Henry Lee came in at ten. Bill and Mary had started a pan of yellow rice and Bill had washed about twenty potatoes for baking. He was putting them into the convection oven as Henry Lee drew himself a coffee from the urns over by Bea’s station. Mary went over to join him and let him know what she needed for the specials. Beef tips was on for tomorrow’s lunch, Sauerbraten for the day after. Henry Lee acknowledged and told her not to worry. Today’s special was chicken fingers and fries with coleslaw. Mary still had to bread the chicken and put the slaw together. She would do that while Henry Lee and Bill prepared the meats needed for the lunch meal.
All in all, the morning was low key and slow. Bill had only had a couple of pulls on the bourbon and he was straight. He drank coffee too. Bill drank a lot of coffee and almost always had a mug by him unless he was drinking beer or bourbon.
“Wanna play any numbers?” Bea asked Henry Lee and Mary while they stood by her station. She was sitting on her stool, looking at the newspaper. She had cut and washed all the lettuce she needed for house salads for the lunch meal, and she had already cleaned and refilled all the salad dressing containers. She was reading the racing charts, looking at what horses were running at Beulah Park.
Mary said, “Play me three-fifty-four and play it for the rest of the week.”
“Two-seventy-eight,” Henry Lee said. He looked over Bea’s shoulder at the racing charts and told her which horses to play for him.
“Ante up,” Bea said. “I’ll call over to Robert.”
Bill had not seen Robert in awhile. The more settled in and more experienced he’d gotten, the less Robert came around. Alvin still came by, almost every day. Sometimes he helped on the line during a meal, but with Bill pulling his own weight and more now, Alvin mostly came with the van and picked up the meats. Robert had called this morning, however. He’d lectured Bill about using drugs, especially at work, and then he asked Bill what he’d seen with Henry Lee and Marie. Bill felt bad about not being square with Robert. He didn’t exactly lie, but he didn’t exactly tell the truth. Robert took Bill’s keeping it to himself as a real strong point for Bill and left it with that it was imperative Alfreda not find out. She did find out, of course, but not for anything Bill said or did.
Downstairs, like always, Henry Lee and Bill started in on the hamburgers and bleus. Henry Lee saw the half round in the walk-in and complemented Bill on the clean and straight cut he made. They took a sip of bourbon before Bill started grinding the chopped meat. Henry Lee cut Tops and Supers while Bill did the grinding, and then when the grinder was put away and the plates and blades cleaned, they started weighing and forming the servings.
Mary came in while they worked and helped herself to a drink. “Got any weed?” she asked.
Henry Lee said he had some in his street clothes and he walked out to get it. Mary sat herself up on the counter and swung her legs, like she always did, intent upon watching Bill work.
“What’s up with you and Bea today?”
“Nothing,” Bill said.
“Yeah, okay,” Mary said. “She ain’t wearing no underwear and she was flashing you coochie out in the hall.”
“I know.”
“What you gonna do?”
“What you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m gonna eat some salad,” Bill said.
“Mercy me,” Mary said. “Long as I get mine, I don’t care.”
“That an invitation?”
“Figure it out, college boy,” Mary said.
With the round in the oven, Mary started the soup of the day, chicken vegetable. She asked Bill, who had not changed his uniform, to cut the vegetables she’d taken from the walk-in downstairs. Bill set up a cutting board and took a chef’s knife from Mary’s knife drawer. He honed the knife on a sharpening steel and was about to start.
“I told you to change your uniform,” Mary said. “Be careful, dammit.”
Suburban did not own its own knives. Their knives were rentals from a knife company. Every Wednesday the knife company delivered freshly-sharpened sets and collected the ones that had been used. Therefore, all the knives were sharp all the time.
Bill was listening to the music Mary had put on. She was putting the water to the soup pot. He started with the onions, large-dicing several big ones. Next was celery, which he peeled first. Then came the carrots. These were sliced round. Several times the knife came close to nicking Bill, something that happened in kitchens frequently and that cooks got used to. In the course of his cooking career Bill would have stitches twice and probably should have had them at least twice more. But he would make it out of kitchens with all his digits, something not all cooks and kitchen workers did.
Bill would always remember: in one Manhattan bistro where he later worked, he would see a kitchen worker, not a cook, so busy listening to music and so not busy concentrating on what he was doing, slice a finger off while slicing a slab of bacon on a slicing machine. Later in his life Bill would recall that it was a tremendously gorgeous Saturday morning with a strong, bright sun and perfectly clear sky, one of those mornings when your first thoughts were thankfulness for being alive and rejoicefulness for everything being the way it was supposed to be. God’s perfection!
Bill was cooking off trays of bacon for the brunch meal, starting them in the broiler’s dutch oven. They were using packaged bacon so there was no need for the worker to be using the slicer. No one understood why he was doing what he was but no one paid it much attention. Bill had just emptied one tray’s bacon into the holding pan and set another into the Dutch oven. The guy was dancing and singing and slicing.
The digital error happened so quickly the guy himself didn’t understand it. He didn’t feel it at first. But then there was the blood all over the bacon and the slicer, and there was the digit, completely separated from the hand. It was the pinky finger, a good two-thirds of it.
Suddenly that all-perfect and truly wondrous bit of God’s perfection had been tainted by human imperfection. Suddenly what should have been memorialized as God’s true beauty was memorialized as human tragedy caused by human carelessness and frailty.
Vegetables for soup done, they started a pot of Bordelaise sauce. Bill would learn that what they called Bordelaise sauce here was not classic Bordelaise in French cuisine. It was more of a brown gravy. The sauce started, they took a break.
Out in the hall, Bill lit a cigarette and sat on a milk case. Mary sat on the empty bread cases turned upside down. Bea came out and took a cigarette from Bill’s pack. Bill gave her his cigarette to light it with. She sat on lettuce cases that were next to Mary and opposite Bill. Bill could see up both their legs and looked openly not even attempting to make it sneaky. Mary was showing white panties. Bea was showing Bea, and she spread wide for Bill knowing he knew she was just doing what he’d asked her to do.
“Lord have mercy,” Mary said.
Decided about Miss no-panties Bea, he was ready to work again. He opened the knife drawer. It was the drawer next to the one where they kept their kitchen towels under which they stored the bourbon sometimes. He took out a butcher’s knife and a sharpening steel. He honed the curved knife blade on the steel then drew a line in the fat with the blade. He revised the line twice trying to get it even so he’d have two equal halves as the finished product. Satisfied, he cut down into the meat all the way to the center bone then followed his line all the way around turning the round as necessary. Having gone all around, he had two huge chunks of meat held together only by the center bone.
Bill paused a moment to look at what he’d done. He lit a cigarette and pulled out one of the bottles of bourbon left from last night. He was taking a drink when Mary came in, so he handed her the bottle.
Mary inspected Bill’s cut on the round then she hopped up on one of the stainless steel counters where she sat with her legs crossed at the ankles, swinging her feet and drinking from the bottle. She was wearing bobby socks today, Bill noted.
Bill rested his cigarette on the edge of one of the tables and switched on the band saw. Goddamn image, he thought. He pushed the meat in place, holding the cut open so the saw blade didn’t touch the meat. Within a moment, the saw went through the bone and the halves were fully separated.
Bill wrapped the first half in film, lots of it, so it would stay completely fresh. He put it in the walk-in and then joined Mary, leaning against the counter next to her. He resumed smoking his cigarette and took a small second drink before returning the bottle to the drawer.
“You got blood on your shirt,” Mary said. She pointed.
Sure enough, meat blood stained his shirt. The blood must have dripped from the round when he’d carried it over his shoulder. Bill saw it, but he didn’t think much of it.
“I’ll change later,” he said.
“Call Bea and change now,” Mary said. “It’s bad luck.”
“Bull dinky,” Bill said.
“Bull dinky nothing,” Mary said. “You change that shirt.”
“Why Miss Mary P., if I didn’t know better, I’d think you care about me.”
“Shut up fool,” Mary said. She jumped down off the counter. “Change the shirt,” she said as she headed out of the meat room and back upstairs.
Bill carted the other half of the round up the stairs and set it into a big squarish roasting pan Mary had set out for him. He went over to the coffee urns and drew himself a coffee which he carried back over by Mary and stood drinking while she dressed the round. When it was ready, he set it in the oven. He was prepared for Mary to goose him, which she sometimes did, but not today.
“Boy,” she said, “change your pants too. Look at you.” More blood had dripped on him from the round. When he’d carried the half up the stairs, he must have held it against him. His pants and shirt were now stained from still fresh-looking meat blood, his pants about the waist and fly, his shirt on the shoulder and arm and about the waist.
“Yeah,” Bill said. “Don’t want no bad luck.”
“You should have put an apron on first.”
“Should have done lots of stuff in my short life,” Bill said.
“Lord have mercy,” Mary said.
Henry Lee had not cut the round. Bill discovered this the next morning. He discovered something else the next morning too. When he and Mary and Bea went down to change, Bea did not have underwear on. She changed in the bathroom, which was not the norm, while he and Mary stripped and changed out in the hall. They’d done it this way so many times it meant virtually nothing. When they were changed, Mary went upstairs and Bill went to the meat room.
Bill went into the walk-in first. Seeing no round cut, he hoisted a whole one, about a sixty-pound chunk of beef, onto his shoulder and set it down on the flat of the band saw. He had to go back to slam shut the walk-in door and when he turned back, Bea was standing there. She smiled at him and lifted her dress.
“No panties,” she said. She turned around and showed him her ass then turned back. “Wanna take a feel?” she asked.
Bill didn’t really. Nevertheless, he stepped into her and reached for her. Bea closed her eyes and enjoyed the touch. She was hot to trot.
“See you later,” she said, when he withdrew his hand. She dropped her dress in place and went out of the meat room.
The band saw and Bea brought on the image. Bill was straight this morning, still a little hung over from the acid, but the memory was vivid. There was Marie and there was Henry Lee clear as fresh spring water. He could hear Henry Lee slapping against her.
He remembered. He was seventeen away at football camp. He had a girlfriend back in the city, but there was this girl Beth at camp who really liked him and made overtures. Maybe Beth just wanted the status of being with one of the football players the athletic director brought to the camp as waiters. They were his first team, his starters from the high school team he coached. Maybe she really liked him. The first week they just petted. The second week they partied and they partied plenty the rest of the summer.
But that wasn’t the image. The image was of one of his teammates in the woods with one of Beth’s friends. They were laying flat. He was on top pumping away. They’d heard her moaning and come upon them.
So now there were two images, not porn, but real life images he wished he could erase from his memory banks.
Interestingly, Beth had gotten really turned on and had pulled him to their spot to do the do. It hadn’t done anything for Bill, but at seventeen, he was always willing and able. At twenty, now as he thought about it, the same was true. He didn’t particularly want Bea, but he could do her and it was probably easier than the consequences of saying no.
He stood a moment and weighed it in his mind. He’d have something on her, he thought. He could use that as leverage if he had to. He’d noted that the more experienced he got and the more he learned, the more bossy she became. He reasoned that she felt her power slipping away, felt it sliding over to him. He could assuage that, have some fun and kill several birds with one stone. Easy peasy, he thought. All he had to do was the do.
So his mind was made up. He would oblige her even though she had him by twenty-five years and probably forty pounds. He would play on her middle age crisis, or her being horny from not getting any at home. What the hell, he thought. He saw it as an existential decision.
Drenovis never looked happy unless he was strutting after having had a waitress, and most of the waitresses he got were not due his good looks or his captivating personality. He used his position to get sex, something Bill would see in every place he ever worked.
Drenovis stopped Bill from his work cleaning the line. “Give me a prime rib rare cut thick cut for me. Give me a baked potato with it.”
Bill didn’t hurry. He was straining the fryer grease and didn’t stop until he’d reached a logical stopping point. Drenovis watched him cut the rib then asked if they’d been busy. Bill knew he knew and wondered why he asked. He didn’t answer.
“What went on in the meat room today?” Drenovis asked.
“Meat cutting,” Bill said. Having slid Drenovis’ plate up on the warmer shelf, he’d gone back to the fryer. Straining the grease meant shutting down the fryer, taking all the grease out by opening the spigot underneath, catching the grease in a small sauce pot then dumping it pot by pot into a very large stock pot into which a metal strainer had been set. It was repetitious work, opening the drain, filling the pot, emptying the pot, over and over. The grease was 350 degrees Fahrenheit, so if a drop touched your skin it immediately blistered it.
“I heard Miss Marie over there was entertaining our wonderful meat cutter.”
“I guess you hear all kinds of stuff,” Bill said, not looking up or stopping what he was doing.
“I hear you saw it,” Drenovis said.
“I hear Robert chewed your ass out tonight and that’s why you came over here.”
“You heard wrong.”
“See,” Bill said. “You hear all kinds of stuff.” He was on his knees before the fryer and was coming close to having it completely drained.
“You better watch yourself,” Drenovis said.
“Thanks,” Bill said. “In know this grease is real hot. I’ll be careful.” This was enough to get Drenovis to leave the kitchen.
When the fryer was emptied, Bill got up. He used his tongs and clean kitchen rags to push out all remaining crud and then rinsed the fryer and drain with several pots of water. All that remained on this fryer was to pour the grease back in and light it up.
Bill paused to light a cigarette. He rang the bell used to call waitresses when an order was ready. Eleanor peeked in an Bill told her to get him a beer.
While he stood smoking, Marie came over. She kissed Bill on the cheek. “Thanks,” she said. “I need this job.”
“I need the job too,” Bill said. “Just remember Alfreda works out west and sometimes she comes over here to bring things and get the meat.”
“Thanks again,” Marie said.
Bill started the second fryer before Eleanor came in with the beer. He put the cigarette down on a metal underneath shelf and turned off the gas. He had cleaned the strainer and set it back into the stock pot. Of all the chores, he hated this one most. Tomorrow, he knew, he’d have to change the grease. That meant carrying the fifty-pound cubes of grease up from the store room.
He started the draining, was on the second pot when Eleanor brought the beer. She stepped around onto the line and put it down by Bill. Seeing him down there, just for fun, she pulled her dress away from her so Bill could see up her legs.
“You like?” she asked.
“I like,” Bill said. “But Drenovis is on the war path, so don’t hang out.”
Eleanor left posthaste. Bill finished out his night’s work.
Out in the parking lot, Eleanor had pulled up right next to Bill’s car. “Hey sailor, need a ride?” she called through her opened window.
Tired and smelling from kitchen funk, all Bill wanted to do was get home. He was about to say no. He was about to do what he really wanted to do. But then the little man chimed in.
Luckily, dinner was slow. It must have been slow over on the west side too because Drenovis came in about nine. Apparently he was closing up.
Drenovis didn’t like Bill and never would. He would be happy when Bill gave notice, unlike everyone else. Meantime, he tolerated him and worked with him, only because he had to. They were cordial, even polite. Drenovis understood that his own job was dependent upon Bill’s performance, yet Bill’s job was independent of how Drenovis did his. That was the power of an experienced broiler cook in a small kitchen setting.
Bill discovered quickly that there were a zillion ways for a cook to kill a restaurant’s profits, most of them invisible to the owners and managers unless they knew what to look for and stood over the cooks all the time. Consequently, the managers had to overlook a lot of dysfunctional behaviors and cooks could do just about anything without getting fired. Not anything, but just about.
When Tommy came in to say good night, Henry Lee and Alvin were long gone. Jimmy was out in the hall smoking a cigarette and Bill was working the two orders they had on the board, a total of two Supers and two burgers, all with fries. Marie was reading the newspaper Bea had left her and Grandma was sitting on Mary’s stool. She was half asleep.
Tommy walked through the line. He looked at everything, made a comment about not having sold much rib. He asked Bill if he thought they needed to cook one tomorrow. Bill said probably not, but then they’d have no rare. He suggested that it might be better to cook one and run rib as a special with a lowered price. Tommy nodded acceptance of the idea. He asked if the round was cut. Bill said he’d check when he brought the meat down. That brought the image of Henry Lee and Marie right back to him, right back to before his eyes. He took up the tongs from the handle of the broiler drawer, flipped the two Supers, then closed the tongs and slid the closed tips under the burgers, one at a time, to flip them. All the while, he saw Henry Lee pumping away on Marie, the image ignited by the thought he might have to cut a round in the morning which meant throwing that meat on the band saw. That band saw would never be the same.
Bill put out the two orders, Tommy gone already a few moments. Then he went over by Marie and drew himself a coffee.
“Ain’t you going to say something?” Marie asked him.
Bill said “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not your boss. I’m not your priest. I’m not your father.”
“Henry Lee…”
Bill cut her off before she could say anything more. “Look, what you do is on you. Don’t bring me in it.”
“You ain’t gonna say nothing?”
“Why would I?”
“Not even to Bea or Mary?”
“It’s not my business.”
“Thanks,” Marie said.
Bill was walking the long way back to the broiler, around front of the line, when Eleanor peeked her head in the kitchen. Seeing Bill there, she stepped all the way in.
“Hey,” she said. “Bebe wants to know if you want a beer. And she wants a Super medium-rare with a baked.”
“Okay,” Bill said. “Yeah for the beer.”
“See you in a bit,” she said. She walked out the out door.
At ten, both Grandma and Jimmy left. Bill fed the dishwashers and started on the waitress orders which would filter in as they took their dinner in turns. He cooked a Boston strip rare for himself which he cut into pieces and left on a plate on his reach-in box. That was for Eleanor who came in and helped herself to it. She brought Bill a beer, sipped from the beer, and since they were alone for a moment, she gave Bill a sweet kiss. She could not stay long, so she came in several times. The last time, she brought Bill another beer and took several hits from his Marlboro.
At eleven, when Bill had begun cleaning the line, Drenovis first came in to say hello. He didn’t look too happy.
