Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

There were things in the back of the produce truck that Cora had never seen: mangoes, persimmons, fine nubbly oranges, not to mention the vegetables she couldn’t name. She and Johnny loaded a good third of the Northbest crates onto service station wagons after the lunch crowd trickled away, and then helped Magda Tutcho wrestle the rest into the General Store. It wouldn’t last long — a week and a half at most, Magda said — but there was always Gertie’s canning apparatus, and besides, it’d be a hell of a week.

Cora hand-lettered a sign for the Sunrise Restaurant’s door— Tropical Party 7pm Tonite: $15 Full Meal —and tacked it firmly down by all four corners. Sunrise was a small town. Word would get around.

They sorted the oddest fruits on the countertop, next to the spine-cracked chef school cookbook left behind, mouldering, by the last owner of the Sunrise Restaurant. “What’s this one?” she asked, balancing a red, round weight in one hand.

“Pomegranate,” Johnny Red said. He’d worked as a cook down in Calgary for three years before he took over the Sunrise Restaurant. By the second year up north he’d mostly stopped complaining about how everything came in tins, but when he took the pomegranate from her hand, the look on his face was like the first day of spring. “All the rage out in BC. White ladies in workout pants beat down your door for them.”

He waggled his eyebrows, and she laughed. It came out bad; forced. There was something cold stuck inside her. The sound of a chopped-down tree, creaking, falling.

“Cor?” he asked, and his eyebrows drew down. She shook her head. “It’s the trucker, isn’t it?”

“Johnny—” she started.

“You didn’t have to go out there.”

“Pomegranate,” she said, firm, and crossed her arms.

He split it with his chef’s knife, and a dribble of red juice wandered across the counter. The seeds were packed in tight, nestled together for warmth or love or safekeeping. They didn’t part easy: Johnny had to dig in with two fingers and pry a cluster out. They were translucent when alone, and bruised easily. She held them to the light before popping them in her mouth.

“Sour,” she said when she could speak again. Her mouth felt washed-out, astringent. They burned warm all the way down.

“That,” Johnny Red said, “is the fruit that trapped a white girl down in Hell at the beginning of the world.”

She ran her tongue over her lips. “Now you tell me.”

He smiled, lopsided. “White people medicine only works on white people, dontcha know.”

“I’m half that,” she replied, mild.

Johnny Red sized her up for a moment, a stare that echoed like Aidan the trucker man’s but much, much warmer. “Well,” he said. “That means half of you is going to be bound three whole months to me and this town. So better decide if it’s the top half or the bottom.”

This time she really did laugh. “Oh, you’d like that .”

He waggled his eyebrows again — Groucho Marx had never had a Dene man’s sharp eyebrows, but it worked out — and leaned over the counter at her. She leaned back a little, shook her head smiling. “Nuh-uh.”

He sighed, overtheatrical, and dusted his palms on his jeans. They left smears and smudges of red. “What’s a guy have to do?”

“Give me a raise,” Cora replied, but her lungs had stopped aching. Thank you, Johnny Red. She rolled a green-red oval at him across the counter. “Next?”

People started showing up come half past seven: fashionably late for a party in Sunrise. Johnny Red took their cash at the counter and Cora steered them to their tables, each stacked with the three-course menu they’d done in two shades of blocky handwriting. It was fresh veg and mangoes, orange juice not from a can; wedges of pineapple cut and perched on scratched plastic glasses. There wasn’t no pomegranate on it; either Johnny Red hadn’t found a use for it in time or he just didn’t plan on sending the whole town to white-man Hell.

Nate Okpik brought his fiddle, and Daisy Blondin her drum, and by eight the whole place was hopping, Johnny slinging plates as fast as he could. Cora dodged the odd dancer, coffeepot and empty soup bowls balanced, rock-certain she wasn’t getting no smoke break tonight.

People streamed in and out, took seats, moved chairs, left them for other tables; nobody sat alone. Nobody was quiet . She noticed, then, the little puddle of silence at the corner table; the little draft of cold air.

Aidan the bird-eyed trucker was hunched alone over a menu.

He was pale, even for a sick man — a sick half-white man with a crack on the head the size of a trailer. He looked up, hunting-hawk quick, and saw her. Two spots of red bloomed in his face: frozen, helpless embarrassment. She reached out to steady herself and caught the handle of the coffeepot, waitress’s self-defence. There was no pretending she hadn’t seen him. No turning away.

She approached the table, holding the pot out like a shield. “Coffee?”

“Sure,” he mumbled, tilting his head away.

She poured. The stream of coffee arced into the cup: it only trembled a little, only spilled a drop. “Sugar’s on the table,” she said, unnecessary. “You take milk?”

He shook his head. He still wouldn’t look at her. It made the back of her neck prickle in a way that Mike Blondin’s too-big smiles never had. “No milk,” he said, and fingered the edge of the menu. “This is from my truck?”

Nate Okpik, next table over, turned and grinned broadly over the booth’s back. “That’s right. You’re drinking free tonight.”

Aidan’s shoulders folded in like a deflated accordion. “Let him be,” Cora snapped. Leave him alone. He’s dangerous.

“Fine, fine,” Nate said, big and rumbling and good-natured, and turned back to his wife and boys.

Aidan had retreated even farther into himself, fingers plaited together as if groping for something to hold on to and finding only each other. “Sorry ’bout that,” she said, and he flashed a wan, anxious smile. He looked like hell. Who was supposed to be watching him — Magda? Gertie? The man shouldn’t have been out of bed.

It’ll be better when he’s gone, Johnny Red’s voice echoed, and she shook her head. Come off it. Do your job.

She swallowed, tried to force up a smile. “Get you the special?”

He nodded, lifting his gaze from her knees to her belly, the apron tied snug about it. A whisper of chill wind wandered across her hip.

“Cor?” Johnny Red’s voice rose sharp and tense across the floor. She looked up and he was right behind the lunch counter, ladle clenched in his hand like a weapon. “Need you over here, please.”

Cora shivered with relief and steered back across the restaurant. The muscles of Johnny’s face eased like she’d just walked back off a highway median. Behind him, over at table thirteen, Georgie Fiddler watched them and frowned.

Grandma Okpik had said Johnny had a bit of the medicine once, back when he’d rolled into town on the Tuesday Greyhound with nothing but a few changes of clothes and a set of knives that’d make your hair stand up until you found out they were for the kitchen. It wasn’t the kind of thing she’d got around to asking about, and this was, unfortunately, not the time for a hearty and extended chat about what it was Johnny Red saw.

“What d’you want to do?” she asked.

Johnny looked over her shoulder; watching him. “I don’t know yet,” he said, and went to whisper in Mike Blondin’s ear.