For the second time this morning, Terrance answered the kitchen phone. “Escargot’s, Terrance speaking.”
“Yo, T, your boss sittin on my stoop!”
“Say what?”
“He crazy!” NuShawn sounded genuinely unnerved. “He woke me up ringin the bell. I looked out the front window and seen him sittin there. Momma ain’t up yet, but she will be pretty soon if he keep on ringin and knockin.”
“I guess you better let him in, then.”
“You know I don’t handle no business here! Shit! Momma’d kill me if she thought I done anything like that. He ain’t even supposed to know where I live.”
“Well, I didn’t tell him.”
“What I’m gonna do with this crazy white man? I leave him sittin out there lookin like a rich motherfucker, he probably get robbed or somethin.”
“You wanna do me a favor? Sell him his shit,” said Terrance. “He don’t have it, he’s gonna make my day miserable. Give him his bag and tell him to go to work.”
“But Terrance—”
“You don’t wanna do it, then don’t do it. It ain’t my problem. Look, I’m busy, I gotta go.”
Terrance hung up, shaking his head. He was happy to be leaving Escargot’s; he knew life would be better at Liquor. But he wasn’t ever going to be able to leave his family.
Mike showed up an hour later. NuShawn must have worked something out with him, because he looked almost healthy and he didn’t start yelling at people right away. In fact, everything was pretty much OK until late that night.
Service was over at Escargot’s, and a bunch of employees were drinking in the bar. Kendall had been training a new bartender, a big Irishman named Duncan. Tonight Duncan had held down the place on his own, and now he appeared to be getting piss-drunk, perhaps to celebrate. “So you’re leaving us soon?” he asked Terrance.
“Fraid so. I’m getting out of the dishwashing business. Got me a cooking job.”
“Nice,” said the Irishman ruminatively. “Very nice. Cooking beats the hell out of washing dishes, and you’ll get away from that asshole Mike.”
“That’s true.”
“I already hate that guy. If I had to put up with half of what you do, I would have left ages ago. How d’you ever stand it?”
“Just patient, I guess,” said Terrance.
“There’s a difference between patient and spineless,” said Duncan. He was kind of an abrasive guy, really. Terrance decided to get off the subject of Mike.
“I look forward to cooking,” he said. “I never done it professionally before.”
“Where’s the job?”
“New restaurant being opened by a couple friends of mine. Place called Liquor.”
“Funny name for a restaurant.”
“Well, there’s a story there,” said Terrance. He explained about Rickey and G-man’s ignominious exit from Tequila-town and Rickey’s subsequent brainstorm in the park.
Duncan burst into deafening laughter. “Liquor! A whole restaurant based on liquor! I love it! That Rickey fellow must be a genius!”
Of course, Mike picked that very moment to walk into the bar. The edges of his nostrils were dusted with white powder and his eyes whirled like pinwheels. Puffed up with cocaine courage, he strode over to the bar and prodded Duncan’s chest with his forefinger. “Don’t ever mention that person or that restaurant in my bar!” he said.
For a split second Duncan just stared down at Mike’s forefinger poking him in the shirt pocket. Then he let out a drunken roar of rage, seized Mike’s wrist, and dragged him halfway over the bar. Terrance stepped back as bottles, glasses, and coasters went flying.
“Touch me, will you?” the Irishman hollered. “I’ll touch you, all right, you prick!” He let go of Mike’s wrist. Mike slid back across the bar and fell to the floor. Duncan was already coming around the bar. He grabbed Mike by the collar of his shirt and hoisted him. Mike tried to kick the Irishman in the shins, but Duncan held him at arm’s length.
“I’ve been wanting to beat the piss out of you since the first day I worked here!” Duncan said. He looked at the Escargot’s employees scattered around the bar. “Can anyone give me a single good reason not to beat the piss out of this prick?”
The employees glanced at each other. Some of them shrugged; some shook their heads. Finally a waitress said timidly, “You might go to jail.”
“I’ve BEEN to jail!” roared Duncan. He shoved Mike against the bar and got him in a headlock. One of the line cooks ran up behind them, hesitated, then kicked Mike in the ass.
“Call the police!” yelled Mike. “Somebody call the police! Terrance!”
Terrance went behind the bar and picked up the phone. This didn’t seem like a real emergency, so he dialed the regular police number rather than 911. “Police,” said a bored-sounding dispatcher.
“Hello,” said Terrance. “Uh, there seems to be a melee in the bar at the Hotel Bienvenu.”
“Melee!” cried Mike, seizing on the word. “Help! Melee!”
“Shut up,” growled Duncan, tightening his brawny forearm around Mike’s throat.
“A what in the bar?” said the dispatcher.
“A fight,” Terrance told her. “A violent disagreement.”
“Does anybody have a weapon?”
“Well, there’s a couple knives for cutting lemons and things …”
“How about a firearm?”
“I don’t think so,” Terrance said.
“We’ll send an officer as soon as we can.”
Terrance hung up. Mike and the Irishman were halfway across the barroom now. One of Mike’s shoes had fallen off. The line cook was still darting in and out like a small dog trying to play with a couple of bigger ones. He stomped on Mike’s sock-clad foot with his heavy workboot, and Mike screamed. The scream wasn’t very loud above the rising noise in the bar. This really was turning into a melee.
“You’re WORTH going to jail for!” thundered Duncan. He lifted Mike clear off his feet and grabbed the back of Mike’s belt. A split second too late, Terrance saw what was going to happen.
“Don’t do it!” he yelled, but it was too late. The bartender sent Mike crashing straight through the big stained-glass window that separated the bar from the lobby.
Late that night, Rickey and G-man parked in Liquor’s back lot and got out of the car carrying a duffel bag, a thermos, and an armload of pillows and blankets. They had been waiting for the perfect night to camp out at the restaurant, after it was all fixed up but before the opening. Once it had opened, it would belong to the dining public as much as it did to them.
It seemed strange letting themselves in like this, with no one else on the premises and no work to be done. “I know it’s our place,” said Rickey as he disarmed the security system and fitted the key into the front door, “but it still kinda feels like we’re breaking in.”
“That’s why we’re doing this, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Getting drunk here, sleeping here and stuff—it’s like we’re saying to the restaurant, ‘OK, you’re really ours now.’”
“Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I like that.”
They locked the door behind them and went through the dark foyer. When they reached the bar, Rickey turned on one small lamp near the cash register. Some of the liquor stock had already been delivered, and the full bottles gleamed mellowly in the soft light.
“At least we know we won’t run out of stuff to drink tonight,” said G-man.
“Dude, we gotta leave that stuff alone. It all needs to be new and perfect when we open.”
“I know it. I’m just fucking with you. Let’s have a drink, though.”
“Let’s go in the dining room and have it there.”
A leaded glass window between the bar and the dining room allowed the lamplight to filter in. There was a little ambient streetlamp glow from outside, but not much. Wanting the interior to have a cozy, clubby atmosphere, Rickey had had the decorator cover the windows with
translucent green-striped shades. The tables and chairs were stacked on one side of the dining room. Rickey and G-man spread the blankets in the very center of the room and sat down with the thermos between them, picnic-style. The carpet was so thick and lush that they might have been sitting on a huge green mattress.
“Want me to get some ice?” said G-man.
“No, let’s have it warm and crappy, just like we did in the park that day.”
G-man opened the thermos and poured large slugs of vodka and orange juice into two plastic go-cups.
“Here’s to Liquor,” said Rickey, touching his cup to G-man’s, then waving it around to encompass the whole restaurant.
“Here’s to Liquor,” said G-man, drinking.
“Here’s to us.”
“Yeah, you right. Here’s to us.”
“And here’s to Lenny.”
G-man hesitated, then said, “What the hell. OK, here’s to Lenny.” He drank deeply. “I’m ready for another one.”
After he finished his second drink, Rickey lay back on the blankets and gazed up at the tin ceiling. He wasn’t drunk, just tipsy enough that its patterns seemed to swim a little in the half-light. “I feel perfect,” he said.
“I can’t even remember the last time I heard you say that.”
“I do, though. I feel totally comfortable here. Like it’s the best place in the world. Don’t you?”
“I like it a lot. I don’t know if I have the same feeling you do, though. It’s your restaurant really.”
“Don’t say that. It’s ours.”
“It’s ours because you say so,” said G-man, draining his cup and stretching out next to Rickey. “And that’s cool. I mean, I totally want to do it. I’m excited. But if you wouldn’t have had the idea, I’d still be working on the line somewhere.”
“You’re probably right,” Rickey admitted. “You always did need me to drive you.”
“See, you got ambition.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
“It’s not all bad,” said G-man. “I gotta admit it’s nice to have some money.”
“What we need is a lot of money. I still want to buy Lenny out someday.”
“That’d be great,” G-man said dreamily.
“You’re never gonna forgive him about the old man, are you?”
“No,” said G-man. “I’m not gonna keep being mad at him, but I’m not just gonna pretend it never happened.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad at you?”
“Because I don’t really care what happened to that old man. I could try to act like I did, but I’d be lying.”
“No reason you should lie. If you don’t have a problem with whatever Lenny did, what’s the point in pretending you do? You’re the one who has to live with it.”
“There’s some kinda commentary in there, but I don’t really want to think about it right now.” Rickey rolled over onto his stomach and poured another drink.
“Don’t worry about it. I still love you—that’s not gonna change. Hey, pour me one.”
“We killed it,” said Rickey, peering into the thermos. “I thought we came better prepared than this.”
“We’re as prepared as anybody can be. What’s the point of owning a restaurant if you can’t even have a drink from the bar?”
“Well …”
“I’m gonna get a bottle,” said G-man, pushing himself up from the blankets. “If you don’t want another drink, speak now or forever hold your penis.” When Rickey didn’t say anything, G-man set off on a slightly weaving path toward the bar.
Rickey watched him go, then turned his gaze back to the old tin ceiling. Now clean and free of cobwebs, it shone softly in the near-darkness. In two weeks, if all went well, people would be eating and drinking beneath it.
When he thought back to the day he’d had the idea for Liquor, sitting in Audubon Park swigging vodka and orange juice out of this same thermos, Rickey could hardly believe less than a year had passed since then. Twelve months ago he’d been a line cook in a crappy restaurant. Ten months ago he’d been unemployed, fired by the crappy restaurant. Then, in his unseasoned opinion, the manager who had fired him had been nothing but an asshole. Now he had a restaurant of his own, with a full staff of employees who would doubtless have their own reasons to think he was an asshole. He didn’t intend to be one, but an unwritten law of restaurant work was that occasionally you were going to hate your boss. Now he would be the boss, and sometimes people would think of him the same way he had thought of Brian Danton at Tequilatown. It was overwhelming.
“Hey,” he called to G-man, “hurry up with that bottle.”
Mike sat on a hard blue chair in the Fast Track emergency room of Charity Hospital. Despite its name, Fast Track was the lowest-priority section of Charity’s ER. None of the other people even looked like there was anything wrong with them. Probably they were just trying to get drugs or a free place to sleep.
Eyeing the spiderweb tracery of cuts on Mike’s face and left arm, the other patients edged away from him as if he might be diseased. He couldn’t remember hitting the window; there was just the image of the big bartender picking him up, then the memory of sprawling in a pile of colorful shards trying to assess his damages. The most terrible moment had been when Terrance came out and helped him up, brushed the glass off his shoulders, and went back into the bar without saying anything.
He’d gotten a nice-sized bag from NuShawn this morning and had been hitting it all day, so he wasn’t hurting too much yet, though his shoulder was badly bruised and his scalp was bleeding. But that was part of the reason he’d come to Charity: he only had $1500 on his credit card and he knew he would have to buy more coke soon. He couldn’t go to NuShawn. He couldn’t return to Escargot’s or associate with anybody who had anything to do with the place. Obviously Terrance was keeping an eye on him for Rickey. NuShawn might be in on it as well. At the thought of Terrance telling Rickey what had happened tonight, Mike’s skin crawled and his sphincter contracted.
The big Irish bartender must know Rickey too. He and Terrance had been talking about Liquor when Mike walked into the bar. They were all probably involved in the murder of Rondo Johnson. Now they were after Mike.
Mike went to the nurse’s desk and asked for a phone book. He flipped through the white pages to the R’s, running his index finger down the columns of names. He had pulled Rickey’s résumé and stared at it for a long time last week, but he couldn’t recall the contact information now. That had been happening to him a lot lately; it was almost as if his mind were being controlled by outside forces. Maybe that old lady in the French Quarter wasn’t so crazy after all, the one who wore a hubcap on her back and lined her hat with tinfoil … There was the listing, RICKEY, JOHN R. on the ass-end of Marengo Street. As if the résumé lay before him, Mike suddenly remembered that Rickey’s middle name was Randolph and that he had attended Frederick Douglass High School. When you got right down to it, there wasn’t much he didn’t know about Rickey.
He made a note of the address and returned to the hard blue chair. “Family Feud” was on TV, not even the classic version but some new thing. The host asked the family members to name something a chef would use, and they started shouting out answers: “A knife!” “A stove!” “Salt!” This couldn’t be real. Everything was being manipulated to fuck with his head.
Mike had to wait ninety more minutes before his name was called. An unimpressed doctor rotated his shoulder and looked at his pupils. “I think I need stitches in my scalp,” Mike said.
“Nah,” said the doctor. “We’ll just clean it out.” He left the cubicle. A few minutes later, a nurse came in with a pink plastic disposable razor, shaved little patches of hair around the worst cuts on Mike’s head, and rubbed them with some kind of burning disinfectant.
“Aren’t you even going to put a bandage on it?” Mike whined.
“It’ll heal faster if you let it dry and crust over. It’s not very ser
ious.” The nurse’s tone was neutral, but her eyes warned Don’t fuck, with me.
When he got back to his car, Mike couldn’t even look in the rearview mirror at his crusting bald spots and swollen face. His shoulder was beginning to throb, so he removed his bag from his pocket and took another poke. Then he drove uptown, found the address on Marengo Street, and sat staring at the narrow little house where Rickey lived. The windows were dark. There was no car parked in front, but people in these old neighborhoods parked wherever they could, and he didn’t know what kind of car Rickey drove.
Though Mike sat there for a long time, he saw nothing but two young black men walking silently down the middle of the street. At last he started his car again and drove across town to the Broad Street property where his uncle had died, the property people were now calling Liquor. There was one car in the parking lot, a black-and-gold Plymouth Satellite so decrepit that Mike assumed it had been abandoned. Rickey must not have gotten around to having it towed. Maybe he would run his whole operation like that, Mike thought hopefully, overlooking little details until the place crashed and burned.
He couldn’t tell whether any lights were burning in the restaurant, but the longer he sat in the parking lot, the more certain he became that nothing was going on in there. Rickey wasn’t at home and he wasn’t here either. Probably he was out somewhere with Terrance and the big Irishman, celebrating a job well done.
Mike drove to his apartment in Metairie and began to pack a small suitcase.
chapter 26
Rickey stood by the big cutting board looking at his six cooks and three dishwashers, all of whom returned his gaze expectantly. For the first time since quitting the Apostle Bar, he and G-man were dressed in chef’s whites. He wondered if this was pretentious, since they weren’t going to do any cooking today, but right now the uniform and G-man’s presence at his side were the only things allowing him to feel some modicum of confidence. Rickey had already worked with most of these cooks in the test kitchen, and a couple of them—Terrance, a guy called Shake from their Peychaud Grill days—he knew quite well. Today, though, he had a horror of coming off like the world’s biggest shoemaker. He’d kept waking up all night, haunted by fantasies of the whole kitchen staff deciding We can’t work for this asshole and walking out of their first meeting. Toward dawn he had gotten up, fixed coffee, and gone over the menu. He passed out copies of this menu now, a rough handwritten thing that would probably be revised several times before opening night.