Richard Risemberg

Egg Sandwiches  

The road was a two-lane that blundered across a desolation hardly to be equaled, while taking you from nowhere to nowhere through the desert West. In the middle of this nowhere was the town of Emmetsville, a sort of congealment of nowhereness. It was so extravagantly characterless that we remember it because of that, exactly because it was so unmemorable. It seemed confused and forlorn, as if it had forgotten its own name.

We visited it, of course, precisely because it was nowhere. We were on a road trip, cruising the great deserts of the West, looking for space and solitude, and the lonely road seemed to promise that. It did not break its promise: a narrow asphalt meander, built at perhaps absurd expense, lined by barbed-wire fences enclosing expanses of sandy dirt, dotted with twiggy shrubs and stunted dead-looking trees. In the distance, naked purple hills that barely rose over the horizon line. When we stopped and got out of the car, a steady if somewhat distracted wind pulled at our hair and made a wan fluttering that was the only sound. In a day of steering towards the west, we saw no other vehicles.

Once in a while the barbed wire fences were interrupted with gates made of dry sticks and more barbed wire; the padlocks on them were rusted and covered with silt; the roads beyond them were rutted dirt. There must have been something human somewhere in the ripples of pale silt, but if there was it was well-hidden. We would climb back into the car and drive for another hour then stop again, and it was as if we had never moved. But eventually we came to Emmetsville.

The first sign of a town was a line of wooden telephone poles plodding in from the south, alongside a railroad track. Then a couple of sheds made of dry-rotted planks, with a broken window each and plenty of shingles missing from the slumped roofs. Then a ragged trench that passed under the road, carrying a glimmer of wetness; a sign saying, “Welcome to Emmetsville,” complete with the bullet holes that seem to be a design requirement of signs in the desert west; a water tower with the word “Emmetsville” still showing, sun-faded, under the dust; and finally, finally, the town itself, which appeared to be about two blocks long by two blocks wide. The highway took on a Main Street look, albeit a dusty one, for those two blocks, and there were shops of some kind, a couple of tired-looking hotels, a couple of diners. We were hungry, and it was late afternoon; we checked in to one of the hotels. The clerk was a skinny old man who was exactly what you would expect to find there, but he was nice enough, and it was almost startling to hear a voice after all those hours on the empty road. We settled our bits of luggage onto the beds, which looked clean enough, then went outside to look around.

The same fluttering wind blew through the town’s narrow streets, occasionally pulling thin white curtains out of an open window in the apartments or offices above the shops. Off the main road we saw small wooden houses with gardens running to rangy grass that was thoroughly dead and yellowed. Between the last row of houses and the desert was a collection of trailers behind a sign touting it as “The Oasis,” and then the rumpled beige sand with its twiggy shrubs. The creek, if it really was a creek, looped around the trailer park, marked by a double row of slumping cottonwood trees. A dog barked somewhere. A cat trotted across the street, glancing at us with suspicious disdain. The wind blew us slowly back to Main Street, if that’s what it was called. We hadn’t said a word to each other. It was that kind of place.

Next to the hotel was a diner that looked clean once you got inside. The waitress was a tough-looking older woman, lean and sunburned, who was, like the hotel clerk, nice enough when you spoke with her. She and the clerk could have been brother and sister, but we didn’t ask. We ordered burgers and beer. The burgers came with a side of fries that were salty so we had another beer, and by then it was dark and there was nothing to do. We took another walk around town, this time on the other side of Main Street, the side where the railroad tracks passed. This was the industrial quarter, with a car repair shop, a welder, and a feed store. There was also a small cinderblock shed barely twelve feet square with a tall radio antenna reaching up from its roof; the call letters of what must have been the local FM station were stenciled on the door. A light bulb glowered over the doorway; maybe someone was inside, parceling out the local news of lost cows and stolen hubcaps, I don’t know. My wife and I speculated briefly, till a passing train distracted us. A long freight headed somewhere else; it didn’t even slow down. A wooden water tank stood on stilts by the track, an artifact of the days of steam. A raven perched on top of it, surveying his realm. We went back to our hotel, nodded at the clerk behind his counter, and climbed up to our room. The shower was clean and ran hot, something we were grateful for after a day in the dust. We fell asleep quickly and slept all night.

I woke up at dawn and went outside alone for half an hour. In the high desert the mornings can be cold, so I wore a sweater. I walked back up Main Street to the end of town and watched the east turn gray and then spill a flood of light when the sun itself came over the horizon. There was no wind for a change, only the silent light pouring across the flatness, pushing shadows ahead of it. The buildings huddled under the sky looked old and empty as ever despite their brief gilding of sunglow. A lone pickup truck turned a corner and drove along Main Street and out the other end of town. After a while I began to feel hungry and went back to the hotel for my wife.

The diner where we’d had our burgers didn’t serve breakfast, so we crossed the street to the other diner. It was in a one-story building made of dry planks and held together by the remains of an ancient paint job. It did not look promising, but it did look open, and it was. When we went in we saw that we were the only customers. Of course it was still early. We walked into a long, dim room filled with tables for four and backed by a long counter. Behind the counter was a galley-like kitchen, and beyond that was a double door, wide open, that gave onto what appeared to be a modest junkyard. Lying sphinx-like in the bare space just beyond the door was an immense German shepherd, holding its head up in a cloud of flies. The flies glinted green and gold in the flood of sunlight. I looked at my wife to see what she thought. She smirked at me and said, “Why not? We haven’t much choice anyway.” So we picked a table at random and sat down.

A movement in the shadows told us we weren’t alone. There was a kid of maybe seventeen sweeping a corner of the floor. He looked vaguely native American, with straight black hair and bronze skin. He looked up at us, saw that we were seated, and carefully leaned the broom against the wall. Then, with equal care, he went behind the counter, washed his hands, placed a napkin over his arm, picked up a pair of menus, and brought them to us. He stood beside us silently while we looked over the offerings. The menus were xeroxes of a typed sheet that simply listed items and prices, without description. It was not long, and nothing looked particularly appetizing, especially given the cloud of flies in the back yard. The kid stood beside us, waiting, without a word. I raised an eyebrow at my wife; she smiled back. I felt the egg sandwich would be safe, and my wife agreed. Eggs come in shells, and the bread would be bagged store bread, no doubt, though one could always hope. The kid silently wrote our orders on the sort of note pad you can pick up at any drugstore and padded away. I wondered whether the town had a drugstore, and how far he would have had to go, or ask a relative to go, to buy a notepad for himself if that’s what he had to do to work there.

We followed his progress with our eyes: he went behind the counter, pinned the order on the wheel, and took the napkin off his arm, folding it carefully and putting it next to a stack of similar napkins. Then he took an apron and a cook’s hat off a hook and put them on, and began to fuss at the grill. My wife smirked: “I suppose he’s the dishwasher too.”

I shrugged. “Don’t see anyone else around. Except that dog.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, that dog! Do you think he owns the place?”

“The dog?”

She laughed. “Of course not. The kid.”

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