The rest of January was fickle. One day was relatively mild, just as a tease. One day was wintry, but not too bad. Snow fell three more times, but no big accumulations. Enough snow fell for one of Bill’s friends, the one from Miami with no experience driving on snow, to rear-end a car while it was sitting at the end of an exit ramp from the highway. Bill told him he had to brake, told him when to brake, but like any true know-it-all, his friend knew better. It was an exercise in futility. The only saving grace was that no major damage was done.
The tenderfoot. It reminded Bill of the famous short story they’d studied in school, the one where the tenderfoot died because he scoffed at the experienced locals, the one where the dog who didn’t want to set out in the first place knew better than the tenderfoot and managed to survive. So he, not the dog, started the fire in the wrong place. That was after he’d done a few other stupid things.
Bill could relate to stupid things. He could relate to doing stupid things. He could relate to not listening to people who knew better in kitchens. Maybe if he’d been experienced that first day, he wouldn’t have burned those fingers and would still have the feeling in them. But that time he hadn’t ignored experienced advice. He just didn’t know better. It simply happened.
Throughout his career Bill would run across cooks who were dangerous. They were dangerous for the very same reason that the tenderfoot in that story was dangerous, for the same reason his friend had had the car accident. In the kitchens, when the experienced cooks ran up against a dangerous one who wouldn’t heed advice, they distanced themselves.
The dangerous ones were relatively easy to spot. They generally had disregard for advice. They generally thought they knew better than anyone else. They generally were rude, loud and abrasive in their personalities. They generally made rookie mistakes like tossing things into hot grease or placing them in in the wrong direction so that they splashed forward instead of back toward the splash wall. It was bad enough when a cook burned himself, but when a cook burned another cook, that was worse, and when he did it wantonly, or stupidly, that was the worst. That caused fights. That caused cooks to get fired. Disrespecting hot and sharp meant tragedy sooner or later. Bill would see his share of tragedy in his career. When all was said and done, Bill would see his share of cooks with less than ten fingers. And personally, he would have stitches several times.
February was a bitter month. It demonstrated the city’s worst winter characteristics. Not much snow fell. The winds kicked up pretty bad and the temperature hovered close to zero for long periods of time. The only good thing was that Ohio State was holding the lead in basketball and so it was drawing phenomenal crowds for the games. This meant that both restaurants, despite the nasty weather, did great business. Henry Lee and Bill spent a lot of time in the meat room cutting steaks. Bill became quite proficient at meat cutting. He also spent a lot of time with Mary doing the prep cooking. He became fully versed as a prep cook and there were days when Mary allowed him to do all the prep work. On those days, Mary stayed downstairs with Henry Lee. She sat, like she always did, up on the stainless steel counter, swinging her legs and lost in her thoughts. Her thoughts were mostly about Yulie and the loss when he killed himself with the overdose.
“I seen enough over there,” Yulie would say.
Mary would run her fingers through his hair. “Lord have mercy,” she would say.
Lately, thinking about Yulie, more about the loss, her loss, loss, she was thinking about Bill. The clock was running. It was dead of winter now, but in a few short weeks…
