Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  An hour later, they sat in a divey little place on Airline Drive eating plates of delicious meatloaf. There was no macaroni, but the sides of mashed potatoes and smothered cabbage made up for the lack.

  “I think we should go ahead,” said Lenny. “Talk to the agent who’s handling the property. Get an inspection. Bring in my contractor and get an estimate on fixing the place up.”

  “You know,” said Rickey. Pride made the words stick in his throat, but he forced them out anyway. “You know we don’t have any money at all, right?”

  “Rickey, how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want your money. There’s a contract sitting on De La Cerda’s desk ready for you to sign—it gives you guys 75 percent ownership of the restaurant. That means you make 75 percent of the profits. It also means you can override anything I say. Remember the first time you came to my house and I told you I was a rich dickhead? I wasn’t lying. I like making money. I think we can all make a lot of it if I invest in you two. Hell, if I wasn’t such a nice guy—for a rich dickhead, I mean—I might even be insulted by all this money stuff.” Lenny finished his meatloaf and wiped the gravy from his plate with half a roll. He did not look insulted in the least.

  Rickey turned to G-man. “What do you think?”

  “I say we should do it.”

  “The kitchen looked all right to you?”

  “It looked like something from the haunted mansion on Scooby-Doo. But the layout’s fine, and we can fix everything else.”

  “OK then.” Rickey put down his fork. “Let’s go over to De La Cerda’s office this afternoon. I’m ready to sign that contract.”

  chapter 13

  Anthony Bonvillano was setting up his St. Joseph’s altar. He hauled the wooden boxes out of the storage room, stacked them in three ascending tiers to symbolize the Holy Trinity, and covered them with pink and white altar cloths. He set the tall plaster statues of Christ and St. Joseph on the top tier and arranged a semicircle of votive candles at their feet.

  For two days the Apostle Bar had been full of Anthony’s relatives bringing in the traditional dishes and decorations for the altar. Now he began to place these carefully on the three tiers. There were stuffed artichokes, whole roasted fish, bowls of pasta, the sweetened breadcrumbs known as “sawdust” because Joseph had been a carpenter. There was a rosary made of white chocolate. There were little aniseflavored Italian cookies frosted in pastel colors and topped with sprinkles. There were a couple of whole lemons, a nod to the tradition that an unmarried girl who stole a lemon from a St. Joseph’s altar would find a husband within a year. (“These lemons are bisexual,” Anthony had told Laura when she said the tradition was chauvinistic.) There was a cut-glass bowl full of dried fava beans, also known as lucky beans: each visitor to the altar was meant to take one of these.

  Perhaps most important were the specially decorated cakes and breads. There was a cake in the shape of a lamb, frosted white and finished with coconut for wool and jellybeans for eyes. There was a book-shaped cake decorated with a picture of St. Joseph and the Holy Infant. There was a sheet cake with the inscription, “In memory of Anthony Francis Bonvillano Sr. and Mary Tomolillo Bonvillano, who Founded this Altar.” The breads were baked in various traditional shapes: a sandal, a hammer, a saw, a shepherd’s crook. This year, for some reason, Anthony’s sister had made carefully hand-lettered index cards identifying each shape of bread. One of them was misspelled—SANDLE—but Anthony put it out anyway, figuring the saint would forgive mistakes in a labor of love.

  He stepped back and examined his handiwork. It wasn’t as fancy as some altars—there was a rich family in Metairie that did one ten feet long and twenty feet wide each year—but he thought it would do. Tonight the priest would come to bless it, and the Apostle Bar would serve a special St. Joseph’s meal through the saint’s day, March 19.

  Rickey and G-man were supposed to be here right now, as a matter of fact. Buddy Diliberto’s sports talk show had just come on the radio, and they were always at work by the time Buddy D came on. They’d been out with Lenny every day this week. Anthony supposed they’d be getting their own place soon. He had already decided to scale back the menu once they left, keeping the now-famous chicken wings but otherwise going back to ordinary bar snacks. The prospect of running a simple bar again was a relief to him. He had enjoyed having the two exuberant young cooks and their crazy, hugely popular menu in the same way he enjoyed Mardi Gras: it was fun for a little while, but tiring.

  Anthony sat down and listened to Buddy mangling the names of likely Saints draft picks. Just as he was thinking about trying to call Lenny on his cell phone and see if Rickey and G-man were with him, they came bursting in. “We signed a lease!” said Rickey. “We signed a fucking lease, Anthony! We got a restaurant!”

  “Well, we got a location,” said G-man. “It doesn’t look much like a restaurant yet.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a big-ass building and it’s already got a kitchen and we’re gonna fix it up real nice.”

  “Where is it?” Anthony asked.

  “Corner of Toulouse and Broad, just down the street from the courthouse.”

  “Big, kinda boxy-looking white building?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And there used to be a restaurant in there?”

  “Yeah, the kitchen’s still partly set up,” said Rickey. “I don’t know what kinda place it was, though.”

  “Italian,” said Anthony.

  “Really? You know anything about it?”

  “Uh, no, no I don’t. I just remember an Italian place being in there about twenty years ago.”

  Rickey and G-man went into the kitchen. Anthony remained at the bar, rubbing his forehead in consternation. They’d be too young to remember the thing, of course. They couldn’t have been more than seven or eight when it happened. Lenny wouldn’t know either, because he hadn’t moved to New Orleans yet. Anthony had just been starting out in the business, and he remembered it well. It had been known among restaurant people as the Red Gravy Murder.

  The restaurant, Giambucca’s, was owned by a trio of mobbed-up guys who caught their general manager skimming profits. A huge amount of money was missing, something like two hundred thousand dollars, a sum that had seemed unimaginable to Anthony at the time. The GM, more concerned with the ponies at the Fair Grounds than with the restaurant, never even twigged to the fact that his bosses knew the money was gone. They must have figured the place was about to tank anyway; otherwise they surely wouldn’t have killed him right on the premises. They’d tried to make it look like an after-hours robbery, but the police hadn’t bought it. Most robbers didn’t blast their victim once in each kneecap before blowing his head off.

  Well, they hadn’t killed him in the kitchen, Anthony rationalized. Not exactly. He thought it had happened in the walk-in.

  He couldn’t remember the name of the dead GM. It hadn’t been Italian; an Italian guy, even if he were stupid enough to steal from the Mob, would have been more careful about it. He was pretty sure the guy had had a French name, and he knew some of the guy’s relatives were still in the restaurant business. A brother was on the Downtown Development District board. A nephew managed a hotel kitchen in the Quarter. He thought Rickey might have even worked with the nephew. Maybe they’d hear about it someplace eventually. Anthony didn’t think it was important, and he wasn’t going to spoil their excitement by telling them now.

  Rickey took the pan of salt cod out of the reach-in where it had been soaking in water since yesterday. Intending to make a brandade, he put some russet potatoes on to boil and started chopping garlic.

  G-man was making sauce for the St. Joseph’s pasta, a savory-sweet concoction of cauliflower, anchovies, raisins, and pine nuts. He consulted a cookbook, then looked over at Rickey. “You think it really matters if you break up cauliflower florets instead of cutting them?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Rickey opened the reach-in. “Aw, fuck!”

  “What?”

  �
�A.J. didn’t shell these fava beans, and I just now noticed.”

  “Give ’em here. I’ll do it if you’ll deal with this cauliflower. It’s the only vegetable I really hate.”

  “How come?”

  “I think it looks like cancer.”

  “Dude, it does not look like cancer.”

  “How do you know? You ever seen cancer?”

  “No, but it’d be all black and shit, probably.”

  “Well, ain’t this a nice conversation?” said Anthony, coming in.

  “G thinks cauliflower looks like cancer.”

  “No it doesn’t,” said Anthony. “Cancer’s purple.”

  “I’m gonna sit up front and shell these favas,” said G-man. “You guys are making me sick.”

  He carried the pan into the bar, made himself comfortable, and began splitting open the pods, then nudging the fat little beans out of the greenish-white plush where they nestled. After shelling, they would have to be blanched in boiling water for sixty seconds before their tough outer skins could be peeled off. “Favas and artichokes,” his mother liked to say, “the only vegetables that make you lose weight cause you gotta work so hard to eat ’em.” She never made a St. Joseph’s altar, but her sister Teresa had one every year. G-man and the other kids helped put together the cookie bags: two fig cookies, two seed cookies, a piece of St. Joseph’s bread, a prayer card, a lucky bean. Their hands would get sticky and they’d end up eating nearly as many cookies as they bagged. He remembered the house full of relatives and strangers on St. Joseph’s Day, the smells of anise, burning candles, and thick red gravy bubbling on the stove. Mary Rose Stubbs would park in front of the little fenced yard, and as she hoisted herself out of her car, Teresa would come out on the porch flapping her hands and hollering, “Go away, lady! You ain’t welcome here!” Then they’d both almost hemorrhage themselves laughing. He hadn’t visited his Aunt Teresa’s altar in years, but the furred texture of the fava pods brought the memories rushing back.

  A.J. came in at seven to work dinner while Rickey and G-man finished making the holiday food. At ten, when the priest showed up to bless the altar, they had sauce ready to go on pasta, sautéed fava beans, stuffed eggplants and artichokes, Rickey’s salt-cod brandade, and olive salad. “Go ask the priest if he wants a plate,” Rickey told G-man.

  “You go ask him. I don’t want to talk to any priest.”

  “Why not? You think he can tell how bad you are just by looking at you?”

  “I haven’t talked to a priest in twelve years,” said G-man. “I’m not in the mood to start now.”

  Rickey shook his head. “I’m so glad I wasn’t raised Catholic. Hey, A.J., go see if the priest wants a plate.”

  “Aw, I don’t feel like it.”

  “What? You’re a lapsed Catholic too?”

  “I don’t see you running out there to ask him,” G-man told Rickey. “Give it another couple of minutes, he’ll be gone.”

  Rickey went up front. The priest, a big young Irish guy with startlingly green eyes, had finished the blessing and was talking to Anthony. “I’d love a plate,” he said when Rickey asked him. “I been doing blessings all day and I haven’t had a chance to eat anything but cookies.”

  “Fire one for the Father,” Anthony called through the window.

  “You know,” the priest told Rickey, “I used to be a cook before I went to seminary.”

  “Yeah? Where’d you cook at?”

  “Started off doing salads at Gertie Greer’s, ended up working the broiler at Commander’s.”

  “Didn’t you, uh, were you, like, wasn’t it—aw, never mind.”

  “No, what?”

  “Well, you know, the way people talk in kitchens—didn’t it ever bother you?”

  The priest laughed. “You’re not Catholic, are you?”

  “No. I mean, my best friend was, so I kinda grew up around it, but no.”

  “Well, plenty of my parishioners are drunker and more foulmouthed than anybody I ever met in any kitchen.”

  “No shit?” said Rickey, honestly surprised. “Oh, fuck, I mean—oh, jeez, I gotta go check on your food.”

  “Nice talking to you,” the priest called after him with no apparent trace of sarcasm.

  “Dude,” said G-man as Rickey came back into the kitchen, “are you blushing?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “See why we didn’t want to go out there? Even if a priest is nice, it’s embarrassing to talk to him. Even if you’re not Catholic, you still feel like you’re in that damn confessional.”

  “Yeah,” said Rickey. “I guess you do.” Glad to be back in his element, he snagged a strand of pasta out of the boiling pot and tested it for doneness. “Hey A.J., you wanna dump this?”

  With so many items on the menu, they were only serving a spoonful or two of everything. Rickey plated the pasta in the center, the stuffed vegetables and olive salad around the edges, and the brandade on a side plate with toasted rounds of Italian bread. A few minutes after sending it out, he peeked through the window to see how the Father liked it. The priest saw him looking and gave him a thumbs-up.

  Later, Rickey went back up front and took a lucky bean from the altar. He noticed a shoebox covered with construction paper on a nearby table. Written on the construction paper was the legend Petitions for St. Joseph. Some blank slips of paper lay beside the box. Rickey grabbed a slip, unclipped a pen from his jacket, and wrote, “Dear St. Joseph, I am not Catholic, if you really care about that. But I bet a lot of Catholic people will like our restaurant. So please let it do great. Thanks.”

  He wasn’t sure whether or not to sign the petition. After a moment of thought, he folded it in quarters and stuffed it through the slit in the top of the shoebox. Surely the saint would know who’d written it, if he was any good at his job.

  chapter 14

  What’s that smell?” said G-man. “I thought I was coming into my kitchen, but all of a sudden I’m in Pirate’s Alley at 4 a.m.”

  “I’m testing a recipe,” Rickey said. “Veal kidneys à la liégeoise.”

  “Why?”

  “Elizabeth David says it’s wonderful.” Rickey held up a book called An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. “She’s got a whole chapter about cooking with liquor.”

  “I think Elizabeth David is fucking with you.”

  “It’s gonna be good.”

  “It’s gonna be disgusting.”

  “Why? Be open-minded. Be open-tastebudded. Why is it disgusting?”

  “Because it smells like pee!”

  “Well, yeah,” Rickey admitted. “But maybe it’ll taste better than it smells.” He covered the large sauté pan that contained the simmering kidneys, poured a generous measure of gin into a skillet, and tilted the skillet until the gas flame licked at its contents. Blue flames sprang from the surface of the gin. Rickey let it burn for a few seconds, then removed the skillet from the heat, took the lid off the kidneys, and clapped it over the gin to extinguish the fire. He crushed something with his marble mortar and pestle—juniper berries, G-man guessed—and added it to the kidneys, then uncovered the gin and poured it into the sauté pan.

  “Now it smells like a drunk who pissed himself,” said G-man.

  “Well, we ought to get used to that—we’re probably gonna have a few in our restrooms.”

  Without asking G-man if he wanted any, Rickey spooned the kidneys onto two plates. The organs had already been cleaned and sliced, and the pattern inside them reminded G-man of a cross between the spores of a mushroom and the sections of an orange. “You know,” he said, “I really don’t want to eat this.”

  “A good cook is a fearless cook.” Rickey put the plates on the table. “Besides, I need your opinion.”

  “Why? We’re never gonna serve this at Liquor. People in New Orleans won’t eat kidneys.”

  “Why they got ’em at the store, then?”

  “Probably they been sitting in the meat case for about a million years. I bet you’re the only person who eve
r bought any.”

  Instead of answering, Rickey picked up his fork, speared a slice of kidney, and put it in his mouth. G-man watched him chew and swallow. “That’s actually real good,” he said. “I guess the pee makes it tangy.”

  “That does it. I’m having a bowl of cereal.”

  “No, dude, just try a bite. Please?”

  Rickey made pleading eyes, big, blue, and innocent. G-man sighed and cut off a tiny edge of a slice. He pushed it around in the sauce, coating it as thickly as possible, then ate it.

  “Well?”

  “It’s even more horrible than I thought it would be.”

  “Aw, you just don’t have any sense of adventure. Gimme your plate. I like it.”

  G-man sat at the table and watched Rickey eat both plates of kidneys. At first he thought Rickey was just showing off, but Rickey wasn’t one to finish two plates of food he didn’t care for. “What do you like about it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The kidneys and the gin both have a kinda astringent taste, and the butter’s sweet. What do you hate about it?”

  “Everything.”

  “No, c’mon. Describe it.”

  “It tastes like a piece of liver marinated in a urinal.”

  The doorbell rang, and G-man went to answer it, glad to escape the smell in the kitchen. Lenny was on the porch. “You just missed the veal kidneys in gin,” said G-man.

  “Too bad. I love kidneys.”

  “You people are perverts.”

  “Listen,” said Lenny, “I’m sorry I didn’t call, but I was on my way uptown and I thought I’d see if you guys were free for dinner tonight. We need to start talking about the renovations.”

  “Don’t you ever have to work?”

  “Actually, I closed the kitchen at Crescent for the past four nights if you want to get persnickety about it. So—dinner?”