Juan and Willy

Chapter Two

  Six weeks later, Juan Verdugo was carefully arranging a population of squeeze-bottle ketchups on a brown plastic tray and singing badly a narcocorrido in Spanish, inserting a flower-loving girlfriend from Arizona in the original Mexican lyrics, which he never knew anyways. As he sang his eyes became watery with the strain and his thin voice cracked horribly so that he sounded like a suffering toad, the type in desert arroyos after a rain. A second shadowy figure, Willy in a hair net and a dirty apron, crouched on a stepstool behind a rack of rubber aprons and coats near the sink where Juan Verdugo stood singing. In one hand this secret lurker wielded a large ladle as though it was a club and he was grinning, a sick, but happy leer. Farther away, in a brighter backdrop, like the background of a Dutch master’s painting, a burly black man, evidently the chef, leaned on a muscular hand that was propped on the ledge of a steam table. His other enormous hand slowly scratched his broad back, wrinkling and stretching a white T-shirt.

  All at once Willy gathered himself, and like some horrible panther he dove off the stepstool onto the back of Juan Verdugo, who was just in the process of thoroughly missing a high, screechy note.

  “Crappy singer!” Willy Jent screamed when he landed on his friend, “I hate that crappy narco stuff.”

  Slashing with the ladle, Willy tried to pummel the large shoulders of Juan Verdugo, from the left, from the right, and straight down. But Juan had only feigned distraction; he fell back on his heels, deflected the ladle, and squirted Willy on the neck with ketchup from a bottle that suddenly appeared in Juan’s hand.

  “Ayeee!” screamed Juan happily.

  The hands of Willy went to his friend’s neck and came back splotched with ketchup, then he fell back as the chest of his apron was smeared with ketchup as well. Willy roared in anger and fell upon his friend. Together as a roiling animal they crossed the kitchen and slammed against a stainless steel shelf.

  “Give up your crappy singing,” yelled Willy from under the shelf. “Give it up, you annoying ass!”

  “Ay, you jealous fucker, stop hitting me!” screamed Juan who was still squirting ketchup everywhere.

  “Narco corridors again, huh!”

  “Let go of me,” said Juan wielding his ketchup wildly and approaching Willy’s hair net and hair.

  “I’ve got you now, and you’re going to regret that stupid song!” Willy screeched.

  The two men twisted and shoved themselves across the room until they ran up against another open shelf. An enormous aluminum colander bounced off its hook and crashed down on Juan’s shoulders. The singer’s hands slipped from his attacker’s neck. The two wrestling workers bent over. Willy wrenched himself around and was thrown toward another wall where he slammed.

  “Fucking fucker!”

  “Ayeeee! Ayah!”

  "Lousy singer!”

  “Ayeeeehah!”

  “Frick and Frack!” shouted the black chef, who appeared in the doorway of their back kitchen, clapping his hands in rhythm to the nicknames he’d given them, “Frick and Frack! Juan! Willy! Stop this! You morons! You two are wrecking my shelves! Stop it! Stop!”

  Juan and Willy stood in the center of the room breathing hard and looking sheepish.

  “Put everything back in place!”

  “Get to work you worthless idiots!”

  The pair struggled with each other for a few seconds more, and then, dropping their arms to their sides and grinning, they stood up straight. Willy sidled up to a sink and began scrubbing a large aluminum pot. Juan wiped his mouth, picked up the colander, and put it in the sink. He grabbed a ketchup bottle from the floor, wiped the nozzle of the bottle, and stowed it on the tray. He picked up the tray, opened the refrigerator door, and slid it in.