Monster's Chef (19 page)

I glanced quickly as Rita tried to wake him from a stupor.

Monster had no genitalia, just something that looked like a brass-ringed hole.

“What is that?”

Rita ignored me and kept shaking at Monster's arm.

“Did he do that to himself? Did he have himself cut like that?”

“What did you expect?” Rita said as she turned back to Monster. “Where is my baby?” she repeatedly screamed into his uncomprehending face.

A flutter of movement, lips twitching.

Dazed, with eyes as red as blood, he tried to stand, teetered, and fell back onto the bed.

Rita slapped him, and he cried in short, hard sobs.

“Go away,” he said. “Where's my Security?”

“It's over, Monster. The hills are on fire, everyone is evacuating.”

Finally, she got through to him. Monster more or less came to his senses.

“Rita, you are so wrong. I did so much for you, and you betray me, just like everybody else. Like those liars out there who talk about me like I'm some kind of child molester. You know the truth; I'm incapable of hurting anyone.”

He glanced down at where his genitals should have been.

I felt like throwing up.

“Where is my baby?” Rita demanded.

“He's not yours. He's my flesh and blood.”

“He's not, you fucking liar! He doesn't have an ounce of your blood in him, and if you don't tell me where he is, I'll shoot you down right now,” she said, shoving the gun into his face.

Monster shoved the gun aside and ran to an armoire and flung it open to reveal an array of bottles with colored fluids inside.

“Leave those bottles alone. You're not poisoning me again.”

Monster's hand darted for something among those dozens of multicolored containers.

Rita fired.

A red bottle slipped from his startled grasp and shattered on the floor. Whatever it was sizzled and evaporated into wisps of smoke. Immediately, I coughed and tasted pomegranates.

“Don't breathe!” Rita shouted to me as she dragged Monster into the hallway. I followed, eyes stinging and throat burning, only able to take a breath once the door closed behind us.

“Where is the baby?” she demanded of Monster as he crumpled on the cold slate of the hallway.

“The baby is home. He's safe at home,” Monster replied.

“He'd never be safe with you. Give him to me,” Rita said, and I was sure she would kill Monster.

“He's away from you. You'll never have him,” Monster said, and started to shimmer and pulsate, skin churning, slipping into something else.

“Stop!”

Monster's face began to elongate into a snout, and that's when she shot him.

He continued to change and she continued to shoot until the gun clicked.

Too late.

Monster had become a massive wolflike creature, with bloody welts across its face. With a snarl, he padded away from us.

 

VEGAN PINEAPPLE-SAFFRON UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE

   
TOPPING

   
5 tablespoons Earth Balance spread

   
½ cup plus 2 teaspoons raw brown sugar

   
1 pineapple

   
CAKE

   
2½ cups all-purpose flour

   
½ teaspoon baking powder

   
½ teaspoon baking soda

   
¼ teaspoon cardamom

   
¾ cup raw sugar

   
1 teaspoon salt

   
1 teaspoon saffron threads

   
½ cup water

   
²⁄³ cup coconut milk

   
5 tablespoons grapeseed oil

Make the topping:
Put the Earth Balance spread and the brown sugar in a small saucepan and stir over medium heat until the spread has melted and the sugar has dissolved. Continue cooking, without stirring, for a few more minutes or until bubbles start to appear around the outside edges of the mixture and the sugar starts to caramelize. Then remove from the heat, and pour into a nonstick or sprayed 9-inch round cake pan.

Peel and slice the pineapple and arrange the slices evenly over the topping in the pan.

Make the cake:
Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and ground cardamom into a bowl. Place the sugar and salt on top of them and mix together. Take some of this dry mixture and, using a spice grinder, blend it with the saffron threads until you can no longer see any strands.

Using a whisk, combine the water, coconut milk, and grapeseed oil in a bowl. In thirds, add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and combine after each addition until you have a homogeneous batter. Pour the batter over the topping in the pan.

Bake at 350°F for 35 to 40 minutes. Cool completely, then invert onto a cake plate so that the pineapple slices are on top.

CHAPTER NINE

“WE ARE HALLUCINATING,” I SAID TO RITA
calmly as she walked about in circles.

“No, he is some kind of thing. He does that. He's capable of anything!”

“Should I have said, Are we hallucinating?”

“He's a demon. A godforsaken thing.”

“I don't know about you, but I think I'm going to faint,” I said, and meandered away.

I found Monster's bathroom and washed my face, and dried it on a towel so thick I could plunge myself into it, submerging totally into the whiteness, its abundance, and wondered if a flock of geese would burst forth.

I returned to her with the towel wrapped around my head.

“I can taste it. It's bitter and thick on my tongue. Don't you taste it? We're both very high,” I said with satisfaction.

“What are you talking about? That man has my child, he turned into some werewolf thing and I shot him and it didn't do anything.”

“I've been very drunk. I've smoked hashish, chewed peyote, done acid, ecstasy, but I've never felt this.”

“Shut up!”

“Listen. My heart, I can feel the beat reverberating throughout my body. The blood rushes all around me, flowing from me into the air around us.”

I meant every word I said because I wanted Rita to know Monster wasn't really a monster but a freak who had thrown us all into a poisoned river.

Rita pointed the gun at my head, gesturing for me to shut up.

“If you say another word . . . I swear to God I will shoot you.”

I made the sign for dreaming.
We're in a dream
, I signed over and over again until she lost interest at pointing the gun at my head.

“You don't think he's a werewolf?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “Let's go kill him.”

I nodded and followed her to a passageway that led to a corridor that stretched for what seemed like a mile.

“Where is it that we're going?”

“Home! Where the baby is,” she said.

“Where is that?”

She ignored me and pulled away. I did my best to keep up with her, but again it was hopeless. Comfortable running at a near sprint, Rita must have been in training for this. I had nothing left, and resigned myself to walking.

I heard something behind me, faint like the rustling of leaves, then a deep-throated growl. I found renewed energy to continue running, saw an open door glowing like a light to the next world.

“Hurry!” Rita yelled from the doorway.

That sound behind me now was a roar of anguish.

Fear picked up my feet, lifted my knees, pumped my arms, filled my lungs; I flung myself forward as if I was at the tape at the end of a race and stumbled through the doorway. Rita slammed the heavy metal door behind me, and soon afterward something struck it, growling and thrashing.

It was a relief to be aboveground and to feel the cooler air coming off the ocean, but from the northeast, as far as I could see, everything was on fire.

“Come on,” Rita said. But I stood there, astonished at the approaching destruction and the sound of it, the explosions.

“That's Monster's Lair going up,” Rita said over her shoulder as she headed to the bluffs. She knew where she was going, but I hoped it didn't involve trying to climb down a steep cliff onto the rocks below.

“Over here,” she said.

I was certain now that Monster had bought all this property for just this kind of contingency, the need for avenues of escape.

She walked along a worn, narrow trail bordered on both sides by clover and wildflowers. The path gently sloped into a forest of oaks, and in the center was a high stone wall, and behind the wall, a picture-perfect cottage looking as if it should have been made of gingerbread. There, half concealed by giant hollyhocks, oblivious to the ash floating about, stood a big-boned woman with intricately braided blond hair. Behind her on the ground in a wicker baby basket was a squawking, red-faced little blond boy.

The woman saw us coming and scooped up the boy and disappeared into the house. She returned clutching a shotgun.

“Stop! You are trespassing,” she said in heavily accented English.

“Who are you?” Rita asked.

“You are trespassing!”

“Listen! I want my baby!”

Heidi didn't seem to understand Rita, or maybe she did because she pointed the shotgun at her.

“Let me explain it to you. That's my baby and you will have to kill me to stop me from taking him.”

Rita started down the path past the huge hollyhocks, the great sunflowers, the trellis covered with the butter-yellow blossoms of a climbing rose to the quaint, artfully painted
Home
on the wooden gate.

The woman fired the shotgun, and the baby wailed. Rita dropped to the ground and crawled for cover behind a blooming jacaranda tree.

I didn't have cover to hide behind. I stood there, hands at my sides, expecting to be shot. I imagined being ripped apart by the pellets, bleeding to death on a bed of primrose. I didn't care; she could shoot me, kill me, I didn't care. The baby and Rita, that's what mattered, but the woman wasn't interested in me. She calmly positioned herself to get a better shot at Rita.

I picked up a good-size stone and hit her flush in the back.

She moved the barrel of the shotgun in my direction. Rita rushed her and hit the woman in the head with the butt of the gun, knocking her to the ground, and scooped up the baby.

I grabbed the shotgun from the grasping hands of the woman and followed after Rita and the baby. With the baby pressed against her chest, Rita flew down narrow wooden stairs that led to a small dock and to a motorboat anchored there.

I untied the motorboat and climbed on board.

“I've never piloted a ship,” I said.

“I have. We're going to Santa Barbara. I have friends there.”

“Monster can find you. You need a shelter, someplace he can't get to. Asha can find you a shelter. She'll know how to get you free from Monster.”

Rita laughed. “Don't need to worry about me. I don't intend to run from Monster. I want all this. I want everything he has, and I will get it, and that still won't be enough for what he's done.”

Rita hopped onto the boat, placed the baby inside the cabin; that's when I saw the black figure of the giant dog running headfirst down the bluffs.

“Start the engine!” I shouted to Rita.

It took a long frantic moment or two for the engine to engage, long enough for the giant dog to land on the dock.

I grabbed the shotgun and aimed. The dog leaped and I fired. I was sure I'd hit it, but the dog kept coming, undeterred and pissed, too close for me to get off another shot. I swung with the stock and whiffed.

The dog lunged, knocking the shotgun from my hands, and sank its teeth into my shoulder and, with a yank, flung me off the boat and onto the dock.

Rita rushed to face it, but it was on her in a flash, throwing her about viciously.

I expected that it would tear her head from her shoulders, but unexpectedly it stopped and gazed at the sky.

The sun, a gaudy reddish balloon, had risen above the haze, and the dog continued to stare at it, as though compelled.

The dog coughed as dogs sometimes do, and lowered its head and opened its mouth wide until it became a gaping maw. It coughed hard and vomited prodigiously, and something long and black slid from within it, and then the dog was gone and there was Monster, wet and steaming as if he had just slipped from out of the womb, but his blinding white skin was gone. Monster was black now, black as a shadow. Black like the trespasser who he complained had stalked him all those years.

I thought Monster was done, that the drugs had worn off; the gig was up.

No.

Monster was still possessed with the need to kill Rita.

“You bitch. You hateful bitch! After all I did for you, you stab me in the back! What were you before I came and pulled you from the mud? You fucking trailer trash!”

Monster had the build and the strength of an anorexic, but his ego was oversize.

He charged Rita.

With one punch she knocked him to the deck and began to beat him with all the unrepressed energy of someone freed from bondage.

“The baby! The baby is crying,” I shouted, hoping to coax her off of Monster, but she seemed intent on bashing his head in.

“Stop it, Rita. You can't be killing people,” Thug shouted.

I glanced up to see Thug walking down the stairs, smiling as though this insanity was a pleasant night at the club.

I picked up the shotgun and pointed it at him, but he didn't seem concerned.

He lifted Monster from the deck, cradled him as though he was the frailest child.

“Monster isn't all that. Y'all treat him like he's the one, the devil or some shit. Sure, he's done some really wrong shit, but you know, he don't deserve this. He don't deserve to die. He's done some good too. You know that. And he gave me another retainer and met my number.”