Liquor

  After what felt like hours of this, Rickey got up, went into the kitchen, covered the pizza, and opened another beer. He had a lot to do tomorrow—he had a lot to do every day now—and he needed his rest, but Mike had robbed him of it. He gritted his teeth as he realized that would make Mike happy. In this way, Mike’s tactics were working. Rickey hated for such people to have power over him. He’d never forgotten Phil Muller, his CIA roommate, and had never stopped feeling a surge of helpless anger whenever he thought of the guy. Now he wondered if Mike Mouton was going to haunt him the same way. The worst part was that he’d never meant to make an enemy out of either man.

  Sometimes sitting up all night drinking was the only way to stay sane. Rickey didn’t much like doing it by himself, though. He contemplated cooking something else, not because he wanted anything so much as because the sound of the clattering dishes might wake G-man. Eventually, though, he turned off all the lights except the little one over the stove, settled down at the table, and sat drinking alone in the nighttime heat. The blue horror of dawn was visible through the windows by the time he felt able to stagger back to bed.

  chapter 21

  G-man awoke with the feeling that he had left something unfinished. When he went to put the coffee on, he remembered what it was: the pizza he’d made was sitting on the counter covered with plastic but otherwise untouched. He wondered why Rickey hadn’t eaten any. Then he saw the twelve empty beer bottles by the sink.

  Sighing, G-man fixed two cups of coffee and took them into the bedroom. Rickey was just waking up, wincing at the weak afternoon sunlight that filtered through the shutters. “No coffee,” he whispered, lacing his fingers over his eyes. “No coffee.”

  “Why—” G-man was speaking at normal volume, but Rickey looked as if he might cry, so he lowered his voice to match Rickey’s. “Why’d you drink so much? You drank all the beer in the fridge.”

  “Ah! Don’t say that word!”

  G-man laughed. He’d been through this hundreds of times, but Rickey was still pretty funny when he was hung-over.

  “You’re never gonna drink again, right?”

  “Right …”

  “Gonna be pretty hard making all those recipes with liquor, then.”

  Rickey pushed himself out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. G-man sat on the edge of the bed and wondered why people ran the water in the sink when they were throwing up. It didn’t mask the sounds of throwing up; it just made them wetter.

  After a few minutes Rickey returned, red-eyed and damp-haired, and burrowed back under the covers.

  “You’ll feel a little better now,” said G-man.

  “Thanks.” Rickey ran his tongue over his lips. “I’m so thirsty …”

  “You want a snowball?”

  Snowballs were a hangover remedy they had discovered by accident when they were seventeen. After a night of drinking vodka and Kahlua, they were rounded up and taken to a Metairie home-improvement store by Rickey’s mother, who wanted them to load her car with several huge bags of sand she intended to dump into a pothole in front of her house. She knew they were suffering, but she had no sympathy. “You got your daddy’s tolerance,” she told Rickey. “That man never could hold his liquor. On our very first date, I drank two cocktails for every one of his.”

  “That must have charmed the pants off him, Momma.”

  Somehow they got the wretched sand into the car. On the way home, they groaned about their exhaustion and thirst so much that Brenda stopped and bought them strawberry snowballs from one of the brightly painted wooden stands that went up all over New Orleans in the summer. G-man didn’t know if it was the coldness of the shaved ice, the quick sugar fix of the syrup, the fluid replacement, or some magic X factor, but they both felt better afterward: so much better that they not only filled in the pothole, but loaded the extra sand into a wheelbarrow, took it over to G-man’s sister’s house, and poured it into his little nephew’s sandbox.

  Leaving Rickey with a glass of water on the nightstand and a pillow over his head, G-man got in the car and drove the short distance to their favorite snowball stand, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz on Tchoupitoulas. Hansen’s had been in business since the 1930s and had moved into an actual, permanent building at some point. Hurricane Betsy had wrecked it in the sixties, and photographs of the devastation were displayed on a colorful piece of posterboard alongside accolades for the snowballs. G-man was scanning the long list of flavors—strawberry was best for a hangover, but he favored chocolate spearmint himself—when someone poked him in the small of the back and said, “Hey, stranger.”

  The guy was wearing Versace sunglasses and a tight tank top instead of a suit, so it took G-man a second to place him: Helmut, the maître d’ from Lenny’s. “Hey, Helmut,” he said. “How’d my Nashville tourists like their dinner?”

  “Oh, they were thrilled. They said it was the best meal they’d ever eaten, and you were just the nicest young man to fix it all up for them. What are you doing now?”

  “Getting snowballs,” said G-man as old Mr. Hansen handed the cups to him. “What are you doing?”

  “Same as you. I live right around the corner. Would you like to come by?”

  “Thanks, but I gotta take this to Rickey. He’s not feeling too good.”

  “Hungover, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, you could do a lot better.” Smiling, Helmut flicked his tongue across the top of his pink snowball.

  “Better than what?”

  “Than that uptight prick for a boyfriend.”

  “What are you talking about?” said G-man, appalled. Was that how people saw Rickey—as an uptight prick? Surely most people didn’t, but he guessed he could see how a waiter might. (In typical back-of-the-house fashion, G-man thought of the maître d’ as a glorified waiter.) Still, wasn’t it rude to say so? Was this how people flirted nowadays, by saying horrible things about each other’s partners? Helmut was only about five years younger than G-man, but he made G-man feel like an old fogey.

  “Never mind,” said Helmut, seeing the look on G-man’s face. “I guess it’s true love. Can’t blame a boy for trying, though.”

  “I really gotta go,” said G-man. He drove home balancing the snowballs against the side of his leg, since the Satellite was too old and primitive to have a cup holder and Rickey hadn’t gotten around to installing one. The encounter with the maître d’ made him feel vaguely guilty even though he knew he had done nothing wrong.

  Rickey sat up in bed, grabbed his snowball, and plunged the plastic spoon deep into it. “Oh,” he said after sucking down several spoonfuls of finely shaved ice. “That hits the spot.”

  “Eat up, then. It’s gonna make you all better.”

  “Like I even deserve to feel better. I’m such a moron, G. How come I had to sit there and drink every damn beer in the house, and on an empty stomach too?”

  “I was wondering that myself.”

  “Aw, hell, I bet you know exactly what I was thinking about.”

  “I had to guess, I’d say you were brooding about Mike. Maybe even reminiscing a little about Phil Muller.”

  “Course I was. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it.” Rickey finished his snowball and set the wax cup on the nightstand. “I can’t let Mike just get away with it. I can’t!”

  “Rickey, you’re gonna be in charge of a kitchen pretty soon. People will be trying to fuck with you all the time, and sometimes you’ll have to bust them for it, but sometimes you gotta let things roll off your back. Why not start with Mike?”

  “Cause I don’t know what he’ll do next. What happens when he figures out he didn’t turn Lenny against us? What if he realizes he actually did us a favor, the dumb shit, and that pisses him off even worse? What I’m gonna do then?”

  “Guess who I saw up by the snowball stand,” said G-man, not sure if he was trying to change the subject or just driven by a vestigial urge to confess. “Remember that guy Helmut?”

  “What, the host from Lenny?
??s?”

  “Yeah. I think he was flirting with me.”

  “You just now figured that out?”

  “Huh?”

  “That little bitch has had a boner for you since the first time he ate at the Apostle Bar. It’s so obvious. He looks at you like he hasn’t eaten in three days and you’re a hot roast beef po-boy.”

  “He does?”

  “Fucking A he does,” said Rickey. “I never liked that guy. I used to give him small portions.”

  “I’m glad you’re not jealous or anything.”

  “Why the hell would I be jealous of a poodle-groomed, designer-label, front-of-the-house fag like that?”

  “I’m not saying you would. I know you wouldn’t. C’mon, give me that.” Rickey had picked up his empty snowball cup and crumpled it savagely. Droplets of red syrup flew out and landed on the sheet. “Now look what you did. Give me the goddamn cup.”

  “Sorry.” Rickey relinquished the mangled cup and lay back on his heap of pillows. “I don’t think that snowball worked. I still feel like shit.”

  “You’re full of hate, that’s all.”

  “I know,” Rickey said wanly. “It eats away at me sometimes.”

  While Rickey was drinking beer in his kitchen, Mike Mouton was drinking Ay Carambas in the bar at the Hotel Bienvenu. An Ay Caramba was made of tequila, Triple Sec, and blood orange juice. They cost seven dollars, but Mike got them free because the bartenders believed, wrongly, that he had some sort of control over their jobs.

  He wasn’t thinking so much about Rickey tonight. Instead he was angry with NuShawn, who had crapped out on a promised delivery. It wouldn’t matter to NuShawn; no doubt he had plenty of other customers, all of whom were paying exorbitant prices for adulterated goods. He was probably making better money than Mike, which was a crime in every sense of the word. If you looked at it a certain way, you could even say Mike was doing NuShawn a big favor buying from him. Yes, goddammit, that was true, and everybody was scared to talk about it—maybe they thought it was politically incorrect or something. Well, he wasn’t afraid of being politically incorrect. “Hey, Kevin,” he said to the bartender, “did you know people are actually doing drug dealers a favor by buying their shit?”

  “My name’s Kendall, Mr. Mouton.”

  “Yeah, OK—Kendall. You ever think about that?”

  “About what? People buying drugs?”

  “It’s like they’re performing a public service. See what I mean?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I really don’t.”

  “It’s very simple,” said Mike, thumping the bar with his fist. “People who buy drugs are actually helping these little assholes make a living, when otherwise they’d be out sticking guns in people’s faces, probably killing somebody.”

  Kendall nodded and walked to the other end of the bar. Mike did not judge this to be an adequate response. “Hey, come back here!” he yelled. “I’m not done talking to you!”

  “I’m busy, sir.”

  “I can see you’re not! Get your ass back here.”

  Returning to Mike’s end of the bar, Kendall busied himself polishing glasses. “So what do you think of my theory?” Mike said.

  “I think it stinks.”

  “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

  “Mr. Mouton, my son had a drug problem. My wife and I found out he’d been using crack cocaine and got him into a program. He’d been clean for six months when he was killed in a drive-by shooting. He would’ve been twenty-one this year. I think your theory exposes you for the imbecile you are.”

  “I agree,” said a man drinking a Hurricane at the bar.

  It was too much: insulted in the space of a minute by a black bartender and a Hurricane-drinking tourist. Mike lunged halfway across the bar and would have punched Kendall if the tourist had not grabbed him from behind. The man was flabby but bulky, and Mike couldn’t pull away. “OK, buddy,” the tourist said in a flat Midwestern-sounding accent. “Looks like you’ve had enough. Let’s hustle on out of here.”

  Easing up a little on his grip, the tourist walked Mike to the bar’s entryway and gave him a gentle push. “Get yourself home, buddy. Catch a cab.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “No need for all that. There’s a guard right over there. Would you like me to call him?”

  Mike glowered at the man, but was silent.

  “All right. Don’t come back in here. Go home.” Goo hoom, in that strange flat accent. There were foreigners everywhere.

  The tourist walked back into the bar. Mike loitered for a few minutes by the big art deco stained-glass window at the bar’s entrance. Eventually he slunk off across the lobby.

  “Thanks, man,” said Kendall. “Thought I was gonna have to go for the panic button.”

  “Why didn’t you just slug him?”

  “Not worth it.” Kendall picked up a glass and began to polish it with his towel, looking deeply into the convex surface. “What good would it do? Can’t help my boy any. Can’t afford to lose my job. Comes a time when it’s just not worth it.”

  “Christ,” said the tourist. “I’m sorry.”

  “Aw, no, I’m sorry. Sorry you had to catch that ugly scene on your vacation. Where you from?”

  “Toronto.”

  “Tell me something. You like that ice hockey? I only ask because I went to one of the hockey games they had here, and for the life of me, I can’t see the fun in a game where the score can end up being zero to zero.”

  The Canadian opened his mouth, closed it, and shook his head. He liked these New Orleanians, but they kept drawing him into conversations like this one, where he didn’t even know how to begin. Sometimes it seemed as if they were living on a whole different planet.

  Ignoring the tourist’s advice, Mike got his car out of the parking garage and drove home. People kept blowing their horns and flashing their headlights at him. He gave them the finger and kept driving. Not until he pulled into Redwood Glen, his Metairie apartment complex, did he realize his brights were on. He must have been blinding people the whole way. Well, fuck them.

  Mike hauled himself up the redwood stairs of his building and let himself into one of six identical redwood doors. His apartment was neat but cheerless, almost regimented-looking. On the table by the door, a flashing red number 1 showed in the message window of his answering machine. He hoped suddenly and wildly that NuShawn had called, even though he had never given NuShawn this number. He pressed the Play button.

  “Irene?” said an old woman’s hoarse voice. “You there? Irene, that you, babe? I got me some nice shrimps over by the Langenstein’s. I’m gonna berl ’em up tonight. Call me, you wanna have some, hear? … Irene, you there, honey? When you got this machine? I’m hanging up now.”

  “You stupid bitch,” Mike snarled. He put his hand on the answering machine, intending to throw it across the room, but stopped at the last possible second. He’d been breaking too many things while he was fucked up; it was getting expensive. Instead he kicked the leg of his sofa as hard as he could. It should have hurt, but he felt nothing. The incident with Kevin—no, Kendall—and the tourist gnawed at him. He hadn’t known the bartender’s son was murdered. How could he be expected to keep track of every little thing that happened to the employees of the Hotel Bienvenu? People like that usually brought trouble upon themselves anyway.

  Mike slumped on the sofa for several minutes. Then he got up and went into his bedroom. In here, a single small window looked out over the parking lot. The bats and insects around the sodium lights made weird, swooping shadows on the bedroom walls. Mike sat on the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of his nightstand. There was only one object in the drawer, a Luger semiautomatic pistol. He lifted it out and turned it over and over in his hands. The rubber grip was sticky against his right palm, the barrel smooth and cold against his left.

  He pressed the pistol’s muzzle into his forehead and sat like that for a long time. His forefinger stroked the trigger but put no pressure on it. He imag
ined his father’s reaction on hearing that he had blown his brains out. Would Pinky be sorry for all the slights and hurts, sorry for what he had done to Uncle George, or convinced of his longtime suspicion that Mike just couldn’t hack it?

  As always, the latter possibility eventually seemed to outweigh the former ones, and he put the Luger back in the drawer. There were six beers in his refrigerator. Mike drank all of them before he was able to sleep.

  chapter 22

  Lenny and Rickey were at Liquor taking delivery of several pieces of kitchen equipment. A reach-in cooler, a new flattop, and an ice machine had already come in on enormous dollies, and a few other, smaller items were still arriving.

  “I got you a present,” said Lenny.

  “What?” said Rickey, instantly suspicious.

  Lenny reached into the attaché case he was carrying and pulled out the smallest cell phone Rickey had ever seen. It folded down to a shiny black rectangle not much larger than a credit card. He dropped it into the palm of Rickey’s hand, where it fit perfectly.

  “Aw, Lenny, I told you before, I hate these things. I refuse to turn into one of those dickheads always yapping into a phone just to show how important they are.”

  “What, like me?”

  “Hell yeah, like you.”

  “Well, it’s got nothing to do with how important you are. I’m tired of not being able to get in touch when I need to. You know how many times I tried to get you yesterday to see about this delivery?”

  “I told you, I was home. I just had some kinda twenty-four hour flu and couldn’t come to the phone.”

  “The flu, huh?” Lenny looked closely at Rickey, and Rickey looked away. “Flu in a bottle, most likely. And where was G-man?”