Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

OLO ETT S

Frankie’s Diner is the only restaurant left in town, though there is a Taco John’s on the east side, right before you hit the Sinclair station with its green dinosaur on the sign. The mountains knew those animals well. Truckers and tourists, when they come through, stop at Taco John’s for their sodas and their burritos and their toilet breaks. Frankie doesn’t seem to mind, though she keeps her feelings close. She doesn’t serve hazelnut French roast anyway, she tells herself. Everything at Frankie’s is like it ought to be, like it used to be.

She bakes big blueberry muffins every Tuesday and they’re gone by dinnertime, mostly gobbled by The Professor and Miss Sally. Frankie’s has its best crowds on Tuesday mornings. Everybody comes in except those crusty old waddies who still try to run a few beeves in the draws. Once in a while, one of them rides his horse right down the street, looking like something out of a crazy cowboy movie. They don’t even wave, just grimly straddle their saddles and clop out of sight. Those boys don’t care to talk much, and if there’s one constant at Frankie’s, it’s palaver. It was busier when she was a kid, when her mom and dad ran the place, but the oil field roustabouts are gone over to Rock Springs in Wyoming. And the uranium miners are long gone, too. Lots of them tearing up the Indian reservations now, but some of them still burning out their lungs and kidneys digging around the back side of the butte. But that’s nearer to Arco.

People don’t mention Arco much. Hell, Arco came up with the figures on the cliff faces idea before they did. Arco beat the Mountain Men every year just about. Arco was the first city (“city,” ha!) lit by nuclear energy in the world. The buttes and mountains look down upon Arco also, and after the seas of molten fire they observed, the reactor meltdown in 1961 was just a little pool.

* * *

Inside Frankie’s, the coffeepot is on and Ralph, the Sinclair owner, sits on his stool at the counter and opens his paper: drunk drivers and abandoned horses and no call for rain. Well, hell — there was never all that much rain to begin with. They are inhabitants of the rain shadow, where those Cascades to the west scrape all the juice out of the clouds as they head this way.

The phone rings, and Frankie beams and sits in the kitchen and says, “Hi, doll! How you feeling?”

“That’s Sammy,” The Professor says, as if everybody doesn’t know it.

“When’s she due?” Miss Sally asks.

“Any day now!” The Professor is feeling like a news anchor, delivering the headlines. “A girl!”

“No shit,” mutters Ralph.

He’s thinking of a vacation. Maybe Florida. He’d like to fish.

They hear her laugh. “Bye-bye!” she says. “Love you too!” Dishes clatter back there.

“Another beautiful day,” The Professor announces.

“Wait. Don’t tell me,” Ralph replies. “It’s sunny.”

The diner’s windows look west, away from the cliffs. Frankie likes it this way. The old motor court sits across the street. And a couple of white houses and two trailers. Some of them have foil over their windows. Satellite dishes. Frankie thinks about how each of those little places is a story. The drivers hurrying through town think about the huge stories looming over the road. They don’t even see the town. Those numbers on the face of the butte.

They’re huge. Much bigger than the old red handprints painted on the rocks when gargantuan creatures walked the plain, hairy and regal and slow as clouds. Taller than the lines of antelope scratched into the rocks.

The numbers start at 23. They march forward through time and stop at 00. Nobody in town likes to look at 77. Especially Frankie.

* * *

“Here we are,” Frankie says, as she says every morning, once the call is over.

She pours the first cups.

“How’s Sammy?” Sally asks.

“Just about fit to burst,” says Frankie.

“I remember those days,” Sally says with a wink.

“How did we do it?” says Frankie, going to Ralph, and to the far booth and then to The Professor.

“What the hell,” says The Professor at his customary window seat, where he spends every morning staring out — as if there would be anything new to see.

Everybody glances outside, and by damn, something new does come along. A lone steer, all slat sides and idiot drool, ambling down the street, looking in the windows. He stops and chews his cud and drops a pound of fertilizer outside the diner.

Frankie opens the door and waves the coffeepot and scolds, “Shoo, now! G’on!”

He shakes his big horns once and gets dogged on down the street by a squadron of agitated biting flies.

“You seen that?” asks Miss Sally, but nobody answers.

Frankie says to Ralph, “Pay you a dollar to shovel that patty out of there.”

Ralph stares at his paper.

“Feed me first. I’ll do it when I’m done. No charge. I’ll be keeping your tip, though.”

“There goes my Cadillac,” Frankie says, winking at Sally, who covers her mouth with a napkin.

“A gentleman,” The Professor announces. “Chivalry is not dead.”

“Sure ain’t,” says Ralph, pondering the ball scores. Goddamned Seahawks.

* * *

Doesn’t every town in America have an old-timer called The Professor? That duffer who knows everything and everybody, as long as they are dead. He can tell you who Monica Benson dated between 1955 and her tragic demise in the flood of ’67. Yep, it rained sometimes. And the big cliffs made sure the arroyos north of town exploded with deep red floods that swept cars out to the lava beds and left them upside down and full of sand.

Frankie is mixing her batter. The ovens are on. Miss Sally grabs the pot and goes ahead and refills her friends’ cups for them.

“Gotcha, Frankie!” she announces brightly, like another breaking news report.

“Thanks, hon!” Frankie calls from the back.

Everybody has a personal cup, and they hang on wooden dowels on the wall. Old Bev and Howie still hang there, though they died a couple of years ago. Right beside Indian Ike’s cup with feathers and a circle with four colors in it.

“Hope you have a hair net!” Frankie adds. Everybody chuckles.

“Oh, you!” cries Sally, which makes her blush as she sits back down.

The Professor’s cup has some kind of chemical diagram on it. He really was a professor, of sorts. Taught Science and Bio 101 at Benson Hill. He coached drama club after school, which is where he met Frankie in 1976. It was hard to get boys in there, since actors were pretty much known as “faggots” by the Mountain Men. Still, Frankie was queen of the color guard that year, and some of the footballers followed her naughty smile into the club. That’s how he met Son Harding and poor old Stick. Stick made it as an actor for a month and dropped out of the club when he tried to read Shakespeare. That was some fairy shit right there and Stick wasn’t going to put up with it. But Frankie and the Colorettes had won a state ribbon that year, and she was hell-bent on winning a drama award, too. She wasn’t about to let all the boys off the hook. So Son was her partner — he didn’t mind — and they did solos from West Side Story. He couldn’t sing to save his life, but Frankie belted it out like Skeeter Davis, by God. And she danced fine, too. Spun those skirts of hers like a carnival ride and made everybody feel like it was the Fourth of July when she took the stage. Frankie made Sonny great. They were all juniors that year.

Frankie puts The Professor’s bowl of oatmeal in front of him. Sally eats English muffins with jam. She can’t afford more, but everyone makes believe she’s a light eater. She actually pays with change that she fishes out of one of those plastic ovals that squeeze to open, as if she’s still in grade school. Frankie makes a big show every Tuesday of eating a blueberry muffin with her, calling them extras, even though she can’t stand them anymore.