The screen door banged shut after me when I walked into the Bright Spot Cafe. A ceiling fan spun listlessly above, harassing a tiny squadron of houseflies engaged in a tight formation flight on the periphery of the revolving blade’s arc. The cafe, with the fan and sweltering heat, could’ve been the setting for the movie Key Largo. I glanced around. Bacall was nowhere in sight but a grizzled old guy, cigarette dangling, sat at the counter. He bore a striking resemblance to Bogart. I didn’t ask for his autograph; didn’t want to gush.
All eyes turned and looked at me as I walked across the scuffed linoleum floor and sat at the far end of the counter. Other than Bogey, a half-dozen men slouched at the few tables placed haphazardly around the cafe. The men all wore bib overalls, and two had baseball caps pushed back on their foreheads, the Santa Fe Railroad logo prominently displayed above the bill on both caps.
A pretty girl with dark hair wearing a white apron over her checkered shirt and tight-fitting jeans wiped a table across the room. Her back was to me, and she was bending slightly. Her hand moved across the table with a slow, mechanical rhythm.
The girl had to be about eighteen with the firm, tight, nascent body of feminine youth, which never failed to tantalize old guys like me.
The girl peeked surreptitiously at me. When she saw that I noticed her, she quickly looked away and continued with her chore.
I plucked the menu, a single sheet covered in plastic, from its metal bracket clamped to the edge of the counter. The front side of the menu listed the cafe’s offerings: bacon and eggs, hamburgers, that sort of stuff, but typed on the back was a blurb, a short history of the Bright Spot Cafe.
The white clapboard building was built in 1930. “John Steinbeck stopped right here at the Bright Spot Cafe when traveling Route 66, doing research for his great novel, Of Mice and Men, about a bunch of Okies coming to Calif.”
The waitress, a woman of undeterminable age but a hell of a lot older than me, brought me a chipped coffee cup, the handle of which ringed the pinky of her left hand. She held a coffeepot in her right hand.
“Grapes of Wrath,” I said.
She dropped the cup on the counter and, with an exaggerated sigh, turned to the food delivery slot in the wall behind her. “Hey Gus, we got another one of them intellectuals here.”
“Hey, buddy, don’t want no trouble,” a heavy voice growled from the slot.
“Nope, no trouble.” I already had to buy one shirt today. “Must have been mistaken, sorry,” I shouted back at the slot.
“S’okay.”
I decided to drop the issue and not delve any further into Steinbeck. It was obviously a sore point at the Bright Spot. Who was I anyway, a literary critic? I needed information about the drug intervention center and I wouldn’t get any cooperation by upsetting the natives. Besides, maybe George and Lenny did travel through Barstow on their way to the Salinas Valley.
The waitress turned back to me. Her chin was tucked in, and she looked at me cautiously. She filled my cup, stepped back a couple of feet as though I might explode, and slowly withdrew an order pad from the pocket of her white but filthy uniform. “Want something to eat?”
I was starved. “Nah, not hungry,” I said. “Just coffee, thanks.”
She started to move along the counter. “Wait,” I called out.
She stopped dead in her tracks, really uptight. Christ, the last intellectual who came in here must have been hell on wheels.
“Got a phonebook?” I said.
It was like she deflated, kind of slumped. Then she dashed to the cash register, reached behind it and pulled out the thin book. She slid it along the counter toward me.
A male voice from behind me, one of the men at a table, spoke up. “Looking for someone in town, mister? I’ve been here nigh on forty years. Know everybody in town.”
I swiveled on the stool. An older guy without a baseball cap nodded.
“Ben Moran,” he said. “Yep, came here from Kansas in thirty-three. Depression, you know, heading to L.A. Had to find work. Got this far, ran outta money. Been here ever since. Still outta money.” When he said that, everyone in the place, even the waitress, let out a loud guffaw.
Ben sat hunched over his coffee cup alone at the table. Even seated I could see that he was a large man, a giant with more fat than muscle. His shapeless form filled the chair and parts of his backside spilled over it, curling around the edges. The man’s stringy gray hair was thin in front but long and wavy in the back and on the sides. He wore a handlebar mustache under a banged-up nose, which was too large for his face. His mouth was a jagged slit cut into his molting, liver-spotted skin.
I nodded. “Jimmy O’Brien, glad to know you.”
His pale, watery eyes, hooded by a thicket of salt and pepper brows, peered at me. “You ain’t really one of them professors or smarty-pants fellows, are ya?” he asked.
“Not me,” I said. “Just a guy trying to make a buck here and there.” I didn’t want to tell him I was a lawyer, God forbid.
“Didn’t think so. Don’t look the type. Well then, come on over here. Bring your coffee.”
I picked up my cup and moved to his table. When I got close, Moran kicked out a chair. I sat down, and we shook hands.
We-or I should say Ben-talked about his town and the people in it. He seemed to know everyone and was determined to tell me all of their life stories. He had everyone in the cafe enthralled with strange tales of his forty years in this strange town. Everyone but me, that is. He chortled and slapped his hands on his denim clad legs when he told me about Vera Olson, an eighty-year-old spinster, who was rumored to have been a communist in the thirties and now subscribed to Ms magazine. Vera was the town’s leading proponent of women’s lib. He figured she was definately bent and he figured she was bent in the wrong direction. “And like Tinker Bell,” he did a finger wave, “Vera had scattered a little pixie dust in her day.” The crowd broke up at that last crack.
But as enlightening as his narrative was, it had to end. It was getting late and I wanted to find the drug center before dark. Ben’s jocular mood shifted when I changed the subject. “Tell me, Ben, what do you know about a Christian teen drug center out here somewhere?”
The cafe instantly became quiet, and the people in the room pretended not hear my question. They all looked away.
“You some kind of government agent?” Ben asked menacingly.
“No, not at all.”
“Why you asking about the center?”
“Heard about it. That’s all.”
He leaned closer and peered intently at me. “You’re the lawyer.”
“What makes you say that?”
Without saying anything he pushed on his chair, and slowly his enormous bulk rose. Then he turned and galumphed out of the cafe without looking back.
I glanced around; everyone was ignoring me.
“Hey, buddy, we need your spot at the table,” the voice from the food slot called out. “Got a big group coming in. Be here any moment now. So, why don’t you be a good guy and hightail it outta here.”
I climbed out of my chair, surveyed the room, and in a loud voice, said, “Hey, c’mon. Don’t you people know anything about a teen drug center right here in your midst?”
Everyone in the cafe sat there gawking at me. Their eyes were dead, their faces masked with blank expressions. There wasn’t a murmur, hardly a sound, just the whining noise of the ceiling fan. It needed a new bearing in the motor.
“Where is it? Damn it, someone tell me!”