josh was no more than a half mile away, I gunned the Victor to announce my departure and headed cross-country to the northeast, where there was even less hospitable ground. Bless his lying little bulldog Hollywood ass, Josh followed, probably watching the dust I was none too careful about keeping down. And I watched his.

My plan was to take him out about ten miles from 117 as the crow flies, and then double back to my truck just before dark. He’d make it back to 117 eventually, even on foot, but it would take at least that night and part of the next day. If worse came to worst, maybe the Jeep’s GPS homing beacon might work and the rental company would send someone out to find him. For all I knew, he might even get cell service, but only if he climbed to the top of one of the piles of rocks that sprouted up here and there like twenty-foot warts.

Dead reckoning was all I had to go on. Walt had put some fear into me about the Victor’s reliability. My heart rate jacked up a few times when the engine sputtered. Its 441cc power plant and road gears took a lot of patience—sluggish on inclines, but a rocket on the flat stretches. It was easy for me to keep the sun to my back and always the red mesa far to my right.

To be certain, Josh stayed on his toes. I stopped a couple of times and took a few cuts north, once almost crossing his path as he wound his way up an arroyo full of granite boulders. For a moment or two I almost felt guilty. The mesa was beginning to catch the full rays of the setting sun. Too often I took the spectacle for granted. I lifted my eyes skyward. The layers of blue upon bluer faded into darkness. The blue reminded me of the photograph of Josh’s wife in her blue sweater and the blue of their son’s eyes. They probably weren’t even his wife and kid.

That was the end of it for me. I made a long lazy turn south and eventually west into a fast-setting and blinding sun, in a hurry to get back to the burned-out ranch and my truck, and on to Walt’s for dinner. Maybe I was struggling with an unexpected change of heart about what I was doing and wanted to put as many miles as I could between me and Josh. A couple of times I thought I was about to pull into the ranch, only to discover more dirt and rocks. It occurred to me that I might have overshot it, gone too far south, then maybe too far west. Without so much as a fart or a giggle of warning, the Victor lurched forward, stalled, caught again, and died. After five minutes of fooling with the prehistoric Amal carburetor and giving the fuel line the blow job of a lifetime, I knew it was no use and gave up. Pushing the Victor uphill for a hundred feet stole my breath and left me drenched in sweat. The shame of waiting for Josh to show up to give me a ride in the Jeep settled over me.

I leaned against the Victor at the crest of the hill and looked back over the terrain I’d covered. Dusk was settling between the low hills. The first shadows wound themselves through and around each other. In the far distance Josh’s headlights came on. Up and down, the beams bumped the darkness and then disappeared as he zigzagged in my general direction. All I could do was wait. I turned west to glimpse the last long streaks of the sunset and saw the cottonwood tree and chimney of the ranch, perhaps no more than a hundred yards away. It was a piece of good luck that I had started back when I did.

I loaded and tied down the Victor and decided to climb on top of the trailer to get a final fix on Josh’s progress. I saw no headlights. Either he had stopped for the night, or he was in a gulley, or he had run out of gas. It didn’t matter. A forlorn wind was beginning to wail through the charred slats of the ranch house walls. There wouldn’t be much of a moon. Josh Arrons, or whoever he was, could count on a long damn night. Claire would get her head start. That was all I had signed up for and all I cared about. What I’d done was nothing more than perform a mean duty on a young man who, if pressed, I might have to admit I liked.

It was closer to eight than seven when I parked my truck at the diner. Walt was probably pissed off at me and, for no particular reason, I was pissed off at him, which I knew was just a way of avoiding the truth that I was pissed off at myself for leaving Josh stranded in the desert.

The blinds were drawn on the diner’s windows. A soft yellow glow spilled out into the drive. My footsteps were heavy as I made my way toward the diner. The “Closed” sign was hanging in the door as usual. I didn’t feel hungry. If Walt was in a mood, I figured I’d skip dinner and backtrack to Desert Home to warn Claire. With my hand on the doorknob, I paused. Walt had the Wurlitzer jukebox cranked up playing some old tune from the 1940s or 1950s. He’d played it before. I was smiling as I opened the door. Walt was wearing a much bigger smile. He was dancing with Claire.