Nine Lives Last Forever (17 page)

The brief contact-friction, unfortunately, did little to slow our pace. We were fast approaching another intersection, this one wider across with more lanes, the connection point with a far busier artery of traffic.

Monty gulped visibly as he registered the danger. His right hand clamped down on a handle mounted into the floor beside the driver’s seat.

“Found the hand brake!” he called out excitedly.

I closed my eyes, grimacing as I anticipated the coming jolt from the brake’s application—but after thirty seconds of holding my breath, my eyes popped back open. The bus was still rolling along, as fast as ever.

I looked up the aisle toward the front of the bus. Monty was holding up the detached handle of the hand brake in his limp right hand.

We were trapped on a roller coaster without any rails, without any brakes. From the distance, a police siren sang out the promise of rescue, but there was no way it would reach us before we hit the next intersection. I was certain we were going to die.

“Horn!” I shouted up at Monty, who was still numbly staring at the sabotaged hand brake.

Monty’s face paled as he dropped the brake handle and pummeled the horn button in the center of the steering wheel.

The sound was deafening, but effective. Startled motorists on either side of the intersection screeched to a rubber-burning stop, gaping in horror as the bus plowed through without slowing. We were surrounded by another interlude of streaming color and blaring horns.

If only I managed to get off of this bus alive, I swore to myself, I would never,
ever
board another one.

The road began to level out as we exited the second intersection, but the bus’s built-up momentum continued to push us forward. Our speed was now gradually decreasing, but still more intersections lay ahead. Our luck couldn’t hold out much longer.

A flashing red and blue light bounced against the metal walls of the bus, and I felt the first calming waves of relief. It was a miracle. The police car had caught up to us.

A bull-horned voice immediately barked instructions. “Pull the emergency brake!”

The voice was gruff, angry, irritated, and oh-so-welcome.

Monty grabbed the broken handle and waved it out the driver’s side window.

There was a short, tense silence before the voice returned. “We’re bringing a car around in front. He’ll slow you down manually.”

Monty waved cheerfully from the driver’s seat. With the arrival of the police, he’d suddenly relaxed—it was as if he were now enjoying this terrifying experience.

“Manually?” I murmured, nervously gripping the seat in front of me. “What does that mean, ‘manually’?”

A second police car suddenly pulled out in front of us from a side street. The vehicle slowed, immediately disappearing from my narrow, angled view out the front window.

Monty hollered toward the back of the bus, “Prepare for impaaaa—”

A jarring crunch signaled the contact of the grill of the bus with the police car’s steel bumper. My fingers clenched the leather seat cushion, pushing against the momentum of the sudden deceleration. The bus shuddered in fits and starts as the police car applied more braking pressure, finally bringing us to a complete stop.

A wave of blissful, motionless silence fell over the carriage of the bus as Monty sprang energetically down the front steps and waved triumphantly at the police car.

My wobbly legs managed to carry me out the mangled rear door. I gripped the bent handle bar next to the steps, trying to steady my dizzied head as I stumbled onto the curb. All the while, the scrambled contents of my stomach threatened to make their own exit.

Monty’s flat-soled footsteps pattered off down the sidewalk, in deep conversation with a growing knot of policeman. Fire trucks and ambulances appeared as if from nowhere, quickly filling the scene.

I closed my eyes and ran my hands over my clammy cheeks. I felt lost, abandoned, and exhausted. I sat down on a curb and put my head between my knees, trying to center myself.

And that’s when it hit me—a strangely familiar smell—one I’d previously encountered in only two other instances.

The first was in the kitchen above the Green Vase. The second was in my growing collection of VC items—in the pages of the shiny green Mark Twain books and on the surface of the black-and-white photo I’d found in the basement wardrobe.

The air on the sidewalk was filled with the smell of sizzling herb-crusted chicken, cooked up in a wrought iron skillet, filled with several inches of deep, savory animal fat. I could hardly believe my nose, but there could be no mistake.

Someone nearby was cooking my Uncle Oscar’s fried chicken.

MY NOSE SOAKED
up the familiar scent, pulling it inward to meet the memory of my uncle’s short, rounded shoulders bent over a skillet, grousing grumpily as he perfected his signature dish of crispy fried chicken.

As far as I knew, Oscar had never written down the exact ingredients he used to make the coating for his chicken. I had assumed that the recipe had died with him, but it appeared someone, somehow, had managed to replicate it.

I took a quick glance at the melee surrounding the disabled bus. Monty had commandeered the attention of the police, firemen, and gawking onlookers circling the scene. He stood in the middle of the crowd, his hands gesturing wildly in the air as he spun a phantom steering wheel. Knowing Monty, the story was rapidly drifting further and further from the truth.

No one appeared to notice as I edged away from the throng. I assumed a casual, nonchalant pace until I was a full block away; then I headed off in search of the source of the haunting fried chicken scent.

The succulent aroma intensified as I turned onto a narrow side street. On either side of the road, shady elm trees dug into the sandy dirt beneath the asphalt. The efforts of the roots cracked the sidewalk, pushing up the corners of the concrete. As I stumbled over the crooked pavement, an unsettled feeling crept over me—one that was completely unrelated to the turbulent bus ride.

Monty’s droning voice wormed its way into my head, spouting off theory after wild, crazy theory of how my Uncle Oscar might have faked his death. Despite the niggling anomalies surrounding his passing, I had refused to consider Monty’s speculations, confident in what I had seen at Oscar’s funeral, in what I believed to be the truth. But now, for the first time in months, that certainty was once again tinged with doubt.

I read the name off of the nearest street sign, trying to find my location in my mind’s map of San Francisco. I was fairly certain that our ill-fated bus ride had terminated on the outer edge of the Mission district.

In San Francisco’s early years, this area was a wide expanse of sandy dunes, inhabited only by cowboys and the Spanish missionaries of the Mission Dolores. After the Gold Rush boom, the dunes were leveled and waves of working-class immigrants began to move in. Irish, Germans, and Poles dominated the densely populated neighborhood in the first half of the nineteenth century; Mexicans and other groups from Central and South America took over in the 1950s.

By the late 1990s, when the dot-com boom pushed Bay Area rents to astronomical heights, the Mission gained a niche status with San Francisco’s young professionals. Many of its ramshackle tenements were torn down to make way for a proliferation of geometric lofts. The concentration of yuppie diners combined with comparatively lower rents to make the neighborhood one of the best addresses for new restaurants seeking to make a splash in San Francisco’s ultracompetitive culinary scene.

Up ahead on the right, halfway down the block, a steady trickle of pedestrians approached the awning-covered storefront of a small bistro. The awning’s sheeting stretched out from the porch of a renovated Victorian. The bright green fabric fluttered in the breeze, making it difficult for me to read the gold-colored letters painted onto its front banner. It wasn’t until I was standing flush in front of the bistro that I could make out the writing.

I read the banner several times, my stunned mind refusing to process the words—the sign identified the name of the restaurant as “Oscar’s.”

A petite woman with bare arms heavily inked in tattoos stood in the doorway, taking down names for table reservations.

“Number?” she asked roughly, eying me suspiciously as she barricaded the door with a forbidding stance.

“Umm,” I replied vaguely, trying to peek over her head to the inside of the restaurant. The crispy smell of what I was convinced was Oscar’s fried chicken overwhelmed my senses.

“Ma’am,” she said sternly. “It’s close quarters inside. You have to wait out here until your table’s ready. How many in your party?”

A tenor voice answered from behind my right shoulder. “Two, please,” Monty piped in as he stepped up next to me. “We’d like a table for two, close to the kitchen, if you can swing it.”

The woman scowled at him callously. “You’ll get whatever comes up next unless you want to wait out here all night.”

“Of course, of course,” Monty said, drumming his fingers across his chest, unabashed by her rebuff. Monty was so used to the cold shoulder treatment, its chill had absolutely no effect on him. He simply ignored it.

Monty leaned in toward the woman’s tattooed arm. “Nice skull and bones,” he gushed. “Did you get that done here in San Francisco?”

In his wool sweater, gray slacks, and pointed loafers, Monty looked an unlikely candidate for a tattoo parlor, but as the waitress pulled up her shirt to show Monty a large spider inked across her midriff, I took advantage of the distraction and slipped around the side of the building. I figured there had to be a service entrance in the back.

In the alley behind the restaurant, I watched as a harried busboy heaved two large garbage bags of refuse into an already loaded Dumpster. Dusting his hands together, he pushed open a small wooden door with the back of his hip and walked inside the restaurant.

I crept up to the door and looked through the mesh screen that covered its upper half. A cloud of the familiar chicken scent mushroomed out at me. I could hear the sounds of clinking silverware and muted dinner conversation, so I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

A narrow corridor led around a sharp corner, emptying out on one end of a crowded dining room. The eating space had been hollowed out from several smaller rooms; remnants of the original Victorian floor plan were still discernible, particularly in the height differential of different sections of the ceiling.

A bevy of waitstaff maneuvered through a tight tangle of wobbly wooden tables, the surfaces of each one worn and homely. The overall effect was one of closeness, walls and shoulders both within easy touching distance.

All available chairs were occupied by hungry eaters, digging into the fried concoction whose smell had drawn me from several streets over. The food was piled up, family style, in the middle of each table. But as I stared at the plates, I realized that there was something decidedly un-chicken-y about the food’s appearance. The shape of each piece seemed much smaller in size than a typical cut of chicken.

I eased out from around the corner and stepped into the stream of waiter traffic winding through the tables. Phrases leapt out from the surrounding chatter.

“Read about this in the Chronicle the other week . . .”

“My friend wouldn’t stop talking about the food, so I had to come try it for myself.”

A waiter swung past me hefting a huge bowl of freshly pounded mashed potatoes. The consistency was visibly lumpy, made just the way my Uncle Oscar used to prepare it—but then again, I noted as a second bowl passed me, upon closer inspection, there was something about the white buttery mass that didn’t seem quite right. Something was different.

My head was swirling, feverish with confusion. Perhaps it was all a coincidence. By chance, another cook had arrived at almost the same recipe as my Uncle Oscar’s. How many different ways could there be to cook fried chicken, anyway? I’d been foolish, I thought, to let Monty’s persistent Oscar theories get to me. If I could just take a quick look at the cooks, I could dismiss this as merely an odd fluke.

All of the waiters carrying hot food were coming from the opposite side of the dining room, which must, I reasoned, lead toward the kitchen. I pushed my way through the crowded tables until I reached a brick-framed cutout in the far wall that revealed the busy cooking area.

The front side of the kitchen was lined by a long stainless steel counter. Every few seconds, another hot plate slid across it for pickup. Pots and pans hung down from the ceiling, blocking the view to the line of stoves beyond—save for brief flashes of the white-coated chefs working on the opposite side.

I followed an empty-handed waiter through a nearby swinging door and into the chaos of the kitchen. Sizzling sounds filled the dense, greasy air.

Several of the cooks and waiters stopped and stared at me, but I didn’t notice. My feet were traveling in only one direction, toward the hunched shoulders bent over the farthest stove in the back corner of the kitchen.

“Hey, what are you doing in here?” a voice called out, but it was mute to my chicken-numbed ears.

I rounded the corner of the hanging pans and took my first unobstructed look at the chef I’d been tracking since I caught the first scent of his cooking.

His back was turned to me, but the thinning white hair on the top of his head was unmistakably familiar. So, too, was the wrinkled hand that reached down to wipe the apron tied around his thick waist.

I leaned forward to tap him on the shoulder. I didn’t breathe; I couldn’t breathe. It had to be him. It couldn’t be him.

But as the curve of the cook’s stubbled face came into view, I saw a piece of meat that he was about to dunk into a deep tray of creamy white batter. The leg had just been separated from its host animal; the remains of the carcass filled a bin near the cook’s left hand.