photo: U.S., Bureau of Land Management
By James Anderson–In this, as in Anderson’s admirable debut novel, The Never Open Desert Diner, you share the adventures of short-haul truck driver Ben Jones, who drives a hundred-mile stretch between two small towns in the high Utah desert. If the town of Price is next-to-nothing, Rockmuse, at the other end of his route, amounts to even less.
These are literary novels, yet they encompass mysteries and crimes of many kinds, including crimes of the spirit. Anderson sets you down, unmistakably, in the high desert—with its sunrises and sunsets, the brilliance of its stars at night, its smells, the amazing quiet, and its deadly hazards, human and otherwise.
In his new book, half-Jewish, half-Indian Ben and his cast of oddball desert dwellers are as reclusive and tetchy as ever. They live far from ordinary conceptions of civilization for a reason, generally. Ben delivers their groceries, water, auto parts, horse feed—whatever they need. In hot weather, it can be a brutal job. In winter, it may be worse. Blinding snowstorms barrel over the mountains, scouring the land and hitting the mesa to the east, only to ricochet back for another strike on the inhabitants.
Ben is in a tricky situation. On a not very good morning, winter weather-wise, he fuels up at the Stop ‘n’ Gone before starting a run to Rockmuse, and finds a Mexican child and a suspicious dog, sitting by one of the pumps. A child not dressed for the freezing temperatures. The station owner has locked up and won’t respond to Ben’s pounding. Ben has “no choice”—a phrase he particularly loathes—but to take the child inside the warm truck cab and sort things out later. The child doesn’t talk. Eventually, Ben finds out why.
This is bad enough, but his neighbor stops him before he can drive away and hands over her infant daughter. She has “no choice” but to deposit her baby with him for the day. Like it or not, and he definitely does not, he’s left holding the diaper bag. So now you understand the book’s title.
The child, the protective dog, and the infant Belle turn out to be good travelers. That’s lucky, because the day turns dangerous and requires all Ben’s concentration. With the road margins indistinct in the blinding snow, it’s like driving into oblivion. And that’s just the weather.
Author Anderson does a great job describing the difficulties Ben runs up against trying to help the people living in such a remote place—their scant resources and limited access to communications, helicopter airlifts, and other take-for-granted trappings of modern life.
Much as Ben hates it, “no choice” often is the choice, and everything cannot turn out well. The book is generous in acknowledging that good people can make bad decisions, it is sincere in grieving for the innocent, and it leaves open the expectation that bad people may yet get what’s coming to them.
