 Last Chance Cafe © 2006 by Beth Stevens Greensleeves is unlike other places, located in the high desert far to the north of even such unprepossessing spots as Devil's Gate and Dunmovin. Once you've passed Pair-A-Dice, and wound along the banks of the Alph River until it expires, discouraged, in the sand, you will have simply skirted its domain. Even so, you can't get there from here. It's that kind of place. You may hike till your feet grow calluses in the frowning hills that overlook it, sighting across to Painted Mountain on the opposite side. You may enjoy the varicolored, shimmering vistas laid out below, thinking you've got it surrounded. From the northeast, you might even sneak in behind the bluff known as Sleeping Woman, hoping to take it by surprise. But in the end Greensleeves will elude you. That's not to say people don't go there. Some few make it; even fewer return. This desert is not without risk: stony, only intermittently rewarding, and dotted with ghost towns. Still, its residents aren't hermits; instead, they seem approachable to the point of absurdity, to the point where you have to wonder just what they're after. Maybe it's more than a coincidence, that those who do manage to find Greensleeves are generally the ones not looking for it. Joan was such a traveler. She hadn't meant to come here. Being here, and having a few days' vacation left, she was determined to make the most of them. The past weekend she had set out by car, fortified with backpack, map (necessarily incomplete), and the careful hiker's oversupply of water. She camped at night, penetrating deeper into the mysteries of that contradictory map, stopping at isolated gas stations and general stores, hoping to discover some secluded meadow where she might lie back amongst nodding penstemon, reading poetry. Needless to say, she was an English teacher on holiday. Where the hills scowled dryly, she came to the highway's end. Parking her subcompact at a trailhead, she proceeded on foot, expecting to make the upper ranges before long. There, surely, a wildflower or two must bloom beside a poetic brook. But after much wandering, between Joan and her hopes appeared Cloverleaf Road, one of the high desert's lesser-known thoroughfares. "Now I find a road!" she said, exasperated. Still, she decided to follow it. By late afternoon the sun was meanly vibrant, as if regretting its earlier lenience. Cloverleaf Road had deteriorated to a washboard surface, scoured by the wind down to its original foundation of hard caliche clay. Just as she was looking for more negotiable terrain, a sign appeared, pricking its yellow point above the rise. She put on a spurt and arrived in its meager shade out of breath, but optimistic. It said triangularly: CLOVERLEAF ROAD. Joan plopped down with her back against the signpost, which managed to shade perhaps a three-inch strip of her sweating body. She drew up her knees so that only her shorts and shoes touched the sand. Even so, she burned her butt and had to get up again. "Useful, aren't you!" she told the sign. "No destination. No mileage." The road had meandered a lot, but as this desert seemed to offer no better path, she soldiered on. Toward evening, she approached the gas station-cum-cafe fronting a mostly deserted town called Greensleeves. Dilapidated buildings peered out from a surprising wealth of trees, cottonwood and elm. In this vicinity the road improved: it was sketchily paved, a faded yellow line bisecting blisters and open chuckholes. It seemed to serve no traffic at all. The Last Chance Cafe, otherwise known as EAT, bore out that assumption. As she scanned the sepia interior, it became apparent that she was the only customer; whether the only living inhabitant remained an open question. The screen door's rusty groan elicited no response. She sank onto a tubular chair at a round metal table and shed her pack. Letting her eyes roam, she recognized in the furniture an old acquaintance: she had met it before at disillusioned little cafes, and in the picnic areas of public parks. It was painted an indeterminate color between pink and brown, and bore the record of human travail in crookedly scratched names and all-too-explicit messages. It looked as if a company of kangaroo rats was in the habit of making trails across it. The proprietor, a dusty man with a blond mustache, arrived from the back premises, preceded by angry mutters and the sound (and sight, through another screen door) of a swamp cooler being kicked. Mopping his receding hairline with a red bandana, he growled, "Yeah?" Joan didn't feel encouraged. But the light outside had reached that lovely state of clarity heralding the end of day, and she was hungry. Woman cannot live by beef jerky alone. "Do you have a menu?" she asked, glad to have a table between herself and the blond man. He took a moment to think this over. "Whaddya want? I'll fix it." Two flies lit on the table simultaneously. They eyed each other while Joan eyed them. "Iced tea?" she ventured. "What else?" "Uh... burger and fries?" The man, whose light hair stood up like a halo on the crown of his head, blinked once and said critically, "You know the chemicals they give cattle at those feedlots?" Oh, God! thought Joan. Why me? "I could make you a yucca burger," he offered. "Okay. Fine." By the time he returned, bearing something nauseatingly whitish-green on a wheat bun, he had recovered from his snit with the cooler. "Vacationing?" he asked, nudging the flies aside to make room for plate, glass and silverware. "You'll see some beautiful country round here. June's the perfect time. Flowers all over the goddamn place, mallow and prince's plume." He stuck both hands in his jeans pockets and settled back against the neighboring table for a chat. Joan hadn't yet spotted a wildflower worth mentioning; she wasn't buying this chamber of commerce line. "It's summer. There aren't any flowers this late." "High desert. We get strange weather up here." "I was going to climb farther up, where it's cool, but I seem to be lost. There's only two days left before I have to turn back." "Give yourself a couple days around Greensleeves, then. You'll get used to the heat. It's all mental anyhow." She had just bitten into the yucca burger, and was feeling malicious. "If the weather is mental, why were you kicking your cooler?" He sat down opposite, barely disturbing the flies in their torpid musings. "Look," he said, fixing her with a serious, grey-blue gaze, "I don't know why you've wandered into the Last Chance, but people mostly visit the desert alone seeking inner peace and all that crap. Recovering from midlife crises or failed love affairs. That your problem?" Joan came ill-equipped to politely repel a Greensleeves native. "None of your business," she snapped, blushing. This pugnacious reply seemed to please rather than offend him. His eyes crinkled, and his pale hair glowed. "Okay, be that way!" The yucca burger, which she dared not abandon while under his eye, had begun to grow on her. Its flavor was subtle to the point of nonexistence. She suspected her palate had been ruined for it by too much ketchup early in life. Still, it wasn't nearly as revolting as it looked. "This is actually pretty good," she said, surprised. The man answered with a shrug. When he spoke again, it was only to say, "Got a room if you decide to stay the night." He slapped the table, which didn't discommode the flies one bit, and stood up. "Let me know." "How much?" "Twenty bucks. Not many tourists stay here." He grinned. "No air conditioning, so you get off cheap." She didn't know what to say. Her bones were dead tired of camping, but the Last Chance Cafe, even at twenty bucks a night, wasn't exactly her notion of a change for the better. "Last bed till Jackass Flat." "I'll take it," said Joan. Her room was surprising. Like the building to which it formed a rear appendage, it had Spanish adobe walls for keeping out the heat (or keeping it in, in winter) and a beamed ceiling. It contained a chest of drawers, an armchair from which the stuffing overflowed, two small tables with ugly lamps, a faded braid rug, and a double bed. Also a deeply recessed window barred with wrought iron, through which a bloated moon was shining. The paintings on the walls were of cacti and roadrunners, and as stylized as Japanese watercolors. "All the comforts of home," murmured Joan. "John's down the hall," pointed out mine host. "By the way, Ernie." Correctly interpreting this cryptic speech, she thanked Ernie and headed for the bathroom, which was indeed down the hall. I'll stay one night, she thought. What can it hurt? Joan's bed was of the smothering, engulfing kind. It sighed. It wheezed. In her half-asleep state, she thought it rocked for no reason at all. Then when she tried to lie very still and catch it in the act, it froze like a startled rabbit. "This is ridiculous," she muttered thickly, punching it in the midsection. Finally she dragged a comforter over to the window seat, sinking down and running one hand through her hair. The nice thing about sleep is, it precludes thought. Reflections on one's life. Depressing realities of a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher vacationing alone. Joan liked her job, for the most part. She enjoyed teaching and she was good at it. In her youth, she never had been one of those women who longed for marriage, children or commitments. Unlike Arthur, who for all his eccentricities was a conventional sort. Arthur was the physics teacher at her high school, and a man whose intelligence was overshadowed only by his social ineptitude. Arthur had wanted to take this hiking trip with her, had even summoned up the courage from some unsuspected depths to tell her so. She had refused him. Joan wanted no serious involvements, not with Arthur, not with anybody. She was entirely out of the habit. She had read a statistic somewhere, that single women over thirty-five had a smaller chance of ever marrying than of being struck by lightning. I am confirmed forever in solitary ways, she thought. Sort of like being mired in cement. Well, why not? But she did feel bad about Arthur. She wriggled on the unyielding window ledge. The single visible eye of the roadrunner painting regarded her with bright interest, following her slightest movement maddeningly, like the Mona Lisa. She didn't trust the way that roadrunner's eye seemed to shift around in the moonlight. Reality might mean different things to different people, but up till now she had come adequately equipped with her own version. Adequately, she thought. What an epitaph! No magnificents. No terribles. No abundance and no need. What we have is adequate, thank you, and what we do not have, we do not want. Arthur would be sitting at home right now in his tiny, unkempt apartment, watching Star Trek episodes while he graded the summer-school physics papers. Arthur was red-haired, nerdish and kind, with a narrow chin and an inexhaustible supply of Murphy's Law jokes. But at heart she suspected him of being a romantic: he harbored a secret addiction to Renaissance music. The roadrunner seemed to be running faster, its legs stretched like a cheerleader doing the splits. She heard a harpsichord playing, and someone in a fox costume invited her to dance. Joan rose gracefully, curtsying so that the sleeves of her green gown swept the floor. They danced, gazing into each other's masked eyes with absurd intensity. She fluttered her Spanish fan. Joan woke abruptly in the window seat. She was certain she still heard a harpsichord. "How am I supposed to get any sleep?" she asked the roadrunner. She charged into the hallway in search of Ernie. Not knowing quite how to phrase her complaint, and laboring under the conviction that conversations with roadrunners should not be confessed lightly, she pounded on his door and yelled, "What's wrong with that room you rented me? Will you come out here and do something?" Sufficiently outraged, without being too specific. He emerged wearing pajamas with large insects on them, and looking himself like a drowsy bird. "I don't know. What do you think is wrong with it?" "I was relatively sane when I walked into this place!" "Yeah, I know. Tough, man," said Ernie commiseratingly. "You put something in my yucca burger." "Yucca fruit. Mayonnaise. Cheese. Alfalfa sprouts." He ticked off the ingredients on his fingers. Then he yawned. "Shoulda been all right." Joan glared at him in utter frustration. "The bed is terrible, the pictures on my wall move, and I'm hearing harpsichord music. I'm going back to bed, and if anything untoward happens to me, I will hold you personally responsible! Good night!" "Feel free. I don't mind," murmured Ernie, closing his door. To her surprise, the rest of the night passed quietly. The music subsided, and if the shifty roadrunner committed any outrages, it did so with immense discretion. At midmorning she was curled once again in the deep window ledge, sipping herbal tea. The window opened inward beside her, only a wrought-iron filigree intervening between Joan and the desert. The sun had risen among clouds, verifying Ernie's remarks about high desert weather, and all of the north was stained with indigo spilled on silver. The air felt cool on her bare arms. It smelled of sand. Ernie in his insect pajamas had smelled of sand, too. "Storm's blowing up," he had remarked when she went in search of the tea. He was flapping across the linoleum in thongs, making breakfast. The insects, in daylight, bore the appearance of praying mantises. They genuflected greenly as he bent and stretched, opening the fridge, loading the toaster. It refused to eject an English muffin. After attacking it with a fork, he managed to produce two incinerated lumps which were placed reverently on a plate and passed across the counter. "No, thanks. Not hungry," said Joan, retiring strategically with her tea. So she chewed a fruit strip and slurped happily, watching the desert. A kit fox slipped around the corner of the cafe, away from the side, and paused to stare at her. His reddish-grey coat blended perfectly with the sand, grey brush, and adobe wall, so that only his movement, now arrested, had caught her eye. His angular face reminded her of someone. "Why, Arthur," she joked, "you followed me." The fox blinked. "I'm in prison," she told him, gesturing at the delicate ironwork separating them. "Guess I'm not allowed to play with you." The fox seemed to accept this, turning his sharp face to survey the landscape. After a moment, he pricked his ears, uttered a low cough, and exploded into the creosote. She felt very un-Joan-like today. Storm or no, she needed to shake off this lethargy, make an effort to get out and see something. "I don't believe you wield any sinister powers in daylight," she told the roadrunner, depositing her backpack firmly on the wide brown lap of the overstuffed chair. She shoved her gear inside, slung it over one shoulder, and walked through to return her cup to the cafe. "Is there a map of the immediate area? Mine's prehistoric. Can't make head or tail of it." "Possibly." Ernie squinted at her as if she were going out of focus. "I'll look around. You leaving town?" "Maybe. I thought I might hike up the road a ways." "Don't lose yourself again." She laughed. Wandering outside, she scouted the underbrush for fox tracks. Either there were none, or her abilities to detect spoor were poorly developed, probably the latter. She noticed a trickle of green liquid emanating from the dismantled remains of the cooler. "No map. Sorry," said Ernie, startling her. "You're a gas station. You must have maps." "Don't judge us by our pumps. They're out-of-order. Very few people venture out here on Cloverleaf Road." "Cloverleaf must take a hell of a long time to get to!" muttered Joan. She tossed her backpack inside the cafe's rear door. "Then I'll take a walk over to the cemetery." "Good idea. Map wouldn't tell you much, anyhow -- only what's supposed to be there." A definite weirdo in insect pajamas. Still, Joan felt too mellow this morning to bear Ernie, or Greensleeves, any grudge for their peculiarities. The clouds gathered rapidly, their shadows fleeing across the ground like tattered clothing before the wind. Joan backtracked down the road south of town, then set off to hike a long ridge toward the wire-fenced grassy patch where wooden crosses and small carved tombstones thrust up from the earth in neglect. She spent quite awhile wandering there, reading what names and brief epitaphs remained. How must it feel to the ghosts, being buried in a ghost town? To arrive at a profound closing line for your life, reverently chiseled in stone, merely so that time and weather might fade the words to where, when others finally came to read them, they were indecipherable. Not all, though. Three separate small graves bore the same baby girl's name: Amanda Evans. The first Amanda had survived for a week; the other two apparently were stillborn in succeeding years. Had their mother after that given up trying? Or had she, too, died? What was the special significance of the name Amanda, that she would use it three times over, like an incantation, without success? Not exactly penstemon beside a quiet brook. But Joan perched anyway on a crooked slab, scribbling lines in her notebook for a poem about the three Amandas. By the time she had exhausted inspiration, the storm was moving beyond town to the south, leaving dust and thunderous odors but no actual moisture in its wake. She would show her poem to Arthur, she thought. He loved Gray's Elegy; the three Amandas might appeal to him. He'd been an extremely shy and introverted man, until Joan began cultivating him in a tentative way. She stood up, dusting her shorts. Wariness seemed rather pointless when you sat on some unknown woman's gravestone and really thought about it. Harpsichord music and a green-sleeved gown -- her subconscious trying to seduce her into romance? It seemed much further back to the cafe than it had coming over. The weather remained cool compared with yesterday, and the hike far more pleasant. But by the time she was close enough to admire the spreading alluvial fan of Painted Mountain on the far side of town, she couldn't wait to get back. She hurried along, the road shouldering her back whenever she stumbled over its edge. A vague stain of trees on the horizon, as seen from the cemetery, soon grew to dusty elms and golden-green cottonwoods. In the slanted afternoon light, the Last Chance appeared strangely attractive. The Spanish-style building housing the cafe stood comfortably among its trees, picture windows facing the road. She climbed the gentle slope to it, and opened the door. "Well, hello," said Ernie, elbows propped on the counter. He was reading Carlos Castaneda. Unlike yesterday, the building breathed coolness, while the scrawled tabletops had been decently covered with checkered cloths. She stared across the gleaming counter at Ernie, then laughed. "Am I in the right place? I don't remember this." "Last Chance improves with acquaintance. I can say that now -- before, you would have called me crazy." "Ah, I'm becoming acclimated." Joan nodded. "Now I'm crazy, too." Her room was also much nicer. Besides fixing the cooler, Ernie appeared to be redecorating. The bed still sagged, but the enigmatic roadrunner had been replaced by an abstract of crows, freely slicing through a blue sky of impossible depth. Someone had pried loose the Spanish ironwork over her window, leaving her with an unobstructed view. She sank onto the window ledge gratefully. It had become her particular spot. Outside the light was fading, yet she saw two pointed ears, and eventually a fox face peering at her from the underbrush. When I do go backpacking with Arthur, she thought, I must introduce him to Greensleeves. Arthur would enjoy its contradictions, and in doing so, might forget to be awkward about his own. "You can come out now," she called softly to the fox. |