T. Boyle - Riven Rock

All right. Sure. So he laid off for a while. He wouldn’t go near the stuff, not if you stabbed him with a sharp stick and drove him into a cage and forced it down his throat. Of course, it was just that swill, that was the problem, the impurities and such — he was lucky he wasn’t blinded or rendered impotent or insane. He hadn’t really seen the Judges — it was just the booze, the bad stuff, a bad batch. But he laid off all the same and he got to work every day, and though his guts were full of hot magma and he couldn’t shit to save his life and his head was like an eggshell in a vise and his legs so heavy he could hardly stand up, he began, very gradually, to experience the world as it really was, without a crutch, without a filter.

The first thing he noticed, shivering and sweating at the same time as he vomited in the toilet at the end of the hall and fucking Maloney who he was going to kill and dismember and maybe boil and eat banging on the door in his boorish inconsideration and impatience, was that he’d begun to get his sense of smell back. It was amazing: he lived in a world of odors. Piss suddenly reeked under his shoes. His socks were vaporous, his underwear yeasty. The hallway outside his door smelled as if somebody had died in it just prior to being immured in the walls. He could smell Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s facial unguent from where he lay in bed, all the way down the stairs and around the corner and through the door to her sad and solitary widow’s room. And he could smell her sadness too, the smell of disuse, old flesh, a body mewed up and wasted. There was a car parked out front and it had gasoline in the tank and he could smell the gasoline. And food: onions, lard, beef, canned beans, some sort of spice — what was it? Basil? Yes, basil. He hadn’t smelled basil in years — hadn’t smelled anything for that matter — and it brought tears to his eyes.

Next thing he knew, he had an appetite.

First the smell, and then the hunger. He started getting up for breakfast, sitting around the table at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s with his fellow boarders, flapjacks like stones, porridge like stones before they petrify, syrup like squeezed stones, but he ate it, ate it all and cleaned his plate with a sop of bread. At ten-thirty every morning, instead of taking a booze break, he ambled down to the kitchen and sweet-talked Sam Wah into frying him a beefsteak or a piece of liver with onions, and at lunchtime he sat there across from Mr. McCormick in the very lap of one of the judges and buttered up his bread and dug into his soup as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. He took dinner at Menhoff’s because he was too late getting home for Mrs. Fitzmaurice, and she’d never charged him, except for Saturdays and Sundays, and when he drank a bottle of ginger ale he studied the label with a wistful smile: “Reminding you of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, the contents of this bottle is sold to you on the understanding that it will not be used or mixed with alcoholic liquor.”

His suits, which had hung slack on him, began to fit again. He took pains with his hair and his teeth and made sure he washed under the arms every morning, and a month later, after swearing off Charley Waterhouse, Bill McCandless, and even Cody Menhoff, who was now selling a finer class of homemade gin under the table and the county sheriff looking the other way, O‘Kane found he’d recovered something else too: his libido. He woke each morning with a tire iron between his legs, and when he strolled down the block to wait for Roscoe to pick him up he leered at every female between the ages of twelve and sixty and tipped his hat so many times he wore out the brim. He needed a woman. And he thought of little else through the rest of that week and into the next, the terrible quandary of where to find one burning in his brain every time he dropped the needle on his Sousa record, unlocked the barred door to the upstairs parlor or set off cross-country with Mart and Mr. McCormick on one of their mad runs. Listening to those faint trumpets, tubas and sousaphones, jogging along behind Mr. McCormick, he turned the problem over in his mind: women, the sort of women he was seeking, were gathered thick as pigeons over cocktails in the speakeasies that had sprung up around town, but to get to them he’d have to drink a cocktail too, and one cocktail would lead to another till he was past caring and lost his appetite and his sense of smell and began to see Mr. McCormick’s judges sitting there before him in all their undeniable corporeality.

It was in this state, goatish and disgruntled but alive to every sensory current of the world, that O‘Kane came up the stairs at Riven Rock one morning to find Mr. McCormick extended as far as he could reach through the bars of the upper parlor door with both his hands locked round the throat of Sam Wah, the cook. Sam’s face was an ugly color, bloated and dark as a bruise, and though his hands were in turn clamped to Mr. McCormick’s wrists, he was barely struggling, his feet half-lifted from the floor, his eyes beginning to film over. And Mart? Where was he? Unconscious on the floor behind Mr. McCormick, a glistening bright carnation of blood blooming out of the comer of his mouth.

O‘Kane lost no time — he was up the stairs in a trice, methodically attacking Mr. McCormick’s forearms, not a word exchanged between them, nothing but grunts and curses and the fierce hissing insuck of breath, until Mr. McCormick released the cook and the cook fell to the floor like a sack of old clothes. But Mr. McCormick wasn’t done yet, not by any means. As soon as O’Kane forced his hands away, Mr. McCormick seized O‘Kane by both arms and drew him violently up against the rack of the bars, and while that struggle went on, Sam Wah rose shakily to his feet, massaged his throat with an angry trembling hand and launched into a high-pitched litany of Chinese complaint. O’Kane finally got a purchase on Mr. McCormick and they paused, locked in a stalemate, each gripping the other’s arms through the inflexible iron bars.

“You no like, I no cook!” Sam Wah shouted, dancing round the landing and shaking his fist. “Mistah Cormah, you got no right!”

O‘Kane, casting a quick glance beyond his employer’s seething face, saw the breakfast things scattered across the room behind him, and gathered that Mr. McCormick had objected to the way the cook had prepared his eggs.

“You got no right take my neck like this, Mistah Cormah!” Sam Wah was livid. He stripped the apron from his chest, balled it up and flung it on the floor beside the toque that had fallen there at some earlier stage of the altercation. “Mistah Cormah, I got tell you, after fo‘teen year, I quit!”

His grip rigid in O‘Kane’s, Mr. McCormick just stood there on the other side of the bars, and he never even blinked, never said a word, but his jaw was set and there was something in his eyes that said he would never let go, the bruised defiance of a very spoiled little rich boy who would die before he would admit he was wrong.

The upshot of all this was a revolution in the culinary life of Riven Rock. Brush, who really didn’t want to be bothered, consulted with Butters and the nurses and whoever else would listen to him, and discovered that male cooks were few and far between — not to mention the male kitchen help Sam Wah took with him when he departed. As a stopgap, they promoted a Mexican gardener who claimed to have been a cook at a restaurant in Veracruz before the revolution. He lasted three days, during which the house was filled with strange and disquieting odors. Every meal he prepared seemed to consist of some sort of glutinous bean and rice paste wrapped in a thin bread-like substance no one could identify, and all of it so everlastingly and excoriatingly hot it was like pouring flaming kerosene down your throat. Mr. McCormick became very disturbed and spent the whole of every morning shut away in-his toilet, trousers down around his ankles, folding and refolding his toilet paper while he awaited the next intestinal emergency.