Lullaby Road
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by James Anderson
Excerpt from The Never-Open Desert Diner copyright © 2015 by James Anderson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Gary Miranda for permission to reprint an excerpt of “First Elegy” from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Gary Miranda and published by Tavern Books in Portland, Oregon. Translation copyright © 1981, 1996, 2013 by Gary Miranda.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781101906545
Ebook ISBN 9781101906569
Cover design by Michael Morris
Cover images: (snow) Christy Chaloux/Aurora/Getty Images; (road) RJW/Stone/Getty Images
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Excerpt from The Never-Open Desert Diner
Dedicated to my enduring role models, warriors and heroines all: Louisa Michaela Cabezut, grandmother; Helen Zuur, mother; Eileen Bernard, aunt; Louise Anderson, sister; Cheryl Zuur, cousin
In my life there are many silences.
—JUAN RULFO
What angel, if I called out, would hear me?
And even if one of them impulsively embraced me,
I’d be crushed by its strength. For beauty
Is just the beginning of a terror we can barely stand:
We admire it because it calmly refuses to crush us.
Every angel terrifies. And so I control myself,
Choking back the dark impulse to cry.
—Duino Elegies, RAINER MARIA RILKE, TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY GARY MIRANDA
1
A momentary silence was all that marked the passing of summer into winter. After living most of my almost forty years in the high desert of Utah, twenty driving a truck, I had come to the conclusion there were really only two seasons: hot and windy and cold and windy. Everything else was just a variation on those two.
Late in the evening I lay half-awake in my single bed and knew the silence meant the season had changed. I like to think maybe I know a thing or two about silence. Real silence is more than the absence of sound: it is something you feel. A few heartbeats earlier a steady wind scattered the leftover sounds from evening—a car passing, neighbors talking from behind closed doors, somewhere a dog barking—all the usual muffled racket of nearby lives. Then there was nothing, nothing at all, as if the desert and everyone in it had vanished and left nothing behind but an indifferent starless light.
By four a.m., when I begin my workday, winter was on its hind legs and waiting. It took longer than usual to get to the transfer station and load my truck. The time was well after five o’clock when I finally got under way, driving cautiously through the light snow and ice in the predawn darkness. My heater was blowing full blast and the bitter, dry cold hijacked the warmth from my body and cracked my skin into something akin to a hardpan lakebed. My last routine stop was to take on diesel. I had missed the morning fueling rush, if there had been one, by being either a few minutes early or a few minutes late. All of the pump islands were empty.
Cecil Boone was the manager of the Stop ‘n’ Gone Truck Stop on US 191 just outside of Price, Utah. The Stop ‘n’ Gone was a cheapo independent, stuck out alone in a patch of sand and broken rock, with the rundown look of a place that must have low prices because it didn’t have much of anything else. Cecil was a stubby, sour man in his fifties. We were inside the small convenience store and Cecil was behind the register. In the eight or so years I had been buying my diesel there, nearly every weekday, I had never seen the man smile before that snowy October morning.
There are probably lots of reasons to smile. Most folks do it every day. In my line of work I don’t see many smiles and I probably don’t give many, not even to myself. That was the way it should be. No one wants to glance up and see a truck driver grinning. My sense is that such a sight is bound to have an unsettling effect on the ordinary driver. I was quickly sorting through the reasons people smile—humor, warmth, trivial annoyance—and coming up short. It was just Cecil and me—and Cecil’s smile.
I paid for my diesel.
“Someone left something for you on Island 8,” he said.
I asked him what.
“None of my business. Just make sure you take it with you when you leave.”
Cecil walked back toward the door of his cluttered office.
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