Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I put the cigarette out against the wall of my restaurant and stripped it, letting the tobacco and paper fly in the wind. I put the filter in my pocket. I wondered how many ash marks pocked the wall outside the kitchen. I went back in, tucked and groomed in the men’s room, wiped the sink clean, and rearranged the white cotton washcloths we folded on a table to be used as towels. Then I went to visit my customers. I managed, by striking off at odd angles, to save until the last the table of three or, depending on how you feel about it, four, one of whom was a woman who could have been the twin of the picture I had seen in the paper. Note this: she was not Courtney or a sister. I could see the differences — a dimpling of chin, a fullness at the neck, the closeness of this woman’s eyes compared to Courtney’s and Tamara’s.

Nevertheless, how is that for extracorporeal life? Most nights, you sell food and drink and it’s deposited in verifiable flesh. Here, in twelve hours, I had seen two ghosts, and one of them ate a steak of swordfish marinated in oil, white wine, thyme, marjoram, salt, and red pepper flake, accompanied by a scallion risotto and roasted carrots along with a glass of house white at a table one quarter of which was occupied by somebody dead.

The pictures had been moved. The one of the dead fellow walking with his rucksack was, despite the absence of his face, facedown. The other lay near the son, Kent, who was finishing the last of a Black Angus steak we sear on a grill over hardwood and dried grapevines. A good bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Vieux Telegraphe, was close to his plate. His mother had given up on her grilled fresh sardines. She was drinking mineral water. Her Scotch was unfinished. She looked to be tasting something spiny and corrosive. As I came up, and Linda’s face assumed its look of amusement, I heard the old woman say, “And then, every time, in spite of my best efforts, I remember the dishonesty and disloyalty. How can I forgive them? And I try . You compartmentalize your life, and soon you get locked in one of the compartments. And I was locked in another. And guess who’d kept the key?” She raised the mineral water, then put it down. “Still,” she said.

Luc hurried past. He was sweating through his shirt and his face ran slick. His eyes were huge, and I couldn’t imagine his being able to see for the constant batting of his eyelids. I held a finger in the air, which was normally a sufficient signal for my waiters. It meant they must meet me at the back corner of the service bar now .

Linda said, “Is everything all right, Peter?”

“Aren’t you kind to ask, madame,” I said. “It’s a busy night. I must seem preoccupied. Forgive me. Are you pleased? Are we pleasing you tonight?” I had to look at her — I don’t know. Yes: I had to look at her encyclopedically. I did. I looked at the way her throat creased when she moved her head. I looked at the folding of flesh at her wrists when she moved her flatware. I looked at the width of her shoulders, the size of her muscled upper arms, the flatness of her barely arched brows.

She said, “What?”

I fled the question. “And you, madame?” I asked her mother-in-law. “Sir?” I said to the son.

Most of a bottle of wine was in his answer: “Ask him.”

“Pardon?”

“You didn’t ask him.” He pointed with his fork at the photographs on the table. Luc went past again, and I raised my finger. He nodded, raised his finger in reply, and all but loped for the kitchen. Tonight, Luc was the amphetamine king, I thought. Tomorrow, he was on probation or canned, I didn’t yet know which. I carefully did not look at the woman who smelled so good, who smiled so cruelly, and who bore the face of the woman whose face on her daughter had greeted my day.

The old lady’s lips were pursed. It was as if she fought a pain. She looked at her son and then at the photographs. She shook her head. The son gestured again with his fork. I looked at the unused place setting. He was there, of course, though I didn’t see him. The son did. So did the widow. I didn’t watch to see where the daughter-in-law looked. Though the rest of them couldn’t see who sat in Linda’s place, I knew, and I didn’t want to know, and I stood in silence, my hands clasped before the waist of my lightweight midnight-blue tuxedo, a man of admittedly studied elegance who tried to smile for the clients. Who couldn’t, though.

“Cat’s got his whatever,” the son said.

From out of the kitchen came Luc. He seemed to roll, as if on casters, across the floor. He moved with grace, the burden of his upper body cradled on stiff muscles, while his hips and thighs moved flexibly to cushion his cargo’s ride. I saw another waiter, Charles, and the barman, Raymond, as they watched Luc move. They were timing it, as they so often did. I had trained my staff well. By the time he’d arrived behind the old woman, then had moved around her and into her line of sight, the kid from the kitchen, Raymond and Charles had stepped forward.

Luc had listened well to my parting instructions. “We would like, ’ sieurs-dames, to present, for the celebration of your birthday, this token of our absolutely happiest wishes.” His voice sounded ever so slightly as if he’d been sucking helium. His eyes goggled as his mouth moved. He bowed, sweating and red-faced, over the small gâteau made with no flour and crushed almonds and imported apricot preserve on which five token candles flared. “And may I ask whose birthday it is?”

The old woman looked at the cake. I saw again how thin and stretched her pale, frayed skin was. Her mouth was open. Her son, lying back in his chair, slowly lifted his soiled white napkin. I thought he might drape it over his face, but he carefully wiped his lips and pointed to the empty chair. I did not look at the daughter-in-law.

Luc strode to stand between the daughter-in-law and the photographs. He looked at me. I shook my head. He didn’t know what I meant. Neither did I. He sang, in his drug-enriched tenor, “Happy birthday to you—” And Charles and Raymond joined him, and so did the boy who made the salads, and so did several diners at tables nearby.

Luc mumbled some sounds as he realized he didn’t know the birthday celebrant’s name. He bestowed the cake on the table, he bowed, and he left to offer service to hungry people who awaited him. The other men went back to their work.

“I am so sorry,” I told the old woman. For she had been betrayed again. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“Yes,” she said. I tried to meet her faded, angry eyes.

The son cleared his throat. He held the photographs. He looked at them with a sorrow I found familiar.

The daughter-in-law’s expression was only a little puzzled. I realized she’d seen how susceptible I was to her. She wondered why, but not too much. She didn’t mind my appetite. She said to me, “Misunderstanding?”

“Yes,” the old woman said, “it always is.”

IT WASN’T HIS JOB, it wasn’t his job, but there he went, in the only vehicle left, a blown-out Suburban with a hundred thousand miles on it and the seat pushed so far forward his belly rubbed against the wheel. He was fighting with the wheel instead of loving it. His father said that when he taught him to drive twenty-five years ago. Love the wheel, be gentle on the wheel, keep your hands on the wheel like you’re touching the tits on a girl you’re scared that will make you stop.

“Fucking dwarf ,” he shouted as he pushed the truck around the long, uneasy loop of dark, slick county road between the cutoff to Si Bingham Road and the farm track called Cemetery Road in spite of its sign saying Upper Ravine. He was cursing the mechanic, a nephew of the sheriff, who changed the oil and filters on the deputies’ cars and who claimed he could change a timing belt and who couldn’t. His legs were short. At the station they called him Chicken Man because he walked with his neck stretched and his shoulders back and his knees stiff, thinking it made him look taller. It made him look like a grease-stained, white-faced freak with those dead white eyelashes and knees that didn’t work. He pushed the seats all the way up when he test-drove the vehicles so his legs would reach the pedals, and he was a chicken-legged runt.