by David Bone
The short-order cook, Viktor, poked his head through the service window, holding a butcher knife. The heat lamps made his sweaty face sparkle an evil glow. He was a Russian something-something who sought political refuge behind a grill.
“Ya?”
“Get Donovan in the back and working.”
“You heard,” Viktor said, lowering his brow my way.
I passed through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. Total disaster. Dirty plates, trays, glasses, bowls, utensils—everything piled up in or vaguely around an industrial sink filled with dark-gray water. The floor and walls looked like they’d been hit by a decade-long food fight. In all the years that I had been coming to The Roost, I had only seen Viktor’s head through the service window. Always a few orders behind, his husky voice and intense focus projected the image of a towering man with expert knife skills. I didn’t expect to find him standing on a footstool with two phone books stacked on top of it so he could reach the grill. His rotund gut was in constant peril of being cooked medium rare whenever he leaned toward the back of the grill.
“Hey,” I said, as bummed as possible.
“Hahahaha, look at you.”
“What?”
“This,” he said, motioning around at the mess. “This is yours now.”
“Who normally does the dishes?” I said, looking at the overflowing sink.
Janice yelled from the front for a chicken sandwich with popcorn shrimp.
“No time for chit-chat,” Viktor said in his thick accent while throwing a chicken breast on the grill.
“Shit shat?”
“Chit-chat!”
“Shit? Shat?”
“Chit! Chat!”
“It sounds like you’re saying shit shat.”
“How many languages you speak, Donovan?”
“All of them,” I said.
“You want trouble already?”
“It gets worse than this?”
“You see.”
Viktor took the hair net off his head and threw it at me. He grabbed a fresh one for himself from a nearby cupboard.
“You wear hair net so you don’t get it on food,” he said.
“But I’m washing dishes, not cooking.”
“I tell you how we work. Work hard, no problem. Work lazy, big problem.”
“Okay, but why do I have to wear a hair net if I’m washing dishes? If I get a hair on anything, it’ll wash off.”
“You have to wear hair net because you have to wear hair net.”
“But the only food I’m touching is going in the trash.”
“No hairs! If I see black hair, I know it’s you.”
“Okay, I promise to not go bald while flying over your grill.”
“Don’t expect breaks because of mamulya,” he said nodding to the front.
“If anything, my hair is the cleanest thing back here. At least it’s been washed today.”
Viktor ignored me. He turned up the classical station on the radio and focused on the chicken breast.
I started whittling away at the dishes. I got bored and picked back up with Victor. “What kind of breaks could there even be? The Roost is like a town gathering of people who haven’t gotten a break. That’s why they work here or eat this shit.”
Viktor smacked the spatula on the grill with a loud clap.
“The break is you don’t break.” Viktor motioned to the dishes. “That will take one hour if you work hard. Two hours if you act like spoiled honky.”
I had never been called a honky before and bit my lip to keep from laughing. I started washing dishes and, almost immediately, let a water glass slip through my fingers. It smashed into more pieces than I thought possible.
Janice burst through the swinging doors.
“Acting out already? Viktor, you have my full permission to keep this boy on track no matter what, okay?”
Viktor flashed a gold tooth at me.
Fuck.
I concentrated on the task at hand. The work was so boring, I strained to think of something to entertain myself with. The only option was listening to people on the other side of the heat lamps. It took some effort to hear over the running faucet and sizzling grill, but most of them wanted to address the whole place anyway.
“I just can’t even remember the last time I could have a milkshake. It’s been so long.”
“Why’s that, Ernie?”
“Milkshake in, milkshake out. Know what I mean?”
I shivered and looked over my shoulder to try to spot the lactose intolerance through the service window. It was an old guy sitting between two other old guys. They all looked the same. I had no experience with old people growing up. Janice had cut off communication with relatives since before I was born and never told me why.
Their skin appeared translucent. You could see the veins at different depths and sizes. Wrinkles and Super Bowl–style rings covered their fingers. I imagined they were for stuff like “1972’s Western Regional Vacuum Sales Leader.” The thought of being a champion salesman made me shiver again. I shouldn’t have turned around. It was better to be hypnotized by the circling drain I hovered over.
Afterward, Janice and I went home and performed our nightly ritual of watching TV in silence. The program was about a talking car and a rogue detective. In the middle of a scene showing the car hydroplaning on the ocean, she changed the channel.
“Wait!” I said.
“That show has gone downhill. It’s like a cartoon now.”
“I think it’s even better.”
Janice flipped through channels and landed on the tail end of the news. It broke into commercial but not just any.
“Nee ner neeeee!” An organ rang out Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” It was seriously my favorite song.
Its thick atmosphere filled the living room as a foreboding voice said, “Castle Dunes is alive again! A living, breathing nightmare of more than thirty incredible rooms, each with its own very special surprise. Wander through the myriad of secret passageways and winding labyrinths. Discover the Throne of the Living Dead and its unimaginable terror. There’s Dracula, the Prince of Darkness, and many more. Castle Dunes is waiting for you!”
Images of witches, zombies, and evil druids went along with the foreboding voice and featured Dracula most of all. At the end, he spread his red-lined cape over a hot chick in a nightie and went for her neck.
“That’s what I wanna be,” I said to an already frowning Janice.
“You can’t be Dracula when you grow up. That doesn’t even make sense.”
“No, like him,” I said motioning to the TV.
“No one goes, ‘Oh, my son? Well, he’s a Dracula. Got a big house on the beach with a big, happy family. Bills? He pays them by scaring people and they just go away. We’re all real proud of him.’”
The Dracula stuff had been a sore subject at home for a while. Years ago, I kept wearing a vampire cape after a Halloween that came and never went. Eventually, Janice threw it away instead of washing it. I rushed into the kitchen when I couldn’t find it.
“Where’s my cape?”
“Cut this shit out. I swear you're just trying to torture me.” The cape was embarrassing for any parent but it was compounded with a reminder of Janice’s magic past.
That Christmas, Janice asked what I wanted.
“A new cape.”
She got me a sweater.
It’s not like I wasn’t into the other famous monsters, but Dracula was the boss. The Castle was his and the rest were capable only of being guests. Frankenstein was too dumb, Wolfman couldn’t control himself, the Mummy took forever, and the Invisible Man wasn’t anything to look at. It was Drac who ran shop. With a hypnotizing eye, flight capabilities, and immortality, he had them all beat.
The career conversation went back on mute and I retreated to my room. I fell on the bed and stared at my two Castle Dunes brochures taped to the wall. The full color pamphlets were the same one but folded out to show each side’s four panel
s. The front side was taken up by a giant photo of the Castle with a crowd below. A hand-drawn Dracula loomed over the scene, and a dialogue bubble by his head said, “Castle Dunes! Follow the bats to the pier of fear!”
The other side featured three shots of the pier showing carnival games of skill and chance, the arcade, and food stands like Castle Pizza and I Scream. There was also a coupon for a discount if you bought twelve tickets.
Based on commercials, brochures, and word of mouth, I could only vaguely piece together what the Castle was like inside. But even better than the Castle propaganda were the local legends. It was said that half of the people going through would never come out, and those that did had lost their minds. They said the Castle people would follow you home at night. And that the building had been transported brick by brick from Carpathia. None of which I knew to be true, but the stories were still rad. The Castle was only about a mile down the road but Janice made it seem a world away.
I opened the window to cool off and listened to the neighborhood’s silence. Dunes sucked. It was totally fucking boring. We had one movie theater and it only showed one movie at a time. The town’s adults were bored enough to actually give a shit about our high school sports. I’d see grown men stop dudes in letterman jackets on the street and talk to them like war heroes. We just had one big grocery store and its produce section constantly sat on the brink of rot. Our main industry seemed based around the liquor stores.
Once a year, Dunes had a Garlic Festival. It never made sense to me. We didn’t grow garlic. It all came from about twenty miles inland. And if two shut-down blocks counted as a festival, then you could call the busiest intersection in town a “Traffic Festival.” But everyone pretended we were “famous” for our garlic. And once a year, this cloud of bad breath hung over Dunes as our prideful tradition. Fucking garlic. I’m with Dracula on that.
So yeah, Dunes sucked. But Castle Dunes? Ruled. To me, it was the saving grace of both the town and my imagination. It was like, yeah, life’s boring and everything sucks, but if you could scale the iron gates of the Castle, you’d escape the pale-gray, slow death of suburban nothingness. Famous monsters never die. And I wanted to get inside more than anything in the world. But the fact that it simply existed gave me enough hope to keep me going. All of the Castle’s advertising spoke an overarching, kind of subliminal message to me. It said, “Don’t worry about them. Join us. We want you!”
As I stared at the ceiling, a change in the breeze outside carried a faint trail of Bach’s “Toccata.” Originating from the Castle’s outdoor PA system, it found me as it poured over the windowsill and crept through the room. Comforted by the other world’s soundtrack drifting into my own, I began to fall asleep.
2
The next day was the hottest on record for that day in Dunes history. When Janice and I walked into The Roost, a rank stench blew past us and out the door. Janice made her signature butthole face and threw her purse at the coffee pot. I couldn’t imagine the odor going without remark.
“What the hell is that smell? Did Viktor die on the toilet?” I asked.
“It’s the grease trap.”
“This place?”
“No, the grease trap. It happens when it’s hot out. Get back there and clean it.”
I parted the swinging doors and got slammed with origin-strength stench.
Viktor was on his hands and knees under the sink.
“Jesus, is that smell coming from your ass crack?” I said.
“Get down here!”
I got on the floor beside Viktor. He pulled his arm out of a deep hole.
“This is you. Clean grease trap. It catches all grease from dishwater and holds so pipes don’t stop.”
I let out a deep sigh but could only inhale short breaths to avoid being overtaken by the smell of rotting grease.
“And put on hair net!”
When I finished, my arms were covered in brown grease that wouldn’t wash off.
“How am I supposed to clean dishes when I’m covered in slime?”
“Here,” Viktor said, throwing a Brillo pad at me.
“This is for stainless steel, not skin!”
“Don’t be girl. It will get off.”
I worked the pad on my arms and it really did take the grease off. It also took off any hair on my arm and the first two layers of skin. I showed my raw arm to Viktor.
“See? Now stop lazy and start wash.”
After a while, I started getting the hang of the dishes but had no pride or pay to show for it. My thoughts turned to a possible escape. Going AWOL from The Roost became a full-time obsession.
While I was scheming to myself over the sink, Janice walked into the back.
“A customer left their dentures on a plate, where are they?”
“Huh?”
“For your own sake, tell me you got them.”
“What dentures?”
“Gibby left her dentures on her plate yesterday. You didn’t see someone’s fucking teeth staring at you while you’re doing dishes?”
“There’s a lot of dishes.”
“So I take that as a no.”
“Yes.”
“Well, Gibby has been coming here for over twenty years and if she said she left her dentures in a pile of mashed potatoes, we are going to find them for her.”
“How do you forget teeth?”
“Well, the good news is you get a break from the kitchen.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Because you’re going through the dumpster to find her teeth. That you threw out.”
“The dumpster!”
“The dumpster!” Janice echoed.
“You told me to never play in dumpsters.”
“I didn’t say anything about working in them.”
I went out to the alley and threw open the filthy dumpster. It was far worse than the grease trap and a hundred times bigger. Parts of it were actually moving, heaving with flies, maggots, and roaches scurrying about. I couldn’t do it.
I went back inside, to the front, where Janice was talking with Gibby.
“I’m not going in that thing! It’s fucking alive!”
Janice grabbed my arm and dug her fingers in the tendons as she led me into the kitchen.
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that. Ever. And especially not in front of customers. You have no class. None.” Janice grabbed a napkin and doused it with a bottle of vanilla extract. “Here. Put this in your face and start digging.”
“I don’t need that—I need a flame thrower!”
Janice made the butthole face and worked her jaw muscles to show that she was gearing up for the rarely seen “other level.”
“Fine. But if I die, it’s your fault.”
“I can live with that.” Janice spun around and changed her expression the moment she put her hand on the kitchen door.
I started walking back to the alley but Viktor stopped me.
“Wait. Take these,” Viktor said, handing me two unused trash bags.
“What’s this gonna do?”
“Put each one on legs and pull drawstring tight by thighs.”
“You’re pretty cool for a Russian, Viktor.”
“Cool is nothing.”
I put the trash bag chaps on and waddled outside. I stood in front of the dumpster for five minutes, trying to psych myself up. Finally, I climbed in and started picking through the rotten debris. All the food that I had scraped off was coming back to haunt me. I plunged my fists through bags of varying consistencies and tried to hold my stomach contents down. What seemed like hours was only fifteen minutes, but I found the dentures with a blind fist. I pulled myself out of the dumpster and slipped on my trash bag legs when they hit the ground—taking the fall on my elbow. I limped inside as a thin layer of blood started to rise to the top of the scrapes.
“Here you go,” I said handing the dentures to Gibby. “Some guys tried to steal your teeth but I wouldn’t let ‘em, so they kicked my ass.”
“That�
��s so sweet of you. Thank you so much, Janice.” Gibby took her teeth and left.
Janice looked sideways at me.
“Bullshit.”
“No, seriously. I should go home, though, don’t you think? I mean, if I’m not supposed to get a hair on the dishes, blood probably isn’t good either, right?”
“Get in the back before you make people puke.” Janice yelled into the service window, “Viktor! Fix him up with the first-aid kit.”
“Ya.”
I went to the back while Viktor unfolded paper napkins next to a spool of tape.
“Where’s the first-aid kit?”
“This,” Viktor said, pointing to the napkins and tape. He then reached out from under his apron and revealed a flask. “And this.”
“I don’t drink.”
“No. Come.”
Viktor pulled my elbow across the sink.
“What are you doing?”
“Vodka cleans.”
“Is it gonna sting?”
“Good vodka won’t sting.”
He splashed his flask on my elbow.
“Fuck, that stings!”
“I didn’t say this was good vodka,” he said, taking a swig.
I grabbed a napkin and clutched my arm.
“That would have been me in dumpster if you weren’t working. You’re okay.”
“Whatever.”
“Keep this up and you’ve got real future here,” Viktor said, laughing.
The next day, Viktor had diarrhea and kept running from the grill to the toilet. All the food burned on the grill in his absence. Janice pretended to serve the dishes like they were perfect and when the customers voiced their disgust, she acted shocked and appalled. Eventually, she told Viktor if he burned another dish, she’d start throwing them back in his face. So Viktor enlisted me to back him up on his runs.
“Donovan, I need you to cook when I go,” he said.
“I don’t know how to cook, man.”
“It’s easy. You put whatever is they order on grill. When starts burning, you flip over. When other side starts burning, you put on a plate with some of this,” he said, pointing at a pile of parsley that looked like fake foliage on a model train track.