North American Lake Monsters (7 page)

The owner was an overweight, meticulously tidy man named Barry Bright—a failed car salesman from Idaho, and about as far from an actual Cajun as it was possible to get. When he walked through the kitchen it was with as much reluctance and mincing care as a man crossing a grassy median carpeted with dog turds. He stepped gingerly around the extended arms of simmering pots and refused to walk over the rubber mats behind the line, which were often caked with squashed gobs of meat and vegetable. The heat made him sweat, and because he was a large man he did so with vigorous industry, ruining his temper and his shirts. He hated being in the kitchen; when he had to address the kitchen staff he preferred to do it in the dining area, where he couldn’t afford
not
to run an air conditioner. So when the kitchen door swung open and he stepped back there, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch. He pointed a finger at Nick and jerked his head back the way he had come. “Nick! What I tell you about phone calls at work!”

Nick set down the knife he was using to chop garlic and made a helpless gesture. “I didn’t call no one, Mr. Bright.”

“Somebody called
you.
Come out here and get it. She says it’s important.” He cast a disparaging glance around the kitchen. “You boys better get this pigsty cleaned up before the night shift comes in.” He looked at Big Jake, a huge man of indeterminate age and immeasurable girth. “You got it under control in here, Jake?”

“Always do, Mr. Bright.”

Bright nodded curtly and retreated into the dining area. Nick followed him out, taking off his hat and wiping a rag over his closely shaven head.

When he picked up the phone, he found Trixie waiting on the other end of it.

“You gotta do something, Nick,” she said, without preamble.

“Hey,” he said. “I thought you were mad at me.”

“Stupid. Why would I be mad at you?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause I ran out of there, I guess.” It had been nearly a week since the meeting at Derrick’s apartment, and he hadn’t heard from her at all in that time. He’d been sure she had cut him loose.

She was silent a moment, which let him know he wasn’t absolved. “Well, you didn’t exactly help yourself out,” she said. “What happened there, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered, leaning against the counter. His chef’s coat released little scent-clouds of garlic and onion whenever he moved. He saw Mr. Bright watching him from across the restaurant. “Fuck them. Derrick’s an asshole; he doesn’t want me in the group anyway.”

“Yes he does, but he’s not gonna just give you a free pass. To him you’re just some punk kid. My word gets you in the door, but after that it’s on you.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know if I want to mess with it. They hate me anyway. They think I’m a pussy.”

“Well are you?”

The question caught him off guard, and it hurt. “What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, Nickie. You seem to be ready to give it all up.”

“Give what up? I’m not in their fucking group.”

“No, but I am.”

After a moment he said, “So it’s like that.” Something was opening up in his chest, some painful bloom, and when he drew in a breath it caught fire like a smoldering coal. He put his hand over his eyes and felt his throat constrict.

“This is who I am, Nickie. It’s part of the package.”

Bright called something from across the room and pointed at his watch. Nick turned his back to him. “I don’t know if I can do it, Trix,” he said. “I don’t know if I care enough. Does that make me a traitor? Does that make me a bad guy?”

She seemed honestly to consider it. Finally she said, “Not to the race, maybe. But to me. Do you care about me, Nickie?”

“Yeah,” he said; then, more forcefully: “Yes. You’re the only thing I care about.”

“Let me come over tonight.”

“Oh, Trix, I don’t think so.”

“Please. You never let me see where you live.”

Nick watched his boss come closer, standing in the middle of the dining area and staring at him openly. “It’s so fucked up over there. I mean, you just don’t know.”

“I thought you said you cared about me.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “We’re at a major turning point in our relationship, Nickie. You gotta let me come over. Otherwise I don’t know what to think.”

He considered a moment. “Fine,” he said. “Come over. But my mom is crazy.”

“I know, you told me.”

“No, I mean really fucking crazy. So, whatever. Come over if you want. But you’re not gonna want to stay.” He nodded at Mr. Bright and said, “Look, I gotta go. Emperor Zog is looking at me like I stole a nickel.”

“I’ll see you tonight,” she said, and hung up the phone.

When he walked back into the kitchen, Big Jake chucked him on the arm. “Boss Man must like you,” he said.

“Funny, it don’t seem that way to me.”

“Trust me. My wife call me, she got to be havin a baby before he even think about comin back here.”

Tyrone shook his head and made a noise of disbelief. “One thing you don’t need is no more babies,” he said.

Big Jake laughed. “I know you right!”

“What you got, big man, roun’ forty?”

The two men laughed and began to banter, and just like that Nick passed from their attention, like an amusing notion considered and discarded. He picked up his chef’s knife and went back to work on the garlic. “Maybe you stop havin so many kids, you won’t have to work three jobs,” he said sullenly.

They stopped talking.

“What you say?” Tyrone said, squinting curiously at him, as though trying to figure out what variety of lunatic he was faced with.

Tyrone was only a few years older than Nick; he had grown up in the St. Thomas project before the city tore it down and kicked everybody out. He and Nick worked all right together as long as they didn’t talk directly to each other.

Nick stopped what he was doing and looked at him. “I’m just saying use some fucking common sense. That’s why my paycheck is so fucking small every week, ’cause the government’s gotta take care of y’all’s goddamn kids.”

“Oh,
shit!
”

“This ain’t even about you, T,” said Nick. “Jake’s the daddy. I’m talking to him. Be responsible, dude, that’s all.”

“What you think workin three jobs
is
, bitch?” said Tyrone.

Big Jake put a hand on Tyrone’s shoulder. “This ain’t the place,” he said. Then he pointed one massive finger at Nick and said, “You better settle down, man. Your young ass got no idea what you even talking about.”

Nick nodded and returned his attention to the garlic. “It’s cool, Jake.”

After that, the kitchen was mostly quiet until two-thirty, when Nick’s shift ended. He punched his timecard and signed it; when he turned to leave he found himself staring at Tyrone, who’d come up behind him and left him no room to edge around. Nick took a reflexive step backward and was brought up short by the time clock. He’d thought that after the incident at Derrick’s place he would be anxious for a chance to redeem himself, but now that he was faced with a real confrontation, he felt his body quail. He became powerfully aware of how much larger Tyrone was than himself, and how many awful things could happen to a person in a kitchen.

But he pressed up to Tyrone until their chests were touching and their faces were only inches apart, in a kind of grotesque intimacy. “What you wanna do?” he said.

“Nazi motherfucker,” Tyrone said. “You get in my face sometime. See how it go for you then.”

“What you wanna do, T?”

“Like I said. Try it and see.”

Big Jake slammed a pan down behind them, making Nick jump. “Goddammit, get your silly ass outta here! T, get back on the line! We got tickets comin in.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” said Nick, and he slid around Tyrone and headed out into the warm October afternoon, where he kept walking until he was out of sight of the restaurant and then leaned against the painted brick of a 24-hour bar, breathing deeply, while his heart threw out flaring arcs of rage and frustration like an effulgent red star.

Nick’s mother used to say
that they’d lost his father to the horses.

Throughout his childhood, Nick thought that meant that he’d been killed by them: trampled beneath a galloping herd, or thrown from the back of a bronco; when he was younger still, he imagined that they’d devoured him, dipping their great regal heads into the open bowl of his body, lifting them out again trailing bright ropes and jellies. At night, when the closet door in his bedroom swung silently open, the boogeyman wore an equine face, and the sound that spilled from its mouth was the dolorous melody of his mother’s sobs. Even now that he knew better, knew that his father had fled in part because of gambling debts incurred at the track, horses retained their sinister aspect.

His mother’s frequent struggles with depression apparently taxed his father beyond endurance, and what comfort he couldn’t find at home he made for himself at the Fair Grounds. He left them when Nick was four years old; he’d burned through their life savings, and apparently decided that there was nothing else worth coming home to. He existed from then on as a monthly child-support check, which supplemented his mother’s income as a receptionist in a dentist’s office.

But even that changed a few months ago, when the high school guidance counselor took him aside and informed him that his mother had been in a serious car accident. She was at the hospital, and it was not known if she would survive. He took Nick back to his office, and they waited there for well over an hour, Nick sipping a lukewarm carton of chocolate milk from the cafeteria, the counselor looking at him with naked, cloying concern, his whole body freighted with the sympathy of the uninvolved.

She survived, of course: paralyzed from the waist down; both feet removed; with a grotesque head wound that became a scar so large that her left eye seemed pulled out of true, giving her a wild, glaring aspect even while she slept. She commenced a free fall into depression, unable to work and neglecting the bills until the utilities were cut off and mortgage payments went delinquent. Finally he understood that the medical bills far outweighed her negligible insurance, and that they were in dire financial straits. She developed an antipathy to sunlight, covering the windows with heavy curtains and protesting angrily even when he lit too many candles at night. Darkness pooled in the house and grew stagnant; shortly afterward, his mother’s affliction manifested into its current gruesome incarnation. It was his duty to assist her, and to clean the blood off the plates when she was finished.

His father’s monthly checks still arrived, but the man who wrote them maintained an absolute radio silence that swallowed all hope of rescue.

It was around this time that he found Trixie—or rather, that Trixie decided to retrieve him from the scrap heap of social inconsequence, for reasons which were still mysterious to him. She provided him with an excuse to spend more time away from the house, which was almost as good as spending time with her. It was a precarious but practicable existence, until it became clear that his father’s checks would not be enough to sustain it. He would have to get a job.

So three weeks ago he waited by his high school’s front gate for the final class to let out. He spotted Trixie coming down the steps and remained there until she strolled up to him. Her red checkered skirt and white blouse seemed absurd in the context of her closely shorn hair, the enticing hint of a tattoo looping down below her right sleeve, and the openly confrontational stance she maintained with the school and just about everybody in it. She was a year older than he was, but to him it seemed as though she was from another, more sophisticated country, where people were cool and didn’t take any shit, and where they believed in themselves absolutely. That she had recently seen fit to spend time with him was a stroke of luck that very nearly compensated for his mother’s dismal condition.

“What’s up, gorgeous?” she said, falling in step with him as he turned away from the school. She started unbuttoning her shirt, revealing the white tank top she wore underneath. He could see her black bra through it, and again he wondered at his fortune. “Playing hooky today?”

“No,” he said. They walked a few steps, and he added, “I’m quitting school.”

“Holy shit, no way! Are you serious?” She looked at him with a mixture of alarm and delight.

“Yeah. Mom made me.”

This was apparently too much. She threw out her arms and pinwheeled along the sidewalk, yelling, “Oh my God, no way! You have the coolest fucking mom!”

Nick just shook his head and watched her dance off her gleeful burst of energy. “She had to quit her job, so I gotta work. It’s not like I get to do what I want.”

“Yeah, but Nickie! Oh my God, I wish I had your mom.” She considered a moment. “Hey, that would make you my brother, wouldn’t it? Mmm, kinky.”

Nick blushed and turned his face to hide it. She still hadn’t let him so much as touch her breasts, yet she taunted him flagrantly with these constant sexual references. Sometimes he wondered if she was using him as a kind of science project, in which she was trying to determine just how much provocation a teenage boy could endure before his hair caught fire.

“Where are you gonna work?”

“I don’t know, somewhere in the Quarter, I guess. I can always get a job washing dishes or something.”

She looked stunned. “That’s nigger’s work, Nickie!”

“Well, what the fuck, Trix, I don’t have any skills. I gotta make money somehow.”

She nodded absently and kept whatever she was thinking to herself. As per routine, they bussed down to the French Quarter, where they played video games at the arcade until it started to get dark. For a time he submerged himself in the surf of the arcade’s fuzzy explosions and kaleidoscopic light show, content with the warm proximity of this strange beautiful girl and the narcotic effect of the video games, with their offerings of bright cartoon villains and violent catharsis.