The road ahead wound into a brilliant sunlight and the snowcapped hills threw back mirrorlike flashes into my eyes. A shrouded red haze was all I could see of the mesa cliffs in the distance. It might be snow, but my guess was fog from the warmer air on the ground rising to meet the cooler, shifting currents coming down from the plateau. Out of habit I began to slow to make the turn into Walt’s diner. It wasn’t a turn I felt like taking and I quickly shifted back up and pressed the accelerator down—hard.
The Well-Known Desert Diner, The Never-Open Desert Diner, began to recede in the distance behind me, swallowed up in the glare and rise and fall of the road. I’d had a love affair with the place for twenty years and once referred to it as a junkyard, and Walt as its guard dog. Now I wanted to leave it behind as fast as I could, and the faster I went, the harder I pushed my truck, it stayed in my mirror—its white adobe walls and green trim, its pale gravel driveway and antique bubble gas pumps—following me, keeping pace with me, as if the two of us were tethered by an invisible towline. Somewhere on a straight or a turn or on a bridge over a nameless canyon, it stopped being a diner and I saw it for what it really was, the museum of a life that no longer existed.
I could have used ten thousand miles of bad and crooked road to try to sort out Walt and his diner. Maybe a hundred thousand. And after that I’d probably still feel as if it were a tangled mystery. I was a visitor to Walt and his museum—nothing more. Every damn thing in the diner dated from before Bernice’s rape—the Wurlitzer jukebox, lime-green stools and booths—time stood still there. Even his motorcycles were from another time. This was Walt’s carefully preserved world. But the visitor only saw what was on display, and that included Walt himself. If you asked questions, your ticket was torn up and you were thrown out. Most of what I knew, I knew by accident. The Never-Open Desert Diner was closed for a reason; and it looked open, welcoming, for a reason. But God help you if you tried to enter. There were more rooms than you knew. Claire was a room. The corpse of one of Bernice’s rapists was a room. And now, by accident, I learned of another room—a son. I was tired of all the rooms. It felt like the end of the love affair.
I was making good time getting to Rockmuse, and I hoped I made equally good time on my return. There was no reason to think I wouldn’t. Steam rose from the warm asphalt on a short straight stretch. John’s cross came into view, its weather-worn brown wood standing out on the shoulder among the prairie grass and scrub junipers. This had to be the scene of the hit-and-run and I wanted to take a look for myself, not that I expected to learn anything.
I parked fifty yards ahead and walked back to the cross. Snow still clung to John’s knapsack of camping supplies, though its contents had been scattered—a couple cans of chili, canteen, pan, and miscellaneous items. I stepped carefully around the cross, which sat upright on one of its corners, probably held in place by the bracket and tire from the wheelbarrow. Unless George righted the cross, which I doubted—why would he?—the impact knocked John cleanly out from underneath it. I walked out into the middle of 117. No skid marks. This stretch had been clear yesterday, probably sunny. From where I stood I could see the knapsack and its contents strewn in a line pointing beyond the shoulder and out into the desert. A plane had crashed at the small airport in Price. It left what they called a debris field. This was John’s debris field and it wasn’t much.
There, standing in the middle of the highway, I thought again of Walt, and his debris field. He had put me down as his next of kin.
About ten feet from the end of the debris field some branches of a scrub juniper had been torn off its slender trunk and I supposed that was where John’s body had landed.
I knelt on one knee and looked out past the tree and shoulder grasses into the desert. When I stood, I saw downtown Rockmuse, floating in the foggy distance, maybe a mile or two southeast, though the road itself at that point continued due east for a few miles before a long, sweeping right turn to the south that led to the City Limits sign.
I took a few more steps and tripped over a discarded old tire half-buried in the sand. Next to it was a black plastic trash bag, also partly buried. It had been there long enough that the plastic had begun to deteriorate, exposing its contents—fast-food garbage. Welcome to the desert. Throw your shit anywhere you like. It’s the desert.
A little farther on I saw a faded pink piece of paper, and then another, caught in some dead brush. I knew what they were before I picked them up—some of the Abandoned Vehicle warnings that Trooper Smith had stuck to Ginger’s broken-down old Subaru. Wind had blown them all over the place. They’d practically blown away even as I reached for them. There wasn’t much to see, and what I saw wasn’t much help.
Back at the highway I guessed at where George had come to a stop in his jeep. There were tire tracks everywhere and could have belonged to any vehicle, though not George’s. The tires on his jeep were as smooth as river rock. Almost everyone’s vehicle in Rockmuse was running on bald tires. By the time Trooper Smith got out to investigate, John would be buried and mostly forgotten and the desert would have blown away and buried anything useful.
I got back in the cab of my truck and released the brakes. I didn’t go; I just sat there. I set the brakes and again walked back to where I thought the jeep had been parked. While there weren’t any tire prints to speak of, there also wasn’t any sign of how George got John on the hood of his jeep. If it had been me, at six foot four and two hundred pounds, I would have picked up John in my arms, or put him over my shoulder, to carry him. Even with my strength, Dr. Wanda was right, it was tough, awkward work to dead-lift an unconscious person.
So what would George have done? He might have driven the jeep up next to where John lay and pulled him by his wrists over the hood. Except to get that close, there had to be some sign he drove the jeep way off the shoulder. There wasn’t. That left the same tactic, but meant he had to have pulled John maybe twenty feet or more to his jeep. And what wasn’t there was any sign of John’s heels dragging. With his weight and bootheels, and a small man struggling, it seemed to me there would have to be. Of course, I wasn’t a cop, or a trained investigator. I was just guessing.
Ginger’s old Subaru had become the new Rockmuse City Limits sign because once you passed it you knew Rockmuse was just around the bend. I confess that I often laughed when I saw the JUST DIVORCED painted across the back window. The message was hardly visible anymore after months of rain and dust plastered to the car. And now snow, which had melted, leaving dried muddy rivulets from the roof down the doors. The wind had managed to take most of Trooper Smith’s pink warning tags. It made sense that at least a couple had blown back up the highway and joined the rest of the litter skittering along the shoulder.
I had one job. Get Annabelle and take her straight back to Price and Ginny. I could have stopped on the way to deliver the water to Dan Brew. It didn’t even occur to me. If he was really pressed for drinking water he could melt some snow, though I did leave him two five-gallon cans. That should last him a couple days for drinking and cooking. These were excuses. I didn’t do what I said I’d do, come back on my return and deliver his fifty-gallon container of water. Maybe I felt a little guilt. What I felt most was the sting of not delivering on a promise.
I drove straight through town and out to Phyllis’s place. My route took me past the theater and I considered stopping, if only for a minute. There was no reason. John’s body wouldn’t be there. The town didn’t have a morgue, or a funeral parlor, and just like all the other businesses that had teamed up and merged, the Rockmuse Mercantile had the largest cooler and it pulled double-duty. When someone died, that’s where he or she was taken, and like the others, John was probably napping on cold cuts and fresh vegetables or across crates of milk. That’s where he would stay until the county sent the wagon out for him, and they’d be in no hurry. From there, I thought with some sadness, he’d go into a pauper’s grave at the cemetery in Price.
I wasn’t much for socializing with the dead. Not once since the old couple that adopted me had died had I visited their graves. The one exception was Claire. And I didn’t talk to her. I just stood over her grave in silence and engaged in the Trickle Down Theory of communication, which probably worked as well with the dead as its economic counterpart did with the living. All she had was Walt and me, in death as well as life. There was room near her for John. Maybe, if the county had no objection…I didn’t even know his last name. As far as I knew, no one did. If George hadn’t brought him in he’d just be roadside litter, and unlike a tire, only for a while until the desert and the animals got to him.