Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Shake, ordering one sardines.”

  “One sardines.”

  “G, ordering one pork, one bunny.”

  “One pork, one bunny … you mean there’s a table that doesn’t want redfish? I can’t believe it,” said G-man. “Whenever a ticket comes in, I just automatically reach for that redfish.”

  One of the runners, a Tulane exchange student named Hedo, came in with a load of salad plates. “Chef, this is table three.”

  Alerted by the two extra words, Rickey stopped what he was doing and turned to examine the plates. Three were clean or nearly so. The fourth, which had held a green salad, was still half full of lettuce. Rickey used a tasting spoon to poke through it until he found a large, untorn, partly wilted segment of radicchio. “Matt!” he said.

  “Yes, Chef!”

  Rickey walked over to the salad station and dropped the oily radicchio segment in the center of his youngest cook’s workspace. “When you order a salad, do you want to eat something that looks like that?”

  Matt nudged the offending segment to the far edge of his cutting board and used a side towel to wipe the spot where it had landed. “I guess not,” he said.

  “You guess not? You wanna try it and tell me how it tastes?”

  “No thanks,” said Matt, plating tomatoes even as Rickey dogged him.

  “Well, if you don’t want to eat it, then don’t serve it, OK? Please? Is that reasonable?”

  “Yes, Chef. Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t tell me sorry,” said Rickey, returning to the expediting station. “Just sort the goddamn greens before you put ’em on the plate.”

  “Jeez,” said Matt under his breath.

  “Hey, he’s right,” said Shake, who was working next to him. “Nobody wants to eat brown lettuce.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You doing OK, kid?”

  “Yeah. I just feel kinda out of my depth.”

  “You are,” said Shake, not unkindly. “But you’ll learn. Besides, everybody hates doing salads.”

  Matt finished arranging the layer of tomato slices, made a ring of pickled onions on top of them, and topped that with a spoonful of cranberry beans. He garnished this vivid red plate with a small bunch of bright green pea shoots. Shake reached over to Matt’s station for a handful of baby greens, sauced his plate, and laid three marinated sardines on the yellow pool of sauce.

  Rickey made six amuses of cured salmon, crème fraîche, and asparagus tips. “Yo, Hedo,” he said as the runner came back in, “take four of these to table three and tell them we’re sorry about the problem with their salad. Take the others to five.”

  “Yes, Chef.”

  On his next trip to the kitchen, Hedo said, “Chef, the couple at table five keep talking about their meal. Like—” He made a scissoring gesture at his belly. Hedo was from Turkey, and his English was almost perfect, but sometimes a word escaped him. “What do you call it when you cut up a dead person?”

  “Dissecting?”

  “Yes. They are dissecting their meal. I think they must be food writers.”

  “Oh my God,” said Rickey. “I hope not. We’re doing good, but we’re not at the top of our game yet.” Over at the cold-pantry station, Matt winced, certain that these words were meant for him.

  The people at table five were lying back in their chairs groaning over how much they’d eaten when Rickey came to their table. He’d always been slightly scornful of chefs who left their stations to go swanning around the dining room, but now he could see the point of this behavior. People loved it when the chef came to their table. It made them feel coddled, and some of them acted like they’d just met a rock star.

  “Hope you folks are enjoying yourselves,” he said. He’d settled on this phrase as a way of expressing interest without seeming to fish for compliments.

  “It was excellent,” said the lady. “Thank you for serving fresh sardines. I wish we saw them more often.”

  “Very fine rabbit dish,” said the man. “The best I’ve ever had, I think.”

  “Thanks. I really appreciate hearing that.” What the hell, Rickey decided; he’d ask them the question that had brought him out here. “So y’all are writers?”

  The man snorted with laughter. The lady smiled as if she rather liked the idea. “Not at all,” she said. “Whatever made you think so?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Rickey, reluctant to blame Hedo for gossiping about them. “Somebody said something about writers coming in tonight. I thought it might be you.”

  “Sorry, no. We’ll be regular customers, definitely, but I’m afraid we can’t write you up. I don’t think you’d want our endorsement anyway.”

  “How come? What do you do?”

  “He’s a poet,” said the lady, “and I’m the coroner of New Orleans.”

  Rickey was a little pissed off when he returned to the kitchen. He was certain the lady had been pulling his leg, and though he couldn’t see the point of it, it seemed vaguely condescending. Some people just assumed that cooks were stupid; they thought cooking was menial, uneducated labor. But why would you want to make fun of somebody who’d just cooked you a nice meal? It didn’t make sense.

  “What’s the matter?” asked G-man.

  “Aw, some lady out there was fucking with me. I asked her and her husband what they did for a living, and she said she was the coroner of New Orleans.”

  “What’d she look like?” asked Tanker, who had come up to the cold-pantry station to help Matt with the salads. “Kinda small, kinda cute, red hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That is the coroner of New Orleans. You wouldn’t think it by looking at her, but I seen her on TV.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Damn,” said Rickey. “Gross.” He hadn’t liked it when he thought the lady was making fun of him, but he wasn’t sure he preferred having the actual coroner at his restaurant. How could she eat a piece of pork after cutting up dead bodies all day?

  “It’s a job,” said G-man. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  “I guess,” said Rickey dubiously.

  “Whatcha gonna do otherwise?” said Shake. “Just let the bodies pile up?”

  “I hope she orders the Napoleon death mask for dessert,” said Tanker.

  “What’s she want to do that for?” said Shake. “She’s already gotta look at stuff like that all day. She doesn’t want to eat it.”

  “She ate pork, didn’t she? I heard human flesh tastes just like pork.”

  “You guys are a bunch of morbid fucks,” said Rickey. “Shit. I wish they would’ve been food writers.”

  “You said we weren’t ready for food writers yet,” G-man reminded him.

  “I don’t know if we are. But at least then I wouldn’t have to listen to all this crap about dead bodies.”

  “Don’t be so squeamish,” said Tanker. “We’re just like her. We work with dead bodies every day.” He leaned over to Shake’s station and picked up a slice of terrine on a plate. “Look, Rickey, this pig died for you, and you cooked him and ground him up—”

  “Leave me alone, you sick bastard. Get back to your station. I think I hear their dessert order coming in.”

  Tanker walked back to his nook and pulled the ticket off his machine. Disappointment spread over his face.

  “A Margarita and a Fuzzy Navel,” he said. “What a waste. She would’ve loved my Napoleon head.”

  For the fifth or sixth time tonight, Sid Schwanz picked up a drink menu, folded it lengthwise, ran his thumbnail along the resulting crease, and put it back on the bar. The tic was driving Mo crazy.

  “So what’s this Irish Channel Cocktail?” he asked.

  As she had done when Schwanz asked her about the Broad Street Julep, the Ninth Ward Iced Tea, and the Rising Sun, Mo restrained herself from pointing out that the drink’s ingredients were listed on the menu. “Whiskey, crème de menthe, and green Chartreuse,” she said.

  “Whoo! You manage to
drink one a’them, you ought to get one for free!”

  In the week Liquor had been open, Schwanz had already visited the bar four times, twice with obnoxious friends from the racetrack. As far as Mo knew, he hadn’t eaten anything except bar snacks. They were high-end bar snacks—spicy mixed nuts, crab and bacon toasts, homemade cheese straws—and he could put away a lot of them as he stood there soaking up his Maker’s Mark and ginger ale. And he was constantly, clumsily flirting with her. She’d been bartending for years, so this was nothing new, but her heart sank a little every time she remembered that this man was entitled to drink here free for a whole year.

  “Hey,” she said, hoping to distract Schwanz from the drink list, “what’s the deal with this Red Gravy Murder you’re not supposed to write about?”

  “Aw, I don’t know if I oughta tell you that.”

  “Sure you can. I’m the bartender. No one’s allowed to keep a secret from me.”

  “Well, it’s funny you should ask, cause I just happened to look it up in the morgue recently.”

  “The morgue?” Jesus, maybe this guy was weirder than she’d thought.

  “That’s what they call the archives at the newspaper. I looked up the story on microfilm. Not that I’m gonna write anything about it, a’course, but I been hanging out here a lot and I got to thinking about it. Place used to be here was called Giambucca’s, one of these old-style red-gravy joints. You’re too young to remember it—you can’t be more than, what? Twenty-two?”

  “I’m twenty-nine.”

  “Damn! I wouldn’t believe you if you didn’t have an honest face. Well, Giambucca’s was owned by a couple guys who worked for the Marcello family—not real Marcellos, just small-time hoods. The victim was a manager, name of George Mouton. I feel kinda sorry for the guy—he loved the ponies, like me. Except he loved them a little bit too much, thought he could pick a sure thing, started skimming money out the till and blowing it at the Fair Grounds.”

  “That was stupid.”

  “Yeah, but the ponies’ll get their hooks in you if you’re not careful. Say, did I ever tell you how I got this limp?”

  “Yes,” said Mo hastily. She had already heard the story twice, complete with Schwanz’s toenails turning black and falling off. “What happened to the manager? Mouton, was that his name?”

  “George Mouton. Owners found out he was stealing from them, took him in the cooler one night, shot him in the knees—blam! blam! and he’s writhing around bleeding and hollering for mercy—and then shot him in the head. Twice. The Mob always puts two bullets in your brain, just to make sure.”

  “Jesus.” Mo pictured the immaculate walk-in with its neat rows of crates and Lexans. “Are you sure that’s where it happened?”

  “That’s what the stories said. Makes sense to me. It’s soundproof.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Mo. She felt a little sick.

  “Hey, darling, all this talk’s making me real thirsty. How’s about another Horse’s Neck?”

  “Coming right up,” Mo said wearily.

  It was an uneventful night. Schwanz stayed until just after eleven; Karl seated about a hundred and twenty-five people. Mo closed out the bar at midnight. In the process of restocking for the next day, she went to refill her caddies with cocktail napkins and Liquor’s signature swizzle sticks, which were topped with little martini glasses. They came from a Texas novelty company in smaller batches than any other swizzles she’d ever used, but she was still surprised to see that she had already gone through a box. That was a lot of drinks.

  She went in the back to get more, but first she wanted to tell Rickey she’d used up a whole box. “He was getting ready to write up tomorrow’s orders,” said G-man. “He’s probably in the walk-in.”

  Sure enough, she found him back there with his clipboard. “Cool,” he said when she told him about the sticks.

  Mo glanced around the inside of the refrigerator. “So this is where they killed George Mouton?”

  Rickey’s reaction was not overtly startling. He just straightened up from reading the number on a box and looked at her. But she’d always found his eyes a little unnerving anyway—they were the bluest she’d ever seen, turquoise really, and not just intense but slightly mad. The expression in them now made Mo take a couple of steps back.

  “What did you say?”

  “C’mon, Rickey, everybody knows about the murder—”

  “Not that. What did you say his name was?”

  “Sid Schwanz told me it was George Mouton.”

  “Mouton? Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  Rickey appeared to zone out for a few seconds. “That’s right,” he said, apparently talking to himself, “he told me he couldn’t remember the guy’s name. He must have looked it up since then. Mouton. But it doesn’t mean—no. It couldn’t be. My luck’s not that shitty.” He shook his head as if to collect himself, then looked back at Mo. “Is Schwanz still here?”

  “No. We’re closed, Rickey.”

  “I guess I can call him at the paper tomorrow,” said Rickey, not listening. “Or ask Anthony B. He might remember.”

  “What’s this about, anyway? It happened more than twenty years ago. You didn’t know the guy, did you?”

  “No … no, I didn’t know him.” Some of the blaze went out of Rickey’s eyes. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you some other time, OK?”

  “Absolutely,” said Mo, and beat a hasty retreat. She had no desire to stay back here in the cold with the ghost and the crazy man.

  “There’s lots of people named Mouton,” said G-man. “And even if he was related to Mike, what difference does it make?”

  “I don’t want to be tied to him. I don’t want that connection.”

  “What connection? It doesn’t tie us to Mike. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “In his mind it would,” said Rickey. “I bet he already knows.”

  They were on their way to the Apostle Bar to see if Anthony B knew anything about the identity of the murdered man. G-man considered this a useless quest, but he knew Rickey would obsess about it until he found out one way or the other.

  “Maybe Mo heard wrong anyway,” he said. “Maybe Schwanz said something else.”

  “She was sure it was Mouton. I asked her.”

  “I bet you did. You probably scared her half to death—she probably agreed with you so you’d leave her alone.”

  “Let’s just ask Anthony.”

  Anthony was tending bar when they walked in. A pair of men with their names stitched on their shirt pockets were playing darts in the back, but otherwise they had the place to themselves.

  “Awright, y’all!” said Anthony. “Hey, I’m sorry I ain’t been in to eat yet, but I gave Laura a week off while we’re slow. I’m gonna try to make it Sunday.”

  “What was the name of the guy that got killed in our restaurant?” said Rickey without preamble.

  “You know, I was trying to remember that awhile back, but I—”

  “Was it Mouton?”

  “Yeah! Yeah, that’s it. His people are still in town. In fact, I thought you worked with one of ’em … his nephew, maybe?”

  Rickey walked over to one of the tables and sat down. For a moment, hoping against hope, G-man thought he might take it calmly. Then he said, “Why can’t I ever do any goddamn thing without some fucked-up shit happening?” With that, he slumped across the table and folded his arms over his head.

  G-man turned to Anthony, who looked stricken. “I didn’t mean to do nothing,” Anthony said. “He asked me.”

  Fifty years ago, New Orleans East was a swamp. Thirty years ago it was a prosperous family neighborhood. With the Louisiana oil bust it had begun to crumble. Now it was scented with the synthetic slime of the shipyards, plants, and waste disposal facilities that had sprung up near the Industrial Canal.

  Mike had a forty-dollar room at the Paradise Motor Court on Chef Menteur Highway. He had bounced around other, similar places since he
left his apartment two weeks ago, but he intended to keep the room at the Paradise as long as he could. Short of setting fire to the rooms, no one cared what you did there.

  Right now he was sitting on a stinking sofa in what once must have functioned as someone’s living room. Several mattresses on the floor were occupied by people who ignored each other. The coffee table was strewn with plastic bags, loose currency, an automatic pistol, and a silver tray heaped with white powder. A baby wailed somewhere in the house, low and monotonous, as if used to crying unattended.

  Mike couldn’t have said exactly what the sofa smelled of. There was a piss element; there were ghosts of the chemical-smelling smoke produced by burning cocaine; there was old food and beer. But there were other things too, things he could not identify and didn’t really want to.

  “How many you want?” asked the skinny white man sitting on the other side of the coffee table. His head was badly shaved, with little nicks and gouges all over the scalp, and one of his front teeth was missing.

  “How much can I get for five hundred?”

  “I can give you seven for five hundred.”

  “The other guy gave me eight last week,” Mike whined.

  “The other guy ain’t here no more. You want ’em or not?”

  Mike gave the man the $500 cash advance he’d drawn from his credit card, stashed his purchase, and drove back to the Paradise. There he took out a cheap hand mirror and dumped a generous amount of cocaine onto its surface. The powder was yellowish-white and smelled faintly of petroleum—these people out East never had the really good stuff—but to Mike’s eyes it sparkled like precious jewels.

  He snorted it greedily and felt the prickling rush spread through him, starting between his shoulder blades, working its way up the back of his neck and down through his bowels. He looked over at the little pile of as-yet untouched glas-sine bags on the dresser and bestowed a tender smile upon them. It was the only sight he still found beautiful: a bag of cocaine that belonged solely to him, that he didn’t have to share with anybody.

  It was eleven o’clock Friday morning and Rickey was making a batch of mirepoix. Matt usually did the mirepoix later in the day, but there was something weirdly soothing about cutting carrots, celery, and onions into millions of infinitesimal pieces. At least, there was until he had almost finished. Then he used the back of his knife to clear a pile of minced onions from his workspace, and the blade scraped against the steel countertop. It made a sound like a razor being dragged across a mirror, which reminded him of Mike, not that he needed reminding.