The Dishwasher

by Stéphane Larue

  “What were you doing in a crack house?”

  Bébert flicks his pack of smokes around in circles on the glossy tabletop.

  “Nothing, man. Just hanging out.”

  A peal of laughter breaks out in the back of the room. You can hear the sharp loud clack of two billiard balls colliding over the music. The players swear in appreciation. I turn around. The guy who clearly just shot is already leaning over the table, concentrating like a sniper calculating wind speed.

  “Last time I saw you, you were working in the Old Port, right?”

  Bébert stares off into the distance. I say it again. He takes another look at the door.

  “When was that again?”

  “I ran into you at the bar. You were with your staff.”

  “Hold on a sec.”

  He puts his elbows down on the table. A crease appears on his forehead.

  “The time we ended up on the roof, with Johnny’s absinthe?”

  “No, that was at least two years earlier. You were going out with a tattoo artist.”

  “I don’t remember that at all. I must have been really fucked up. Was it winter?”

  “It was summer. It was hot as hell. At the Zinc.”

  His eyes light up, and he chuckles.

  “Yeah, now I remember! I woke up at the McGill Hospital. Emergency Room.”

  Six years ago, just a few months before I stopped working on the Plateau, I’d run into Bébert in a bar on Mont-Royal Avenue. He was out with his work crew. It must have been the entire kitchen staff, plus some busgirls, and half of them were riding the white horse. I went over and sat with them. Bébert was completely out of control, stealing beers from other tables in between rounds, dropping out of the conversation after a few comments, doing big keys of coke in front of everyone and walking around barefoot as if he was in his living room. The bartenders just let him run wild, they’d long lost control of the bar. The tables were overflowing with empty glasses and half-drunk pitchers, beer was dribbling onto our thighs. The kind of night when everything is bathed in a dirty pool of beer. The sous-chef was ordering rounds of shots, twenty at a time. I tried to keep up. I knew one of the busgirls, we’d worked together at Pistou, and she came and sat between me and Bébert. She told me about a time, on the day of the sidewalk sale, when they were still taking new tables two hours after closing. Two of the cooks said fuck it and slept in the restaurant, right in the booths, so they’d be there to open the next day. For the entire hour she spent beside me her hand never left my forearm, and she gave me a squeeze every time she wanted to emphasize a point. She was practically talking right in my ear. We’d always been kind of into each other, but that night I met my Waterloo. I’d gotten too drunk too fast. When she said she had a little weed and asked if I wanted to go out and smoke, the Jameson came up in my throat. I jumped up, bumping the table on my way, and made it out of the bar just in time. The nausea subsided a moment but I ended up a few streets away puking my guts out in front of a McDonald’s, holding myself up against the window, in front of an old couple peacefully sipping coffee. Bébert never saw me leave.

  “You were at Portico, right?”

  “If I was at Portico we’re talking more like five years ago. Maybe six. Yeah, six.”

  Bébert is tearing the label off his bottle, one strip at a time.

  “How’d you end up here?”

  He leans back on his chair and gave me a quick look.

  “That’s a long fucking story, man.”

  His shoulders are a little broader than back in the day. His big cheeks are just as red. Alcohol and rosacea. Bébert was never one to look after himself. But he might have laid off the pills and stuff.

  “I tried to open a restaurant in Sainte-Agathe,” he said, rubbing his skull. “It failed. Bad. One of our partners fucked us over. But on paper he was in the right. There was nothing I could do. Couldn’t even get back the money I’d put in.”

  “How much?”

  “That was like a year and a half ago. Anyway, I came back here, broke as fuck and kind of pissed off. Took me a while to find a decent job. I worked for a Portuguese bastard who never paid me my full hours. There’s someone waiting to rip you off around every corner, man. Then my roommate took off with three months’ rent, my tv, my dvd player, and an ounce of hash I had stashed. Motherfucker, when I moved in he looked me in the eye with his pretty-boy suburban face and was all like, ‘I always pay on time, you better not make me chase after your half of the rent.’ Two-faced bitch. Hadn’t paid the rent in months. If I ever see him again he’ll be leaving in a coffin. In the end I had to sneak out of that apartment too.”

  He runs a meaty hand over his bald head. In a way he looks like Frank Black playing Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. In another way he looks like Buddha. On speed.

  “I’ve sorta been couch surfing since then. That’s how I ended up across from you. At my buddy Doug’s place.”

  I remembered Doug. No dad, looked after his younger brothers, and his mum too, for ten years, until she was confined to her hospital bed. Huntingdon’s disease. That made him kind of angry. Guy wouldn’t say a word until he started drinking. But once he was drunk he had a real big mouth, and he was drunk most of the time. He’d order liquor by the bottle, at the bar, whichever ones hadn’t banned him yet. Then he’d go on a ghb binge. Got arrested a couple times—possession, assault. At the Living he managed to permanently disfigure some dude with the cast on his arm, a souvenir from his fight with a doorman a couple weeks earlier.

  “Where you working now?”

  “I’m not working. Got laid off in the fall. Saw it coming though. I’ve got two months of unemployment insurance left.”

  If he could talk about it so calmly, this must have been one of his smoother exits. Either that or he’d pulled something dirty on his way out the door. That was Bébert’s style: the man just enjoyed getting even. On his last night at Tasso he’d unplugged the seafood fridges when he was closing. At Saisons, where he got me a job seven or eight years ago, he’d taken all the knives, tongs, and ladles and frozen them in buckets of water just to make sure the team got to start the next day empty-handed.

  I take a sip of my Tremblay. The taste of moist grain fills my mouth. Bébert’s keeping one eye on the hockey game, and one hand on his big bottle of beer. He has tattoos all the way down to his fingers now, and his hands have grown fatter, hands inscribed with the scars of twenty years in the kitchen, burned daily and gouged by wayward oyster shuckers and subjected to malevolent blades severing tiny chunks of fingertip; thousands of shifts spent shelling, peeling, dicing, stirring, gutting, deboning, and chopping; the never-ending repetitive handling of foods raw and cooking and cooked; the infinite cycle of frying pans and scouring stainless counters with steel wool and industrial-strength degreasers.

  “You looking for a job?”

  “No, I’ve got plans. Might have a job in a hotel, in Belize.”

  “Belize.”

  He nods and then takes a long swig of beer, with his head turned at an angle so he can keep watching the game.

  “You could go sailing. Still go once in a while?”

  Two guys came in right as he was going to answer. Bébert followed them with his eyes. He tensed up. They look like a couple back-alley wannabe gangstas in their mid-thirties, kind of dudes who finished high school in prison. The first is wearing a Celtics jersey under his X-large Ecko parka. Tattooed temple, unlaced Timberlands. The other one’s rocking an unzipped puffy coat with an Ed Hardy panther t-shirt and red Pumas. The guys at the back of the bar lift their heads from the pool table a moment, then look back at each other, and the table. The two guys head toward the bar, in no rush. Bébert take his eyes off them. I figure he knows them.

  “What about you. Where are you now?”

  “I work with Fred.”

  “Therrien?”

  “No, Kazemian
.”

  “Freddy-E. He took you in the kitchen?”

  “No, I’m on the floor now. Been out of the kitchen for a while.”

  It took a while, but eventually I got fed up with the shitty pay and unrelenting rushes, the hours cooped up in microscopic kitchens in suffocating heat, your face dripping sweat and grease, parked in front of your station while new orders just keep pouring in by the thousands without an extra minute to put them out, until you end up slapping the finished plates down with venom. Yeah, when I got the chance to move to the floor I jumped.

  “So that’s why you’re clean-cut now. Clean-shaven, cleaned up.”

  “Yeah, I have to shave now. I guess I’m cleaning up my act a bit too.”

  “Cleaning up your act, c’mon. You were always chill. Never made waves. Always had your shit together.”

  “Yeah, I guess compared to you we’re all pretty chill.”

  This cranks up Bébert’s laugh, like a powerful croaking. But it doesn’t last long, and he’s back in serious mode pretty quick. Sort of. He lifts his bottle at an angle. It’s empty. I keep talking.

  “Yeah, I do some managing, and some serving.”

  He smiles in the corner of his mouth. Waves the bartender over. One of the two guys, in the Timberlands, is playing with his phone. Mr. Puma is playing the VLTs. From my seat I can see the combinations scrolling down on the coloured screen. He’s playing Crazy Bells. The results come up. Nothing playable on the horizontals, just one 7, no bells, not even a cherry.

  “It’s going pretty well,” I said.

  “No surprise there.”

  There was not a trace of friendly mockery in his voice.

  “Hey, did you hear that La Trattoria shut down last week. I heard it from Fred.”

  The bartender comes over, still watching the hockey game. He asks Bébert:

  “Same again?”

  “Yeah, but also,” he says, lowering his voice, “I also want you to take two 7Ups to those two clowns over there.”

  Without changing his expression the barman looks over at the two guys, then turns back to Bébert.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Look at those faces. Kind of guys that just love a good 7Up.”

  The bartender looks at Bébert for a few seconds without saying a word. His hands are panning through the change in his pouch. He’s sixty, easy. Skinny chin, close-shaved, a long laugh line on either side of his mouth, hair slicked back. David Carradine in Kill Bill.

  “Funny,” he says. “They don’t strike me as the kinds of guys who like 7Up.”

  “Well we’ll never find out if you don’t take them one!” Bébert has a big grin as the words come out. His teeth are a shit-show.

  At the back of the bar one of the pool players breaks explosively. There’s more swearing. Bébert and the barman turned around. Four balls in succession drop into their pockets with a muffled sound. Two of the players high-five.

  “Come to think of it, I’m out of 7Up,” said the bartender. “I’ll be back with your beers.”

  He walks away from us, toward the pool table.

  “You haven’t changed, eh?”

  “Why would I? Got millions of friends, no faults to speak of. It’s all good.”

  “Speaking of friends, heard anything from Greg?”

  “It’d surprise me if I did.”

  “Why? Where’s he at? What’s he up to?”

  Bébert looked me square in the eyes.

  “Remember what I told you back in the day. About Greg. And asking questions?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I sure did remember. I had to laugh, a little ruefully, and take a last sip of beer to chase the bitter memory.

  “What about Bonnie, any news?” I eventually asked.

  The bartender comes back with our beers and puts the two big bottles on the table. Bébert hands him a twenty. The bartender gives him his change without a word.

  “Bonnie, man—haven’t thought about that chick in ages. Haven’t heard that name in five years. She went back to Ontario. Got married to some hippie grows organic vegetables. Somewhere in southern Ontario. She’s through with cooking and shit.”

  “Married. Damn.”

  “I’m sure she’s just as confused as ever. What about you, you hear anything from Renaud?”

  “Uh, yeah. I did.”

  “You ever run into him?”

  “I must have seen him a couple times since La Trattoria.”

  “Well if you see him tell him to fuck off, from me.”

  I fill my glass with beer. Take a look at the bartender, then at Timberland and Puma sitting at the machines. Timberland catches my eye and gives me a cocky wink. I turn back to Bébert.

  “That’d be tough. Renaud’s dead.”

  I take a sip and push back my hiccups. Bébert doesn’t react. Then he leans back and takes a big swig, as if he hadn’t had a drink in weeks. I go on:

  “Died last year.”

  “Well tell him to fuck off anyway. Asshole.”

  He makes a move to get up. The legs of his chair scrape on the floor tiles, but he sits back down. He looks over his shoulder. The two guys are coming toward our table. They’re walking slow and nonchalant, as if to let us know that they own this joint. I can see from the expression on Bébert’s face that this night is about to take a sharp right turn. Or maybe it’s headed exactly where it was going all along and he’d merely neglected to inform me. From a distance these guys may have looked like a part of two-bit clowns, but now that their hard-luck faces are right up in our grills, the joke isn’t so funny. Bébert leans back in his chair again, as if he was the one who’d decided to stay put, and calls out to the bartender:

  “Same again. Just me and him though.”

  I don’t say a word, though I’ve barely touched my bottle. Suddenly I realize I can’t hear the pool game any more. The guys are almost frozen in place, staring at us. For a few seconds no one moves. No one says a word. An entire verse of “Living on a Prayer” rings out into the emptiness before one of the players leans over the table again. The shot rings out throughout the bar.

  Timberland puts down his gin-and-tonic and sits at one of the little tables, sprawls right out. The other guy backs up a bit, arms crossed, between us and the front door. He looks like he just bit into a lemon. I should have stayed home, warmed up with a bowl of dhal. I should have come up with an excuse for Bébert, to put it off until another time. It was late, I would have drifted off to sleep, next to my girlfriend.

  Bébert gives Timberland a cocky grin. It looks forced. He stretches, forming a V with his arms, and moans like a moose. Clearly I’m the odd man out in this new grouping. I decide to stay seated and bide my time.

  “You didn’t choke. Smart move,” says Timberland.

  “Tell him we don’t have all night. I’ve got wet fucking feet.”

  Timberland’s hands are red and chapped, like beer deliverymen during the holidays.

  “You should try wearing boots like everyone else,” he says, turning slightly toward the guy wearing Pumas.

  Bébert is tucking into his third big beer. I can feel him coming to a boil. Timberland acts like he’s suddenly noticing me. He stares me down. I lower my eyes. Fucking Bébert.

  “Who are you? We don’t know you.”

  He looks at Bébert, who’s grinning like an idiot. He stinks like an ashtray.

  “So you brought a little bodyguard?”

  Bébert lifts up his hand, with his palm toward the guys—like Magneto stopping a hail of bullets. I’ve never seen him tense like that, caught without a comeback.

  “I’ll catch up with you boys in a minute. We’re not done here. You guys are kind of in the way, eh?”

  Puma uncrosses his arms with a sniffle. My armpits are wet and I can feel sweat running down my back. I
can see the bartender staring at us, oblivious to everything else. Timberland slaps his thighs and gets up heavily.

  “Sure. We’ll go for a little walk while you guys catch up. And you better be here when we get back. You’ve been jerking us around long enough.”

  Timberland claps Bébert on the shoulder and heads out. Puma’s already outside, lighting a smoke. I let out a sigh of relief and take a big sip of beer.

  “Jesus, Bébert, you could have warned me.”

  “Don’t worry about that. That’s nothing.”

  “Who are those guys?”

  Bébert’s got his big crooked smile on again. He looks at me.

  “Man, it’s good to see you again.”

  Chapter 1

  Wet snowflakes drifted onto the windshield. You could hear the back-and-forth of the wipers and the dampened whirring of cars driving by in front of us. Malik was parked in the street, behind a Tercel that had seen better days. He had turned down the music and was staring straight ahead. The sky was growing dark. It was barely four p.m. People hurried up Saint-Hubert, necks tucked into their shoulders. Some carried armfuls of packages. Apartment windows gave off yellow or orange light. The fake-happy holiday vibe was in full swing on Mont-Royal Avenue in front of us, and I felt nothing. Barely audible, idiotic Christmas tunes came sputtering from loudspeakers on lampposts. Malik kept his hands on the wheel. I brought my coffee cup to my lips. He sighed, as if preparing to undertake an onerous task that could no longer be postponed. He still wasn’t looking at me. I broke the silence he’d maintained since we’d crossed back to Montreal.

  “Grandpa was born on this street. Did you know that?”

  My cousin gave me an icy stare. He’d been chewing the same gum since we left Trois-Rivières. The tension in his facial muscles was visible even in the fleshy part of his cheek. It was as if he’d gotten mad all over again. Like he was replaying the scene from the week before as a prelude to dragging me home by the scruff of my neck. He was getting ready to say his piece. I had a pretty clear picture of what to expect; it wasn’t the first time. I’d been dreading this moment for hours. I stayed slouched in the passenger seat, trying to project indifference, but I knew he was right, again. He took his hands off the steering wheel and turned to me: