Drive Like Hell: A Novel

by Dallas Hudgens

  Her name was Rachel Coyle, and she was a server, a position just above busboy since it actually required some flicker of brainpower to remember which meal belonged to which customer. That’s not to say she was a model employee. I could tell by the slouchy way she walked back to the kitchen. Of course, I immediately took a liking to her.

  Rachel walked in with a steak dinner and stopped to survey the aftermath of Fay’s tizzy: the shrimp and the rice and especially Yuri’s zigzagged trail of blood. She didn’t bother to ask what had happened. She acted like she couldn’t have cared less.

  “The couple at table fourteen keeps asking about their scampis,” she said. “The woman wants to know if we had to send out a boat.”

  “Ha. Ha,” Yuri said. “People are so fucking clever.”

  Rachel tiptoed through the debris in her clunky black shoes. She carried the steak dinner over to Yuri. He considered it for a moment and grunted.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Rachel shrugged. “That’s your dinner special tonight. Remember those rib eyes that were about to go bad?”

  “No,” he said, clearly irritated. “I mean why are you bringing it back?”

  “The woman at table nine says she ordered it medium well, and it’s still rare. Her husband said he could see the marks where the jockey whipped it.”

  Yuri clenched his eyes shut. “I don’t want to hear anymore what customers have to say.”

  He picked up the steak with his fingers. He held it to the light and studied the spot where the woman had cut into the flesh.

  “It is fucking gray,” he said. He slapped the steak back onto the plate, whipped his cigar out of his mouth, and tamped a coat of ashes onto the meat.

  “There,” he said. “Now tell her it is well done.”

  Rachel never batted an eye. She just stood there looking bored.

  “What?” Yuri asked. “What is it? Tell me.” He looked jumpy. It was obvious that Rachel had a way of unnerving him.

  “You never gave me an answer about the shrimp scampi.” Her voice was as flat as the spatula in Yuri’s hand.

  Stan and I were unloading the washer. I nudged his shoulder and pointed to the grill. “What do you think of her?”

  Despite his penchant for pot and pornographic letters, Stan was no run-of-the-mill idiot. Apparently, he’d scored a 1,320 on his SATs after graduating from the Four Loaves Christian Academy. And yet he’d postponed college for Yuri’s kitchen.

  “There’s something about her eyes,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know. They’re kind of sexy in a weird way.”

  “No, that’s not it,” he said. “Something about her eyes reminds me of my older sister. The doctors told my parents she has a chemical imbalance.”

  “Is that a mental thing?”

  “Yeah. She has to take medicine for it. Otherwise she goes out and wrecks cars and shit.”

  Yuri held up his bloody paw. “Can’t you see I am wounded?” He sounded like he was pleading with Rachel. “I cannot make scampi now.”

  Rachel still refused to ask what had gone down in the kitchen. “Well, if it’s that bad, you should go to the hospital. Either way, I’m not telling those people their scampis are on the floor.”

  She turned her back on Yuri and walked off to deliver the Macanudo-dusted steak. Along the way, she tramped through a pool of Yuri’s blood. Before the kitchen doors swung shut, I could see that she’d left a trail of it on the dining room’s gold carpet.

  Yuri stood there looking butchered and beleaguered, like some kind of pro wrestling chef who’d come out on the wrong end of a Ginsu-knife cage match. He might have been six feet tall and two bills with change, but he’d proven no match for a couple of skinny women in aprons. He surveyed the shrimp that littered the floor, and then his blue eyes traveled to a stack of clean dishes that I’d just set beside the stove. He stroked his beard in a devilish way, as if he was considering the unthinkable.

  Stan placed his hand on my shoulder and leaned in close to my ear. “I got five bucks that says he serves those shrimp.”

  All I could do was shake my head. “I sure hope this kind of stuff doesn’t happen at the T-Bone King.”

  I found Yuri sitting at the bar after the dining room had closed. That’s where he always doled out the checks to the kitchen staff. The bar was quiet and empty. Even the bartender had knocked off for the evening. Yuri had helped himself to a bottle of Courvoisier. He was nursing a snifter and watching Cool Hand Luke on the TV mounted above the bar. The wet, gnawed stump of a cigar lay smoldering in an ashtray.

  “Sit,” he commanded, waving his hand, which he’d finally gotten around to patching up with a roll of gauze. “This is good movie, yes?”

  I gazed up at the screen. The card scene was on, the one where Newman bluffs his ass off with a worthless hand.

  “Ha!” Yuri let out some strange hybrid of a laugh and a grunt. “I love that. He beats them with nothing. With pooey.”

  Yuri had a physical way of talking. Even when he was happy, you got the feeling he might just reach out and slap you shitless at any second. I nodded and smiled, trying to stay limber in case the need arose to bob and weave.

  “Your name is Luke, yes?”

  I was surprised. He really did know my name.

  “Maybe we call you Cool Hand Luke,” he said. “Cool Hand take knife from Fay.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  Yuri turned his attention back to the screen. The stack of checks was sitting between us. I could have thumbed through it and found mine, but I got the feeling he wasn’t finished talking to me.

  “Your parents like Cool Hand Luke, yes?”

  “I don’t really know. Why?”

  “Why? Because they name you Luke.”

  I was worried I might have to explain that my name wasn’t all that uncommon, and, anyway, Claudia had named me after the alter ego of Hank Williams: Luke the Drifter. I had a feeling Yuri didn’t know who Hank was, and I wasn’t in the mood for explanations.

  Then Yuri started laughing. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I am kidding, beeg boy.”

  He poured a little more Courvoisier into his glass. Gazing into his bleary eyes, I could tell that he’d advanced past the stage of a light buzz and was working his way toward a full-fledged bender. Tomorrow was his day off.

  “Paul Newman,” he said, pointing at the screen. “I love that man.”

  “Yeah, he’s cool,” I said. “He races cars, you know.”

  “I know that. You think I am fucking idiot? Paul Newman stay in this hotel last year when he race at Lakeside Circuit.”

  Yuri pounded his fist on the bar to emphasize his point that it was this hotel and none other.

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. Yuri cook steak for Cool Hand Luke. I try to send him fifty eggs. Ha. Ha. Ha. But he like steak, medium rare. He even came back to kitchen, and we make salad dressing together.”

  “Make what?”

  Yuri pronounced it as clearly and as slowly as he could. “Sal-eet dress-king. He makes his own. It is very good. I tell him he should start his own company.”

  There was a road course near Green Lake called Lakeside Circuit that hosted a big GT race every fall. I could see Newman showing up for it, as the race attracted all the top drivers. The story checked out until the salad dressing part.

  “I met Jack Nicklaus once.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Nicklaus, the golfer.”

  Yuri waved his hand through the air. “I don’t know golf. Paul Newman, though. I love that sonuvabitch.”

  I waited to see if he had anything else to say, but he kept his eyes on the screen. Finally, I decided to make a play for the checks. I eased my hand down the bar, toward the stack of paper.

  “Let me tell you something, beeg boy.”

  I tried to jerk my arm back, but he clamped his bandaged hand over my wrist. He leaned over like he was going to tell me a secret.

  “When I was small boy, they pack me and mother on r
ailroad car.”

  “Who did?”

  “Who? Who do you think? Joseph Stalin.”

  He jerked his head derisively. “Fucking cocksucker. Pooey. They take us from our village in Chechnya, and they burn it to ground. It was very cold, and mother, she die in cattle car. She die with her arms around me.”

  He wrapped his arms around himself and squeezed tight, like he was trying to dislodge a chicken bone from his windpipe.

  “My father was killed in war, see. And then my mother, she was killed by Stalin. They throw her body to the snow. So I have nothing. I am eight years old, and I have nothing.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  Yuri pointed to the TV screen. “That is okay, beeg boy. Don’t feel sorry for Yuri. Sometimes nothing is a pretty cool hand.”

  He shoved the stack of checks in front of me. “What are you waiting for? Take it. Go buy Fay a drink. Tell her no hard feelings. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

  10

  I stopped by the hotel gift shop on my way out. It was closed for the night, but the lock on the glass door was busted. I looked around to see if anybody was watching and then I let myself inside. I felt my way through the dark, past the peanut-shaped ashtrays and the little souvenir bales of cotton. I stopped at the magazine rack and waited for my eyes to adjust in the dim light. When I could read the covers, I picked up the latest Road & Track and stuffed it into my backpack. I considered lifting a Payday bar but resisted the temptation. I was still riding high on my wave of law-abiding citizenship, determined not to slip up. I even planned to sneak the magazine back into the gift shop when I came to work the next day.

  I parked myself on the curb, right beneath the floodlights at the kitchen’s back entrance. Nick and the band were playing a late set at Smokey the Bar, so I figured he’d be a while picking me up.

  The night was still and warm, typical early May stuff, with a whiff of the swimming pool’s chlorine hanging in the air. I pulled off the white oxford that I wore in the dining room and shook the hem of my T-shirt to stir some air around my body. I fired up a Winston that I’d lifted from Nick’s soft pack and opened the magazine. I’d just started to read about the new Porsche Carrera when I heard Rachel’s voice.

  “Don’t they cut off your fingers for stealing shit like that?”

  She was standing over me, wearing her green waitress jumper and her bad girl leather jacket. She was slouching to one side to make up for the weight of the green backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “Nobody except Fay,” I told her.

  “You’re the one who took the knife from her, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t have much choice. Yuri told me to take it.”

  “The modest hero,” she said. “How refreshing. Too bad you’re a thief.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The magazine,” she said. “I was picking up my check in the bar. Anybody could have seen you stumbling around in the gift shop. If I were your guidance counselor, I wouldn’t suggest a life of crime.”

  “Well, it’s nothing you need to tell anybody. Besides, I’m gonna return it.”

  She let out a snort, as though she had no doubt whatsoever that I was full of shit. She hoisted her backpack a little higher and turned to walk away.

  But then she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “I knew a boy in Ohio who looked like you.”

  I figured this was a good thing.

  “He was a fucking asshole,” she said.

  The statement just sat there, rotting like the shrimp in the Dumpster across the parking lot. She waited for a response, but I didn’t know what to say. So, I decided to go with Nick’s tactic. One morning when we were lifting weights on the front porch he told me that if I was ever with a girl and found myself at a loss for words, it was best to just keep quiet and look irritated. This was the same morning he’d told me to wash my Hanes pocket T’s in hot water so they’d shrink up nice and tight. “Then you gotta stretch out the neck,” he said. “Girls eat that shit with a spoon.”

  I tugged at the neck of my white Hanes, puffed the Winston, and tried to pull off a Clint-like squint. I looked at Rachel, and she looked at me. I was determined to wait her out.

  “So is there anything to do around here?” she said finally.

  I felt like I’d won a contest, only now I really did have to say something. I went back to the well again and asked myself, “What would Nick do?” The answer appeared like a burning shrub.

  “You wanna smoke a joint?”

  Rachel tilted her head and pushed her long spill of hair behind her ear. She appeared hopeful. “You got one?”

  I was on empty at the moment, but I knew that Stan was equipped to handle all marijuana emergencies this side of a Rastafarian convention. “Stocking the pantry” is how he put it. I gazed out into the employee lot to make sure his van was still there.

  “I can get one,” I said.

  “Where?”

  I took one last drag off the Winston, then flicked it across the pavement. I stood up and turned to go back inside. “Wait here. I gotta call room service.”

  Rachel drove an old white Peugeot sedan with Illinois plates: GS 8349—Land of Lincoln. I remembered reading somewhere that Peugeots never wanted to start in cold weather, but I didn’t see any need in telling her that. Besides, she went well with the car. It wasn’t all that attractive at first glance, just a boxy European four-door. But it had its appeal if you kept looking, the slightest of curves around the trunk and the grill, small details that made it interesting, details you’d never see on a Ford or a Chevy. I suppose I would have been disappointed if she’d been driving an ordinary, dependable sort of car.

  We were smoking in the Peugeot at the back of the employee lot. We had a real fog going in that thing. Rachel told me how she and her mother just moved to Green Lake a few months back. They were from Champaign, Illinois, though they’d lived somewhere in Ohio for a year before coming south. Rachel was seventeen, heading into her senior year of high school in the fall. Her mother was an English professor who’d just taken a job at Lakeside Community College.

  “Why would your mother want to teach here?”

  “Probably the only place that would have her. She’s been at three schools in three years.”

  She handed me the joint and went to work on the radio dial. I took a quick hit and looked around the car. It was a mess, cassettes and paperbacks strewn all over the floorboard and the backseat. One of the books was called The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The car also had a distinct smell to it, like Juicy Fruit gum. It was strong, even amid the pot smoke.

  “Does your mother have trouble holding jobs or something?”

  Rachel paused amid the radio static. “Don’t you think you’re being kind of nosy?”

  I held out the joint. “It’s one of the lesser-known side effects.”

  It turned out Stan’s pot wasn’t half bad—certainly not in Nick’s league, but passable. I felt loose, like a big Slinky snaking its way down a staircase. And I was craving a stick of Juicy Fruit all of the sudden.

  Rachel took her turn with the joint and went back to the radio. She paused at “The Gambler.” Kenny was singing about knowing when to hold ‘em, and when to fold ‘em. I was expecting her to say how much she hated that song.

  “So where’s your car?” she asked.

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “You mean Mr. Road & Track doesn’t have a cool-as-shit Trans Am?”

  “Only rednecks and Burt Reynolds drive Trans Ams.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were a man of such discerning taste.”

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “I tend to enjoy the finer things. A good steak, maybe a plate of scampi.”

  “So, why don’t you have a car?”

  “I don’t have a license.”

  She laughed. “What happened? Did you fail the driving test?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I fucking aced it. I got screwed on the parallel parking, because this dickhe
ad patrolman was on some kind of fucking power trip.”

  Rachel looked confused. “So, you’re saying they wouldn’t give you a license because you can’t parallel park?”

  “No, they gave me a license. But then I had it suspended for six months. This juvenile judge cut it up right in front of me.”

  That little piece of information impressed her so much that she turned down the radio. “A judge?” she asked. “What did you do?”

  I reached over and plucked the joint from her fingers. “Who’s being nosy now?”

  She gave me this beautiful sneer, just like the ones she’d given Yuri. I felt honored.

  “Forget it,” she said. “I didn’t really want to know, anyway.”

  She turned up the radio again. Kenny was still singing. The Gambler was down to his last cigarette, just about to break even.

  “God, I hate this song,” she said.

  She spun the dial, but the next station was playing the same thing. She let out a pained groan and turned down the volume.

  “I went for a drive in my neighbor’s car,” I told her, “and I sort of neglected to notify the woman.”

  Rachel shut off the radio. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “You mean you stole a fucking car?”

  “No, I just had an errand to run. I was gonna take it back.”

  She started laughing again. “Yeah, right. Just like you’re gonna take back that magazine.”

  I didn’t see any point in trying to convince her that I really did plan to return the magazine, or the car. So, I just tried to look irritated again.

  Rachel was excited now, more animated than I’d ever seen her in the restaurant. Her eyes were bigger, her mouth wider, stretched into a juicy smile. She took the joint out of my hands and sucked on it until it almost burned her lips, until there was almost nothing there, and the glowing ashes tumbled onto the front of her leather jacket. Then she grabbed my arm up under the shirtsleeve.

  “Come on,” she said, “I want to show you something.”

  I stood at the back of her car while she emptied her backpack into the trunk. The bag was crammed full of stuff: more books—The Bell Jar and The Flowers of Evil—a hairbrush, a pink cardigan with the price tag still attached, mascara, lip gloss, and about a dozen packs of Juicy Fruit. The yellow packs were raining down into the trunk.