Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  Eva was calm, surveying the room like a walk-on first-year outfielder looking for her parents in the stands. Braque grabbed her cousin’s arm.

  “We’re gonna get thrown out of here,” she said.

  “The line is for a table,” Eva said. “We don’t need a table for what we’re doing. Oh, look, I recognize those people. From your wall calendar.”

  Braque looked where Eva was pointing. Patricia, Tangela, Maya, Ann Richards, Ann’s gay friend Nate, and starting junior catcher Rachael “Thunder” Rhodes—a wide-hipped Nebraskan with a left arm that nailed 46 percent of attempted base stealers—sat around five mostly untouched Styrofoam bowls of chili, cramming bread into their mouths and drinking milk and water.

  “You made it!” Patricia said, running across the room to hug Braque. “Is this your cousin? Come join us!” And so Braque had to. She introduced Eva to everybody, and, once they had jammed into the booth, withstood a volley of questions about why she had changed her mind and joined them, and wasn’t she supposed to be studying, and all of that shit.

  “I didn’t know your cousin was finally visiting. What have you been doing?” Patricia asked.

  “How much will you give us to watch her eat some of that chili?” Braque asked.

  “This chili?” Maya asked. “I can hardly eat a bite of this chili.”

  “Yeah, how much would you bet that Eva can’t eat two spoonfuls of it?”

  “Two spoonfuls?” Maya said. “Better have some milk ready.”

  “How much?”

  Maya looked at the chili. “I’d pay ten bucks to see her try, but I don’t think anyone that size can handle that.”

  “I don’t know,” Tangela said. “I’m out.”

  “Twenty bucks,” said Rachael Rhodes. “To eat, chew, and swallow.”

  “I’ll do five,” Patricia said.

  “I think she can do it,” Ann Richards said. “I’m not betting against her.”

  “I don’t gamble,” said Nate.

  “Money on the table?” Eva said, putting thirty-five of her own dollars down.

  Maya passed a white Styrofoam bowl over, and Patricia grabbed a clean spoon from the cylinder in the middle of the table. Eva took it and immediately scooped up a spoonful of chili.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe she’s actually going to do this,” Patricia said.

  “How old is she?” Tangela asked.

  “Eleven,” Eva said.

  “Get a big, heaping pile on your spoon,” Rachael said. Christ, Rachael could be a bitch.

  To Eva’s credit, she plunged the spoon back in without protest, presented a mound of steaming red and brown chunks, and thrust it into her mouth.

  For the first time all night, Braque saw that Eva was in evident pain. Eva pulled the spoon from her lips as color ran to her face, and she slowly moved the chunky chili around in her mouth. She closed her eyes and the lumps disappeared from her cheeks and crawled down her throat. Her tongue poked from her mouth and did a full, slow circuit around her lips. She opened her mouth and her eyes, exhaled, and immediately ate another heaping bite.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Rachael said.

  “I told you! I told you bitches!” Ann Richards said, leaning forward to give Tangela Bass a high five, and both women who hadn’t bet against Eva high-fived her in turn. Other than that forced show of solidarity, Eva gathered the money without a word or change in expression.

  “How was it?” Braque asked.

  “Whoa,” Eva said.

  “Could you eat more?”

  Eva nodded enthusiastically. “But gimme a minute.”

  Then came the barrage of questions about where Eva developed her tolerance for hot spices, where else they’d been that night (everyone was somehow equally amazed that she ate the Circle of Hell Wings at Jack Cermak’s), and how much more she could eat, because the team totally wanted to soak this room of gross, cocky men for everything they had.

  “Before we start,” Braque asked, “where’s the crapper in this hellhole?”

  “Through the gift shop,” Maya said.

  Of course it’s through the fucking gift shop.

  8:31 P.M.

  The Truth’s gift shop was worse than Braque had imagined. First of all, there wasn’t a straight path through it; it zigzagged like a duty-free store in an international terminal, forcing you to reckon with the words THE TRUTH on every conceivable piece of Made-in-China crap known to humanity—shirts, caps, mugs, steins, keychains, license-plate frames, trucker hats, vests, and belt buckles. They also had a full line of Truth Sauce, Truth Rub, Truth Spice, and something else that caught Braque’s attention.

  Braque walked to the register. “How is this sweet pepper jelly?”

  The young tattooed woman behind the counter nodded. “All of the food products here are actually pretty decent. They’re made locally in Batavia.”

  “Have you had this?”

  “I’ve only tried the green. The green is awesome.”

  “OK, I’ll go back and get the green.”

  • • •

  By the time she returned to the register, there was a line. The guy right in front of her was the American Eagle polo guy from the line outside. His face was flushed and sweaty, his eyes looked bloodshot, and he was holding a golden ticket in his hand. Braque wasn’t going to say jack shit to this weirdo, but he turned and looked at her.

  “Oh, hey, Miss Cut-in-Front-of-Everybody,” he said, not unfriendly.

  “I was meeting a group of people here,” Braque said.

  “Oh. Well, why didn’t ya say so? I thought you were gonna start a riot out there after you bolted in here like that.”

  “I don’t fuckin’ care,” Braque said.

  “I like your attitude,” the dude said. He stepped forward to the now-empty space in front of the register and handed his ticket to the woman behind it.

  “How quick did you finish it, Benny?” the woman asked, taking the ticket.

  “Three minutes, four seconds,” Benny said.

  “What’s your size?”

  “Men’s large,” Benny said, and when the woman handed him a black T-shirt, he put it on over his polo. The shirt read I CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH’S HELL CHILI on the front in a garish font, and HELL NIGHT, THE TRUTH, CHICAGO ILLINOIS on the back.

  “You just got here,” Braque said. “You’ve already finished a whole bowl of that chili?”

  “Ah, it’s way weaker this year. What are you getting? Aw, that stuff is the bomb.”

  “Glad you approve,” Braque said, handing the green sweet pepper jelly to the woman. It was then that it occurred to her that she should’ve just stolen this shit; why was she buying it and supporting this awful establishment?

  “Do you know who makes the best sweet pepper jelly in the world?”

  Braque hated it when people, guys especially, asked the kinds of questions that only they evidently knew the answers to. “I don’t care,” she said.

  “It’s this woman down in New Mexico. But you gotta go there in person. She won’t let you order it online.”

  “I’ll be sure and ask you all about it,” Braque said.

  “That’ll be $5.10,” the woman behind the counter said.

  “Have you handed out a lot of those T-shirts tonight?” Braque asked.

  “No, that’s the first,” the woman said.

  Braque was actually going to turn and congratulate Benny, sort of, but he was gone.

  8:37 P.M.

  Braque sat in a Pepto-Bismol pink toilet stall in the otherwise empty women’s bathroom and opened the jar of green sweet pepper jelly. Even with the sound of AC/DC playing and the smell of cheap bleach rising to her face, the scent of the jelly overwhelmed her senses. She realized that she had forgotten to bring a spoon or fork with her, but then she realized that she hadn’t forgotten at all; this was
an impulse buy. Why wasn’t she offered one at the register? Probably because the woman didn’t assume that she was darting off to eat it in the bathroom. So, OK, fine. She plunged her fingers in and drew a handful of warm green goop to her mouth.

  • • •

  Oh, wow. It was the best thing she had ever tasted. This was the best thing she’d ever done in her life, maybe. She smeared another handful across her tongue. It was incredible. What had she been waiting for? What had she been waiting for?

  Her phone buzzed. She wiped her hands on the single-ply toilet paper and pulled the phone out of her bag. It read TOLD YOU.

  She had to sit and think about this for a second.

  Braque was still pretty damn sure that what she’d been seeing around all day—the ephemeral SWET PEPER JELY on a protein bar, on the campus Rock, on her new phone—was some kind of madly subjective fever dream. She didn’t even bother to tell Patricia about it, and she told Patricia everything. She might have been making it all up.

  So, that confirmed, she didn’t see the harm in writing back.

  YOU WEREN’T FUCKING KIDDING, she typed. THIS SHIT IS AMAZING. WHY DO I LIKE IT SO MUCH?

  BECAUSE I LIKE IT, it wrote back.

  Braque typed, WHY CAN’T YOU LIKE SOMETHING NON-PROCESSED AND LOW-CALORIE?

  ARE WE GOING TO NEW MEXICO RIGHT NOW, it wrote.

  NO, WE’RE NOT GOING AT ALL, Braque typed. TOUGH TITTY.

  BUT THE BEST SWET PEPER JELY IS IN NEW MEXICO THE GUY SAID.

  SCREW THAT GUY, Braque typed.

  NO WERE GOING, it typed back.

  Bile rose in Braque’s throat, and she vomited up her side salad and the recent green pepper jelly all over the tile in front of the toilet.

  DID YOU JUST MAKE ME DO THAT? she typed.

  YEP, it wrote.

  WELL FUCK YOU, Braque wrote. If this wasn’t happening, and she was hallucinating or dreaming this, she might as well take a hard line.

  WERE GOING TO NEW MEXICO, it wrote. IT WIL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

  Braque threw her phone in her bag. She left the stall, and even though two excessively perfumed chicks were staring at her from over by the sinks, she stood there and shoved the last fistfuls of amazing, beautiful jelly into her mouth.

  When she was done, she cleaned out the last flecks in the jar with her tongue as they watched, and threw the empty thing in the bathroom trash.

  8:48 P.M.

  There was an immense noise coming from the main part of the restaurant, like what happens in sports bars during the Stanley Cup or World Series or Super Bowl or that kind of thing. Cheering and thumping and then a huge applause. The woman who was supposed to be behind the register wasn’t there; she was standing on the border between the gift shop and the restaurant, watching whatever was happening in the dining room. Everyone that Braque could see had their backs turned to the gift shop.

  Braque made her move. She grabbed all of the jars of green sweet pepper jelly and a few reds and crammed them into her shoulder bag. As she shoved two more into her pockets, she thought maybe she’d have one now. Why the hell not?

  • • •

  The roar of the crowd noise got closer, and Braque rose, fist and mouth full of delicious green sweet pepper jelly. She peeked over the top of the aisle just in time to see her cousin being carried aloft by her softball team and set down on the counter by the register. Benny took off his own HELL NIGHT T-shirt and slid it over Eva. Ann and Tangela raised Eva up again, and the crowd roared.

  When it finally hit Braque what was happening, she shouted and raised her green-stained fist in the air. Catching her cousin’s eye, she pushed toward Eva, reaching for her hand, just as Eva bent at the waist and vomited a flume of steaming brown and red chunks all over the cash register. It smelled like a cross between a fart and a burning tire.

  The smell made Braque’s throat open and evacuate a full eight ounces of undigested green slime onto the floor. What a scene! People backed away groaning and shouting. Someone called for a janitor. In the midst of it all, glowing with rude joy and shining with vomit, Braque at last grabbed her little cousin’s hand, and raised it to the sky.

  WALLEYE

  It was not just Will Prager’s opinion, but also unbiased fact, that in order to get girls in high school you had to have a thing. Maybe your thing was that your mom or dad was a lawyer and you lived in a nice house with a pool. Maybe it was rock-hard abs. Maybe your thing was that you were a computer nerd and you spent Prom Night in your parents’ basement, listening to Rush and thinking about string theory. There was someone for everyone, just so long as you were someone.

  Until freshman year, Will Prager didn’t have a thing. He was smart, but not a super-genius, and played sports, but not well enough to ever get a scholarship somewhere. Then some seniors who were in a band called Smarmy Kitten invited him personally to one of their shows. Their lead guitarist, Brandon Spencer, who always wore T-shirts of really obscure stuff like Merzbow and Tzadik Records, and was the coolest guy in the band, looked Prager in the eye and said, “Hey man, you should come to our gig. You’d like it.” Well, he did, and that was it. Ever since, Will Prager’s thing was music.

  • • •

  In the summer of ’05 alone, he drove the forty-five minutes from River Falls, Wisconsin, to Minneapolis ten times, and saw Built to Spill, Drive-By Truckers, Spoon, Heiruspecs, Dillinger Four, Boiled in Lead, Maitiera, Tapes ‘n Tapes, the Owls, and Atmosphere with Brother Ali, mostly with his friends Vik Gupta and Ken Kovacs. He also started a band called the Lonesome Cowboys, with Vik on drums, Ken on bass, Zach Schmetterling on pedal steel, Erick Travis on violin, and Will on lead guitar and vocals. Their thing was that they played sad cowboy music, and played cover songs in the style of sad cowboy music. Their cover of “No Diggity” was off the chain! It made hot girls forget you were a dork, which is the point of all music. Girls were lucky, they didn’t have to have a thing. They just had to look nice and come to your shows and not call you all the time about stupid stuff.

  • • •

  But the new girl in the back of Killer Keeley’s fifth-period American History class, first day of school, junior year—she for sure had a thing. She had on oxblood Doc Martens, black nail polish, a black miniskirt, bright red Manic Panic hair, and a white T-shirt that read THE SMITHS and MEAT IS MURDER. Total Goth.

  “What was North America like before the Europeans arrived?” Killer Keeley asked. Will Prager raised his hand, and Killer Keeley continued looking around the classroom. It was time for Prager to set the tone for how the year was gonna go.

  “Anyone else?” Mr. Keeley asked. He somehow already knew better than to call on Prager, but no one else had his hand up. It was fifth period, right after lunch, so everyone was in a food coma, and it was eighty-five degrees outside, and the question was insultingly broad.

  “I just want to be in love,” Prager said. “Will you help me or not?”

  “I didn’t call on you, William,” said Keeley.

  Prager sang the first lines of “Where Is the Love,” and the cute new girl in back, the Goth, laughed.

  Rumor was Killer Keeley had gone soft over the last couple years. Now, thanks to Prager, he was losing his new batch of juniors in record time.

  • • •

  At the end of class, Prager got a good look at the girl who’d laughed at his heartbreaking rendition of the Roberta Flack/Donny Hathaway soul classic. She was even hotter than at first glance. She had boobs and an ass that looked too amazing for mere Wisconsin boys and their cold, jittery hands; he imagined her in Miami, riding a dolphin while wearing a bikini, capsizing sailboats full of horny men. Plus she was tall, at least six-two, which was cool with Prager, because he was six-four. And she thought he was funny, which was also pretty sexy.

  • • •

  An hour later, walking into Madame DuPlessis’s seventh-period French class, he saw her seated in th
e back, and probably smiled when he saw her, but tried not to in case she saw him. The seat to her left was open, and even though he didn’t like sitting in the back row because his vision wasn’t so good, he took it.

  “Hey,” he said, glancing in her direction.

  “Hey,” she said brightly, and even welcomingly, he thought.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Eva,” she said. “You?”

  Uh-oh. He had to think for a second how to phrase it in a way that sounded memorable. “Will, Will Prager,” he said. Now he had to keep the conversation flowing somehow. “So, you like the Smiths?” he asked, looking at her shirt while simultaneously trying not to stare at her chest.

  “Yeah, they’re OK,” she said.

  “You a vegetarian?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I just wanted a Smiths shirt. You?”

  “Yeah, just started,” he said. He’d seen a documentary about chickens at Ken Kovacs’s house the week before that had converted both him and Ken. It was now another thing they both had, in addition to their band.

  Madame DuPlessis stood in front of the class, dressed for the heat in a sleeveless sundress, straight brown hair glistening under the fluorescent lights. She was kinda cute but she was also the mom of a kid who was a freshman, so that was weird.

  “Regardez ici, s’il vous plaît,” Madame DuPlessis said.

  “À bientôt,” Will Prager said to Eva. Damn, that was smooth, he thought, as he turned his attention to the teacher.

  • • •

  They had to speak and write things in French for the next fifty minutes and there was limited time for meaningful interaction until the bell rang, which, after a burning eternity, it finally did.

  “You like Radiohead?” Will asked Eva. He was hoping that she’d linger and talk with him, but she was clearing her desk too quickly, sweeping her books into a black shoulder bag.

  “Yeah, they’re cool,” she said. She seemed to be in a hurry.

  “My band does a couple Radiohead covers,” Prager said. He had to work in the fact that he was in a band before it was too late. “We have rehearsal tonight.”