The Bialy Pimps (20 page)

Rich applauded.
 

Jenny, the new girl who also worked at Java Jive down the street and routinely stole drinks for the crew, did not applaud. She was in the middle of making a Giant Beefy Weiner sandwich (a new specialty) and screamed, dropping six ounces of hot meat onto the floor.
 

The moment’s chance for immaturity was not lost on Rich, who immediately said, “You just dropped six ounces of hot meat onto the floor!” and giggled.
 

“This place has rats?” said Jenny.

“Just one,” said the Anarchist.

“Well, no, there has to be at least...” Darcy began.

“
One
,” the Anarchist repeated.

Jenny was slim and dark, with brown hair and a subdued wardrobe. She wore black cat’s eye glasses over sarcastic brown eyes and today wore a black shirt that simply read
I shot the sheriff.
She had already stepped outside of her cool zone by screaming, so now that she had composed herself, she wasn’t about to deal with the rest of this issue girlishly.
 

“I do seem to remember Philip saying something about an exterminator,” she said.

The Anarchist scoffed.
 

“Don’t be such a nonbeliever,” Rich said to the Anarchist. “We’re gaining ground. We’ve killed The Rat way more than normal these past few months.”
 

“I thought you said there was just one?” Jenny said.
 

“There is,” said the Anarchist.

“But he rises again and again,” Rich clarified. “He’s a turd that won’t flush.”
 

Darcy tried to interject, but the Anarchist stopped her. He turned to Jenny. “Imagine a world without boundaries. A world where an immortal rodent rules, and others cower in his shadow.”
 

“What are you talking about?” said Darcy.
 

“You have to imagine me doing that as a voiceover for a dramatic movie trailer. I’ll admit it loses some of its punch without music and jump-cuts.”

 
Darcy turned to Jenny. “We’ve only ever seen one rat, but then someone kills it and only then do we see another, and so on, but only one at a time. These guys...” She jerked her thumb toward the Anarchist and Rich. “...like to pretend it’s only one immortal, regenerating rat.”
 

Jenny shrieked and dropped more meat. Rich giggled, but refrained from commenting.
 

“I don’t like rats,” Jenny said.

“Well, that’s good,” said the Anarchist, “because we only have one. You won’t have to deal with the plural.”

Again Darcy tried to say something to Jenny, but this time it was Rich who stopped her.

“The Rat is just a part of life here,” he said. “Like the ice machine. Are you afraid of the ice machine?”

Jenny, composed again, gave him a level look.
 

“Or the slicer. Are you afraid of the slicer?”
 

“You goddamn well should be,” said the Anarchist, rubbing a bandage on his index finger against his thumb. Just the other day, he’d been cleaning the slicer and it had bitten him. The wound had bled for hours, the same as every time anyone other than Slate cleaned it. Looking at it now, he could tell it was looking at him, sizing up his weaknesses. Waiting.

“I didn’t sign on for rats,” said Jenny.
 

“You’ll get used to it,” said the Anarchist. “He’s hardly threatening. If you see him, kill him. That’s what we do. I think it’s what he expects. In fact, you see him and
don’t
kill him, he’d probably be offended.”
 

“He’s like a pet,” Rich added. “Except that instead of walking him or playing fetch with him, we kill him.”

“We? You mean, you’ve
all
killed rats here?” said Jenny.

After a moment, Darcy nodded. Both Rich and the Anarchist opened their mouths to correct her improper use of the plural, but at that moment Philip emerged from the office holding a newly delivered box.

“You guys won’t believe what just arrived,” he said.

The changes at Bingham’s over the past weeks had not only affected the humans. They had affected The Rat as well.
 

In an effort to level out the insanity he was sending Bingham’s way, Dicky Kulane tossed something into each email to Philip that sounded “managerial” as a kind of sanity control rod. At first, this “managerial stuff” was numbers – profit, loss, budgets, and financial welfare, discussed in a vague enough way to pass for legitimate. But after time went on and the deli’s business didn’t seem to decrease, Dicky shifted to talking about operations:
Be sure to make a bank run daily. Watch your portion sizes. Order more light bulbs. Clean thoroughly.
And more and more often, as Dicky ran out of ideas, “cleaning” had become the path of zero resistance. He told Philip time and time again:
Clean, clean, clean.
Philip, trying to be the good soldier, had cleaned... and he, in turn, told the Anarchist, and so the Anarchist had cleaned. And both of them had, in every spare moment, told the others to clean.
 

Philip, who wrote up the profit and loss reports, thought that the place would be in the clear once Bingham saw what kind of money Bingham’s had been bringing in lately. The latest hadn’t so much as raised an eyebrow. There were problems here beneath the surface, said Wally, and because both Philip and the Anarchist loved Bingham’s, they tried to polish their way to its salvation.
 

Tables were doused with the Purple Stuff, both on top and underneath. Gum was removed from under chairs. Velour was shined and glossed. Steamers were picked clean with brushes and toothpicks. Equipment was moved nightly so that all of the crumbs and specks could be recovered and discarded. The nozzles on the soda machine were removed and soaked overnight. Closing crews got down on hands and knees to scavenge every scrap of dirt and food from underneath make tables, under the slicer table, under the beverage coolers.
 

The Rat was not pleased. Every night he found less, until he began finding nothing at all. He even died once from starvation. Philip found him after that, put him in a plastic bag, and wore him as a hat the next day until Beckie hit Philip with a broom and made him stop. Then, when The Rat rose again, he was still hungry. So hungry.
 

The night before the Anarchist saw him while washing dishes, The Rat was near collapse. If this obsessive level of cleanliness persisted for much longer, he might even need to leave. He might need to move out into the streets, and into alcoves. It would start getting cold outside soon. He didn’t want to have to leave the warmth of Bingham’s, no matter how pleased Philip and the others might be at their long-awaited victory, but it looked like that’s how this adventure might have to end.

But then he smelled something. Something distant and far off... but definitely
there
.
 

Perhaps his sense of smell had become more sensitive after searching so long in vain, and perhaps that was why he detected the odor, faint as it was. But smell it he did, so he followed the odor. His stomach growled. His clawed feet made whispering sounds on the stainless steel of the counter as he walked.

The scent drew him behind the soda machine, where the syrup hoses dove through a hole in the tile floor. The hoses eventually resurfaced in the corner near the office, where the syrup boxes and the tank that Rich had used to decisively flatten one of The Rat’s prior selves were situated, and near the mysterious portrait of Jason in the plaster.

The scent was coming from the hole beneath the soda machine. And it wasn’t just soda syrup either, as adequate as that would have been under the dire circumstances. It was meat.

Meat.

The hole was an easy spot for the humans to miss. A strong stroke of the broom would send dirt – and any food scraps riding shotgun along with it – into the hole. And so over time, a little more meat and a little more cheese and a little more produce had been piled into the hole. Nobody thought of the soda system unless it stopped working, and nobody ever moved the soda machine to clean behind it because it was too damn heavy. Most of the crew didn’t even know the hole was there, and certainly nobody ever tried to clean it out. But now it held what amounted to a feast.
 

Salvation
.

The Rat squeezed into the hole. It was dark in here, but for The Rat, who spent the majority of his existence in dank and gloom, it was no problem to locate the food on smell alone. There was a lot at the bottom of the hole, muted with time and mold. But the smell that had drawn him in was closer, fresher. A piece of turkey that had begun life as part of that day’s lunch rush had fallen on a wire. The wire came from the next counter over, and joined the soda tubes as they entered the pit. The fortuitous turkey slice had wrapped itself around the wire and now hung as if on display, like a skinned duck in a Chinese butcher shop.
 

The Rat devoured the turkey and in the process, gnawed the wire beneath it nearly in half.

The wire, which came from a Bell service box in the basement, began to fail.
 

Within three days, Bingham’s would have no phone service at all.

The next day, after The Rat had been given his temporary reprieve from a second fatal round of starvation, Philip set the box on the counter in front of Darcy, Jenny, Rich, and the Anarchist. He’d already cut the tape, and re-opened the package by pulling the flaps out of the way. The four workers gaped at what was inside.
 

“I’m not wearing those,” said the Anarchist.

Inside the box were roughly a dozen nested hats, each bright red with several giant white spots. Rich, who was a video game junkie, immediately pointed out their similarity to the mushrooms in the Super Mario games. Each hat had a long, skinny bill. Next to the stack of hats was a collection of what appeared to be plastic bagel sandwiches, each with a stick protruding from one end. On further inspection, these sticks turned out to be springs that had been wrapped in thin cardboard sleeves to prevent damage during shipping. On the tops of the hats was a slot into which the spring-and-bagel assemblies fit.
 

“The rest of the uniforms apparently got held up in Duluth. They’ll be here in a few days. Wally told me not to worry. For now, we can wear just the hats.”

“I’m not wearing those,” the Anarchist repeated.
 

Rich had removed one of the plastic bagel sandwiches from the box and was moving his finger into and out of the hole in its middle, giggling.
 

“This is a joke, right?” said Darcy.

“Apparently not. Wally says that Bingham has this idea that a consistent appearance in a restaurant makes it seem more trustworthy. Like a franchise that has been around the block.”
 

The Anarchist shook his head. “He’s lost his mind. They’ve been beating us over the head with ridiculous cost-saving measures, and now he’s
spending
on uniforms. And, he’s doing it for a restaurant he seems sure he’s going to have to close down soon. That’s insane.”

“That’s exactly what I said to Wally, and he replied right away, like instantly, like he was just sitting there waiting for my message. He said that Bingham had these laying around from another bagel store he’d ordered for a few years ago, but which he decided not to reopen after a fire. He wants us to wear them, to make us seem more ‘established.’”
 

After a verbal struggle with the Anarchist, Philip sent another email to Wally protesting the hats. As expected, Wally reiterated that they absolutely must wear them and said that this theory had been tested and proven to increase revenue in Bingham’s other restaurant holdings. He added that there had been a large “corporate expense” just recently thanks to Bingham’s follies in the past (an expense Wally refused to elaborate on) and as a result, the new income had in no way taken Bingham’s out of the danger zone. Its closure was as imminent as ever, and if Philip was a team player, he’d get his people to wear the hats.

Wally concluded the email by reminding Philip to make a bank run daily and to keep the place as clean as possible.
 

By the afternoon, Philip, trying to lead by example, had mounted the spring bagel on the top of one of the hats and was wearing it himself. Darcy, Rich, and Jenny had joined him. The Anarchist, who worked until four, and Beckie, who came in at two, stolidly refused to wear them. Slate argued that because he was still doing the day’s slicing and wasn’t interacting with customers (he was only through the cheeses by noon), he should be exempt, and refused to wear his, too.

At 3pm, Philip emerged from the office holding a printed-out email and showed it to Beckie, Slate, and the Anarchist. It was from Wally, and said that Wally’s Aunt Sharon had come in today and had called Wally to tell her that she’d been in the little deli he managed in Columbus. She had mentioned the very nice hats, but asked why not everyone had been wearing them.

There was then much anger and managerial remonstration in the email, and a command that should some of Philip’s employees refuse to comply with management’s wishes, that he was to fire them.

The Anarchist filibustered for twenty minutes and sneaked out to go home early. Slate began stocking in the back after finishing the slicing and argued that he was now completely out of sight and hence wouldn’t wear his. Beckie, unable to argue her way past Wally’s email, donned her bagel hat and became surlier than anyone had ever seen her. She shouted at her co-workers, shouted at employees, and shouted at Philip. Philip said he understood her frustration. Beckie told Philip that he could shove both Wally and his policies right up his fat ass.
 

After the morning employees had left, Tracy and Smooth B came in for the dinner shift. Tracy saw the hats and, without knowing what they were, put one on for kicks. Smooth B read the note (the
strongly worded
note) that Philip had left and reluctantly put his on. He also noticed the Super Mario resemblance that Rich had seen.