Nacho Unleashed

by Laurence Shames

  In any case, Rita and Albin were alone at breakfast. She was eating cereal from a chipped bowl and drinking coffee from a chipped mug that matched the bowl in neither style nor color. Albin had his perfect teapot, his lacquered marmalade jar with mother-of-pearl spoon, and his sterling silver toast rack. He’d been sporadically jotting things down in his suicide journal; he paused now to answer her question. “Actually,” he said, “I was just thinking back to the time I almost got married.”

  “Married? Really? Who was the lucky fella?”

  “Not a fella. A woman. A girl, if you’ll excuse me. We were very young.”

  “Ah, your erreur de jeunesse,” she said, coming fairly close on the pronunciation.

  “Right,” he said wistfully. “My erreur. Marjorie, her name was.”

  Rita spooned some cereal, sipped some coffee. “You were engaged?”

  “Oh, no, nothing that formal. It was more…how should I put it? More that we shared a wish, a dream, that we might get married sometime. That it would be so nice, setting up a home together, making things cozy. We were very dear friends. We laughed a lot. Danced, listened to music. We thought we were in love. And we were. We just had no idea who we were or what we were doing.”

  Rita dabbed her lips on a napkin. “And you were sleeping with her?”

  Albin attempted a scandalized look but couldn’t quite pull it off. “You certainly have a way of cutting to the chase, my dear.”

  She shrugged. “Beating around the bush. Where’s it get ya?”

  “Where it gets ya,” he mimicked…then seemed to decide that he didn’t really know. “Well, okay, yes, we made love a couple times. Extremely awkward, as you can imagine. Both virgins. And one of us a virgin who hadn’t yet quite noticed he was gay. She probably figured it out before I did. Anyway, it was the kind of scene that could easily be played for laughs. The awkwardness, I mean. But that’s not the part I remember.”

  “So what do you remember?” Rita coaxed.

  He didn’t answer at once. He stirred his tea, took a piece of toast from the rack, spread marmalade on it, put it on a plate. “The tenderness,” he said at last. “Not sure I’ve known anything exactly like it before or since. She was very kind, which made the whole excruciating business sort of wonderful. In a way, it was more like a vigil than a deflowering. We both wanted so much to believe this was right for us even at the exact moment we were realizing it wasn’t.”

  “You stayed friends, I hope.”

  “Only for a little while. I went off to college in New York, she headed to Boston. We stayed in touch a month or two then drifted apart. To this day I’m really not sure why. Maybe she thought I was embarrassed about what happened—and maybe I was. Maybe she ended up being angry that she wasted her virginity on me. Or maybe it was nothing dramatic and we just got on with our lives the way young people do. I really don’t know. Only know we’ve been out of touch for almost forty years now.”

  “You regret it?”

  “Regret which? The love affair? Or the getting out of touch?

  “Either. Both.”

  He had a bite of toast. The pool pump switched on with a click and then a hum. The morning’s first puff of breeze shook the palms so that the fronds gave off a soft rattling noise. “My dear,” he said at last, “you have a gift for asking direct and simple questions. Unfortunately, you usually ask them about things for which there aren’t any simple answers. Regret? I don’t think that ever comes down to a simple yes or no. Regret comes in fifty shades, as they say.”

  “That one I get, Albin.”

  “I mean, it might be the most complicated word in the language.” He tapped the suicide book that was still resting, open, at his elbow. “Maybe I should even do an appendix about it, a sort of glossary or thesaurus. About all the different flavors of regret.” He rested the butt of his pen against his lower lip and thought a moment before going on. “Chagrin. Remorse. Pangs. Qualms. Contriteness. Self-reproach. Rue. No shortage of synonyms, each with its own particular sting or ache. They have a way of piling up over the years, so you can really zero in on the fine distinctions.”

  Rita finished her cereal and let her tarnished spoon rest in the bowl. The vocabulary lesson was all well and good but she still wanted an answer to her question. “Okay, so let’s narrow it down. Sex with Marjorie, you wish it never happened?”

  “No, I’m glad it happened. How else would I have known what I was missing?”

  “Regret it that you’re out of touch?”

  “Regret it?” he mulled. “No, not exactly. Regret, I save that for situations that might have turned out differently if I’d said or did a different thing. But this turned out exactly as it had to. At least I think it did. So there’s nothing to regret…except it’s still a loss. The loss of a first love. I’m sure you know what that feels like that.”

  “No, actually I don’t.”

  She said this in her usual deadpan tone and a moment went by before it really registered with Albin. Then he said, “You don’t?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You’ve never been in love?”

  “Not that I know of. I mean, I’ve had crushes, hook-ups, things that last a few weeks, a couple months. But a big romance? A grand passion? No. Maybe I’m too guarded. Too impatient. Too cynical. Too something. Maybe I’m just a commitment-phobe. I mean, why should guys have a monopoly on that?”

  “Well, as the hopeful old cliché goes, maybe you just haven’t met the right person yet,” said Albin.

  “Christ knows that’s what I’d like to think.” She gave a brief laugh without much mirth behind it. “That way I can put the blame on every guy I’ve ever known instead of on myself.” She finished her coffee and looked at her phone. “But hey, I’m late. Gotta go get ready now.”

  “I thought you’re off today.”

  “I am, but I’m going up to the distillery. Been bugging my manager for a week now to set it up. Can’t wait to see how it all works.”

  “On your day off, no less. Pretty perfect beach day, too. Sounds like maybe you’re getting a little bit committed to this job.”

  Sounding surprised at herself, Rita said, “Yeah, I guess I am. A little bit.”

  “Well, maybe that’s a start,” said Albin, and he went back to his jottings.

  11

  T he chief distiller was a tall and rawboned guy, not handsome but distinctive, with an oversized Adam’s apple, a narrow, bony nose, and darting, yellow-flecked hazel eyes beneath busy and expressive brows; and Rita started falling a little bit in love with him practically the moment they met. Who can say why these things happen? Maybe it was just the right day. Maybe she was softened up, primed for emotion, by her chat with Albin. In any case, she was smitten by the distiller’s brown leather apron and green calf-high rubber boots, which she found geekily adorable. She also liked his frizzy brown hair, the kind of hair that a comb would break its teeth on. But what mainly attracted her—attracted her before she could even quite define what she was feeling—was that the distiller, in every word and gesture, had the bearing of someone who absolutely loved his work, who was thrilled and fascinated to be doing it, and who hoped to keep doing it forever.

  His name was Anthony Orsini, and when an assistant brought Rita over to be introduced, his eyes were glued to a temperature gauge on one of the gleaming copper stills. He flashed her a brief smile and rather hurriedly shook her hand, but his gaze went back to the thermometer in a fraction of a second. “Sorry,” he said, “I need to deal with this right now. We’re getting close to the magic number.”

  “Magic number?”

  “One seventy-three point one.”

  “Ah.”

  “Boiling point of ethyl alcohol,” he said, and he kept staring at the gauge. It was digital. It stood at one seventy-two point three and was ticking ahead by a tenth of a degree every fifteen seconds or so. There was nothing intrinsically suspenseful about the steady rise in the temperature, but the distiller seemed to be holding his br
eath as during the countdown to a rocket launch or the dropping of the ball on New Year’s Eve. Rita found herself watching his eyes watching the gauge and timing her breaths to his. It was just very slightly like the way two people breathe when they are making love.

  The gauge hit the magic number and the distiller sprang from readiness to action, cranking open a series of stainless steel valves. There came a sharp hiss that quickly dropped in pitch then gradually resolved into a soft chiming of the pipes. When the sound had settled into a barely audible hum, he relaxed just a bit, his restless hands fluttering to rest at his side. “Sorry,” he said, “what was your name again?”

  “Rita.”

  “Anthony.”

  “Yes, I know. We were already introduced.”

  Unembarrassed by his gaffe, he said, “So you work in the tasting room and I’m supposed to give you a tour, right?” His tone wasn’t exactly resentful, but it was clear that showing people around was not his favorite part of the job.

  “Well, not exactly,” she said. “I mean, not a tour as in tourist. I want to learn how all this stuff works. I want to know how you do what you do.”

  He looked at her sideways and got a little friendlier. “Most people couldn’t care less, you know. As long as there’s something tasty and alcoholic in their glass, they couldn’t care less how it got there.”

  “Same in the tasting room,” she said. “I do my song and dance, maybe one person in twenty really listens. Goes with the territory. Can’t take it personal.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, or as much of his hair as his hand could get through. Then he suddenly said, “So what’s the boiling point of ethyl alcohol?”

  “One seventy-three point one,” she said.

  “I guess you really were listening.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Okay. Feel like putting on an apron and a pair of boots? I’ll show you how a still works.”

  She went over to a wall where some extra aprons hung on wooden pegs, a rank of green boots neatly lined up beneath them. Pulling them on, she had a feeling that she hadn’t often had in her life and had never been able to hold on to for very long: that maybe she was in the exact right place, the place where she belonged.

  When she turned around again, it took her a moment to find Anthony, because he was standing on top of a twelve-foot ladder, his nimbus of hair almost grazing the rank of pipes and ducts that lined the ceiling. He gestured for her to climb up on a ladder next to his, and the two of them stared down into an empty tank whose top had been removed for cleaning. “The column,” he said. “Basically a three hundred gallon tea kettle. Made of copper. Why? Because the ferment contains a lot of sulfur compounds, and sulfur compounds can make booze taste like rotten eggs or moldy cabbage. But sulfur atoms bind with copper, so the potential stinky stuff ends up clinging to the metal instead of messing up the juice. That green patina you see on copper? That’s actually a kind of sulfur rust. Eventually it wears through. Still like this will last twenty, thirty years.” He paused, then, as an afterthought, said, “You okay with heights?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Guess I should’ve asked you before.”

  He started climbing down. As soon as his feet were back on the floor, he went on. “So what is distillation? Distillation is alchemy. Separating the inseparable. And here’s something I think is kind of cool: Beer and wine—bad beer and wine—would happen without any human intervention whatsoever. Fruit drops on the ground, it turns to wine. Grain rots in a puddle, it turns to beer. Nobody had to invent those things. But booze would never, ever have happened by itself. Booze happened because people willed it to. Like art. Like music. It’s a totally human concept. I think that’s kind of cool.”

  He walked back over to the still that had hit the magic number. Rita scurried to keep up. Her boots were a little too big and they sucked at her heels as she walked. Also, she was a little bit distracted by the way Anthony’s Adam’s apple shuttled up and down in his neck as he spoke. The more emphatic he got, the quicker that lump slid up and down.

  “So how does it work?” he went on. “Why does it work? It works because alcohol has a lower boiling point than water. The stuff you start with—fermented sugar cane for rum or wine for brandy or grain mash for whisky—has alcohol and water mixed together. So you heat the mixture until the alcohol starts to boil but the water doesn’t. You collect the alcohol steam, run it through a bunch of squiggly tubes where it cools down and turns back into liquid, and boom, that’s distillation. Simple, right?”

  “Sounds like a trick question,” Rita said.

  “Well, yeah, it is. Because chemistry isn’t as tidy as people like to think. There’s a few thousand other compounds tagging along with the alcohol and water. Some of them taste good, others taste lousy. Some are more volatile than others, which is just a fancy way of saying they boil off quicker. So you’re always fine-tuning temperature and timing and design to get the compounds you want and lose the ones you don’t.”

  He went over to the still and opened a spigot at the end of a pipe that ran from the column. A couple ounces of clear liquid splashed into a glass beaker. He handed it to her and asked her what it smelled like. She took a sniff, then hesitated. Not that she didn’t have her answer ready, she just wasn’t sure if she should say it. “I don’t want to be negative or insult you or anything.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Okay. Nail polish remover.”

  “Bingo. Ethyl acetate. One of the first things to boil off. That’s what we call the heads. Not to worry, it doesn’t end up in the rum. Now try this.”

  He opened up another spigot, drew another sample. She closed her eyes and inhaled. “Pancake batter? And something kind of chocolaty. But not chocolaty like a candy bar, more like cocoa powder.”

  She opened her eyes to find that Anthony was staring at her. His Adam’s apple was in repose halfway between the up and down positions, his hazel eyes were wide, his lips were slightly parted. He said, “Tina, you have a really good nose.”

  “Thank you. It’s Rita.”

  “Rita. Right. Got it. Well, that’s called the heart of the distillation. It’s where most of the good stuff is. Most, but not all. Try one more.”

  She sniffed the third sample. “Vanilla. No, wait. More like marshmallow. Heavier than just vanilla. A little cloying maybe.”

  “Wow,” said the distiller. “Just wow. You nailed it. That’s called the tails. A little of it goes in to give the rum more body. Gotta be careful with it or you end up with sweet, flabby crap.”

  “Like for mixing with Coke,” she ventured.

  He gave a little shudder at the thought.

  She gestured past his shoulder at the softly humming still. “So the heads, the tails,” she said, “the stuff that doesn’t end up in the rum—it just gets thrown away?”

  This seemed a natural question, but there was a vague something in Anthony’s reaction that made her wonder if she had somehow overstepped or said something gauche. His tall shoulders rounded in just the tiniest bit, there was a barely discernible hitch in his cadence. “Thrown away?” he said, after the quick missed beat. “No. The rest gets pumped off directly to the lab.”

  “Lab?”

  He pointed up at the pipes above the stills. Rita’s eyes traced out their winding course until they disappeared behind a wall. “Run by a very eccentric chemist. Very eccentric and very private. No one’s allowed in his part of the building. Not even me.”

  “So what’s he do back there?”

  The distiller gave a quick shrug, mainly with his eyebrows, and said rather dismissively, “Develops flavorings.”

  “Flavorings? Like, additives? Isn’t that sort of exactly what Wreckers doesn’t do?”

  “Not with any of the artificial crap that’s out there. If this guy comes up with something natural, something from the cane itself, well, then we’d see. I’m not holding my breath, since he tells me zip about his progress. In the meantime, he does his wor
k and I do mine.”

  He managed a tight smile but it was clear that the mood had been broken from when they’d just been talking pure, old-fashioned rum and that the distiller was once again getting antsy to get back to his work without a visitor around. His eyes wandered off among the beautiful machinery. His hands began to twitch toward useful actions. Rita felt a twinge of…what? Which synonym for regret would come closest to describing the feeling of missing an opportunity that didn’t even quite exist yet? Whatever it was, she wasn’t about to stand by passively and let that feeling overtake her. After a pause that was stretching toward unease, she suddenly blurted out, “Can I come back next week?”

  The question took Anthony by surprise. “Come back? I’ve pretty much walked you through the basics.”

  “The basics, right. But there’s a lot more I’d like to learn. Maybe I could work with you.”

  “I can’t hire another person. It’s not my call.”

  “I’ll work for free. On my day off.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Come on,” she pressed. “I aced the boiling point quiz. I passed the sniff test. Great nose, you said so yourself. Cut me a break. Gimme a try.”

  He ran a hand partway through his impenetrable hair. He pawed at the floor with the toe of his green rubber boot. Finally, he said, “All right. Okay. If you really want to. Come back a week from today. Wear crappy clothes and be ready to scrub out the inside of a still.”

  12

  O n the water-view patio of a tidy condo on Key Largo, a large hairy hand with a couple of mangled knuckles reached across a snack table holding a pair of martinis and a bowl of nuts and gently clasped a wrist that was as thick as a turkey leg. The hand was Max’s; the wrist belonged to Rocco. Max was saying, “I’m sorry, hon, I just don’t feel like it this evening.”