by N. Godwin
“Family?” I sputter. “I figured you were spawn like a fungus.”
“Ah, woman, I love it when you talk dirty to me,” Rawly sighs leaning his elbows against the counter as everyone laughs.
“You look magnificent in red. Doesn’t she, men?
”The SEALS nod and give me different greetings. “Hello Goddess!”
“Give him your best shot!” one I recognize from the 4th insists. His nametag says Edwards.
Bull!” the tall one named Washington argues in my direction. “Go easy on him. He’s been killing us and we need a break!”
“Where are we in the pool anyway?” another asks.
“No one’s decided yet,” Edward says as the whole café shakes from the thunder and lightning outside and the lights flicker and threaten to go out.
I busy myself making burgers as Rawly sits down at the table nearest my register with some of his men. I turn around and look and they’re all grinning at me as if they know some big secret I’m not privy to, and I look heavenward and wonder why Rawly has ordered all his men to eat here tonight? I recognize another face, and another …and another. Come to think of it they all look familiar…
It dawns on me suddenly that all of SEAL Team 6 got to see me with my top off on the 4th! I turn back to the grill and can quickly feel myself flushing from head to toe. God! That would explain all their grins!
Kelly walks timidly over to Rawly’s table, order pad and pencil in hand even though she can’t write yet. “Ain’t—aren’t serving anything but salads, gumbo, chicken and dumplings, and boiled shrimp tonight cause it’s raining and nobody wants to work the grills and fryers for long,” she tells them softly.
“She’s making hamburgers.” Rawly point over to me.
“Not for you, sailor boy,” Andrea tells him breezing by his table. “Bet you fifty bucks.”
“Aw, man!” half his troop moans. “We hear you’ve got the best cheeseburgers in the county!” another says.
“What about you then, Andrea?” Rawly asks.
“Ugh!”
“She’s got her period,” Kelly informs the SEALS as I cringe and their table erupts in laughter.
I move towards Kelly quickly. I can see her lips trembling. I can see Rawly reaching out gently and touching her arm: “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he tells her kindly. “Don’t be frightened. They’re just loud, like the thunder outside. We’ll just start with a few pitchers of beer and popcorn. Looks like we’re all stuck here until the storm blows over, and that could take hours.”
“I can do that!” Kelly tells him with a proud smile.
“Hey, I’ll cook y’all whatever meat you want!” Genie offers from the kitchen.
“Yeah!” Mandy agrees and giggles.
“We got good steaks,” Genie tells them. “I’ll cook you steaks or burgers and fries. Might need one of you to come and help me though.”
“Dream on,” I tell her as everyone laughs.
“I love American women,” Edwards offer.
“Yeah,” Alvarez says smacking his lips. “Sweetest puss—ah, sweetest poon—I mean, cun—aah!”
“Sweetest pussy on earth you mean? Oh shit!” McBain says, covering his mouth. “I mean--”
“Ahh!” both men says exasperated.
“This is going to be hard!” Alvarez moans to Rawly.
“Humor me.” Rawly’s voice remains even but his gaze is threatening.
“Thanks!” Every other woman in the café seems to say at once, and miraculously mean it. I shake my head at this sighing deeply.
“I said Hey, Jimmy-Sue!” I hear Horst say as he snaps his fingers in my face.
I look up and smile as he stops and smiles back with flushed cheeks. His blue eyes appear larger to me somehow and gone are all traces of his Mohawk and shaved head. His dark brown hair is two inches longer now and is sun-streaked.
“I—ah… These are for you,” he says quickly as he hands me a box of Godiva chocolate covered cherries.
I look at him and the box of candy and smile politely. Then I notice that he’s holding a large bouquet behind his back of the most beautiful blush-pink peonies I have ever seen. “Are those for me too?” I ask reaching quickly to take the fragrant flowers.
“No,” he tells me as my face falls. “The candy is for you and the flowers are for my girlfriend.”
As he arrives by Eunice’s side and hands her down the flowers, I notice how nicely he’s dressed this evening and wonder if he has a date? Then I wonder if it would bother me if he did? I almost smile over this.
“Flowers, for me?” Eunice gasps. “Jimmy-Sue, come see! Horst just gave me flowers! Pink huh?” she queries just as Sandy’s Girl Scouts burst into the café on several rolls of thunder. “Oh well,” Eunice tells Horst, “they’re still pretty. What’d you get?” she asks as she surveys the box in my hand. She cocks her head to one side and stares at the box of chocolates in a daze, rubbing her temple as if conjuring up a rusty memory.
“He gave me chocolate covered cherries,” I say, eyeing the bulbous delicate flowers in her hands as she discards them on the table.
“Oh. My. God!” Eunice emotes slowly grabbing the box from my hands. “I just love Godiva chocolate covered cherries!” She opens up the foil box and throws down the lid and grabs a chocolate and gulps it down, then closes her eyes and moans. “God, twenty something years… maybe?” she says. “I’d forgotten.” She grabs another, then another while we all stare silently at the sight of Eunice eating, too dumbfounded for words.
Eunice places the chocolate in her mouth and closes her eyes. Her sallow cheeks almost cave in from the massive suck she gives the center of the candy. I give in with a chuckle as I take the flowers she has abandoned and hug them to my breast and inhale them luxuriously.
“I love peonies,” I sigh and rub my face against them.
“Ah,” Eunice moans sucking back another cherry.
“Women!” Horst groans, throwing up his hands and sinking down into the chair opposite Eunice.
“Thanks!” Eunice and I say as she reaches for another and I turn and reluctantly walk over to the register and the stupid, daily receipts, while inhaling my aromatic bouquet.
I am humming along with the music as I walk by Rawly’s rowdy table. Ali is helping Kelly deliver the pitchers and mugs and popcorn. Ken has delivered the burgers to Sandy’s Girl Scouts and is sitting at the corner of the bar leaning against the wall holding his guitar with his eyes closed while Randy badgers him about his infamous wave theory.
“Ali!” Randy motions for her loudly. “Hurry, you gotta hear this one!” He yells across the restaurant. “Come on, Ken, tell us about that “mondo killer cosmic wave, dude,” you know, the one you’re always talking about. The one headed straight towards us,” he beguiles with a sly grin.
Killer is still balancing on his stool with his eyes closed, still as stone. Right when we think he hasn’t heard Randy he rises to the challenge, instantly snapping into the other person he becomes when he shares. I always love watching people’s faces when it dawns on them that Ken is not the scrub they’d assumed but is in fact true genius.
“Very soon,” Ken’s eyes pop open like a light bulb, “our little neck of the woods is due an unprecedented pulse of high energy emissions, a gamma ray stellar blast from a distant disintegrating star 12 billion light years ago. This explosion at the very edge of the universe collapsed a massive star into a black hole and shot jets of energy across the entire universe in narrow beams, like a laser and one of them is aimed right here.
“My guesstimate is that for precisely twelve hours, expect the unexpected. Reverse polarity and electromagnetic storms of untold proportions!” Ken has a fire burning in his eyes, his voice so hypnotic, so smooth it rolls off his tongue like silk. The entire café is mesmerized. “The tides will turn as they haven’t in a millennium, and the waves, dudes, the waves are going to be mind boggling, waves the likes of which this coast hasn’t seen since Noah’s great flood.”
&n
bsp; “Woo! Woo! Woo!” the surfers hoot and whistle, their arms pumping in circles over their heads.
“And, ah, when exactly is this, blast from the past due?” Randy asks trying hard to keep a straight face.
“Well, if I could get my hands on some decent infrared equipment like La Sillia or one of the Hawaiian telescopes I could have figured out the answer much quicker,” Ken says. “After countless years of tracking and calculating it came to me just last week in a dream. I realized I know the date!”
“Tell us, Killer,” several people say at once.
“As best I can tell, give or take twelve hours, we are in for the mother of all waves on September 7th at 7:00 a.m.”
The only sound in the café is the fryer sizzling and Randy snorting so hard you’d think his brains were going to blow any second. He pounds the bar and laughs.
“Hey,” John offers quickly, “that’s Labor Day, dude. We’re getting killer waves on Labor Day!”
John and Alan high-five one another as the room erupts in clapping and barking. Everyone is patting Ken on the back and congratulating his brilliance. The only skeptic in the room seems to be Randy.
“Who is this guy?” The sailor named Alvarez asks Bud.
“Our resident genius,” Bud says.
“Village idiot is more like it,” Randy snorts.
“If Killer says it’s so you can darn well bet it’s so!” Bud insists. “I’m taking my boat out of the water then. Write that date down, Otis, September 7.”
I turn up the stereo and find the least dented pitcher and fill it with water and begin to arrange my flowers, singing softly along with Dan Fogelburg:
“Stood out in the rain,
let it soak me down before I call you.
I called you.
“Didn’t see me there,
hidden by the rain beneath your window.
But I saw you--”
I stop singing. My eyes are closed but I can feel him looking at me, watching me with his infrared vision. Suddenly I can hear him singing this song, hidden by the rain beneath my window, and I don’t like this song anymore because it’s spooky now!
Under his constant gaze I feel particularly vulnerable and dim-witted. How in the world have I allowed this demon to get so close to me? I find myself shivering and open my eyes. Rawly is staring at the flowers in my hands, then he glances over to Horst. I look down just as he looks back in my direction.
I step back from his nonsense and lay my hands across the calculator again, just as I have done in sporadic bursts of energy since mid afternoon. I rerun the tape again, retype the receipts into it, and find the same stupid mistake. I try again.
There it is again! Every other night for the past two months, I have been off by exactly six cents. It doesn’t matter how many times I recount or rerun the tape, any tape, or whose calculator I use, I am always off every time. Every. Stupid. Time!
“Go to hell!” I shout and hit my calculator with my fists.
I realize the room has gone deathly quiet. I look up and see that every eye in the room is on me. Cecile and Kelly are staring at me, mouths hanging open as if I’d just kicked their teddy bear, and Robert, Genie and Mandy have their hands over their mouths while Tony, Eunice and Sandy are shaking their heads in disbelief. Even Ken and Horst look shocked, and Rawly is simply watching all this with his face of stone.
“Jimmy-Sue!” Eunice gasps. “Have you bumped your head on a rock? What in the world?”
“I, ah, I’m sorry,” I say, flustered and digging in my pocket for five dollars.
All I have is change so everyone gets to keep staring at me while I rummage through my apron for coins. My cheeks are flushed and I am shaking from inadequacy.
“It’s just this stupid calculator,” I say feeling close to tears. “It’s just me, alright! It’s just me! I can’t —I’m just so dense!”
“Never heard her do that!” Sandy huffs.
“Never,” John and Alan agree.
“Oh my God!” Andrea emotes, striking an exaggerated pose in the center of the room, “what’s next from our angel, adultery? Murder? Cable T.V.?”
“Eunice, how come you let this simpleton run this place?” Randy barks. “She can’t even count!”
“Because she’s the only person all of us trust with our lives,” Ken says.
“Yeah!”
“She’s my right arm!” Eunice says. “Leave her alone! She’ll figure it out.”
“She’s our leader!” Kelly defends, banging down an empty beer mug on the SEAL’s table as they all jump.
“Yeah!”
“So what if she ain’t—isn’t too smart,” Tony defends me gallantly, “so what? Neither are you!”
“Oh Lord,” I sigh to the ceiling.
“Just don’t swear no more!” Kelly insists.
“Any more,” I say and look at their glum faces. “Does anyone else feel the need to comment? Good, then get back to work and for the love of God will somebody please change the music!”
The SEALS can really down the beer. Between the twelve of them I’d say they’ve been through thirty pitchers in about an hour and they don’t look ready to stop any time soon. Much to my annoyance Rawly has pulled a chair up for Horst to come and join him at his table. All the other SEALS are scattered in every nook and cranny interacting with everyone. John Alazar and a SEAL named Salazar are arm wrestling in the center of the room while the Girl Scouts and Halflings lay odds. Horst and Rawly seem to be cozying up while cousin Ali and Kelly keep refilling pitchers and massive orders of boiled shrimp and chicken wings.
Every so often I’ll look up and find both Rawly and Horst staring at me or I’ll hear them burst out laughing, sharing another insight with a nod in my direction. Usually when people stare at me I can just brush it aside but Rawly’s eyes are too spooky and I don’t want to even guess what he’s researching now. So I listen as Ken and Hobie state their arguments about Southerners in general, wishing Rawly would just look away and join in the debate.
I meet his eyes and give him the finger and he doesn’t change expressions. I realize I’m being vulgar and I scan the room quickly, making certain no one noticed my latest rebellious maneuver. At this point I realize I could eat one of Hobie’s buggers and this nut-case probably wouldn’t even blink. I want to scream and hit him! I wonder if he’d hit me back? And this makes me want to swear again! But I don’t.
“Yeah, you Southerners are so perfect,” Alvarez laughs to the locals. “You know you rebels are prejudice and close-minded. Hey, cutie,” he says to Mandy as she approaches with a fresh platter of wings. “You ever had a hungry Mexican before?” We watch as he winks at Mandy then licks his eyebrow slowly.
“Oh my God!” Andrea and Sandy say.
“Alvarez, you better apologize to the kid, man,” Washington warns him.
“Ah hell,” Alvarez laughs carelessly. “If she’s old enough to pee she’s old enough for me!” He chortles while Mandy looks flustered and trembles.
In a flash Rawly stands and kicks the chair out from beneath Alvarez with one swift sweep of his foot as easily as if he were side-kicking a soccer ball instead of a two hundred and twenty pound man. The SEAL falls on his back and stares up into Rawly’s furious eyes.
“Gunnery sergeant Alvarez will now apologize to the child,” Rawly says through clenched teeth.
“Miss Maddox , Mandy, everyone, I’m sorry. Really sorry, Mandy. When I haven’t been around ladies for a while I sometimes forget my manners. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t,” Rawly says as the Girl Scouts clap and giggle.
“Oh, just like T.V.,” one says.
“Cool, dude,” Hobie offers. “Teach me that move?”
“Wow!” Genie gushes.
“I’ll bet divorce attorneys love you guys!” Andrea scolds as she points out Alvarez’s wedding ring.
“Why get divorced,” Alvarez tells her quickly, “when we’re so good at hiding bodies?”
“Boo
yah!” the SEALs bellow as I jump.
“Continue your rebuttal,” Rawly nods towards Bud. “I believe you were debating Southern prejudice, myth or reality.”
All the locals sigh. When tourists come South they expect all of us down here to be right out of Gone With the Wind and have some minority chained to our stoves or some coo coo-bird aunt locked in our attics, or wishing we did.
“Look,” Bud says, “listen up. All you Yankee and west-coasters alike always prefer your minorities in groups, believing, as your city dwelling minds are programmed, that there is safety in numbers. You believe every person is the same, inside and out,” he laughs. “And Southerners believe just about anything about anyone except that everybody is the same inside and out!” Bud laughs. “We know too many people serving time or blowing people up in the name of one dogma or another to buy into that one. We may all have eyes but we still see things differently. No matter how much brainwashing you try on us one size does not fit all.”
“So you’re admitting you’re close-minded and prejudice?” Alvarez scoffs.
“Not at all,” Bud insists, “it’s hard to relate to something you’re not exposed to. Take your typical black or white Southern man, he may be less inclined to have yellow friends, or red friends, or purple friends from here and yonder because immigrants don’t seem to want to settle in our rural neck of the woods down here, do they? Nope, they want opera and chain restaurants and people with faces just like theirs. Now, when you throw us the odd immigrant who fishes, or golf’s, or hunts, or prays, or raises his kids with us, we are going to relate eventually, just like the rest of us, on an individual basis, not because you tell me I’m prejudice if I don’t. Southerners relate through the land, you see, so we can be very suspicious of anybody in big groups in tight spaces. We think that just turns ‘em nuts, living all together with no trees. I reckon it’s something to do with their pack mentality and our love of wide open spaces.”
“I see where you’re going,” Killer says, nodding his head.