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The travellers were all males, and had mostly asked for coffee – which was great, because this meant they could simply help themselves from the three Sunbeam coffee pots located on a hotplate to the side of the serving counter. However, two or three of the visitors had also requested hot food – bacon, sausage, and grits, mostly.
De
De
Waddling back into the tiled kitchen area, De
He picked up a cloth and erratically wiped grease stains from the various surfaces, as he glanced curiously across at the group seated by the window. He was most fascinated by the role of the younger man, who sat with the coach party.
He had arrived on a green motorcycle about ten minutes after the bus. When he walked into the diner, all of the other customers nodded to him in acknowledgement, but he didn’t appear to recognise any of them. He walked confidently to the counter, and asked De
The elderly man had instructed the newcomer to join them in taking a seat. For a moment, he glanced cautiously around, before he finally sat down on the opposite side of the table from the three men, whereas all of the others from the bus were scattered around the diner.
The elderly man, a larger one in a Hawaiian shirt, and a scrawny figure in a Mickey Mouse hat sat opposite the young guy. It almost looked like the young buck was being interviewed for a job. As opposed to the rest of the customers, who looked on quietly, the three amigos - as De
At one point, the young guy brought some type of flat computer from inside his jacket and laid in on the table. He worked his fingers across the screen, as the three amigos looked on with wide eyes. There was a great deal of explanation going on, with the young guy frowning and nodding.
Suddenly, the elderly man said something, and the youngster laughed loud enough to draw the attention of everyone in the building. The kid shook his head and stood up for a moment. De
They got talking again, only this time De
At one point, mid-conversation, the Mickey Mouse guy glanced up, and spotted De
Although De
Eventually, the conversation in the window booth seemed to draw to a close. Without any specific a
‘Hey,’ De
‘It’s okay,’ said a deep voice from over his shoulder.
De
‘I’ll settle up for all of us,’ he said, with a broad smile, and pulled out a brown leather wallet from his back pocket.
‘Ah, that’s good.’ De
‘Not at all,’ the large man said. ‘I just wanted to query one thing?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Who ordered that?’ the large man asked, and pointed to the last bill on the spike.
As De
Tearing at the meat with his teeth, the large man stood over De
Before the large man in the Hawaiian shirt left the diner, he dropped the lock on the door and tilted the hanging sign to “CLOSED.”
3
At the dusty bus stop, on the edge of the cluster of lifeless homes known as Burke’s End, Laurie-A
The Greyhounds and Intercity coaches that occasionally growled along Route 15 through the parched landscape were generally fitted with air-con and toilets. There remained, however, a degree of uncertainty, because today19 she would be travelling with a lesser known bus company.
It had been almost one week since Vicki had called out of the blue, and invited her down to the coast for a break from small dusty boredom. In the fourteen months since graduating college in San Diego, Laurie had done nothing other than serve coffee and burritos in the sun-bleached diner of her home-town. Her patrons were mainly locals or the occasional marine from the military camp over at Barstow.
When she had first accepted the job, she had optimistically imagined she could bring her Nikon SLR to work, and between orders, she could take dramatic portraits of American diner life. In reality, any time between orders was spent cooking, mopping, and washing. The camera only came to work for one shift, and was subsequently returned to a crushed shoebox at the back of her cramped wardrobe.