AHMM, Jul-Aug 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "And some chop suey,” the customer said, loudly and slowly, the way people do when they're having to repeat something they shouldn't.

  "Oh, right.” I dished that up, too. The man was still at the window. Fumbling nervously, I dropped the spoon. I picked it up and was going to scoop out the customer's chicken chow mein when he said, “Hey."

  "Oh, right,” I said, tossing the spoon in the sink and getting another.

  The customer looked at his order suspiciously, but he paid and left. There was no one else in the store. The man was still at the window. He watched the customer leave, then he smiled, winked, and walked away too.

  When I was sure he was gone, I went to the window to look for Kevin. I wanted him to forget the damn sign and come back. He was halfway to the corner, talking with Miss Twilly who put her hand on his chest.

  * * * *

  Donald had taken to coming to the restaurant late at night. A few times, Kevin and I were just about to close when he walked in and told us that he was going to stay open a while longer. By then, some of the food had been sitting since eleven in the morning. Even spraying and stirring wasn't going to help it to look palatable. Maybe that's why he often wore the Speedo. Maybe he figured it would help bring in customers.

  * * * *

  On Wednesday night, Kevin said, “We better find something to put the fat in.” The fryer held fifty pounds of the stuff, and the job of cleaning it was overdue. We had to drain the fat last thing at night while it was still hot, then let it congeal so we could throw it out in the morning. While I cashed out, Kevin found two round metal containers. “How about these?"

  "Perfect,” I said. We turned the machine off, pushed a container under each spigot, opened them, and went home.

  * * * *

  When I walked in the next morning, Donald was fussing with the steam table. The fat had congealed in the two containers. Kevin arrived and we each picked up one of them.

  "You can't throw those out,” Donald said. “I need them. Use something else.” He left without offering any suggestions. All Kevin and I could find was a green garbage bag that had been used before and didn't look promising, but it was almost opening time.

  I took a serving spoon and, while Kevin held the bag open, I lifted the containers, tipped them over, and scooped the fat into the bag. The sound was unpleasant.

  When the containers were empty, Kevin closed the bag and began dragging it across the kitchen floor. Through a small tear that we hadn't noticed, the bag left a six-inch-wide trail of fat behind. Kevin pulled faster. The trail got wider.

  I opened the side door so he could back out into the alley. Then I grabbed hold of the bag too. We lifted and, as soon as the bag was clear of the ground, the bottom broke. The fat splatted onto the asphalt and lay wobbling in the morning sun.

  "Oh well,” Kevin said. “At least it's outside."

  We had to open in fifteen minutes. There was the deep fryer to clean and refill. There were food preparations to make. And now there was a streak of fat on the kitchen floor to clean up.

  * * * *

  I had mopped the floor. Kevin had scrubbed the deep fryer, replaced the fat, and unlocked the front door. We were watching people pass by, wondering if anyone would come in, when a woman slid off the sidewalk. She had been walking briskly and all of a sudden she looked like someone on skates for the first time. Her feet went in opposite directions, floundering for purchase. She waved her arms in frantic pinwheels. Then she launched off the curb, landing unsteadily in the gutter.

  "Wow,” Kevin said.

  "She's lucky there wasn't a car coming,” I said.

  The woman looked around with a stunned expression, then, gingerly, she climbed back onto the sidewalk.

  Then a businessman had his feet shoot out from under him, like a silent film character stepping on a banana peel. He twisted his body, arms out for balance, briefcase bursting on the sidewalk. He caught himself awkwardly and froze, bracing for an aftershock.

  Kevin said, “Oh no.” We went to the side door. It was very hot in the alley and the pile of fat was gone.

  * * * *

  Kevin lost the toss. Taking a bucket of hot water and a mop, he went out onto Wellesley to clean up the fat. A few more people had done pirouettes in front of the window but no one had been hurt or been crushed by a truck.

  When Donald returned, he was pleased to see that we had saved his metal containers. He told us that Moshe had quit. He hadn't taken to wearing the sandwich board as good-naturedly as Kevin. He was a doctor's son.

  Being suddenly short of staff, Donald wanted us to work through until two A.M. Kevin negotiated time and a half. By then we were laughing about the fat. Nobody had been hurt after all.

  Around eleven, Chuck came in for his chop suey. I gave him a free drink. It was habit now, although he was as surprised and appreciative as he had been the first time.

  It was still hot outside and there was no hint that things might cool off. The extra heat from the bain marie, the deep fryer, and the steam table made it worse in the Express. It was a time before every place was air-conditioned. Movie houses still could draw customers by advertising, “It's cool inside."

  Chuck didn't mind. He leaned against the counter eating and looking around. “I like this weather. The hotter the better. Stickier the better. Like the jungle."

  I wiped the counter as we talked. When I looked up, the scruffy man was outside the window, smiling.

  Chuck gave no hint that he'd registered anything, but he must have caught my expression. “Buddy?” He took a large mouthful of chop suey, not looking at the window but obviously seeing it nonetheless.

  I shook my head.

  "Bad guy?"

  "I don't know him."

  Chuck turned to look out the window, directly at the man on the other side of the glass. The man stopped smiling and went away.

  * * * *

  Just before closing, I took the garbage out to the alley. All I had to do was take two steps outside the door and heave the bag toward the sidewalk. If raccoons or rats didn't get it, the garbage men picked it up sometime after dawn. Just as I was about to swing my arm back to throw, my foot slipped and I almost fell. Damn, I thought, Kevin hadn't cleaned up the fat out here. I wasn't about to do it now. In the morning I'd slop some hot water around.

  After aiming the bag almost perfectly, I turned and saw the body. It was outlined by the glow of the streetlight behind me. At first, I assumed it was one of the bums who slept in the alley some nights. But this one was lying twisted around in an odd way. Normally, the bums curled up like babies, even on hot nights.

  I wasn't about to touch him. I never disturbed anyone I found sleeping there. But there was an emergency flashlight inside. I switched it on and saw the scruffy man. The ground around his head was bloody, and near his feet it was slick with fat.

  He must have slipped and smashed his head. That was all I could think. I went inside and was going to tell Kevin to call the police, but I didn't. It was our carelessness after all. I locked the side door. If the body was still there in the morning, we'd do something.

  Chuck had left his cup on the counter. The ice had melted. I dumped the water in the sink and threw the cup away.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Copyright © 2005 by Peter Sellers.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Death at the Port by Marianne Wilski Strong

  As the sun rose over the blue sea, the harbor of Kantharos at the port of Piraeus, four miles below Athens, bustled. Ships had come in carrying corn from Egypt, cheeses and pigs from Syracuse, ivory and seasonings from Libya, and pillows and carpets from Carthage.

  "It's been busy all spring and summer, Kleides,” my half brother Lamicus said. “Once we get our ship out, we can make two trips this season. One to Sicily with vases. That'll take two weeks round trip. Then one to Egypt with olive oil. That'll be three weeks. We have a contract to bring back flax for cordage and papyrus.” Lamicus rubbed his hands together
. “Kleides, you'll get a good return on your investment in our ship. Athens is the powerhouse on the sea now. Commerce is booming. The whole Mediterranean wants our coins and our naval protection."

  Lamicus clapped me on the back. “A shipment of flax for papyrus,” he said. “You should be overjoyed. You and your friend Socrates can write to your heart's content."

  I stopped dead. Lamicus disapproved of Socrates and my other intellectual friends. Said we talked too much, questioned the state too much, and most damning of all, even questioned the existence of the gods. He also said, and his wife Cleodice agreed, that since I'd started hanging around with Socrates and other bad company a few years ago, I never looked quite as well groomed as I ought.

  Well, in my own defense, when you're busy reading Homer and Hesiod and busy discussing whether or not fish fossils mean some sort of slow development of creatures, including humans, as Anaximander proposed, or whether or not, as Pythagoras proposed, the universe was ordered by a harmonious system of numbers, you haven't time for a regular haircut or beard trimming.

  From behind, two men bumped into me. Traders from the Black Sea. I could hear them muttering in a strange language. Sounded barbarian. Certainly not Greek. I stepped out of the way. “Lamicus,” I said, “are you actually approving of Socrates and myself working together? You haven't been drinking too much Chian wine, have you?"

  This time it was Lamicus who stopped dead. “By Zeus, of course not. I haven't taken to hanging out with your wine-drinking, fish-brained philosopher friends, though I do admit that now and then Socrates does seem to make some sense."

  Actually, I couldn't imagine Lamicus, unlike myself, ever drinking too much, eating too much, or even paying too much for a flute girl, no matter how beautiful she was. Oh, Lamicus did pay his due to Dionysus, drinking to the god of wine at festivals, and to Aphrodite, honoring the goddess of love now and then with a flute girl, but on the whole, he preferred to worship Hestia, honoring the goddess of the home by keeping his young wife, Cleodice, happy. Lamicus was the perfect citizen, or would have been had both parents been Athenians. But my father's affair with a Syracusan woman had made my half brother a metic—able to live and work in Athens, paying taxes, attending festivals, but not able to vote—a kind of half citizen.

  I was about to protest that all the discussion with my so-called fish-brained friends was the real excitement of Athens and that our elected head of state, Pericles, whose building plans and democratic ways Lamicus adored, liked our fish-brained talk.

  But at that moment, three things happened that took the breath out of me, like the whirlpool Charybdis sucking a ship, one of our great naval triremes, right down a watery hole. Of course, Lamicus would say the whirlpool was Poseidon displeased, but I subscribe to our new philosophy of the universe: It is a material, natural world, and we can use reason to understand how it works.

  Anyway, I remember those three things that happened that day as if it were just yesterday rather than back in those heady days when I was a young man and Athens was heady with prosperity and new ideas.

  First, I saw, just ahead standing in the colonnade behind the stone-paved quay and holding a crock of our sweet-smelling Athenian honey, an exquisite young woman: tall, slender, black shining hair fixed Ionian style, with two curls hanging down the whitest and most elegant neck I'd ever seen. If I believed in the gods, I would have said it was the goddess Artemis herself. The woman's body, beneath her flowing chiton, was graceful, elastic, buoyant, as if she could bound off and, like the huntress goddess, leap over streams and fields.

  "Aspasia,” I heard the older man with her say. She turned toward him, facing me, and I saw the light of life and intelligence in her eyes.

  It was then that I fell in love with the woman who was to become Pericles’ paramour and the mother of two of his sons.

  "Kleides,” Lamicus said. “Are you ill?"

  Indeed, I was thunderstruck, sick with longing.

  Then the second bolt struck.

  A boom rang out over the colonnades, the quay, and the Saronic Gulf. I swayed and grasped my head, certain that Aphrodite had just sent an arrow into my heart. For that moment, I was a believer, instead of a skeptic.

  Then my ears began to work again. I heard screaming and banging. Fish, spices, hides, figs, nuts flew off the marble slabs of sellers and spilled out of ceramicware. Vases tumbled off tables. Along the quay, merchant ships rocked as if in a tempest.

  When the swaying stopped, the busy harbor had fallen silent. Buyers and sellers had stopped haggling; harbor agents had stopped their collecting of harbor duties; sailors, prostitutes, shippers all stopped talking; Macedonians, Egyptians, Libyans, Corinthians, Carthagenians, Athenians, Syracusans all stood hanging on to each other, to columns, to anything they could grasp.

  Slowly, talk began again, became louder and louder, as people pointed, speculated, warned. Sellers began to pick up their tumbled wares.

  We had had an earthquake.

  "Hades,” someone yelled. “A warning from Hades."

  "Poseidon,” Lamicus said beside me. “Poseidon sends earthquakes."

  "I don't think so,” I said. “Actually, Leucippus of Miletus thought that the universe was made of colliding atoms. I think so too. Poseidon's probably nothing but colliding atoms and that's what caused..."

  "Oh you're worse than the earthquake, spilling out words faster than the quake spilled the figs and nuts,” Lamicus said. He hates blasphemy. “You'd better make a votive offering to Poseidon today. We need him to watch over our ship when..."

  That's when the third thing happened.

  A woman started screaming.

  "Someone's hurt,” Lamicus said, “over there.” He pointed to a small shop in the colonnade.

  I could see a woman's back and head. She was clad in a rough-looking gray chiton that hung heavily round her bulky form. Her hair was bundled into a head scarf of the same rough gray material. She was holding her hands on either side of her head and facing into the shop. She was knee deep in tumbled ceramicware.

  Leaping over spilled eels, bundles of material, several charcoal braziers, and sundry other items, Lamicus and I ran to her.

  "Are you hurt?” Lamicus asked.

  She turned to us. Her face was a deep olive color, her skin as tough as an animal hide. She had a very broad forehead and equally broad jowls, quivering now, whether in pain or fear I could not yet tell.

  "Are you hurt?” Lamicus repeated.

  She pulled at her hair and rocked back and forth. “Oh great Zeus,” she wailed, “oh great Zeus."

  "Madam,” Lamicus tried again, this time with less patience, “what is the matter?"

  She stopped wailing and glared at us both. “Are you blind?” She pointed to the back wall of the colonnade.

  I peered into the shadows. At first, all I could see was a small hill of ceramicware, half of it broken, smashed into shards of use now only for scratching in names of people we wanted exiled.

  I squinted and stepped forward. Then I saw it. An arm, thrust out from beneath the hill of ceramic. “Lamicus, help me get him out.” I presumed the hand, long, thin, but a bit hairy, belonged to a man.

  Lamicus and I knelt and pulled at the ceramicware, tossing away shards, rolling away wine pitchers, pushing water jugs behind us.

  "Great thundering Zeus!” Lamicus exclaimed.

  The body of a man lay before us. His skull was crushed on the right side. An eyeball hung precariously from its socket, a cheekbone was pushed grotesquely up toward the eye, and blood stained the neck, the arm, and the chest.

  "Out. Get him out of here,” the woman behind us shouted.

  Lamicus turned and stared at her.

  "Is this your husband?” I asked.

  "Of course not, you trash fish,” she shouted at me. “My husband went to talk to a shipper."

  I wasn't sure how I was supposed to have known that. “Do you know who he is?” I asked.

  "A thief,” she said.

  I looked a
t the corpse. If he were a thief, he'd paid a heavy price for trying to steal cheap ceramicware.

  "Did you kill him?” Lamicus asked, his brown eyes very round.

  "You son of a boar. How dare you claim I killed him?"

  Lamicus stood up. “Madam, I didn't claim you killed him. I was asking..."

  "How do you know he was a thief?” I interrupted, realizing that apologies were useless.

  "What else would he be doing in the shop?"

  "Perhaps he came in to buy something,” Lamicus suggested.

  "I had just come in to open the shop, you fish brain,” she said.

  I looked at Lamicus and smiled.

  "Why don't you two Spartan dummies do something?” the woman yelled.

  Lamicus looked offended at being called fish-brained and a Spartan, but he said nothing. I realized that he'd decided silence was his best defense against this harpy.

  By this time, several people had gathered in the doorway of the shop. Among the various tongues, from Egyptian to Syrian, I heard the Athenian dialect. “The earthquake,” a man said. “It tossed up this man from Hades and killed him. He is cursed."

  The harpy took a step back. Mouth open, Lamicus looked at the corpse again. But to my half brother's credit, he closed his mouth and looked skeptically at the superstitious Athenian.

  "The earthquake might have tossed around everything from mussels to wine jars, but it didn't toss this man anywhere,” I said.

  "Perhaps he struck his head against the wall,” Lamicus suggested.

  "I don't think so, Lamicus,” I said, shifting my weight to my left knee and leaning more closely over the corpse. “Had he hit the wall, it might have knocked him out, but it would not have caved in the side of his face.” I looked around. Nothing in the shop appeared hefty enough to have been used as such a damaging weapon. “Besides,” I said, “the blood is brown and dried. This man died in this shop a while ago.” I sniffed. “Not that long ago, of course, or we wouldn't be able to breathe easily."