**********
Carl burst through the kitchen door with cane in hand, startling Elaine enough to make her jump. Tasia didn’t seem at all bothered by Carl’s dramatic entrance, but of course she’d seen it all before. Vic had captured his brother’s full attention, and that was good news for everyone else in the room.
Slinking over to the kitchen table like uninvited vermin, Carl snatched the vodka bottle away from his brother and regarded it suspiciously. “Who gave this to you?” he demanded, looking right at Tasia.
“Well, I took the liberty of retrieving that myself,” Vic told him, rubbing his mouth and staring at the alcohol as if he’d do just about anything to get it back again.
“I told you to stay out of my liquors,” Carl said, shoving the half-filled bottle right in Tasia’s face. “Put this back where you found it.” As she reached out to take the bottle, he held it so tight that she wasn’t able to take it out of his hands. That stunt forced her to look at him in an effort to try and figure out his intentions. Body language was a common form of communication between those two. The rest of the world needed Cliffs notes to follow. A lot was going on there, Elaine could see it in their eyes, but the subject was too taboo to mention. Everything that happened between them was a riddle, as if complication was a prerequisite to participate. No one dared to touch that fire for fear of losing a hand.
Finally, Carl allowed Tasia to take the liquor. Everyone knew he had a score to settle with her over her newfound preoccupation with Zach, and it was just a matter of time before he came to collect on the debt. And it seemed as if that time was today.
“Yes, sir,” Tasia said, turning to leave the room. Stopping short, she almost ran into a man who was standing on the other side of the door. He surprised her at first, but her alarm mellowed after she recognized him. His dark eyes scoured her face like a cleaning pad. If Elaine had been standing where Tasia was right now, his looking that way would’ve scared the hell out of her. But Tasia took it all in stride by saying a very polite, “Excuse me,”and then electing to walk around him rather than ask him to step aside.
As the mountain of a man came inside the kitchen, he closed the door behind him. At least six-foot-five, his shoulders were muscular and broad, like someone who enjoyed lifting weights. Standing behind the boss with his arms folded, he was almost like Carl’s shadow: dark, brooding, and about as quiet as a corpse. Elaine observed him carefully, from his curly black hair down to his noteworthy size-seventeen shoes. His features were sharp and his brow narrow, like one’s interpretation of the Grim Reaper. The automatic pistol he had tucked under his jacket was his scythe.
This lanky fellow seemed to feed off the evil emanating from Carl. He had to be the John Linton to whom Tasia had referred. It was spooky to realize that a person of John’s size and stature could have gone about so stealthily that she’d never even noticed him until this moment. John glanced away from Vic and looked right at her. Catching her staring, he took particular pleasure in playing his mystical ambiance to the hilt. She couldn’t look away fast enough.
Carl started pacing, one of his hands tucked inside a pocket while the other held onto a cane, which he pressed hard into the floor as he passed. A grin almost encircled his nose. “I have a whole case of vodka for you,” he told his brother Vic.
Walking over to the broom closet, Carl pulled out a large crate which held at least twenty bottles. Sitting on top of it and then folding his arms, he watched with sick humor as his brother drooled. “I’m going to let you have all of this, and you can drink yourself to death if you want to.”
Vic snapped to attention as Carl patted the crate rather enticingly. “What do I have to do?” he asked as he focused on the prize before him.
Carl pointed down at the floor with his cane and said, “I want you to crawl for a start.”
“You mean, you want me to get down on my hands and knees?” he asked, his index finger pointing out a trench in the floor.
“That’s right.”
Glancing over his shoulder at Elaine for a moment, Vic shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“There are twenty bottles in here, Vic. Twenty, eighty-proof bottles right here.” Carl patted the crate again.
The old drunk thought about that as he rubbed his dry lips. Peering over at Elaine with a face filled with shame, he said, “I want her to leave first.”
“Oh, no, no. I want her to stay. It makes this all more interesting, don’t you think?”
“For some of us,” Vic said, managing a bit of humor while in such a mortifying situation. It was obvious that Vic was used to satisfying his brother’s insatiable desire to humiliate people, but probably never in front of anyone else besides John. A larger audience seemed to be a new, embarrassing addition to Carl’s arsenal of tricks.
“Crawl over to that young lady and lick the bottom of her shoes,” Carl said between bursts of snickering. Even John joined in.
“Come on! I’m not going to do that.”
“If you want these bottles, you’ll do it.”
While thinking it over, Vic glanced at Elaine. The temptation must’ve been too great, for he fell to his knees and began the trek over to her. He didn’t hesitate to grab one of her feet. Staring at her shoe, he finally said, “Thank God you keep your shoes well brushed, my dear,” as he looked up at her with an unusually dignified smile. Even so, she could see that he was crying. Quickly kissing her shoe, he couldn’t seem to stand up fast enough.
“Oh, no, no, no! I said the bottom of her shoe!”
“Come on, Carl,” Vic said, a whining, sibling-like quality to his voice this time. “Enough is enough!”
“I said the bottom of her shoe, and I meant it.”
Vic’s usual joviality crumbed, and a glint of anger snuffed out what little self-respect he had left. He seemed willing to do just about anything for alcohol and yet was frustrated by the fact that he had to do it in front of a woman.
For awhile, Vic looked ready to get up and call the whole thing off. Elaine was praying that he would. Instead, he grabbed her foot again and raised it to his lips. If he didn’t have the guts to stop this insanity, she sure did. She pulled her foot out of his hands and stepped back. “Why don’t you kiss Mr. Kastenmeier’s shoe?” she suggested, looking over at the boss’s exuberant visage. “Mine isn’t available to you, sir.”
“Let him have your shoe,” Carl told her.
“No,” she said flatly, and then waited for that old standby, ‘You’re fired!’ to come screaming past those well-formed lips of his. It surprised her when silence ensued instead, followed by a round of laughter.
“Not to worry, old chum,” Carl told Vic. “I’ll let you have this crate anyway and everything that goes with it.”
Looking suspicious, Vic wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “No fooling?” he asked, and so Carl shook his head.
“No fooling, old man.” He stood away from the bottles as a gesture of goodwill. Vic beat it over to the crate and started tearing it open. It was nailed shut, but he used his hands anyway. Elaine winced when she saw him scratching and clawing at the wood so much that the skin on his hands and arms started ripping and tearing. Some of his fingernails were bent back and bleeding. Splinters dotted the underside of his arms like protruding freckles.
“Hey, watch my tiles!” Carl said as Vic’s manhandling of the crate started it reeling across the floor. “Let me assist you, dear brother.” Carl retrieved a crowbar from the broom closet and peeled off the top of the box. Diving inside, Vic snatched up a bottle in each fist. The old sot looked happy, extremely happy, but soon his trills of joy ceased and his smile faded. Carl watched him carefully, as if studying the innards of a good book.
“What the hell?” Vic said, looking away from the bottles and staring at his brother as if he’d lost his only friend.
“What’s wrong?” Carl asked, snickering again.
Vic threw the bottles to the floor and they broke into hundreds of pieces. Elaine put h
er hands up to protect her face from the flying glass. Reaching into the box, he took out another bottle, and then another, and still another, throwing each to the floor one after the other. It didn’t take the poor man long to come to one startling conclusion. “They’re all empty!”
“You didn’t think I’d waste good liquor on you, did you?” Carl said.
“Son of a bitch!” Vic said, rushing at Carl in an attempt to tackle him. Elaine screamed as she drew back, turning away from the violence.
The sound of scrambling feet, a bloodcurdling thud, and kitchenware clanging against the floor like a hard rain forced her to look again. John, who’d been watching from a distance, had wrestled Vic to the floor and was shoving his nose and left cheek flush against the hand-painted broccoli spears on the tiles. Vic’s nose was bleeding, and his face was being cut by some of the broken glass. He kept saying, “Owww! Owww!” over and over again. The sound of his voice against the floor seemed to magnify it, hurting Elaine’s sensitive ears.
Without prompting, Carl stood away from his brother and faced Elaine. She felt so inconsequential, so small with him staring down at her that way. But that was exactly how he wanted her to feel.
“As for you…” he told her, folding his arms and looking quite miffed, “…I think you should do as you’re told in the future, or out you go!”
“Sir?” she said, not really sure of what he was talking about with all that had transpired.
“When I tell you to let this vagabond lick the soles of your shoes, by God you’d better let him do it!” Snatching a spool of red thread from his coat pocket, he ripped off a piece so long, it almost touched the floor. He grabbed Elaine’s hand and tied the thread around her left index finger. The thread was so tight, she could feel the blood coursing through her veins as it squeezed past the pressure.
Carl’s annoyed countenance grew smug as he said, “You’ll wear that thread and like it, or out you go! And I’ll take it off when I’m good and ready. If you touch it, you’re fired! Do I make myself clear?” His breath felt hot on her face and smelled stale, smothering what was left of the stench of sweat and Vic’s strong body odor.
“Very clear, sir,” she said.
“If we ever have this conversation again, you’ll be out on your ass.”