Stick a Fork In It

by Robin Allen

  Troy held his belly and guffawed. “That…was…awesome.” He wiped tears of hilarity from his eyes. “The way you ran and screamed.” He made his voice high. “Nooooo! ”

  Something really must be wrong with me. Practical jokes are a rite of passage in restaurants, and with all the ones I’ve seen and perpetrated over the years, I should have at least suspected a setup. I didn’t like being humiliated so publicly, but I especially didn’t like being off my game.

  Todd caught up to us, and when he saw the look on my face, he did the right thing and stopped laughing. “Poppy Markham, meet my brother Troy, the practical joker. Troy, meet the health inspector.”

  Troy scooched himself off the stunt pillow and removed the noose from around his neck. Except for bloodshot eyes, he still looked exactly like Todd. He held up the other end of the rope. “It’s not attached to anything. I was just having some fun.” He gave me the same look he had given his girlfriends in high school, a look that said, Don’t be mad. I’m just a dumb, adorable jock. It always worked on them, and, surprisingly, it worked on me.

  “That was pretty good,” I admitted.

  “Did we get the permit?” Troy asked.

  “We need three sinks,” Todd said.

  See? They never pay attention. “You need a three-compartment sink and a separate mop sink,” I said. “Two sinks. One if you reuse—”

  “You know,” Troy said, grinning, “I remember a cute blond from high school named Poppy Markham. Would that be you?”

  Troy “the Train” Sharpe had noticed me in high school? And he thought I was cute? I felt flush again.

  “I was two years behind y’all.” My voice sounded strangely delicate. “My cousin, Daisy Green, was in your class. She’s Daisy Forrest now.”

  Troy nodded. “Right, right. Daisy.” He leaned toward me, and I pulled back from the odors of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and the same sweet cologne Todd wore. He lowered his voice. “So, Poppy, can’t you just…”

  I looked up at him, and the hard hat fell over my eyes. I pushed it back. “Can’t I just what?”

  “You know.”

  My regular voice returned. “No, I do not know.”

  But of course I knew.

  It didn’t concern Troy that the dining public might swallow hair with their hamburger or crunch on a little grime from the bathroom floor with their mozzarella sticks. He wanted me to ignore what he thought was a minor detail compared to finishing construction and earning profits.

  And then it came. And he wasn’t even subtle about it.

  “I can make it worth your while,” he said.

  “Unless you can get me a date with Keanu Reeves, there’s nothing you can do to make it worth my while.”

  Troy smiled as if a date with the star of The Matrix would be the easiest thing in the world to arrange. Before I was faced with a choice between a dream I had never outgrown since Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and keeping my oath of office, I said, “And even a date with Keanu wouldn’t do it.”

  I could feel Troy’s body temperature rise into triple digits. He balled his fists and threw his head back like a sleepy three-year-old who had been told it was bedtime. “Archer!” he bellowed. “Archer! Archer! Archer! ”

  “Right here, Troy,” Miles said, coming in from outside, through the double doors he had refused to let me enter earlier. He was followed by a lanky, dark-haired man with soft features, dressed like the twins in a red polo shirt and shorts. I didn’t need to see the name on his hard hat to know that he was another guy I had gone to high school with: Danny MacAdams.

  Danny had been in the same grade with the Sharpe twins, but he hadn’t been friends with them. The twins had mentally and physically tortured Danny for the two years I was there with them. Everyone called him Danny Dull. And now they were opening a restaurant together? An ocean’s worth of water must have passed under that bridge in the past twenty years.

  Troy crossed over the line of scrimmage, cursing a blue streak of insults I had never heard and ones I would never repeat. The inside construction workers had stopped moving as soon as Troy started yelling for Miles, but they honored their jefe by going back to work and pretending he wasn’t getting verbally flayed in front of them.

  Todd and Danny tried to calm Troy down, which turned Troy against them, too. Soon everyone became infected by Troy’s hostility, yelling over each other, pointing fingers, getting nowhere.

  “Hey!” I yelled, clapping my hands like a kindergarten teacher. They stopped bickering and swiveled gargoyled faces toward me. “It doesn’t matter whose fault this is,” I said. “You can send someone over to CapTex Restaurant Supply and get a three-compartment sink. If it’s installed by the time I’m finished with the rest of the inspection, you can have your permit. Assuming everything else passes.”

  Miles, who’d had the most fingers pointed at him, said, “Done.”

  Troy looked at him. “Done,” he mimicked. “You said ‘done’ yesterday.” He swatted away the hand Todd put on his shoulder. “‘Everything but the second floor,’ you said. ‘You can open tomorrow as far as I’m concerned,’ you said. I’ve got a photographer here right now, food vendors coming tomorrow, and—”

  “I’ll handle it,” Danny cut in.

  “You do that,” Troy said. He pulled a red box from his wrinkled shorts and jerked his hand up to eject a cigarette. He pointed a final hard finger at Miles. “June eleventh, Archer. June freakin’ eleventh.”

  “I’ll go get them sinks right now,” Miles said, then took off.

  Troy put a flame to his cigarette. Danny blew it out. “Jeez, Troy!” he cried, gesturing to the welders. “They’re using propane in here.”

  Danny hadn’t been fast enough, and Troy answered by unloading both nostrils of smoke into Danny’s face. I sneezed like I always do at my first whiff of cigarette smoke. Troy said “Bless you,” but I could tell he didn’t mean it. Then he walked past us toward the kitchen.

  Todd gave Danny a look that could have been either an apology or a challenge, and he was about to say something when Miles came back.

  “What now?” Todd said.

  Miles put his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor. “I need money.”

  “Cripes, Archer!” Todd said. “Charge it to our account like you always do.”

  Miles looked up. “It’s like this, Todd. Last time I was in there, Jesse said we were cash-and-carry.”

  That’s a harsh burden for a fledgling business. It meant that they had somehow ruined both their credit and their good will with the vendor. Ruining credit is easy to do: don’t pay your bills. But ruining good will with Jesse Muñoz? The man who encourages restaurants to trade in their old ovens and stovetops so he can refurbish and donate them to at-risk youth programs? That’s hard to do.

  “Since when?” Danny asked.

  “Must’ve been last week, when I went to get a microwave. Paid for it with my own cash money.”

  “Why am I hearing about this now?” Todd demanded.

  “I figured y’all knew,” Miles said.

  Todd took a deep breath, then shook out both hands as if he had washed them but didn’t have a towel to dry them. I remembered him doing that on the football field while he waited for a play to start. I always thought he was flashing his assets to the other team.

  “Come on,” Todd said to Miles, heading through the kitchen doors.

  “Sorry about that,” Danny said to me after they left.

  “Forget about it,” I said. “If you’re opening on June freakin’ eleventh, you’ve got plenty of time.”

  He grunted. “Twelve days. We still don’t have our liquor license, and we just now decided on a chef.” He looked toward the kitchen door that both Sharpes had passed through. “We need about four weeks to get the restaurant finished out and the rest
of the staff hired, but Troy won’t budge on the date.”

  “What’s so special about June eleventh?” I asked.

  I watched Danny debate with himself whether to tell me. Good grief! So what if that date was the twins’ birthday or the anniversary of the first time they ran Danny’s tighty whities up the flagpole.

  “I signed a confidentiality agreement, Danny.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Paranoid freak.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Troy coming up with that stupid agreement. I told him we need to tell everyone about this place—give interviews, get some buzz going—but he wants to keep it a secret as long as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks there are roving bands of restaurateurs waiting to pounce on his idea.”

  “What does that have to do with June eleventh?”

  Danny’s eyes darted around the dining room. “He’ll kill me if it leaks out.”

  “I understand.” I pulled a rubber glove out of my backpack and snapped it onto my right hand with a calculated flourish. Danny flinched. “I’ll be in the kitchen finishing that part of my inspection,” I said.

  “I guess I could tell you.”

  I pushed the hard hat back and looked at him. “Only if you want to.”

  “I’d like to know what you think, actually. Todd and Troy are crazy, and this whole idea seemed cockamamie when they first told me about it. They have this way of making you buy whatever they’re selling…I don’t know what’s normal anymore.”

  A rev-up like that was sure to crash at the end. I waited for him to tell me that they were fusing Italian fare with Hawaiian cuisine to come up with Pineapple Pasta Primavera and Coconut Manicotti, which would make a certain kind of sense if they had only recently decided on a chef. That’s what happens when amateurs set a menu without the help of a professional.

  I beckoned with my gloved fingers. “Unburden yourself, Danny.”

  He took a deep breath, then said, “June eleventh is the day Timothy McVeigh was executed.”

  “The Oklahoma City bomber?”

  Danny started pacing. “I told those guys the date was too much, but they blew me off like they always do. And now Troy wants to serve nothing but mint chocolate-chip ice cream on opening night…”

  I tried to make something of what he said, but I couldn’t even locate tab A to insert into slot B. “Are we still talking about the restaurant?”

  Danny stopped in front of me. “Didn’t they tell you about our concept?”

  “Todd told me you’re serving comfort food.”

  “In a way.”

  “What way?”

  “We’re serving the last meals of death row inmates.”

  I looked around at the cinder block walls, the catwalk, the high fence visible through the open doorway. “And this is a prison,” I said.

  Danny started pacing again. “It was just going to be the waiters dressed up as prisoners and guards, you know. Toy guns that shoot ketchup and mustard. But then Troy got that stuntman pillow so we could do hourly hanging executions. Once he got going, he decided to bring in gurneys and syringes, put in a firing squad shooting gallery for the kids. Add a gift shop, except he wants to call it a gift chamber and fill it with dry ice. Like a Hard Rock Café for death. Every day he comes up with some demented new idea.” He pointed to the far side of the room. “See those crates over there? It’s an electric chair. It’s been sitting for a month because none of Archer’s guys will touch it.” He wrapped a hand around his forehead. “We’re bleeding money and behind schedule, but Troy…”

  Venting had reddened his face and warmed him up. He took off his hard hat and fanned himself with it. “What do you think?” he asked.

  I could only tell him the truth. “I think it’s sick and twisted, and—”

  Danny pushed me. “Look out!”

  A hammer landed where we had been standing, taking a bite out of the concrete floor. I looked up at the catwalk but saw no one.

  “Happens all the time,” Danny said. “That’s why we wear these.” He knocked on his hard hat, then put it back on his head.

  Death row inmates, prison cells, fake suicides, and now a hammer almost carving out a pound of my flesh. No wonder I had felt creeped out earlier. I adjusted my hard hat. “How about I see the bathrooms now.”

  Danny pointed across the dining room. “Cell block D, next to the elevators. They’re not working, so you’ll have to take the stairwell in the wait station to the ones on the second floor.”

  I started across the room, then thought better of being out in the open and stayed under the shelter of the catwalk. I passed by a worker standing a few inches from the wall. He was using an awl to scratch graffiti into the cinder blocks, referring to a piece of paper on a clipboard. I read “Im inoccent” and “I dint do it.” He had gouged tick marks to count off the days.

  So I was wrong. This was something new under the sun.

  I started with the downstairs women’s room, which looked more interesting than the rest of the place, if you find white porcelain toilets and matching sinks interesting. I always turn on the hot water at each sink and then flush the toilets to check that they work, and to draw cold water out of the pipes to send the hot water out faster. Except there was no water. Not in the men’s room, either.

  Strange, because the kitchen and the bathrooms usually share a plumbed wall, and the water had worked in the kitchen. Hadn’t it? Before performing any inspection I wash my hands and put on gloves, but my bandaged hand is a burden to wash, so I may have skipped it. I couldn’t remember. Todd shadowing my every move had me flustered and forgetful. And after the flashback situation in front of the walk-in, I was almost willing to believe I hadn’t checked the water. If the water on the first floor wasn’t working, the second floor wouldn’t be working either, so I saved myself a trip upstairs and went to tell the boys the bad news.

  three

  When I came out of the bathroom, I saw Troy standing in the center of the dining room, talking to two of the construction workers. As I approached them, he took a swig of something in a green bottle. Ten o’clock in the morning, and he was drinking beer.

  “Excuse me, Troy,” I said.

  “There’s Poppy!” he exclaimed, as if he had been looking for me. He turned to the two guys who had followed Miles outside when I first arrived. “Do you know Poppy?”

  They looked at him.

  They may not even know English.

  “Poppy, this is Rudy and Mingo. Rudy and Mingo, this is Poppy.”

  We smiled hello, then I said, “I inspected the bathrooms, and there’s no water.”

  “Rudy and Mingo are going to be our drivers,” Troy said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Rudy’s the fastest, aren’t you, Rudy? Mucho zoom-zoom.”

  Rudy nodded.

  “You can have Mingo,” Troy said to me.

  “What if I don’t want Mingo?” If he wasn’t going to make sense, then I didn’t have to either.

  Troy waved his hand around the restaurant. “Then pick one of the other guys.”

  “I want Rudy,” I said.

  Troy drained his beer. “Negative. Rudy is my driver.”

  “If I can’t have Rudy, then I’m going to finish my inspection.”

  “Okay,” Troy said. “You can have Rudy.” He pulled a walkie-talkie from his waistband. “Eight to eighty-eight. Come in, eighty-eight.”

  “Eighty-eight here,” came Todd’s response.

  “Me and Mingo against Poppy and Rudy,” Troy said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  Danny shot through the kitchen door. “No way, Troy!” He forced long strides across the room. “They have too much work to do.”

 
; “What are you talking about?” I asked again.

  Todd had been right behind Danny through the doors. “Danny’s right, bro, so just one lap.”

  “These guys are getting paid double because of the holiday,” Danny said.

  I’d had success with shouting and hand-clapping earlier, so I did it again. They looked at me. “What are y’all talking about?”

  Troy handed his empty bottle to Danny. “Go get me another one,” he said, then turned to me. “Over here.”

  With all the talk of drivers and laps, I thought Troy would take me out to his car, but everyone headed toward cell block C in the back of the dining room. I suspected another practical joke, but curiosity wouldn’t let me stay behind. He wouldn’t get me this time, though.

  Troy rolled two long silver tables away from the wall, then patted one. “Hop on.”

  “A gurney race?” I asked.

  Troy pointed to the floor, where two lanes had been lined out with bright blue painter’s tape, dirty and missing in some places. The track went in an oval all the way around the room.

  “Outside lane gets a two-length head start,” Troy said. He pulled a quarter from his pocket and flipped it into the air. “Call it.”

  What I should have said was “You’re crazy and I need to get back to work.” But I felt the pressure of dozens of eyes on me and said, “Tails.”

  The quarter landed at Todd’s feet. “You won,” he said to me. “Inside or outside?”

  I looked at Rudy and pointed to the floor. “Afuera,” he said. Outside? That was interesting. Wait, what was I doing?

  Danny returned from the bar and handed an open beer to Troy. “One lap,” he said, “then everyone gets back on task.”

  Troy brought the beer to his lips and leaned his head back, guzzling half of it. “Two laps,” he said. He wiped chin dribbles on his sleeve, then held up peace fingers to Rudy and Mingo. “Dos lapos.”

  Danny crossed his arms over his chest, possibly to restrain himself from punching Troy in the throat, but he didn’t say anything. Even I knew that the number of laps in the race would increase with every protest Danny made.