Henry Lee did not hang out. He couldn’t. He did manage to survey everything that was happening as it was happening, which took less than half a minute IRL. Then he went back down to the meat room and went back to work cutting steaks.
Henry Lee would spend all day cutting steaks. Not even an hour into it, the west called and said they were going gangbusters too and they would surely need more meat. As had been expected, and like here in the east, they were selling mostly Tops and Supers, the steaks from the sirloin butts.
So Henry Lee worked on these, first and mostly, coming back to them after he’d cut enough to keep pace with all the others as he imagined it and be assured not to run out of anything in the meantime.
He was swift and sure at what he was doing. He was swift and sure at all meat cutting. He trimmed the butt, evened it out the way he liked it, cut the first two cuts along the trimmed butt the long way. These were the Boston Strips. Then he split the butt so there were two triangular pieces. From these he would cut the Tops and Supers, the only difference being the weight by greater thickness. Tray after tray, one after the next with no let-up, that’s how he worked such that he ran out of trays and had to go upstairs to tell the pot washer to get the stack of trays he had by him washed and down to the meat room.
Meanwhile, Mary was on her third pan of vegetables, the ovens had all been emptied and refilled with baking potatoes, Esserine was washing lettuce as Bea set up salads, Grandma was frying chicken, Alvin continued drinking beer and smoking cigarettes right there in the middle of the line, Bill was changing his apron for the second time. Under the arm where he held his tongs, his shirt was filthy-soaked with grease from the tong’s tips.
“Ain’t never seen it like this,” Mary said to Tommy when he came to the back of the kitchen to check on her.
“Hasn’t ever been like this,” Tommy said. “You okay?”
“Everything here is okay. So far so good. Boy is doing a great job, better than Alvin could do.”
“He’s running as fast as the grills will let him and he’s keeping himself well-enough ahead of the orders to stay a bit ahead.”
“Notice he’s not fighting Lillian either. Listen. Just every now and then he’ll step a bit close to her and say ‘Lillian darling, I got to go with…’ and tell her what she has to pick up.”
“Don’t matter to her. She’ll keep ordering anyway.”
“He tracks the orders. But ever-so-gently today he’s making her pick up.”
“We could see as much as fifteen hundred covers,” Tommy said. “That would eclipse our previous record by more than a hundred.”
“Mr. Bowman should kiss the boy’s ass.”
“He won’t.”
Mary smiled. “No,” she said. “He won’t.” Then, “How’s the new girls doing?” she asked.
“Out there, we’re running as fast we can seat them. I just hope we don’t run out plates and silverware.”
“Bill watching that too. He would have been a great manager.”
“I hope we don’t lose him too soon. I know his fiancé just graduated, but I keep hoping he’ll stay around a little while.”
“I think he wants to stay. Least that’s what he tells me.”
“It is what it is,” Tommy said.
He stood by the side of the line close to Bea’s station for awhile watching what was happening. Then he told Lillian he would be back in a little while to give her a break. She was not against that idea. Neither was Bill who quietly, consistently worked to regulate how the orders got called and were picked up.
