Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  She was wearing black high-top Keds, a pair of soiled gray sweatpants, and a purple U Dub T-shirt that she’d stolen from me. She had dirt on her chin.

  “I’m throwing myself on your mercy.”

  “You expect mercy from the woman who single-handedly moved both of us today?”

  I held the champagne bottle up. “I’ve brought an offering.”

  She squinted at the label and then at me. Krystal.

  “At least you weren’t cheap.”

  “You deserve it.”

  “You’re damned right.”

  My old oak coat tree was standing behind the door. I took my leather jacket off, spun the coat tree so the broken foot was facing the corner, and hung my jacket on its regular hook. I instantly felt more settled. “Can we find any glasses?” I asked.

  She took me by the waist and pulled me toward the kitchen. The hall walls were lined with boxes. The kitchen was ankle-deep in crinkled-up newspaper. “I started on the kitchen,” she said, “but I pooped out. I was just nodding off in the living room when you knocked.”

  I traced a line down her cheek. “You’ve got blankey marks.”

  “Okay, Mr. Detective, maybe I was napping.”

  From the cabinet on the far side of the sink, she produced a pair of squat highball glasses. “That’s it,” she said.

  I popped the cork and poured us both a handful.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  She told me. When words alone failed, she took off. I followed her all over the house, upstairs and down, as she recapped the difficulties of the day and related her decorating plans for the future. By my reckoning, the latter would require one of us to win the lottery.

  It was forty minutes before we were back in the kitchen, and I poured us the last of the Krystal. “Thanks,” I said.

  She gave me the fisheye. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Don’t I look okay?”

  “You just let me babble for an hour without interrupting me once, without once telling me how hard your day was. Do you realize that, Leo? That’s got to be a first.”

  “I’ve been listening to Dr. Lorna on the radio. She says women need to talk it out. That what they really want you to do is listen to them. I’m becoming a more sensitive, nineties kind of guy.”

  She seemed to think this was funny, and it earned me a kiss, so I wasn’t complaining. She let me go and said, “Well, then, the least I can do is listen to you. So…how was your day, Leo?”

  I put the back of my right hand on my forehead and said, “I can’t bear to talk about it.”

  I was only half kidding. This was one of those stories I was hesitant to tell. As I’d run through it in my head all afternoon, I realized the story had the sound of folklore rather than fact.

  Rebecca did better than I expected. She listened to my story without comment, all the way up to the point where I started telling her about going to Jack’s new restaurant, before she began shaking her head.

  “Are you sure you aren’t exaggerating just a bit here, Leo? You know your penchant for embroidering a story.”

  I almost wished I were. The whole thing was completely over the top. After leaving Cecil, I’d swung by Jack’s new place. I don’t know why. I certainly had better things to do. I think maybe I was still in denial and needed to reassure myself one way or the other about this mess I’d gotten myself into. One thing was for sure. If it was reassurance I was looking for, I’d definitely gone to the wrong place.

  The restaurant was a storm of activity. The front door was jacked open by a chair, allowing the parade of delivery people easy entry. Rickey Ray was sitting on a barstool just inside the door. He was wearing the same cowboy weightlifter suit as when we’d first met.

  “Leo, my man,” he said, “what brings you down here?”

  I stepped aside to let a guy with a dolly full of apple boxes go by, and then Rickey Ray and I exchanged high fives.

  “Just wanted to see how things are going.”

  Dixie’s voice rose from the kitchen. “Ay said over here, Ahnstein.”

  I pulled another stool over from the bar and sat.

  “This is craziness, man.”

  “What’s that, podna?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  He gave me a blank look.

  “The whole thing with the helicopter. Flying a goddamn bull carcass into the middle of downtown Seattle just to prove you can do it.”

  If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

  “The Jackster don’t think so.”

  “The Jackster is out of his goddamned mind.”

  “You got it, my man.”

  “This is going to be the end of him.”

  Rickey Ray checked the area around us. “He’s done either way, Leo. Too many fuck-ups, too much booze, the Meyersons doggin’ his trail, Dixie cuttin’ his fences. You right, podna. The old Jackeroo is headin’ for the last roundup.”

  “You don’t seem real concerned,” I noted.

  “It’s just a job, Leo. Jack’s responsible for himself.” His nonchalance evaporated, and he was suddenly serious. “It all comes around, my man. Comes a time when all of us have to atone. When, whether we like it or not, we gotta take responsibility for our actions. Been a long time comin’, but the Jackster’s ’bout to get his.” He caught himself raving.

  “Old Jack should never have started in with that Meyerson woman,” he said quickly. “She’s gonna be the death of him yet.”

  “The Meyerson woman swears she’s not the one eating old Jack’s lunch. She claims there’s somebody else out there sabotaging his business.”

  He ignored me. “I tol’ him not to do that shit with that sign of hers. That bird got no sense of humor. That sign shit just woke her up.”

  “So if this all comes apart, you’re out of here?”

  He reached over and patted me on the back, once more the good old boy. “I be updatin’ my résumé as we speak,” he joked.

  I wondered whether maybe I couldn’t flip his switch too, so I said, “What about Candace? She gonna do the rats-from-a-sinking-ship thing too?” I could.

  His mismatched face clouded. “You know, podna, you always a little too damn interested in Miss Atherton.”

  “Funny, but you know, I was thinking the same thing about you. Isn’t that weird?” He looked up at me through his hair. I kept talking. “Really. On the way over here, I was thinking how if a guy didn’t know better, he’d almost have to figure it was you and Candace instead of Jack and Candace. You know, because she spends a whole lot more time with you than she does with Jack.”

  He slipped off the stool. “Know what I’d do if I was you?” He punctuated the last word with a stiff tap on my chest with his finger.

  “You’re not me, Rickey Ray,” I said calmly. “That’s why they gave us different names.”

  He tapped me again, harder this time. “They can give you whatever goddamn name they want. Don’t change a goddamn thing. You still who you are. Long as you never lose track of who you are, they can’t hurt ya. Miss Atherton and what she is or ain’t doin’ is none of—”

  We never got a chance to finish our little discussion. At that moment, Jack came blustering around the corner. Today, he was doing his man-of-the-people thing. Blue jeans and a crisp blue work shirt. The plebeian attire merely served to highlight the three pounds of jewelry. He looked like the king of convicts.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Looky heeya.” He palmed my shoulder with a big red hand. “Nice to see you, boy.” He sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. I half expected him to turn away at any moment and announce to some invisible audience that I was not the brightest boy in the world.

  “You seen the place yet?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  He threw the rest of the arm around my shoulder. “Well, there, Lee—”

  “Leo,” I corrected.

  “Well, there, Leo. Lemme show you
’round.”

  I was all right as long as we were indoors. I’d expected Texas longhorns and mounted buffalo heads, but the place was slick. It had kind of a Hunt Club motif, with thoroughbred racing thrown in as the kicker. As we walked, Jack kept up a running commentary.

  “When I started in the business, Leon, they said you couldn’t put pictures of horses on the walls of a steak house. Said it was crazy. Said it made folks nervous. The Jackster, he said…”

  For the next half hour or so, as we strolled around the restaurant, things seemed to fold themselves back into a recognizable pattern. In the kitchen, Jack and I found Candace polishing glasses and carried her along on our tour. She patted Jack’s arm as we walked. The bustle and hum of preparing for Friday night’s opening lent me a much-needed feeling of stability, as if the sight of real people performing real tasks somehow increased my distance from the Looney Tunes universe into which I seemed to have fallen. I was feeling better. There really was a restaurant called the FeedLot. It was nice. The staff seemed nice. This spasm of sanity lasted until we stepped out the side door.

  The half block to the south of the FeedLot used to be a twelve-story office building, named, if I remember correctly, after some insurance company. A few years back, a new owner had leveled the property and completely cleaned off the lot in preparation for another shiny new business-retail complex that never came to be, leaving an entire half block of downtown Seattle sitting paved and empty.

  In a town where, depending upon the section of the city, it can cost over twenty dollars a day to park a car, a half acre of bare concrete ranks right up there with bread from heaven on the covet meter.

  In a nanosecond the slab had become Seattle’s only genuine free-parking area. I’d used it myself a couple of times. The city was not amused. As the City of Seattle sees it, no act performed by any member of the citizenry, while in the confines of the city limits, shall be without charge from the city. It’s Rule One D: Everything costs. No exceptions.

  They made the owner fence the thing, and for the past few years it’s been a downtown eyesore. It was an eyesore no more. Jack had turned it into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. My heart hit my shoes.

  It wasn’t the green-and-white-striped tents set up around the edges. As a matter of fact, the tents and the jaunty pennants flying from their peaks merely worked to imprint the Après the Derby motif and to intensify my sense of well-being. That’s not what set my teeth on edge.

  It wasn’t the big cattle trailer parked in the alley, either. The white eighteen-wheeler filled the alley on the far side of the fence like a cork in a bottle, effectively both blocking the alley completely and lending, I’m sure Jack imagined anyway, a certain rural charm to the proceedings. A charm he sought to accentuate by the strategic placement of a number of bales of hay, piled on the ground along the perimeter of the rig as well as on the tops of both the cab and the trailer, all of which pretty much cleared up the mystery about the stuff he’d had delivered from Wagner’s. It was window dressing.

  It wasn’t the forest of trees, shrubs, and flowers that Jack had imported in order to transform the slab into a formal garden, nor was it the bandstand being set up over on the left. All of this seemed part of the regular, rational, everyday world. No. They weren’t the problem.

  The problem was on my left as we came out the door. It was the world’s only combination stage and barbecue pit. A full four feet above ground level, the raised platform ran nearly the width of the yard. A giant blowup of Jack and Bunky had been affixed to the brick wall behind the stage. It said only HUNGRY?

  Everything was right there. An open-pit barbecue you could have driven a truck into. Back in the north corner, a dump-truck load of charcoal briquettes formed a pitch-black cone on the ground next to the forklift.

  I pointed to the steel apparatus at the center of the stage.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Jack squeezed my shoulder again.

  “That, Leo, is the finest, most modern barbecue pit ever known to man.” Using my neck as a lever, he guided me over in that direction. “Barbecue is an art,” he announced. “Ya probably didn’t know that, did ya, but it is.”

  When I seemed to agree, he went on.

  “What we’re gonna do tomorrow will make barbecue history.” Jack’s eyes took on a distant light. He pointed to the huge metal pan sunk in the center of the stage. “When we set that ol’ boy on the spit tomorrow, Leon, they’ll be a full ton of coals blazin’ away down here. Two thousand pounds of flamin’ flavor.” He eyed me closely. “You know anything about cookin’?”

  “Not a hell of a lot.”

  He gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Well, you see, the reason nobody ever tried to cook anything this big is the problem that you got to cook it so long to get the inside cooked that the outside is burned to a cinder. T’only way it could be done would be with a real intense dry heat, like you got in an oven. The charcoal’s too hot in one place and not hot enough in another. Can’t be done with charcoal.”

  “Isn’t that what’s in there?”

  “The top layer. We gonna use that to sear him nice and pretty and to heat up the lava rock. ’Cause, ya see, under those coals is another ton of lava rock.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small round stone. It was a deep red and its small face was cratered like a miniature moon.

  “Finest intense dry-heat source you can have. Charcoal be gone after a couple hours, then we roast him nice and slow. These little boogers hold a heat charge for ten hours, maybe more. Feel it,” he said. “Don’t hardly weigh anything at all.”

  He dropped the rock into my hand. It weighed almost nothing.

  I tried to give it back, but Jack magnanimously told me to keep it.

  He looked up at the sky, as if to marvel at the wonder that was the Jackster. “Ain’t nobody since the Romans had the giblets to cook up anything as big as what we’re gonna do.” He jerked me closer. “Couldn’t nobody but the old Jackalope do it, neither. Nobody else got the vision.” He pointed to his right eye and then tapped his temple. Candace patted him lovingly on the shoulder.

  “See over there, with the handle?” He pointed to the far end of the apparatus. “That’s how we’re gonna turn that good old boy so’s we cook him up nice and even. Got me the granny gear out of a bus down there in that gearbox at the bottom.” He pointed again. “We can put over a ton on that momma, and a child could still turn the handle. Whadda ya think of that?”

  I like to think that I would have taken that last opportunity to tell him what I really thought, but we’ll never know.

  Rickey Ray appeared in the doorway. With all of us standing in the late-afternoon sun, I could see what Spaulding had meant. Rickey Ray and Candace did indeed have similar light brown hair, right down to the glinting highlights.

  “Jack,” Rickey Ray said, “we got us a bread supplier here who says you got no credit arrangement and he ain’t leaving nothin’ les’n you give him the cash…as in no check, cash.”

  Jack detached himself from Candace’s arm and strode toward the door. “Double R, what say we teach this redneck how to be polite?”

  “Might just as well sort it out now as later,” Rickey Ray agreed.

  Candace Atherton and I stood alone in the garden.

  “Openings are always a rush,” she said.

  “You can’t be serious,” I replied.

  “About what?” she deadpanned.

  “You encourage him,” I said. “He stands there and talks this lunatic-asylum stuff, and you stand there and encourage him.”

  I couldn’t read her expression, but she said, “Jack’s following his star, Mr. Waterman. Don’t you believe in following your star?”

  “Yeah, but not by helicopter.”

  “Some men just dream bigger than others,” she mused.

  I shook my head. “I think I’m having a déjà moo attack.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The strange feeling that I’ve he
ard this bull before.”

  She didn’t think that was funny. Her face closed like a leg trap.

  “Desperate situations call for desperate measures,” she said and then walked off into the restaurant.

  That was the point in my recitation where Rebecca lost it and broke in. “And none of his entourage seems the least bit concerned?”

  “Not as far as I can see. It’s almost like they see it as fate or something. They seem perfectly content to watch Rome burn.”

  “Sounds pretty weird,” she remarked.

  “These are the same folks who thought so little of that Bound, they got up and left after the first half hour. Said it bored them.”

  “Bound!”

  “That movie we saw at the Metro with Jennifer Tilly and what’s-her-face. Remember how it started?”

  “The one with the…” Rebecca gave me a sly smile.

  “Kinky sex. Yeah. That one.”

  “The one after which we made that short stop at your apartment and were late for our dinner reservations.”

  “The very same. And then, if I recall, the movie moved right along into the gratuitous violence.”

  She gave a chuckle. “You’re right, Leo. It’s downright un-American to walk out on sex and violence. Maybe they’re Commies.”

  The champagne had my mind moving in slow motion. Every time I turned my head, my eyes took a second to catch up.

  “Then I ran down and tried to get Normal and Hot Shot out of the slammer. Jerk-offs let me stand around for four hours before they bothered to tell me that Hot Shot had three outstanding warrants and wasn’t going anywhere.” I sighed. “Cost me six hundred for Normal.”

  I’d slipped Normal another of Sir Geoffrey’s fifties and sent him off to keep George company.

  “That reminds me,” she said. “There’s a message from Jed on the phone. He’s had calls from several others who’ve been picked up. Judy and Frank and, I think, Red and somebody else.”

  Morning was going to have to be soon enough.

  “Is that lovely new bed still upstairs?”

  “I believe it is,” she said.

  “What say we try it for sleeping this time?”

  Rebecca stood and stretched. I heard her neck pop as she rolled her head in a circle. “I’m not due in until noon.”