Then he thought, you’ve got to be shitting me! when he went through the door into the room-service kitchen. He didn’t see Kyle, but he did see one holy hell of a mess. Dishes stacked up till next Easter! I’ll be here all night! And that line Kyle had given him about his dish-man being ragged out? What a load of shit. There’d been no dishman on duty over here at all; the machine wasn’t even turned on; the temp gauge read 50 degrees. They’d done a whole night’s worth of room service orders and hadn’t cleaned a fucking thing!
Boy, am I getting screwed, Lee thought, and lit the Hobart’s pilot. If he thinks I’m gonna clean his dishes every goddamn night, he’s got another thing coming. This was an outrage. There was junk all over the floor, broken plates, food, trash. And if the mountain of dirty plates wasn’t enough, the entire cold line counter was stacked with racks of dirty glasses. “Hey, Kyle!” Lee called out. “I’m not a goddamn machine! What are you trying to pull?”
No response. Where the hell did he go? Lee cranked the heat knob on the Hobart to high, then looked around. Along the aisle wall to the room-service elevators stood the tall steel doors to Kyle’s walk-ins and pantries. There were all locked.
Except for one.
Lee pushed his long hair back off his brow and approached the one door that stood partway open. As he neared, he heard something, a fierce slapping sound.
Slapping?
He peeked in. Stared.
It was a storage room. Another door at the end was closed. And the sound he heard was slapping, all right. Lee couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
One of the room-service staff—the short, fat, doughy woman Lee had seen around—was hunkered down in the corner against several one-hundred-pound sacks of rice. One quarter of a club sandwich lay in pieces on the floor. And towering above was Kyle, his hand a hot blur. He was slapping the living shit out of the woman…
“Fuckin’ fat retard bitch,” Kyle murmured, slapping away at the woman’s face. “How many times I gotta tell you dolts to stay the fuck outa here, huh?” Slap-slap-slap! “Next time I catch you in here I’m gonna bust you up good.” Slap-slap-slap!
Lee was too shocked at first to even react. Tears streaked the woman’s wide, reddened face. Kyle laid his open palm twice more across the side of her head, and she recoiled, whining. “Gonna fuck with me, huh?” Kyle remarked. He roughly grabbed her by the ear, hauled her up, and drew back his fist—
“Cut it out, man!” Lee yelled.
Kyle’s fist froze. He glanced over his shoulder. In the pause, the woman, sobbing, crawled out of the corner and scurried away.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lee demanded.
Kyle turned, glaring. “None of your fuckin’ business, fatboy. I thought I told you to get this joint cleaned up.”
“You can’t be treating people like that, man. You’ve got to be out of your mind.”
“She’s a fuckin’ thief,” Kyle countered, “just like all the dolts around here. You don’t slap ’em around every now and then and they’ll steal you blind. I caught the pig ripping off food.”
Lee went agape, pointing to the bits of club sandwich. “You’re beating the shit out of her for stealing toast points? All she’s gotta do is file a complaint with the labor board and your ass is grass, man.”
Kyle ushered him out of the pantry, closed the door, and put a padlock on it. “She won’t say shit, fatboy. Wanna know why? ‘Cause she’s illegal. She says anything to anyone, and she gets deported.”
“Yeah?” Lee gestured. “Well you can’t deport me.”
Kyle leaned against a trans cart and chuckled. “Who’re you kidding? I been working with guys like you for ten years, and you’re all the same. You got no life except for this. Shit, fatboy, this is the most money you’ll ever make, and you know it. You fuck with me, and I’ll fire your ass faster than it takes me to shake the piss off my dick, and then you’ll have nothing. You wanna go back to the city where you’ll have to pay rent on half the money you make with Feldspar?”
Lee didn’t answer.
“I thought so. Learn quick, fatboy. Around here you don’t fuck with the system”—then Kyle pointed—“and you don’t fuck with me. And anytime you see me wailing on these pig-ugly dolts, you keep your mouth shut, otherwise you don’t get that raise.”
“What raise?”
“The raise I’m putting you in for tonight, for ‘exceptional performance and high attitudinal standards.’ Get it?”
I get it, all right, Lee thought. You’re greasing me.
Kyle grinned around the RS kitchen. “Yeah, looks to me like if you bust that wide-load tail of yours you might be out of here by six in the morning. Me, I think I’ll go viddie some tit flicks and have a few beers. Better get on the stick, huh?”
“Yeah,” Lee replied, but many other, better replies came to mind just then. Kyle swaggered off, leaving Lee to the landslide of dirty dishes and chock-full garbage cans. Good Christ, he thought.
“Hey, fatboy,” Kyle called out from his service cage. “Catch.”
Lee flinched and caught the bottle of EKU Maibock that Kyle tossed him. “You’re real generous, man,” he said.
Kyle laughed out loud. “Damn right, and if this floor ain’t clean enough for me to eat off of by morning, I’ll shove the empty bottle up your fat ass. Have a good one, buddy!”
Kyle’s laughter disappeared when he went up the room-service elevator. All Lee could think was you motherless motherfucker as he turned on the Hobart’s chain motor and began spraying off the first rack of food-smudged dishes, the first of many.
— | — | —
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Donna supposed they must seem the oddest couple. Dan B. was big, brusk, brazen-mouthed—he sometimes took things too seriously—while Donna cast an opposite appearance: fawnish, sometimes flighty. Perhaps it was this very contrast that held them so securely together. Donna didn’t really care about the whys and wherefores. All that mattered was that they loved each other.
Making it hadn’t been easy for the two of them—they had their dreams much as any couple did. But it was difficult to pursue a dream beyond life’s often brutal realities. She’d done a lot of low things in her life, back in the Bad Old Days, many of which she’d never even told Dan B. How could she? What man would want her? She hadn’t had a drink in over six months; the most she’d ever gone before that was six days. It was Dan B. who had pulled her out. He never gave up on her, where most guys gave up the first week, or night. Yet Dan B. was the only one who’d cared enough about her to keep her from faltering. Many of the men before him actually encouraged her to drink. It made me an easy fuck, she realized now, in the tense dark. Sometimes she cried just thinking about it, and about how ugly the world could be.
She’d boozed herself right out of college. Ten years ago? she wondered. Twelve? She’d spent the next decade throwing darts at a map of the country. Each new city, and its promise of a new start, spat her back out like used gum. How many towns had she been run out of? How many times had she made her name mud? Oh, God. From Akron to Tucson, Seattle to Baltimore, the one thing she could never escape was herself. She’d been fired from so many jobs that soon she’d run out of cities. Dark days. Each night after work she spent all her tips in the bars, and when she spent all her tips…