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The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 4 of 7.

As we’re cleaning up afterward, Amanda comes charging through the doors with a concerned look on her face. She’s been busy tonight so she hasn’t been in the kitchen much, which is a shame because the window between the line and the servers is positioned to perfectly obscure our faces when she’s standing at the counter. This means we can stare at her tits with total impunity. It’s nice.

“He’s here,” she hisses at me. “Look out!”

“Who’s here?” I’m confused. It’s too late for the Chef or the owners to be hanging around, and there’s no way any reviewer worth their salt would waste time on this place. Not on a Wednesday, anyway.

“Ted!” she whispers.

“Oh…” I would bury my face in my palm if it weren’t oily and bloodstained.

“That’s just fuckin’ spectacular.”

“Hey,” says Jack, eyeing Amanda. “That sounds like bad news. If you need someone to comfort you or, you know, have wild sex with, I’m right here.”

She smiles sweetly.  “If that’s what I need, Jack, you’re the first person I’ll call,” Amanda says.

“Really?” Jack says, surprised.

“Not really,” she admits, and exits the kitchen.

“Don’t feel bad, man, you know she has a boyfriend.” Nick slides over to Jack, putting a friendly hand on his inner-thigh and running it up his leg, making Jack jump to avoid having his balls fondled. His tone though is conciliatory. “And you know he’s a douche bag. Some guy who thinks he’s better than everyone ‘cause he’s never been drunk on mouthwash or shit his-self in public. You know the type.”

Nick slaps his own nuts, wistfully.

“Nick is right,” Bandula says. “She have no want for Jack and his fuck. That’s why he give the fuck to little boys,” he looks up at the invisible figure of authority, once again going into analytical mode. “To them, he feel a man. To woman, his cock is like cock of the baby.” The dishwasher makes a sympathetic face, and tries to comfort the rejected cook. “Jack?” he asks, rubbing his hands together and frowning. “Want whore? I get whores. Cheap too. You need woman who can make baby cock feel like the black adder inside. Cheap whore? She ocean of cock. Her fuck good for you.”

“Thanks man,” Jack says, with genuine gratitude. “But it’s gotta be Amanda. Boyfriend or not. Just ‘cause there’s a goalie don’t mean you can’t score.”

“What’s this now?” Fuck me. It’s his voice. I knew it was coming. He must have been standing just outside the door to the kitchen. Ted swaggers into the room, a pint in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Why does he need a clipboard, you ask? The answer is that he doesn’t, but he always carries it with him. Whenever I need to ask him a work related question he likes to hold up one finger, like a conductor chastising a particularly rough crowd into silence at a cello recital in a bad neighborhood, and contemplate the clipboard for a few minutes before responding. “This doesn’t sound like a discussion appropriate to the workplace,” Ted pauses meaningfully, and then erupts in that hideous guffaw as blood fills his head and face, twisting it into a purple leer. “I’m just kiddin’! I won’t rat you out,” he gives Jack a conspiratorial nod. “I had a dream about her last night.”

He says it the way that a normal person would say, I just got my Ph.D. in Quantum Physics, or I was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, or my sculpture of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. is being displayed at the United Nations summit.

“She was naked,” Ted adds, with a wink. Then he bursts into peals of stupid laughter as Peter comes in.

The bartender gives me a telling look.

“You can’t drink in the kitchen,” Peter tells Ted, “and you’re not working right now. You really shouldn’t be in here.”

“These guys are my buddies!” Ted is thoroughly indignant. “We’re just shootin’ the breeze.”

God forbid I let him know I don’t like him. If I did that I’d end up in a forty-five minute meaning where well-meaning owner number one and well-meaning owner number two would sit Ted and I down and try to ‘work things out.’ This would end up making me look like an asshole, and Ted look like a nice guy who got treated badly when he was just trying to help. I’m not taking the bait.

“We’re buddies,” I say, shooting Peter a ‘what the fuck do you want me to say?’ look. “Don’t worry about it.” The bartender glares at me, and leaves.

“So,” Ted says, appropriating a businesslike tone, flipping through the bills from the rush. “I see that Amanda ordered a couple of steaks and a nacho twenty minutes ago. Did you make those for her?”

“No,” I say. “I kicked her in the box and told her to go fuck herself. It’s okay. We have an understanding.”

From the pit I hear Bandula hoot with laughter. The dishwasher could care less about Ted. He stays out of Bandula’s way. They never speak to each other.

Ted stares at me for a second. Then he guffaws again, but this time it’s forced. “You’re quick,” he observes. “That’s funny.” He says it as if he was making an accusation. He says it like a normal person would say, you seem to be shitting on my foot. He examines his clipboard for a moment. Nick pipes up.

“Hey Ted, I was just noticin’ the mashed potatoes today,” Ted can’t see his face. Nick is looking at me with a wicked grin. He applies the palm to his crotch and winks. “How do you make them so smooth?”

Jesus fucking Christ.

For what feels like an eternity, Ted talks. No, Ted explains. He explains that the secret to making mashed potatoes is that you have to, and for your sake I’ll paraphrase here, you have to mash the potatoes. Ted does have one talent. It’s the ability to stretch the incredibly fucking obvious into a twenty-minute speech. When he finally runs out of steam he heads back to the bar for another beer. I’m sort of impressed with Nick. He did keep Ted distracted for a while. Distracting Ted by getting him to talk about himself isn’t exactly the most difficult task in the world, but the bar is low for Nick. He had a good idea. I’m going to give him credit.

“Fucking asshole,” Jack snarls as Ted leaves. “At least he won’t ‘rat me out,’ though.” Jack’s voice is heavy with sarcasm. He’s going to hear about the Amanda shit from the Chef tomorrow. We both know it.

Re-beered, Ted comes back. I hear him saying something to Peter, followed by the guffaw. “You’ve got a good sense of humor, bud,” he tosses over his shoulder as he returns to the kitchen. If Ted is telling you that you have a good sense of humor, it’s probably because he just said something incredibly rude and obnoxious that he’s trying to pass off as a joke. Don’t get me wrong, we talk a lot of shit in the kitchen, but we’re all on the same side. When Bandula threatens me with rape and murder, I can take it as playful camaraderie. He’s sure as hell never going to go to the Chef or the owners with stories about me, no matter what happens back here. Ted is a crybaby and a tattletale. Whatever you say to him is likely to be repeated to upper management. That takes the fun out of it.

“The real reason I’m here,” Ted reveals. “Is that I have to tell you something,” he gestures to me with two fingers. The ‘come here,’ gesture. Livid, I lean over.

“What?” I hiss the word at him.

“The Chef asked me to ask you to pick up a meat order. It gets to the market-” I wave my hand brusquely in Ted’s face.

“He called. He told me,” I have no time for this. “Seriously? He told you to come here and tell me that?”

Ted stiffens.

“I was led to believe that was my responsibility,” he says, coldly. “I take my responsibilities very seriously,” he gives me a meaningful look, and taps his clipboard with a pen. “You know,” a gentle note creeps into Ted’s voice, “I’m used to gettin’ up in the morning. If you like, I can take care of it for you.”

Oh. Hell. No. Giving a task that the Chef entrusted me with to this suckhole would be tantamount to abandoning my position entirely. I’d never hear the end of it.

“That’s fine,” I manage a smile. “I have the situation under control.”

A shadow passes over Ted’s face. Oh, I get it. This is why he’s here. If he picks up the meat order he can go on and on to the Chef, the owners, to anyone who will listen about how the sous can’t control the kitchen when the Chef is away, the sous can’t be trusted to drag himself out of bed to do important work, the sous pawns off his responsibilities on Ted, the under-paid culinary genius rotting away on the day shift. The plan, shoddy, and transparent as it is, becomes crystal clear to me.

“You’re sure?” he asks.

“I am,” I say.

“Okay,” Ted gulps his beer. “I’ll be in to check on you in the morning.” He leaves. At last.

“He’ll be in to check on you, huh?” Jack throws a carrot stick at me. “Just to make sure everything’s running smoothly, right?”

“Shut up,” I mutter.

After we get everything cleaned up and put away, the three of us sit at the bar across from Peter. The place is closed but he’s still pouring. Bandula left. He has to be back in the morning. Jack and Nick are halfway drunk already, and I’m nursing a beer. “Four a.m. huh?” Peter shakes his head, “that’s brutal. Are you even going to sleep?”

“Fuck that,” I say. “What’s the point? I’ll just hang around here until three thirty. I know where the place is, and it’s not far. I can stumble over there, grab the meat order, and stumble home. No problem.”

To this day, I don’t know what happened. I’ve worked nights for years, so I normally go to bed around 6 a.m. I’m never even tired at four. Never mind at… well, whenever I finally fell asleep. Overconfidence. That was my problem. I was just so pissed that Ted would question my ability to get this very simple task done, I felt defiant. When the first wave of sleepiness swept over me, I didn’t even fight it. I leaned back in one of the booths, put my feet up, and decided to rest my eyes. I’d make it. That scruffy penis thinks he can question me? Fuck him.

The next thing I become aware of is a distant sound. Wheels on bare floor. The mop bucket in the kitchen. I hear it, but I don’t realize what it means right away. The sound stops. The door creaks open. Footsteps are coming toward me. I don’t want to open my eyes. I just hope that whoever it is won’t try to disturb me.

Then, a voice. “Beware,” it says. “The cock of failure.”

Wooden Rocket Press’ Sunday Paper posts new serialized fiction each Sunday. Return next Sunday morning for the next section of Blood Come. For other stories check out the Sunday Paper archive.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.

The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 3 of 7.

They say he was running coke for some Vietnamese gang when his car went off the road and hit a tree. He tried to drag himself away from the crash so he wouldn’t be caught with the blow, but only made it a few hundred yards. He wasn’t found for three days. In the meantime, his injuries became infected. He ended up losing three fingers, two toes, and an eye. He went to the hospital and then to prison, where he served seven years. During that time, he acquired a culinary degree and (rumor has it) killed two other inmates.

This is how the Chef came into my life. Because of the culinary degree that is, not the jailhouse murders.

When he really doesn’t like somebody and decides its time for a disciplinary lecture, he takes out his glass eye first. He loves forcing people to deal with that gaping socket. God help you if you look away.

“If you were stranded in the wilderness due to a plane crash,” he asked me during the job interview. “How long would it be before you chose to consume human flesh?”

I immediately said that after five days without meat I would probably resort to cannibalism to survive.

“To survive?” he asked. “You would make that choice?”

“Anything to survive,” I told him emphatically.

“The important thing,” he gripped me tightly in a firm handshake as his eyes penetrated my soul. “Is that you don’t have to think about it. The important thing, is that I know you have asked yourself this question before I asked you this question.”

“I will destroy you,” he said. “Only to rebuild you. The man you are will be immolated in the fires of discipline. From his ashes, a sous chef shall rise.”

The dishwasher interrupts my reverie. Bandula is looking at me thoughtfully. Seeing that he has caught my eye, he turns his gaze upward, as though addressing some highly placed authority figure. Any time his remarks become analytical, Bandula looks at the ceiling.

“Denis has a trouble,” he says mournfully, rubbing his hands together. “No doubt. If he does the fuck up, fucked he will be. Not by the gleaming cock of his playdream, but by the burning cock of failure.”

“Woah,” Jack squints at me little. “That’s intense.”

“The cock of failure will fuck him away from his home, fuck him away from his job, fuck him away from the cake that is his love. You,” Bandula looms over me, his face a stony mask of prognostic calm, “beware the cock of failure.”

“Glad you guys are looking out for me,” I mutter. “Thanks a lot, but I won’t fuck this up.”

“Maybe you don’t. Maybe you do,” Bandula considers the possibilities. “Life is a maybe. Maybe I kill someone today,” he likes to launch into little homicidal soliloquies. To pass the time, I assume. “Maybe I kill you,” he points at me, fully extending his long, bony arm in my direction. “Yeeeesssssss,” he says thoughtfully. “You fat, lonely faggot. No one cry for you. No police. Oh, but not to worry,” he beams benevolently at me. “Before I kill you, I fuck you. I fuck you. You cry. Blood come. Then die. No more cake.”

Jack sighs, “and they say romance is dead.”

“Wow,” what else do you say, right? “You couldn’t even, like, buy me dinner first?”

“I buy hallmark card for dead baby’s mama,” he snaps. “Wipe my ass.”

“This is awkward,” says Jack. “I’m a little jealous right now.”

Finally, almost an hour late, Nick shows up. He brought another joint, so I forgive him. He’s more of a retard than an asshole, so when you take the bribes into account he does more good than harm. He’s white as a sheet and his hands are shaking, but that’s pretty normal.

“Hey shitwits,” he says as he fills a one liter container with water, downs it in a single gulp, and fills it again. “Did I miss the four p.m. rush?”

Nick says shit like that to emphasize his view that it’s not such a big deal whether or not he shows up to work on time. I inform him that we just got hit with a thirty-person rezzie. He shuffles his feet and stares at the wall. Then he mumbles something vaguely apologetic and heads out the back door to begin his daily ritual of open vomiting and clandestine masturbation.

“One weeks, three day,” Bandula says. “Three hundred.”

Jack laughs, and says, “no way man. I give my boy a month at least.”

“I make from you the money,” Bandula smiles. “I buy for me the pussy.”

“A week and three days?” Jack scoffs. “That guy’s been a day away from death for six years. It’s going to take more than a payday weekend to kill him.”

“Your money will be my money.”

Peter, passing through the kitchen to get lemons and limes for the bar, provides his own analysis.

“If Nick lives to the end of his shift I’ll be shocked,” he laughs. “I saw him at the Centurian last night getting his ass kicked by three bouncers. Tom told me that he whipped it out on one of the shooter girls,” Tom is a bartender at the Centurian.

“Sunshine is lucky he works here. That’s the only reason they haven’t banned him.”

“Dude, that was entrapment,” Nick walks in to hear his reputation slowly dwindling. Or growing, depending on the scale that we’re using. “She offered me thirty bucks for it.”

“What?” a shrill note creeps into Peter’s voice. “Are you nuts? Who the fuck wants to see that?”

“You’d be surprised,” Nick grins, slapping his ball-sack with his palm, as he always does when he thinks he’s scoring a point. “I gotta charge you fifty though, I got bills to pay and you got no damn vagina.”

Jack and Nick laugh their asses off. Peter is unphased.

“How are YOU standing?” he demands of Jack. “You were there with him, weren’t you? Didn’t you guys go to the Burn after that?” The Burn is an after hours bar which is only slightly less welcoming than a Russian gulag after three days without gruel.

“I went home at ten a.m.” Nick yawns. “Gotta get my beauty sleep.”

“See, that’s his problem,” Jack says, pointing at Nick and shaking his head. “This dumbass went to bed.”

Oh, I get it. Jack isn’t hungover because he’s still drunk. Figures. That explains how he managed to make it to his shift on time. He probably didn’t even go home last night.

When the supper rush hits, we’re all ready. I love the rush. The rush is the reason that I cook on the line. You just put your head down and go. Consciousness is restricted to one hundred and twenty seconds in either direction. There are no long-term plans and no distant memories. It’s all about right now and what needs to be done. From six p.m. to nine, everything is a blur.

Wooden Rocket Press’ Sunday Paper posts new serialized fiction each Sunday. Return next Sunday morning for the next section of Blood Come. For other stories check out the Sunday Paper archive.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.

The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 2 of 7.

“Why you come to work?” Bandula inquires. “Why not stay home to bed? Sleep.”

“Hey, Bandula. How’s the black adder?” I ask, because he has a way of terrorizing the rest of the staff that I find charming.

“I think I know why he is here, yes? Need money for cock,” he rubs his hands together, pleased to be able to answer his own question. “He needs big cock for fat ass, so he does the work. Maybe too, for cake. Fat faggot love cake.”

Peter storms into the kitchen, relieving me of the burden of trying to formulate some kind of come back to Bandula’s barrage of homo-erotic imagery. He looks pissed. He points at me.

“What the fuck? Denis!” Peter demands of me, “where the fuck are the other two mutants? We’ve got a thirty person reservation for three-thirty?”

“I’m here, right?” I shrug. “What else can I say?”

Peter knows the score. He’s just likes the sound of his own voice. Jack and Nick will show up late, punch in, and spend twenty minutes getting changed like they always do when the Chef isn’t here. Peter and I will have to work together to keep things from sliding into total anarchy. It won’t be easy. Well… though… wait…

I can see Jack sneaking up behind Peter. This is a surprise. Jack is supposed to show up for work at three. What I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around, is that it is three and here, for work, Jack has shown up. The mind reels.

“Bean-ZAY!” Jack yells in Peter’s ear, flashing him a brown-toothed grin. Peter is gay and likes to sing in the kitchen, so Jack thinks it’s funny to call him Beansie because beans are, as Jack points out, the musical fruit.

“I’m here, man! It’s a new day, Beansie! A new fucking day.” Jack always emphasizes the ing when he says, fucking. As he frequently reminds us, Jack don’t drop no g’s.

“I fuckin’ can’t believe it. Fuck-nuts made it to a shift on time. Somebody call the fuckin’ papers,” Peter mutters under his breath.

Peter is gay and likes to sing in the kitchen, so Jack thinks it’s funny to call him Beansie because beans are, as Jack points out, the musical fruit.

“Tell me when Nick finally gets his ass in here,” the bartender barks. “Ted, the little shit, was whining about start times today. He’s talking about going to the owners and telling them that the sous can’t control the kitchen while the Chef’s away. Fair warning.”

“Jesus Christ,” I sigh. How the fuck can I make these idiots listen to me? By that I mean, how can I convince the bosses that cooks who can crank out a hundred flawless plates after a three day coke jag, are better for business than those clean-cut culinary grads they keep sending me. I can’t use cooks who want to go home if they cut themselves, think they know how to make a carbonara better than the Chef, and always want weekends and holidays off. “I’m going to kill that fuckin’ twit.”

I mean it this time. I can’t take it any more.

“Get in line,” Peter says. “He called the Chef at home to say that I was on the phone all day with my husband. Like, excuse me? I called him twice because we’re trying to buy a house. The deal is in the works, thousands of dollars are at stake. I wanna keep an eye on the situation. So fuckin’ sue me.”

This is bad news. In a way, Ted’s right. I can’t control Jack and Nick. They’re both great line cooks, but it’s always something with those two. I can depend on Ruggario and Juan to do their jobs and show up on time, but they don’t cook on the line. Jack, Nick, and I cook on the line.

It isn’t that they don’t respect chain of command, it’s that they’re both relentless fuck ups, and they fuck up as a team. Jack and Nick are a satanic wedding of insanity and stupidity. Jack providing the lion’s share of the former while Nick brings the bulk of the latter.

Nick will probably puke blood in the parking lot for a while when he does arrive, so we won’t be able to count on him to help with the reservation, but he’s an incredible broiler-man. For perfect steaks, salmon, and halibut all night, I’ll put up with a little tardiness and projectile vomiting.

I’ll have to be extra nice to Jack. It’s just him and me, and I’m going to need him to be on the ball very shortly. The cue ball that is, not his customary eight ball. He wasn’t sporting a four-day growth of beard, shaking uncontrollably, or reeking of vodka when he walked through here just now, so we might be okay.

Incidentally, do you know how much vodka you have to drink to ‘reek of vodka?’

You know it’s going to be bad when he shows up wearing his glasses. If he doesn’t have his contacts in, it means that he rolled out of bed covered in liquor sweat and dried puke thirty seconds before he left for work, and is only on his feet out of sheer force of habit.

There is silence for a while. Jack is prepping his station, looking uncharacteristically fresh and useful in his clean whites. “Got time to burn one?” he asks me, arching an eyebrow. “It feels like a sleeper. We’re totally not going to get hit for a while.”

When I tell Jack about the reservation, his face falls for a second.

“Thirty people?” he pauses. “Pfft. Ten minutes, we serve thirty people. THEN we get baked.”

Well… why not, right?

Peter comes back into the kitchen. “It’s coming,” he says. “Get ready to roll!”

We spend the next twenty minutes running our asses off, trying to make sure that all the food looks good and gets out at more or less the same time. There are close calls, but no disasters. I’m blown away. Jack’s got a lot of energy for three thirty, he’s not even hung-over.

After the hit, we sneak out back and smoke a joint. Then we come inside and clean some fridges, restock our stations, this isn’t a time that we normally do a lot of business.

Bandula wanders into the dining room. He wouldn’t do that if the Chef were here. If Ted saw it he’d have a field day, but what am I supposed to do? The Chef warned him about that shit, but he doesn’t listen. Bandula likes to find the biggest pair of tits in the room, and stare them down as though they were challenging him to a duel. It’s like the Wild West, except instead of a six-shooter he’s packing a hairy, one-eyed monster that could give Tokyo a run for its money. It terrifies the customers and its bad for business, but he never calls in sick, is never late, stays until his job is done and never complains about the work. He might threaten, harass, grope, and molest the staff but, he works doubles on a regular basis, and he keeps the place clean. He’ll be here until at least ten tonight, and come back at five a.m. to vacuum the dining room and clean the kitchen. A dishwasher like that is hard to find.

The Chef (speaking of one-eyed monsters) is the only person he listens to. But like I said, the Chef isn’t here today.

How can I explain the Chef?

Peter charges into the kitchen. “Chef on line one!” he yells to me. “He sounds pissed.”

I run to the phone and hit the button, “what’s up?”

“The meat,” his voice is raspy and hollow. “You are responsible for the meat.”

“As always, Chef,” I say, running a nervous hand across my chin. When you work with food you try not to touch your face, but this guy throws all of my instincts out of whack. I’m like a stammering schoolgirl, except instead of wishing he would ask me to the prom I’m sort of afraid that he’ll kill me and eat me. “What… um…” I struggle for a moment and try to ignore Peter and Jack snickering in the background. “What does that mean?”

“Meat. The good meat. The best meat. It comes from Brazil tomorrow morning. It gets to the market at four a.m. It will be gone quickly. We must have it for the special. For Thursday, the champion of days,” the Chef is big on authenticity. And freshness. He asks me to do this kind of shit all the time. “You must be first to the meat. Do not be late. Do not try to sleep, or you will never make it.”

There is a click, and I hear a dial tone

Wooden Rocket Press’ Sunday Paper posts new serialized fiction each Sunday. Return next Sunday morning for the next section of Blood Come. For other stories check out the Sunday Paper archive.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.