Redhanded (5 page)

Danielle starred in 98 percent of my own mental erotic adventures. In real life, Danielle and I had enjoyed two actual dates: a visit to the Cinemax in San Francisco, a 3-D movie featuring moray eels and lionfish, and an evening of thrill rides at a carnival by Lake Merritt, amusements that spun us upside down and rocketed us, yelling, in wide circles. Danielle and I were good at having ordinary fun together, but I was wondering how to dig deeper. I didn't know how to begin.

Steaming gravy splashed our arms and our apron fronts, but the two of us made a show of not minding the pain. The dishwasher was a big tray built in a circle, like a carousel. You stacked the spray-gunned dishes in the rubberized trays, making sure the glasses and cups were upside down, just like loading the dishwasher at home, except that this washer held hundreds of dishes at once. A multitude of dirty plates trundled off as the wheel turned, into a dark, whooshing hurricane.

By the time the glistening dinnerware reappeared from the washer, it was pristine and very nearly dry. The dishes were hot, too, and whoever unloaded the green-and-white Syracuse china had to wear special thick gloves, and even then got sweaty from the heat radiating from the piping hot flatware.

The stainless steel kept the heat the longest, knives and forks too hot to bare-hand out of the crate. I helped Danielle with this chore, grabbing fistfuls of forks and putting them over in the trolley, where the busboys would come in and take what they needed for the setups, the places on the dining room tables out in the real world. Danielle had said I was the best athlete she had ever seen, after watching me skip rope for twenty minutes, and sometimes I liked to show off.

I flipped a cup up into the air and did a basket catch, like an outfielder, and made a mock microphone out of one of the Duralex water glasses. You couldn't really talk with all the gushing and rumbling noise, and all communication was yelled and accompanied with sign language—“I need a mop” or “Your cap's on crooked” shouted and acted out.

Most of the time we bent our backs to our work, looking foreign to each other in the plastic caps Mr. Gartner ordered us to wear, like green shower caps. They made us look like medical technicians, people laboring in a humid emergency room.

The kitchen beyond was a room of wartime noise and frenzy. Even at our worst moments, with huge gravy pots carried in blistering hot, and hundreds of dishes piling up laden with half-eaten veal steaks and Thousand Island dressing, our chamber of hell was not half as hectic as the kitchen.

Sometimes the soup and gravy pots were so hot the dishwater sizzled, and it was sweaty labor, swabbing out the crusted minestrone or country gravy, using a stick-sponge and all my strength to work free the gunk cooked fast to the bottom.

That afternoon I was manning the spray gun, a coiled chrome hose with a grip-handle that powered a blast of water. Towers of barely eaten dinners would pile up in the stainless steel sink-top, and I would hose the food into the large metal trough. At one end of the sloping bottom was a hole, a serene maw that took it all in, not struggling or sputtering like the In-Sink-Erator at home.

Food that half an hour before had probably looked fit for the cover of a magazine was now disgusting to behold, and even Yancy, a man who had worked as a mess mate in the Coast Guard and scrubbed pots for cafeterias up and down the West Coast, shook his head when he saw some of the food wrecks that people had created.

I was blasting ricotta cheese, boneless chicken breasts, and crinkle-cut beets with the water gun, and I had it down to a rhythm. Three short bursts with the gun, and I turned and handed the plate to Yancy, who had sure hands.

Danielle and I would drop a cup every few days, and despite the sturdiness of the china a handle would break off, or a water glass would bounce off the rubber-grid mat on the floor and show a crack. “Sorry!” Danielle would sing out.

“Breakage,” Yancy would call, meaning: no big deal. Kitchen work has its own terminology. A spill was
spillage;
sea crabs that showed up dead from the wharf, too rotten to cook, were
wastage
.

Danielle caught my eye, pretending she was going to flip something invisible off a spoon. She gave the spoon the wrong sort of tension, bending it back. The stainless steel spoon came to life for an instant. The utensil spun through the air, bounced off the rim of the steel trough, and fell into the gobbling hole of the garbage disposal.

Yancy moved fast, in a fluid, seemingly unconcerned way, hit a red kill switch down by the floor, and put his hand into the grind hole.

The sudden ceasing of the mechanical roar made the noise of the dishwasher distinct, a wet, mechanical chugging, and for some reason when Danielle made her sorry-about-that smile I did the logical thing. I fired the water gun right at her.

This spurt of water didn't do Danielle any harm. We were both sashed up in our plastic-cloth aprons, chest to knee, although my apron was covered with bits of meatball and stir-fry rice.

Danielle said, “Stop it.”

I fired the water gun again, one more time.

Just as Mr. Gartner came through the door.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Yancy bent to rearrange some soup spoons in their cubicle.

Gartner nodded, making sense of what he was seeing, and what he was not seeing. He stepped over to the trough and peered into the silent hole, exaggerating, almost making a joke of it, a caricature, the Patient Boss.

The dishwasher raised a thunderhead of steam, obliterating Mr. Gartner's voice, forcing him to shout. He wanted to see us when our shift was done.

Yancy gave me a smile I could not mistake, a silent farewell.

I gave him a stiff, unreal smile right back, as though I didn't care.

We were waiting outside his office. It was twilight, and now, two days after my bout with Del Toro, my ribs were aching. Boxing soreness is like that, surprising you long after the fight is over.

Danielle and I waited in the corridor.

“Steven, you make such a big deal out of everything,” said Danielle.

“Gartner thinks he can treat us like this,” I said.

“Steven, look at you, full of all that tension,” she said, sounding a lot like her mother, a sweet-voiced, no-nonsense woman.

Mr. Gartner breezed down the hall.

He hefted a key ring, picked out a key, and ushered us into a room of folders and software tumbling all over his desk, squashed soda cans in a paper bag, ready for that yearly trip to the recycling bin. A Hansen's coffee calendar decorated a wall, the entire year with phone numbers and notations scribbled all over it.

“You two find a place to sit,” he said, falling into a mock leather starship chair.

I perched on a yellow plastic chair. Danielle leaned against the calendar. We had taken off our aprons, and washed our faces and arms, but even after all this time some of the pink was still in Danielle's cheeks from the dishwasher heat.

Danielle spoke first. “We're sorry we fooled around, Mr. Gartner, and we won't let it happen again.”

“I've worked in restaurant administration for decades,” said Mr. Gartner, giving her a save-it wave of one hand. “I have fired almost no one, for the simple reason that when it isn't working out most people quit.”

“You want Steven and me to tender our resignations, Mr. Gartner?” asked Danielle, polite but not puppy-dog nice. “Because if you do, I really think you should rethink the situation.” Her mother ran a staff of nurses.

Mr. Gartner settled back in his chair. He rocked back and forth for a while, relaxed and quite happy to be where he was. “I have fired personnel for drinking on the job,” he continued. “For showing up high on drugs. And one time we had one individual try to stab another individual with a fillet knife.”

“How awful!” said Danielle, maybe realizing the situation was flowing, Mr. Gartner wanting to tell his life story.

Mr. Gartner ran a hand through his balding hair. “I do believe we settled for disability in that case, because the attacker turned out to be a Gulf War vet with three kids and antianxiety medication that didn't work very well.”

Mr. Gartner kicked off his shoe, a brown loafer, and tugged at the toe of his black sock. Danielle wrinkled her nose at me.

Mr. Gartner saw this, and he shook his head just slightly. “I like working in the bowels of an inferno,” said Mr. Gartner. “Like today. Today the pastry chef is out with stomach flu, and forty people off a bus from Reno stagger in, pick up trays, and head for the salad bar.” He chuckled and shook his head.

“And it gets worse,” he continued. “Chef gets a speck of cayenne under his contact lens, and a customer finds a dime in the canned peaches, and then when I make it through the kitchen on my way to take a leak, two of our employees are playing war games with the hydraulic sanitation equipment.”

“We were wrong,” said Danielle. “And we're sorry.”

Mr. Gartner's face would have looked good on a Supreme Court justice. “My problem is I really do like all this,” said Mr. Gartner. “If I was your age, and saw myself running an insane asylum for a living, I'd think: this man is crazy. But I love it.”

He looked at Danielle steadily, and Danielle looked right back, fresh and alert, with a sweet air that was absolutely genuine.

There was a long silence.

Mr. Gartner turned to me.

“So what I'm going to suggest,” he said after thinking for a while, “is that you two work different shifts.”

“You hired the two of us together,” I said. I hadn't spoken for so long that I hardly recognized my voice.

“I signed you on at the same time,” said Mr. Gartner, “but not necessarily as a team.”

“One of us goes, we both go,” I said.

Mr. Gartner put on his shoes, easing his feet into them, tapping the heels against the tiled floor. “Steven, let me talk with you alone.”

Danielle trailed me in the parking lot. The East Bay summer nights are often cold, and I wished I was wearing a jacket.

Interstate 580 rumbles past on the other side of the lot, trucks sighing by, going eighty miles an hour. I wondered what Raymond was doing right about then, probably hanging out with men who carried concealed weapons.

“You told him okay, you'd work nights,” Danielle was suggesting hopefully.

I kept walking, keeping my mind focused.

I was way ahead of Danielle, and she had to raise her voice, calling after me. “Tell me you didn't quit.”

CHAPTER NINE

We were driving down the freeway, toward Chad's house. I had called Raymond the night before, said I wanted to go visit his new friend, and Raymond had made the arrangements. Raymond gunned the open-air car out of the slow lane. It was a little past noon, and we were supposed to be there at twelve-thirty.

The next day I was set to fight Stacy Martell, and the entire gym was alive with the upcoming bout when I dropped by to pound the speed bag and shadowbox in front of the floor-length mirror. The Spanish-speaking guys said things I didn't understand, smiling and making punching motions. The older, experienced boxers wished me well, in a way that made me nervous and proud. “Don't mess him up too bad, Beech,” one of them said, a thick-necked, coffee-colored welterweight with graying hair who, the story went, once fought a preliminary in Vegas.

I had worked in front of the mirror for hours, silver with sweat. Body hooks, head bobs. Getting that special, commanding look in my eye, like I could see through walls of steel. Andy, the timekeeper, said he'd heard that if I handled Martell, San Diego was a sure thing.

Raymond changed lanes and asked, “How are you feeling?”

I stretched my fingers to show that my fists weren't sore, which they sometimes can be, from working out with the thin speed-bag gloves. Dad took meticulous care of his own hands, wearing cashmere-lined gloves on even a slightly chilly morning, flexing his fingers unconsciously in idle moments, his hands nervously eager to be off and running. Years of keyboard lessons from Dad meant I could snap through Mozart's “Turkish March” without a note out of place, but Dad and I both knew I had about one-tenth his natural ability.

“I mean, about meeting Chad,” said Raymond.

“Chad is no big deal to me,” I lied.

Raymond let me see him thinking about this.

“Chad says Loquesto was a bleeder who couldn't go the distance after he turned pro, so he ended up picking up a little extra money.”

Raymond was making sense, the sort you hate to hear. Loquesto was always smooth and well dressed, and liked to rivet you with his stare, a man pushing forty, an air of defeat about the way he probably dyed his hair.

“Okay,” said Raymond, as though I had made some additional remark. He made a little down-turned shrug with his mouth. “If you're happy, I'm happy.”

Even when he was accepting and forgiving, there was an alternate, opposite view, and he let you see it. “It's just, you can back out of this if you want to.”

“I said I better meet Chad.”

“But it doesn't have to be today.”

“You ashamed of me, Raymond? You think Chad'll take one look at me and think, what's so tough about this guy?”

“We'll see Chad right this afternoon,” Raymond was saying, “if you want to.”

“That's what you agreed to.”

Some part of me wanted never to have a conversation with Chad, the way some part of my body wanted never to drive one hundred miles an hour on the freeway ever again, hanging on the steering wheel like I had a few weeks before, Raymond in the passenger's seat asking why couldn't we go any faster, in a thin, scared voice.

Raymond said, “Chad tells me Loquesto used to throw fights for money, down in Mexico.”

“You don't believe that,” I said, knowing how much Raymond used to admire Loquesto.

“Not really. But I wonder.”

That made me mad. I said that Chad was a liar. I actually used the word
liar
, realizing how biting and challenging it was.