Bill should have supposed that Mary would get pissed. It started when he and Bea came up the stairs together even though Mary knew Bill was helping her. Bea was simply gone too long for her liking, and she supposed, she would tell Bill later, that they were fooling around in the storeroom. Whether it was actually the case or not didn’t matter at all.
Being pissed didn’t stop her from getting high or from sitting on the counter with her legs crossed at the ankles watching Bill and Henry Lee make the hamburgers. She swung her legs as always, and at one point she got up to get herself a good drink of bourbon. While she was up she handed Henry Lee the bottle and waited while both he and Bill drank so she could put the bottle back in the drawer before she sat down.
Then it was time for lunch. Or, it was almost time for lunch in that Bill and Henry Lee still had to cart up the meat for the service and Bill still had to do the inventory of French fries, fish, onion rings and anything else that was needed for the service.
“You did start the potatoes baking, right?” Bill asked Mary.
“No I’m stupid,” said Mary.
“Well we know that,” said Bill.
“Keep it up, boy.”
“You two gonna fight?” Henry Lee asked.
“I ain’t fighting,” said Mary.
“Me either,” Bill said.
“Good,” said Henry Lee, “cause I don’t want to hear no shit.”
Bill was busy breaking off the bleu cheese and gouging holes into what would become the bleus. Not only did he not like eating bleu cheese, but he did not like touching it either. He did not like the smell. He did not like the feel. He did not like anything about it.
Bleu cheese would not be the only food he did not like to eat in the kitchens. However, he would discover that if he wanted to get his paycheck he not only had to handle the foods he didn’t like, but he also had to prepare them and even taste them. Sweetbreads and liver were two of the things that could easily make him puke if his paycheck had not depended upon him tasting them. Then there would be other things he disliked doing, like messing with live stuff such as lobsters and trout from a live fish tank. Regarding those, he would learn that the best and most efficient way to deal with them was to do the killing quickly and cleanly.
Killing trout was a whole story unto itself. One was not accepted as a cook in one of the restaurants he would work later on in his career until one could easily capture the trout and artfully kill it without mangling it. In another place he worked, one was not accepted as a cook, stupid as it seemed, until one could open a beer bottle with the backside of a knife.
Bill learned all of these things. Bill, as a cook, learned many things, most of which he would have been better off never having to learn.
As always of late, Bill pulled the baked potatoes from the convection oven two at a time in each hand. As always, since that first day as cook when he burned his right hand, he felt almost nothing in his fingertips there. But the potatoes were the proverbial hot potatoes for his left hand. Meanwhile, Bea, Mary and Henry Lee were out in the hall. Henry Lee was telling Bea to close her legs when Bill walked out. Mary was standing by the screen door looking out into the snow. The snow had finally stopped, but the weatherman, as per the radio, were predicting more snow later in the day. They didn’t think, as Mary related it, that it would be another significant accumulation.
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The menu called for a nice, thick cream of broccoli soup which Mary started as soon as she got upstairs and finished her coffee. Bea sat longer than usual on her stool sipping her coffee and reading the racing page in the Dispatch. She asked Bill if he wanted to place a bet or if he wanted to play a number. Bill did not play the horses, but he did play the numbers for both himself and Mary. Those number bets would end up in the hands of Robert who would hand them to Mr. Bowman. Robert was the numbers runner, why he had been busted in the first place and how Bill had met him when Robert was on his work detail. Mr. Bowman ran the game. He was the money man.
By 10:00 AM just about all the work for the day was done. The snow had settled into a flurry pattern and the streets were well plowed. More than a foot of snow had fallen. The University was on a delayed opening schedule, so morning classes were canceled. Bill had still not heard from his fiancé. He tried to call home several more times but to no avail. She could have called the restaurant, but there were no calls for him. Any call would’ve been forwarded to wherever he was at the time.
Bea met Bill downstairs while he was straightening up some things in the storeroom. He had brought up everything Mary needed for the rest of this day and for tomorrow as well. He and Henry Lee were about to start grinding meat for hamburger and making the patties and the bleus. She snuggled on him from behind while he was bending over straightening up a stack of stewed tomatoes cases. He’d had to move the stack in order to get to some things that should have been rotated forward but were not. It caught him by surprise when she goosed him, so much so that he almost dropped the case of tomatoes in his hands.
“Goddammit,” he said. “What the hell?” He turned to see it was Bea. She was already chuckling, her throaty chuckle, and she was reaching out to take a more intimate feel of him.
“So you slept at Mary’s, huh?”
“It kind of seemed like the best solution given the weather.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Where were her kids?”
“They stayed by her mother. Don’t ask me anything else cause I don’t know nothing.”
“I suppose all you did was go to sleep.”
“No,” said Bill. “We got high. We took some Quaaludes. I took a shower and then we went to sleep.”
“And that’s all you did?”
“Nope,” Bill said. “We slept, we got up, we cleaned all the goddamn snow off my car and we drove here.”
“So I guess you got some left for me,” Bea said.
“Some what?” Bill asked.
“Some something,” Bea said.
“I always got some something. But I got to help Henry Lee make the hamburgers. So maybe we could meet sometime later.”
“You putting me off boy?”
“Not at all darling. I just got some stuff to do.”
“Well I need some salad dressings,” Bea said. “Want to help me carry them upstairs?”
Bill could see no way out of it. So he finished straightening up while Bea watched him work. Then together they carried up the gallon jugs of salad dressings that Bea needed for her station. When he had helped her put them into their place, he checked the steamship round and checked to see that Mary had put in the baked potatoes. The potatoes were not in yet. He washed them and put them into the convection oven. Then he told Mary all she had to do was turn the oven on when she wanted to.
“What you doing, boy?” Mary asked.
“Going down to help Henry Lee make the hamburger. You want to get high come on down.”
A moment later Mary joined Bill and Henry Lee in the meat room.
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They woke up at five. The first thing Mary did was call Bea to let her know that Bill would be taking her to work. While she was on the phone, Bill started with her. He pulled the covers from her and started kissing up her thighs from the back. They were both naked and so Bill had free access to all of her.
“Cut that out,” Mary said.
“Never,” Bill said. He laughed and kissed in the places he knew Mary loved to have kissed.
Mary wriggled and tried to make it more difficult for Bill to do what he was doing. Bill just laughed more and tried harder, making sure he could get to all the places he wanted to get to.
“Goddammit,” Mary said, but even if she was saying it she pushed her body closer to him making it apparent that she wasn’t really opposed to what he was doing.
Once she was off the phone, she turned toward Bill and removed the covers from him but he pulled them back up and made her yield to what he wanted to do.
“Let me make a call,” he said, stopping.
Mary handed him the phone and he dialed his home number. There was still no answer. He knew he was off the hook, that he would not have to explain much to his fiancé. This was a comforting thought, and then he thought maybe she would have to be explaining something to him. Maybe not.
“Quaaludes won’t kill you,” he said. “Heroin and shooting stuff will kill you.”
“You ever shoot anything?” Mary asked.
“Nope. I snorted heroin couple of times and smoked opium a couple of times too, but that’s it. Something about sticking myself with a needle really bothers me,” Bill said.
“Still, you drink way too much and use too much stuff. That LSD will mess up your brain,” said Mary.
Bill was busy licking and kissing Mary again and did not stop what he was doing. Still and all, he told her about the person he knew who had used LSD more than a year straight, more than 365 consecutive times. He also told her about someone he knew who had fried his brain on LSD. That person spoke only in terms of his trips. Trip number 57, he would say, that was acid and we did it at the quarry.
When Mary was tired of the kissing and licking, even in those most intimate of intimate places, she asked Bill if he was going to waste their time doing just that. Bill told her to keep quiet and made her put her hands over her head and hold onto the headboard. That’s when he pinned down her legs and concentrated only on the one spot he knew she loved the most. Only later did he please himself. He did this quickly and efficiently, just the way he wanted.
Mary didn’t bother to make coffee. No phone call had come from Tommy and so they assumed they would be opening on time. When they were done showering and dressing it was time for them to leave. Bill spent a good fifteen minutes cleaning the snow off the car. He could see that the roads had not yet been plowed, at least on the side streets. He made sure that they left plenty of time to slip-slide their way to the restaurant.
Tommy was there when they arrived. Bea arrived a few minutes after them. They were already inside the restaurant and were waiting for Bea to come so they could change into their uniforms. Tommy told them he thought they would not be very busy for the lunch and if the weather didn’t improve much it wouldn’t be busy for the dinner either. Both Mary and Bea were happy about this. Bill thought it would be a perfect day to trip.
