by Anthology
“Can I help you with something? Maybe you lose something down there?” A heavily accented voice spoke from above him.
Grimes stood up quickly, rapping his head on the underside of the counter. Pain clouded his vision as he steadied himself with the chrome-studded seat of the stool and straightened his legs cautiously. “Mr. Tomacheski, I presume?” he said to the field of white before him which was slowly beginning to focus into a large beefy man a full head taller than he, in kitchen whites and apron.
“Tomacheski,” the figure said, extending a huge hand. Grimes tried to grasp it with the ends of his fingers, but the hand engulfed his and squeezed, pumping his arm up and down like an oil rig. He pulled loose and reached into his pocket for a card. “Morton Grimes. Health Department Officer.”
“Oh, yes. You came to grant my A-card! How do you do, Mr. Grimes!” The arm-pumping began all over again. “An unfortunate name for a man in your profession, yes?” Grimes stiffened. “An A-placard is not given lightly, Mr. Tomacheski. I’ll be making an extensive inspection of your premises.” Oh, indeed, I will, you Red bastard. The accent was definitely Russian, Grimes thought. This guy wasn’t even trying to sound like an American. Of course that could mean he wasn’t really a communist, since if he was, he probably wouldn’t sound so much like one. Well, he could decide about that later, he had an inspection to do.
“. . . Of course we weren’t expecting you until Wednesday,” the Russian was saying.
“Bacteria don’t make appointments, Mr. Tomacheski. A Health Department Officer is empowered to inspect a business at any time.”
“Of course. Well, where would you like to begin?”
“Let’s begin with the exterior of the premises. On the application here, it says that the name of the business is Tomacheski’s ‘Hole in the Wall.’ You would not appear to be doing business under that name.”
“But yes, of course. That’s the name. What it says right there on the paper.”
“Yet,” Grimes continued, warming up now, “there is no sign outside to that effect. There is only that.”
He pointed out the front window at the sign, which said only EAT, but said it so brightly that even in broad daylight it was sending coruscating pink and green waves through the glass bricks that made up most of the front wall.
“This is a little place, Mr. Grimes.” He put two huge hands close together to show how small. “The name is too big for the building. But EAT is what people come here to do, yes? So the sign says the important thing. Excuse me, but this is a concern of the Health Department, this sign business?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Tomacheski, but the Department doesn’t operate in a vacuum. We have an understanding with other branches of city and county government to report possible violations of any nature.”
“Well, the sign has been approved by the county, Mr. Grimes. Now, where would you like to begin?”
“With the kitchen.” Grimes pushed ahead of the big man in the narrow space between the counter stools and the booths and walked into the back of the diner. “Well, here’s your first problem right here,” he said, pulling out a notepad and his Parker. “Peeling paint on the wall of the, uh . . .” He peered around the comer. “Ladies’ Room. Peeling paint is a serious health hazard in a food service establishment. Lead, you know.”
The paint seemed to melt and run even as Grimes looked at it. He put his finger to the wall to determine the degree of flaking. A hot tingling ran up his arm to the elbow and he pulled away, shaking his hand. “What have you got here, Tomacheski? Loose wiring in this wall? I think the Fire Department will want to know about this.”
“They were here yesterday, Mr. Grimes, and the wiring is good in this building. The paint is good too, I think. I saw this same thing yesterday morning, and I think it is only a trick of the light. Look.” He pointed at the wall. The spot was gone.
Grimes touched the wall lightly with an index finger. No shock. No paint. He stood there for a moment, feeling puzzled and not liking it. Then he turned on his heel and pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen with Tomacheski following close behind. A row of high windows illuminated the room with a fine morning light. Grimes marched into the cooking area and stopped dead in his tracks. Tomacheski pulled up, but too late to avoid bumping Grimes, who was propelled forward into the arms of the very Negro whose presence in the kitchen had alarmed him so.
“You all right, Mister?” the Negro asked, setting him back on his feet.
Grimes pulled away from the man’s grasp and brushed off his clothes. “I’m fine,” he croaked. “Fine.” He stared for a moment at the black face, the white cap and apron, then spun around to face Tomacheski. “We need to talk. Out there.” He walked back through the kitchen doors and into the dining room.
“You weren’t in the kitchen very long, Mr. Grimes. You sure you saw everything you need to see?”
“I’m scarcely finished with my inspection, Mr. Tomacheski. In fact, you might say I’m just getting started.” He pointed back the way they had come. “Mr. Tomacheski, there’s a Negro in your kitchen.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited for the other man’s reply.
Tomacheski blinked, furrowed his brow, and blinked again. “Yes.”
“Well, who is he, and what is he doing there?” Grimes could hear his voice climbing a bit, like it always did when his blood pressure went up. He could definitely feel it going up now.
“He’s Leon Duffy and he washes dishes, and I’m training him to cook so maybe he won’t have to wash dishes the rest of his life.” He cocked his head slightly, narrowed his eyes at Grimes. “Is there a problem you have with this arrangement between Mr. Duffy and myself?”
“Just this, Mr. Tomacheski, there are a lot of men—white men—out of work in this country despite Mr. Eisenhower’s best efforts. We have an understanding in this town about Negroes, about selling property to them, and about encouraging them to settle here by giving them jobs that could go to white men. Do you take my meaning?”
“Not entirely, Mr. Grimes, but I don’t speak the language so well yet. This is a law, this thing about not hiring Negroes?”
“Not exactly a law, Mr. Tomacheski—an understanding.”
“There are a lot of these ‘understandings’ around here, yes?”
“Exactly. And they help keep things running smoothly with very little unpleasantness. That’s the way we like it. When you grasp the way things work here, things will run smoothly for you, too.” He reached into his portfolio and withdrew a shiny new A-placard with the seal of the Health Department emblazoned in gold in the center of the A. He smiled up at Tomacheski, waiting.
“Curse me for an ignorant immigrant, Mr. Grimes, but I don’t understand your ‘understanding.’ Every night, except for Saturday when I go see a movie, I study the U.S. Constitution for my citizenship test. Nowhere do I find it written that I can’t train a dishwasher to be a cook.” Grimes could have sworn that Tomacheski was deliberately avoiding his point. He felt the beginnings of a tension headache crawling up his neck to the back of his skull. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a careful breath. “He’ll have to have a blood test, a skin Tuberculin test, and a lung X-ray in order to obtain a food worker’s permit. Without a food worker’s permit, he cannot work in your kitchen. And to obtain such a permit, he will have to go through my department.”
“Oh, he has these things already. He paid for all those tests last week.”
His vacation. Crawford had done it while he was away on vacation. The headache arrived in full force. Grimes slipped the A-placard back and pulled out a different one—sun-faded, fly specked, and marked with a large blue letter B. “My inspection reveals serious nonconformance with Health Department standards. You will remove your temporary permit and display this B-placard until my next inspection.”
“But you haven’t inspected anything yet!” Tomacheski protested. “This is terribly unfair, Mr. Grimes. You know I deserve an A-card. This restaurant is spotless. You could eat o
ff this floor!”
Grimes glanced at the red and white linoleum, then up at Tomacheski. “County regulations require you to display this card until the premises have been inspected again.” He smiled briefly and turned to leave. That should take care of the Negro business.
Tomacheski followed him to the door. “Well, when is the next inspection?”
“You’ll have to call for an appointment, but I’ll warn you right now, I’m a very busy man. I may not be able to make it back for, oh . . . sixty days.”
“No customers will want to come to a B-card restaurant. In sixty days I could be closed down!”
Grimes tucked his portfolio up under his arm. “Business is uncertain in the best of times, Mr. Tomacheski. Perhaps the next proprietor at this location will prove more amenable to the way we do things around here. Good day.” He walked out onto the sidewalk. The screen door clicked shut—a lovely sound.
He arrived back at the department in the early afternoon. There was a message from Crawford. He left the day’s files on his desk and walked down the hall to Crawford’s office.
“Come in,” Crawford called from the other side of the door. Grimes walked in and stood before the hopelessly cluttered desk of the Chief Health Officer. He doubted Ed Crawford had seen the surface of his desk in months. “You asked to see me, Ed?”
“Yeah, Mort. What exactly is this Tomacheski business? Did you actually perform an inspection on his premises today, or didn’t you?”
So. The Russian had gone over his head. “There are serious problems at that place, Ed.”
“You have samples? Is the lab starting cultures?”
“This isn’t exactly something you can culture, Ed.” He crossed his hands behind his back, tapped his toe on the floor.
Crawford looked up at him expectantly. “Well?”
“This guy Tomacheski has a Negro working for him. As a cook.”
“Oh, yes. That would be the fellow who was in here getting tests last week. Don’t see too many Negroes applying for food cards around here. Came out clean as a whistle, though.” He shuffled through a stack of file folders, scattering loose papers across the desk.
Grimes went on tapping, a little harder now. “Ed, you’re a newcomer around here, relatively speaking, and if you’ll pardon my saying so, you haven’t gone out of your way to fit in—join up—you know what I mean, I guess. But there are things we do in this town and things we don’t do. Encouraging Negroes to live and work here is one of the things we just don’t do.” He nodded sagely, certain that Crawford would understand.
“Let me tell you what I do, Mort,” Crawford said, rising from his chair. “I enforce the health regulations and protect the health standards of this county. I do not decide who will live or work here, and neither do you. It’s simply not our job.” He handed Grimes a sheet of paper. “You have an appointment at ten a.m. tomorrow to conduct a genuine Health Department inspection of Tomacheski’s Hole in the Wall and grant or withhold his A-placard based on the results of that inspection. Is that clear?”
Grimes took the appointment slip and left the office. On his way back down the hall he reduced the paper to a tight, sweaty ball in his fist, and lobbed it at a wastebasket. It missed.
Tomacheski met him at the front door. “We’ve got a little problem back in the kitchen, Mr. Grimes. I don’t know if this would be such a good time for your inspection.” Grimes beamed. “You made an appointment. Tomacheski—I’m keeping it.” He advanced down the row of stools. Tomacheski retreating before his burning righteousness. “Just what is the nature of your problem?”
“You remember that funny spot on the Ladies’ Room wall?”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Well it came back this morning, only worse.”
“Probably comes from using cheap paint. I won’t be able to pass you if there’s any peeling. Lead, you know.”
“I’m afraid it’s worse than just paint.” Tomacheski stopped retreating just outside the kitchen doors.
“Well? Don’t just stand there. What happened?”
“It sort of opened up.”
“The door to the Ladies’ Room?”
“Not exactly. Sort of a hole. Where you thought the paint was bad.”
“And?” Grimes was running short of patience with this ignorant commie, or not-commie, whatever he was.
“He’s in the kitchen.” Tomacheski pushed open the doors with his back and gestured Grimes inside, never taking his eyes from Grimes’ face.
Grimes strode into the kitchen. What he saw inside nearly made him stride out again. The Negro was still there, of course, but Grimes scarcely noticed him next to the filthy, louse-ridden Indian sitting on a bench under the window and slurping soup from a Buffalo China cup. Grimes clutched his portfolio under his arm and struggled to control his voice. “What is that doing here?”
“That’s what I was trying to explain. This hole opened up, you know, on the wall of the Ladies’ Room, and he sort of fell through”
“He was in the Ladies’ Room?” Grimes could feel his voice rising in step with his blood pressure. “What was he doing in the Ladies’ Room?”
Tomacheski and the Negro were staring at him in amazement. The Indian had pulled his blanket up over his head and was peeking out with one frightened eye. Grimes stood in one spot and trembled, imagining the bacteria count on one square inch of that skin. He put two fingers on his left wrist and felt his pulse. Not good. This bastard Tomacheski was going to be the death of him. He turned toward the Russian, took two deep breaths and let them out slowly. “What,” he repeated in a voice dripping control like icicles, “was this Indian doing in the Ladies’ Room?”
“I don’t think he was in the Ladies’ Room, exactly. You see, the wall started looking funny again, like it did yesterday and the day before, only this time it got worse, and it turned into a kind of a hole, and there was a great snowstorm on the other side.”
“A blizzard,” inteijected Duffy. “And there was all this snow blowing in on the floor, and all this cold wind, like to froze us both.”
“Duffy tells the truth. It was like some other place in there. And then we saw someone walking toward us, and this poor fellow stumbles into the hallway.”
“Well, why didn’t you push him right back through? He’s a walking health hazard!”
“Because he was half-starved and half-frozen to death!” bellowed Tomacheski.
“And also because the hole closed up right after that,” Duffy added. “Then it was just the wall again. Wasn’t nothin’ we could do after that. I think we’re stuck with this guy.”
“No,” Tomacheski said, “I don’t think so. What time were you here yesterday, Mr. Grimes?”
“Nine a.m.”
“You’re sure of that?”
Grimes snorted. “Of course I’m sure.”
“And that’s when you saw the wall not looking just right. And the morning before that I saw it, too. I’m sure it was about the same time. I thought it was the light, remember? I think that if we just wait around until nine o’clock tomorrow morning . . .”
“Tomorrow morning!”
“Yeah!” said Duffy. “If the hole opens up again tomorrow morning we could put this guy back where he belongs, and everything could get back to normal around here.”
“And in the meantime,” added Tomacheski, “We could get together some food and warm clothes. Maybe some boots . . .” He placed his foot next to the Indian’s, comparing sizes.
“Mr. Tomacheski, you will take that . . . person to the Social Welfare Department now if you want to retain your permit to operate a restaurant.” He turned and pushed through the swinging doors, knuckles white around the handle of his portfolio.
Tomacheski followed him into the dining area. “Mr. Crawford promised you would make an inspection.” Grimes turned at the door. “You will be open for business in less than two hours, and in your kitchen there is a filthy, infested savage not six feet from where food is being prepared.”
>
‘There’s a little porch out back. I’ll put him out there. He can’t go to the Welfare, Mr. Grimes, he needs to go home.” Grimes said nothing, but fixed the Russian with his gaze. “You come back tomorrow,” Tomacheski said. “You come back and see for yourself. The hole will come back. And then he will go. But not before that, because I’ve been cold, Mr. Grimes, and I’ve been hungry, and I’ve got a home I can never go back to, and I won’t do that to nobody.” Grimes looked up at the Russian and anger burned in his breast, clean and bright. “I’ll be back at nine tomorrow morning with the Chief Health Officer. Enjoy your day, Mr. Tomacheski. It will be your last doing business in this county.” He walked out and slammed the screen behind him.
Grimes adjusted his hat and knocked on Ed Crawford’s door.
“Come on in, Mort.”
“Ed, it’s ten minutes till nine. Aren’t you coming to Tomacheski’s with me?”
“Yeah, Mort. You go on ahead. I’ll be along in a couple of minutes in my car. I’ve got some things to straighten up here.” He indicated a particularly tall pile on the desk. “Well, hurry, Ed . . . please. This is important.”
“Just a few minutes, Mort. I’ll meet you there.”
The door was open, and Grimes walked in without knocking. He could hear voices coming from the back.
“I think it’s starting. Look there.”
“Yeah, there it goes. Get him ready, now.”
Grimes hurried back to the hallway. Duffy and Tomacheski stood on either side of the Indian with bags of provisions. They were all staring at the Ladies’ Room wall, where a widening hole was forming from churning whiteness that boiled out of . . . Grimes steadied himself on Tomacheski’s arm and looked away for a moment.
“You see, Mr. Grimes?” Tomacheski was shouting over the roar that was emanating from the hole. “It was true, what I said. This hole goes somewhere. Look!”