I took the needle filled with the venom of the snake and tipped with the apple of good and evil from beneath the child’s drawing paper, and popped off the apple. Then I pushed the needle quickly, gently, like an expert, for I’d seen this many times in my pictures, right into the loud muscle of his heart.
There, I said, stroking his skin where I withdrew the needle, there, as his eyes opened, there it will be scorched.
And as he bucked and sank away I got the picture. I’d tie a loud necktie around his throat, winch him up into the rafters. Got Bliss cutting him down. Got the sight of him lying still in the eyes of others, got the power of it and the sorrow. I got my children’s old gaze, got them holding me with quiet hands, and got them not weeping but staring out calmly over the hills. I got Bliss running mad, foaming, blowing her guts, laughing and then retrieving Billy’s spirit from its path crawling slowly toward heaven, got the understanding she would organize the others and take over from Billy, but that before they could pin me down in the Manual of Discipline we’d have scooped up the money already and run.
Oh yes, I got us eating those eggs at the 4-B’s, me and my children, and the land deed in my name.
Evelina
The 4-B’s
I WAS PULLING a double shift and it was that slow time in the afternoon between the lunch and early supper crowd. To keep busy, because you never knew when Earl the manager would poke his fat head out the door of his office, I was filling ketchup bottles. Earl called it consolidating. We had a hollow plastic ring with threads on both ends. You put the ring on a half-full ketchup bottle, then upended another bottle on top and let it drain into the first bottle. We had only two of these rings, so it took a while to fill all thirty-five ketchup bottles at the restaurant. Sometimes, if everything was very dull, like on that afternoon, I’d balance half the bottles on the others, mouth to mouth, without the rings. The arrangement was precarious. After filling each bottle I’d wipe it clean and set it on the booth, make sure the salt, pepper, and napkin dispensers were filled up too. Then I’d either study French in my Berlitz Self-Teacher or sneak-read the paperback I had in my pocket (a little black and purple copy of The Fall by Camus) or I’d stare out the window.
That afternoon, I was doing all three things. The ketchup bottles were balanced in the back booth. I had just put down Camus and was now muttering, Je vais Paris, je vais Paris. Je n’ai jamais visit la belle capitale de la France. I was also staring out the window. So I saw Marn Peace arrive with her two children—I guessed they were hers, though I’d never seen her with children before. I knew Marn from the summer before, when she’d worked at the 4-B’s. I also knew she had married Corwin’s uncle, Billy Peace. I was just about to graduate and was working at the 4-B’s, saving money up for college.
Marn parked across the street, got out of the car, an old beat-up Chevy, and she and her children walked across the street to the 4-B’s front door. There was a stiff, spring wind and they pushed into it, hair flying, as they crossed. Marn’s hands were white and knotted and she was gripping her kids, hard, but the kids didn’t look like they minded it. They weren’t pulling away. They didn’t look punished or grim or sad, like you might expect knowing where they came from. They looked amazed, that’s what I thought. They looked like they were walking out of the funnel of a tornado. Like they couldn’t believe the things they’d seen whirling around in there. After a few moments, I went to let them in, because they were standing in front of the old wood and glass double doors, stuck, as if the sidewalk had reached up and hardened around their ankles.
When I opened the door, Marn finally grabbed the heavy brass frame beside my hand, letting the kids go in under her arm. Marn’s skin looked parched and stiff, her cheeks were knobs of bone. She was a small woman, hair the color of twine, ears sticking through the limp strands of a braid that reached nearly to her waist. She glanced at me, eyes wide—I could see the whites nearly all the way around the intense blue iris—and she made a gasping smile that showed all her long white teeth.
Later on, I thought maybe that was the way a person looks who has just murdered her husband, because there were all sorts of rumors that she had done in Billy Peace.
Marn and her children walked in and took the last booth open, farthest from the windows. I had the ketchups in the very last booth, behind them. Their table was set for four so I took one setting off. She waved away the menu and ordered three number eights, the breakfast special with steak. Well done for all of them. Coffee, orange juice, water with ice. It had been warm the day before, but turned cold and spring-raw today. They were dressed like winter and shed their coats.
“I’ll take them,” I offered, and she handed me her children’s coats but kept hers beside her on the booth bench. “I’ve got stuff in the pockets.”
I gave crayons to the kids—a boy and girl, mouse-haired and pallid but with those dark Peace eyes. They began to color the cartoon cow and chicken figures on their place mats. They set the crayons carefully aside when the food came, bowed their heads, and folded their hands in their laps. I put the plates down before them. They stayed poised like that, just waiting. Maybe they were waiting for ketchup. I grabbed a half-consolidated bottle and put it on their table. Marn picked up her fork.
“Lilith, Judah,” she said, “pick up your forks. And just eat.”
The girl picked hers up first, watching her mother closely. Then the boy did. Marn took a mouthful of hash browns. The children watched her. They forked up hash browns and placed the food between their lips, then began to chew. All of a sudden, Marn grabbed the ketchup bottle and dumped ketchup onto their plates, first the girl’s, then the boy’s, then her own. She reached over and cut up their meat with jerky, excited, little saws of her knife. She dropped the knife with a clatter and began to shovel food into her mouth. They kids started picking up speed, and soon they were hardly stopping to breathe. When the food was gone, the toast devoured down to the crumbs and last tubs of jelly, I refilled Marn’s coffee and cleared their plates. I asked Marn if she wanted her check.
“No,” she said, her thin cheeks flushed. The children sat back in the booth, stupefied and glowing. “We’re gonna have dessert.” The children’s faces became very alert.
“Really,” she said. She scanned the room and the street outside, then got up to go to the bathroom. While she was gone, I came and gave the kids menus again. They bent over the list, their mouths forming the words.
“Banana cream pie,” said the boy finally.
“You got it,” said Marn, sitting back down at the table.
“Could I have ice cream too?” the boy asked in a small voice, then looked down at his lap.
“Chocolate sundae,” said the girl. She smiled. She had big, cute bunny teeth in front.
“With nuts?” I said.
She looked blankly at her mother and Marn nodded. I went back to the kitchen and made the desserts extra big with whipped cream on top of the ice cream and maraschino cherries stuck all over the mound.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Earl, coming up behind me.
“What’s it look like?”
“Those are way too—”
Uncle Whitey said, “Get back in your office, fathead.” Now that he was related to Earl by marriage, he enjoyed insulting him.
Earl did have a big, round, white head with pasty yellow hair that he glued to one side. He tried to run things in a military way even though he’d only lasted a week in the Marines. He hated that I brought books to work and when he saw my French book, he said, suddenly enraged, “The French are pussies.”
“Take that word back,” said Whitey, “or I’ll fight you. Thou shalt not take that word in vain.”
Earl opened his mouth, but Uncle Whitey kept talking. “Besides, my niece is going to Paris. She is in love with Paris. She’s a saucy Francophile.”
Whitey thought he was so clever.
“Okay, I take back the pussy part,” said Earl. His face was red and his neck was getting thick. “
But you scrape that damn cream off there,” he said to me.
“I’ll pay for the whipped cream out of my tips.”
Often, once Earl left, we’d fry up a whole bag of popcorn shrimp and eat it. Plus I stole sugars, boxes of jelly, and especially the ketchup. I liked ketchup, hated running out. Earl couldn’t fire Whitey because Whitey had married Earl’s sister and she wouldn’t let him.
“Jesus,” said Whitey to Earl, “so what about the whipped cream? There’s no other customers. I don’t think those kids ever saw whipped cream before.”
Earl peered out the slot of a kitchen window and saw Marn. I’d forgotten that he had a crush on Marn.
“Yeah,” I said, “they’re her kids.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed, and I knew he hadn’t realized that Marn had children, either. I put the desserts on a tray and backed through the swinging doors into the restaurant. Marn was smoking a cigarette and the children were watching her with fascination, as if they had never seen their mother smoke a cigarette before.
“Voil,” I said. The kids’ eyes opened wide.
“Oh, nice,” said Marn. She looked up at me and smiled, for real now, and she had the sweetest smile, with deep shadows at the corner of her mouth. She was almost beautiful when she smiled and looked into a person’s eyes. There was something that drew you. I could see why Billy, I guess, and Earl, had crushes on her. She had a facile, tough, energetic little body.
Earl came to the booth and started offering Marn her old job back, trying to convince her, but she waved her hand and said, “You don’t have to harangue me. I’ll start whenever.” Earl drew his head back into the hump of his shoulder, almost shy. Marn said that she’d come to town looking for Coutts, the lawyer. Earl looked over at me. I decided I’d better take down the ketchup bottles before he realized I had them all subtly balanced end to end.
“I need to get my land back,” Marn said.
That’s the first we heard of it.
“What are you going to do with it?” Earl asked.
“Start a snake ranch.” Marn raised her eyebrows and tapped a cigarette smoothly from its package.
Just then the door opened, this time with a windy crack, and a heavyset blond woman in a quilted green jacket barged through, bawling, “There you are, there you are! Defilement!”
Marn threw down her cigarette, whirled, and jumped up, out of the booth. I heard her say to the children, “Bliss!” Then all of a sudden Marn was standing in the aisle of the restaurant with a steak knife in one fist. And a hammer in the other. What she’d had in her coat pocket. The children slipped underneath the table like they were practiced at evading this sort of danger. Bliss surged forward but halted when she saw the steak knife and hammer. Her skin was thick and pitted with old acne scars and her eyes and lips were swollen, red as if from weeping or a bad cold. Her coxcomb of rough, spiky hair shivered as she launched into a torrent of accusation. She lambasted Marn for murdering Billy Peace and taking money from the group. As a result, Marn was going to be struck dead by something or someone who might be Bliss herself.
“Whoa,” said Earl, planting himself, legs apart in a bravado stance, behind Marn and her tool-utensil weapons. “You’re outta line,” he told Bliss.
“Call the cops, then,” Bliss bawled. “Call the cops and dump her in the slammer too!”
“She wasn’t doing anything,” said Earl.
“I was enjoying a peaceful meal with my children,” said Marn, dancing a little on her toes. She was shedding electricity. This confrontation seemed to make her happy and it looked to me like she was ready to stick that knife right into the big woman. She was moving the point of it back and forth, as if trying to decide where it would go in easiest. Her other arm was cocked up with the hammer ready to come down. I was behind her and behind Earl, and Whitey was behind me. He’d come out to see what was going on.
“My goodness,” said Whitey. He tapped me on the shoulder and leaned close to my ear. “Marn has a kamikaze grace, don’t you think? Or would you call it catlike?”
“You have a crush on her too?”
“I’m content,” said Whitey, “with very distant admiration. Let’s stay behind Earl’s abdominals.”
Bliss paused and licked her lips. She shook her hands like she was wringing water off them. Her swollen red eyes went slitty and mean. She took a huge breath of air into her cheeks, gathering herself up, then crashed forward. She grabbed the arm with the hammer and twisted Marn’s wrist. Then she slammed Marn into Earl, who staggered backwards slowly enough so I could step aside and let him plow his ass across the booth where I had been filling the ketchup bottles. The bottles went toppling away, cracking on the table, rolling across the floor, at first with the sound of cascading glass and then with smaller sounds of movement as they continued clinking and skittering. Whitey and I edged away, against the doors, ready to bolt through. Marn had dropped the hammer but the knife had entered Bliss’s green coat under one arm and Marn was silently trying to rip it away. The serrated edges had been caught in the threads. Bliss began slamming her hands across Marn’s face and shoulders; she was speechless at first, shocked with fear probably. Then, realizing that the knife hadn’t penetrated and was hung up in the lining of her coat, she looked down, snarled, took two handfuls of Marn’s hair, and started yanking. Marn yelled in pain, pushed forward again, and this time the knife went into Bliss. It only could’ve stuck in about an inch, nowhere near a vital organ, but when Marn stepped back Bliss fell away, clutching the handle, and began to weep with desolate fervor. There was ketchup all over the floor, but only a few of the bottles had broken. I don’t think Bliss was bleeding much. You could still see the handle sticking out of the coat and most of the knife itself was even visible. As Bliss walked out the door, sobbing, we just watched her, saying nothing. She dragged herself over to a dull mustard-colored car I hadn’t seen pull up, wrenched the door open, got in, and drove away.
“A mere flesh wound,” Whitey said to me. He had shelves of crime and adventure paperbacks with sexy women on the covers wearing tight blue sweaters or low-cut red evening gowns. “But look, the aftershock of violence.”
Marn was standing in the aisle with her arms hanging limp, shaking. The kids were still underneath the table. Earl was trying to ease himself off the top of the table without knocking any more bottles off. I took a few of the bottles out of the way, setting them down carefully on another table.
“You are fired,” Earl told me shakily.
“I am not,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
“What for?”
“I told you never to balance those ketchup bottles like that again. Plus, I am fed up with your attitude.”
“Qu’est-e que c’est,” I said, “big whup.”
“You can’t fire her,” said Whitey, “not only is she a woman of grace and intellect who will go far, but you don’t have anybody else.”
“Marn said she’d work.”
“I won’t, if Evey’s fired,” said Marn. She seemed pretty much recovered and crouched down to talk to her children, who crept out from under the table, into her arms.
“Careful now,” said Marn. “Don’t touch your heads to the table bottoms, people stick gum there.”
Earl liked Marn partly because she not only cleaned off the tops of the tables, but scraped underneath at the gum and dried candy. Now she helped her children back onto the booth and settled them while I got rags and a bucket of water to wipe up the spilled ketchup. While we were doing this, a couple of people came in and I had to serve them, so I brought new coffee cups and dessert plates for Marn and Earl, because they’d sat down to make up a schedule.
One of the things I liked about the 4-B’s was the motif of B’s. There were four B’s hooked together, an old livestock brand belonging to the first owner, but there were also honeybees. Bees here, bees there, bees printed on the napkins. The waitresses wore yellow shirts with black pants or skirts, our “uniform.” I also liked that we didn’
t pool or share our tips, although that meant we bussed our own tables. At closing time, we had to mop down the floors, clean the booths, even wash the windows on slow days. We had to clean out the soda machines and maintain the bathrooms.
The restaurant had once been the National Bank of Pluto, and it was solid. The ceilings were high and the lights hung down on elegant brass fixtures fixed to decorative scalloped plaster bowls. There were brass rails along the counters and the floors were old terrazzo, the walls sheeted with marble, and in the corners there were a set of dignified marble half columns. The orange booths were set alongside the tall windows and light flooded from three sides under the old cornices.
Across from us there was a gas station and a reeking movie house that showed B movies. At times, a fake flower or decorative basket shop would spring up—some farm wife’s hopeful crafts project outlet—or a secondhand clothing store that smelled of sweat and mice would suddenly appear in an old closed-down storefront.
Marn Wolde was brooding while her kids ate a second helping of pie when Mama dropped off Mooshum. He sat down in the booth with Earl, whom he liked to annoy. Earl left. Marn’s children were so full their eyes drooped. She let them keel over in the booth. I brought their jackets for pillows, then poured out more fresh coffee. I brought Mooshum’s sour cream and raisin pie. He would usually draw a line down the middle with his knife, and we’d each eat toward the mark. But that day we shared the pie three ways, with Marn.
“I think I look French, don’t you?” I said to Marn.