A pleasant autumn came to the high desert of Utah for a few days in late December. I sat in the cab of my truck on the eastbound shoulder, just outside of Rockmuse, a warm, northwestern breeze coming through my window. I stuck my head out like a dog on a car trip to the grocery store. They had to shave my head to clean and stitch all the wounds and the air felt good on the thick bristles of short hair. A cold, foil-wrapped burrito lay on the passenger seat next to me.
My jaw had been wired for weeks after I left the hospital, and then the dental work began, thousands of dollars in oral surgery, caps, and implants. I was glad to be alive and it seemed as though I’d be making payments for the privilege for a couple years or more. I picked up the burrito, planning to eat it while I waited. The afternoon sun was already reflecting off the red cliffs of the mesa and snow streaked the edges of the plateau, splintering the distant light.
Walt was in a rehab facility not far from downtown Price. The doctors had told me the week before that he remained unresponsive, even though his most serious injuries had healed. By that they meant he wasn’t talking much, though he seemed to understand the questions of the police and doctors just fine. My weekly visits there were almost the same as my twenty years of visits to him at the diner. Unresponsive was pretty much how he had always been. The medical staff just didn’t know it.
Walt was changed, thinner, gaunt-faced, his pale eyes always fixed on some private world as he sat in the wheelchair in the dining hall. We didn’t speak of that night. The cops tried and got nothing but grunts, and it wasn’t for some time that I remembered the man saying he was Walt’s son. When I asked him about it, he was extremely unresponsive.
There were lots of things I remembered later, and the more I remembered, the more I questioned how accurate those memories were. Like so much of my life and the lives of people I knew, living and dead, I kept most of it to myself. None of it really mattered anyway.
The question of who ran John down remained a local mystery and curiosity eventually went the way of the wind. What happened at the diner and in the desert came and went so quickly in the news and disappeared as a topic of local conversation that, as usual with tragedy, only those with scars cared, and like Walt, we gradually became unresponsive, except perhaps in our dreams.
I saw the cross in my side mirror, bobbing toward me along the shoulder a hundred yards away. I got out of my truck. It seemed to me I had forgotten something and then I remembered the burrito. I wasn’t ready to eat it, but I was far from ready to leave it behind.
John said he was just fine with leaving the cross on the side of 117. The unofficial Rockmuse City Council wanted it moved off the road, and it would be several months at least until John was strong enough on his new leg to even attempt to haul the cross into town. I’d offered to transport it in my trailer and he was adamant that the cross should never leave the ground. It had to be carried.
There was the implication that hell was a possibility if his wish was ignored, and, publicly at least, that suggestion brought some laughter, except from the few of us that knew a bit of hell firsthand. We could have lied to him—in fact, the consensus was to lie—but when it came right down to it, no one wanted to be a party to lying to a preacher, especially John. A relay of volunteers became the only solution, followed by a community potluck dinner at John’s True Value First Church of the Desert Cross.
The squeak of the wheelbarrow axle signaled the impending arrival of the couple who had the leg of the relay ahead of me. I recognized them as the two who had come upon the accident and had gone up ahead and sent Andy.
The relay had begun at dawn and it hadn’t taken long for folks to realize that hauling that cross was more strenuous and weighty labor than anyone anticipated. Roy solved the problem, as he solved all problems, by fashioning a yoke of sorts out of a used tire. With some foam rubber and an old quilt for padding, two people could harness up and carry the cross for the prescribed mile. To my knowledge no one had been able to carry the cross alone.
Roy had mended well and quickly. He never saw who shot him, or the dog. He did see the snake—after it had struck him, and would have struck again if the girl hadn’t come out of nowhere and grabbed the snake and thrown it back into the mountain of tires. For a week or two after he returned to his garage, people from Rockmuse, including Phyllis, brought him food. He must have liked her food because little by little he began taking his meals at her place, where, as rumor has it, he now occasionally eats breakfast. The two of them shared an early leg of the relay.
The couple, perspiring heavily, huffed up to me and I put the burrito inside my shirt and hefted the cross on my shoulder. The makeshift yoke dangled behind me. I thought I was big enough and strong enough to carry the cross all by myself and declined offers of a partner. Less than a hundred yards later, when it was too late, I reassessed that glowing estimation of myself and increased my admiration of John—and Jesus, in that order.
The bullet the surgeon dug out of me had not penetrated very far, slowed considerably by first passing through the girl. It had lodged in the dense muscle of my neck, barely missing the carotid artery. If it had hit the artery, someone else would be carrying the cross in my place. The pressure of the cross brought back the pain, and as I walked I switched the weight back and forth between shoulders. It didn’t help that much and my mile stretched out endlessly ahead. I knew if I stopped to rest I might never get going again and I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, my eyes on my boots, and willing myself not to look too far down the road. My relief was to meet me at the Rockmuse City Limits sign.
Ginny and Annabelle were coming to the potluck, which surprised me. She would be late and moving fast, as usual. Two days went by after their return before she knocked on my door. I needed those two days. The distance from my bed to my front door seemed as far as the night’s journey searching for Manita, and a lot less fun. I assumed my visitor was Ginny and made the effort. She just stood there for a moment looking at me, unable to disguise the shock. When she recovered she said, “I see you’ve started dating again.”
Annabelle was napping and I invited her inside. She stood while I gently lowered myself into my tattered old recliner. I didn’t ask her why she had returned. I could guess. Besides, talking was painful. I was just glad she and Annabelle were back. She volunteered that it hadn’t taken long for Rod to discover the truth about her mother, and the truth about Belle’s real father.
“Rod even told me I could stay. He gave me the money to come back to Price. Said to say hello.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a $50 bill. “Rod told me to give you this to repair your screen door.” I took the fifty.
“After Rod got a clue, it was all downhill in a hurry from there,” Ginny said. “I said goodbye to her at the coffee shop at the Reno Greyhound bus station. She wasn’t even listening. She was batting her eyes at some guy a few tables over. My guess is she got on something after I left, and it wasn’t a bus.”
After a long pause, she concluded by telling me that Belle missed me. I asked her if Belle was talking now. Ginny went to the door and wiggled her pierced eyebrow. “Better than you.”
A few days after her visit, Ginny took me for a follow-up visit at the hospital. On the way back I asked if she’d stop by the Price cemetery. She stayed in the car with Annabelle while I did something I hadn’t ever done: say “Thank you” to the childless old Mormon couple who had adopted me when I was six. They loved me as best they knew how, and I didn’t make it easy. More important, they kept me safe. My visit didn’t take long. Saying thanks never does. It’s the excuses that eat up time.