by Mike Wehner
“Hey man, is she always this nice?”
“When we’re closed,” he lowered his eyes at me.
“I figured.”
I unreeled my knives on the closest table and looked back to Miguel for approval. He didn’t give a fuck about my steel, he was snap cleaning bass with a broken putty knife better than I’d ever be able to with the best vanadium steel razor blade.
Make her a memory she said. One day she’d taste all the bad inside me but today I dug around my head for something good for Erin to eat. I was half expecting her to ask for something sexy—in my experience that is what food was about. In my four days cooking for the Pork Slut she must have asked for it to be more sexy a hundred times. How literal was that tattoo? Did she eat a fat chop and sleep with the first guy who made eye contact at the bar or did she need bacon fat to be rubbed on her lady bits to get turned on? If pork got in there it would wreak havoc. The pork slut with toxic shock syndrome, now that’s a food show I would watch.
I don’t know why foodies my age continued to apply the sexy moniker to savory dishes. The whipped cream manufacturer, I get their innuendo. At least if you go down that road your crotch only gets sticky, not rotten.
I thought a long while what to serve her. Erin was accomplished and educated, she’d spot any weakness in my technique if I presented her a refined plate. Taste was always most important to me, but paying customers care about plating and knife work.
I had to cook something so simple it appeared audacious yet impossible for me to screw up. She mentioned Irish heritage during the interview and looked half the part with that almost auburn hair and a possible freckle or two. I wanted to use a russet potato because I hoped some percentage of her genetics wired tubers to the happy part of her head. A perfect potato salad was what I would serve, kartofflesalat to high Germans, grundberresalat to my hillbilly family. Ground berries, that’s what my ancestors called them—no wonder I turned out this way. Four ingredients: a russet potato, white vinegar, cured pork and a yellow onion.
I dug through the vegetable bins to find the perfect potato and washed it well because Erin didn’t need any more grit. The rest of the ingredients were prepped while the chunks of starch boiled. There was an aged white vinegar that tasted pretty good from the bottle, which meant like a mouthful of nickels. Every other vinegar tastes great by itself, some of the aged balsamics are so sweet you can put them on ice cream.
My grandmother used a plastic jug of ninety-nine cent vinegar for potato salad. She kept it under the sink because she used it to clean her collection of brass seals more often than to cook. Her potato salad was amazing, but there was a giant tin of MSG emblazoned with a golden dragon hidden above the stove that I’d caught her digging in one Thanksgiving.
I diced the onion in an even row of decent chops. It wasn’t perfect technique but I was getting better at the fundamentals. My knife holder was fanned in front of me, I ran my fingers down the row of handles like piano keys and stopped at the small, hook-nose paring knife. I slid it into my front pocket with onion-sweat fingers.
In the cooler there was both slab and jowl bacon. I squeezed and sniffed them, both had a rich, smoky aroma but the slab looked really lean so I lopped off chunks of both, diced them up and threw them into a hot pan with a bit of avocado oil to get them crackling.
Potato salad isn’t a recipe so much as it’s a method. Blend these ingredients until it tastes right, measuring verboten. Too sour? Add more bacon fat and potatoes. Bland? Add salt and bacon. Not enough bacon? Add more bacon. Enough bacon? Add more bacon.
I got all of it together in a ribbed white ramekin and let the raw onion mellow in the vinegar while the bacon fat cooled and emulsified into a paste with the starch from the potatoes. I fingered the flat top of the blade in my pocket as I waited for the mixture to be ten seconds from perfect.
The tiny bowl was enough for two or three bites. I rushed it down to Erin remembering to skip the rotten stair.
“Here you go, a perfect potato salad. This is the real deal, like Oma taught me.”
“That whole kitchen and you give me a potato?”
She looked up from her computer where everything had been put back into disarray.
“It better be amazing.”
Erin held the ramekin out with both hands like it was the cup of Christ and then sucked up the aroma with her eyes closed. She looked demonic when she peered back at me through the wavering steam, the heat seeming to radiate from her skin and not the bowl.
Erin’s plain warning started me digging at my pocket, she liked my nerve and now I wanted to see hers. Not because of what she was, but because of what she wasn’t. I didn’t have her full reaction but if I got a sense of displeasure I was going to take the sharp little bird from my pocket and dig it around the bottom of her throat, right where the committed smokers get the trach ring. I’ll deflate her voice so fast that fishmonger Miguel won’t hear a peep when I go to work. I’ll dig my fingers around in the hole while the tendons in her neck strain together like the gums of a calf searching for mother’s milk. In full mount I’ll demand to know what really happened that night and as she struggles to learn to breathe again I’ll cover the hole with my left hand so she can huff out muffled responses. When I run out of questions or she runs out of answers I’ll gut her with my right.
“This is what food should be, simple and delicious,” she turned her phase with a darted glance. Erin shooed me from the office while the validation stirred me into a vortex.
“I love it, thanks for coming in. I am seeing a few more people today but I’ll be sure and let you know the moment I make a decision. You did good, the food fits,” she said and left me at the front door with my hand in my pocket, flicking dirt from under my thumbnail with the tip of the knife.
I wanted to scream and grin, go fetal, then do seventy-two burpees. My abs tensed and my face became stuck in a loop of varied, near-expressions. I’d been in a deep hole for so long, walking and talking but ever thinking about making the dead. The only good those last three years, the only light I’d seen had been from the shade. This was a small moment of sunshine, catching the rays between skating white clouds far off in the distance as they amble towards you and steal the light again.
Five
The sun blinded me when I walked out of Essen but I didn’t bother to try and shield my eyes. Being in the light wasn’t something I was used to so I didn’t know how to react. In the car the paring knife ripped through my pocket when I sat and poked me in the belly. The slash turned the world into a silent film and I dug around my torso searching for holes.
Car running, nowhere to run. I fiddled with the radio buttons, settling on “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
This madness needed a method. I could have paid a vagrant to drag Erin into the alley after a late night at the restaurant and stab her or rape her or rape her and kill her and stab her but that’s not what I wanted. Vengeance, sure, but filed and notarized. Death was too light a penalty, I’d feel better once she suffered and I knew she deserved it.
I thought that once I got to her the sundering would be easy so I didn’t bother to plan it. This wasn’t in my character, I always planned everything. My digital calendars were synced across all my devices. It was Friday and the blue block in my phone’s appointment book that said Interview had just passed, what followed was blank white space. Every time I tried to schedule my life post-interview I was overcome by the vastness of every possible tragedy—for both of us.
Follow your instincts.
You’ll know what to do.
Nobody told you to hold your breath when you were baptized.
I was wrong and I knew it the moment the sun hit my face, the moment the hooked knife pecked my stomach, when my hands jiggled on and off the scorch of the steering wheel. I knew it yesterday and now and tomorrow. What lay ahead was going to be hardest, coaxing out my inner fiend.
The comics I read growing up made vengeance look fun. The alien-man hero swooped down on to
p of the bridge, wagged a one liner from his brick chin about the value of humanity and then melted the evil genius with his laser-death eyes. I’d cheer from my bed sheeted with his super-face while the bad guy screamed.
They weren’t superheroes, they were serial killers.
My hands shook on and off the flaming wheel, palms thumping like a dog trying to find an itch with his back foot. Do I know she’s guilty? I hear John’s voice in my head telling me how dangerous my certainties are. How I am getting too old to be so certain about everything.
While I turned the radio up to drown out my thoughts the historian in my head was reading my updated biography. I’ve abandoned my career, squandered my savings and alienated everyone important to me to get here and now I have no idea where to go. I ruined my life to ruin another. My head was on the wheel and I was fighting for air. Breathe. The monster’s hand was like my hand was like your hand. Breathe. Messy, unprofessional, but human. Breathe, I told myself.
The heat inside the car forced me out onto the sidewalk and I blazed down a path towards the water to cool off. I was looking for something, I don’t know what. A plan, a place to think, a beer maybe. After a few blocks the houses and businesses morphed back into the stereotypical California character I’d come to enjoy. There were pastel bungalows with white gates and student rentals with faded thrift shop couches on the porch and empty wine bottles in the yard. My head got lighter as the stench from the bay got stronger.
There was a small park by the water filled with filthy, dreadlocked teens and their rucksacks. Packs of these latchkeys roved the coastline all way up to the Redwoods. They were a homogeneous group of dirt-smudged kids who differentiated themselves with different colored bandannas and mutts. I didn’t understand their plight. They chose to be homeless. Where I came from homelessness wasn’t a choice, it was an affliction. Real homeless people are hidden down ominous alleyways near open dumpsters, their hands are covered in shit and they argue alone in the dark. Those honest homeless are hardest to coin because they don’t have a cup for change, they ate it to stay alive.
A small bookstore was across from the park and I went in to look around. It was a craftsman-style house that sat under a low-pitched roof whose chimney was missing several stones. The pillars on the patio were boxcar red and all sorts of fliers and advertisements were stapled to them. A punk rock show from last week. A liberal judge asking for a vote. Free kittens.
Inside the house-turned-shop were sections for books new and used, in the bedroom to the left according to the chalkboard sign. I went to the stationary section and a small, white-haired man in a T-shirt sporting a hideous purplish painting of a zombie asked me if I needed help. I liked art and had seen that painting, it lived in Chicago like me but I couldn’t remember the name.
“I am looking for a notebook, but I want something special,” I said.
“A notebook for something more than notes, how on the note-se,” he said touching his nose and thinking he was clever. “This is what you need young man, it can be carried through many adventures.”
He handed me a beaten leather journal. The pages inside were tacky and new but the outside looked like it was made from roadkill. It smelled like a hard day’s work.
“You know,” he said, “I went to high school with the leather worker. All the leather is from found objects, sometimes in the trash.” He pointed half his face at me and raised his brow for approval.
Local leather. Great. Everything had to be local. You’ve got to support local garbage picking. This journal was worth sixty bucks because the guy who made it was less than ten miles away. I bought it anyway, even though I didn’t like his hokey, buzzword mentality.
Back outside I settled in on the farthest park bench from the dirty squadron of kids and got to work. I started writing but scratched it out, my penmanship suggested idiocy or mild retardation.
I only had a vague recollection of the world without computers, a more difficult time to get places and talk to each other. A time when you had to talk to each other about getting places. The air of mystery must have made the world more exciting. The days when men were men because there were no videos of them at sixteen, getting hit in the nuts with a whiffle-ball bat on a lost bet. I wondered what my friends would think if they knew I was sitting beneath a tree, pen in hand, trying to plot the destruction of another.
If I lost control and they caught me I’d blame TV, or video games. Or some combination of devices with digital displays. All those little arrays of colored boxes I was looking at made me blind to morality, obscured in high definition.
Premeditated murder wasn’t a setting I could switch off. I asked grief counselor Tim if planning Erin’s death in my head was a phase, a limp I could walk off with time and professional assistance. Tim told me to write it all down and I wished I’d listened because I could use the notes. All I remembered were years of hurt and rage, no thoughts, only a lingering seethe in the back of my head. I kept notebooks around the house but they all ended up becoming food journals. A paragraph of pain followed by ten pages of techniques to drill or equipment to research. Random words I didn’t understand filled the margins. Confit. Sous Vide. All the energy I put into cooking was really a fancy form of procrastination. Now that I saw her I felt moved to try and finish what I’d started.
Erin was living her dream on blood money, blood I can’t seem to get out of my head or the carpet when my eyes find some. I should slow down. No more knives in the pocket. Research, calculate, execute—that’s how things got done. Slow down, take her bite by bite, savor this opportunity. The head should be eaten last. That was assuming I got the job, if not I needed an alternate route. I began writing.
Plan B: If I don’t get the job I’ll book a flight out of this mild-weathered nightmare and stop off to stab her in the heart on the way to the airport.
Under the sun, way out west, I wrote that line and then knotted the leather strings together. The time for hurt was up for the day and I had to go on living my life. I stretched my legs out and clasped my hands behind my head as the gulls squawked on the nearby railing.
My phone buzzed, Charlie sent me a video from work. His raspy voice repeated, “ma’am, ma’am,” from behind the phone which was pointed at a thick-hipped woman who was trying to pet a roadside elk. The noble beast bowed its head to greet her and then flung her ten feet with a rocket jerk. Charlie fought back laughter as he ran over asking if she was alright. “Ma’am? ma’am?” his voice pitched up a step with each repetition of the word. I watched it six times, laughing harder each time and drawing more stares from the dirty kids who wished they had cell phones. Losing John meant losing Charlie too, the replacement. I couldn’t tell him what I was doing, he’d want to help.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a start. If I got the job it might be fun to piss in the soup. Besides, she was happy, I couldn’t have that. A humane hunter shoots the deer bounding merrily through the reeds. I’ll put terror in her heart before a bullet. My hair was long enough to get windswept and I almost fit in, no reason to waste that. I’ll bum around the coastline on my days off, eating street meats from food trucks and watching my dog get frustrated as he tries to bite the waves.
There’s no hurry, I didn’t have to kill her today. I could do it a little at a time; kill the things she loved. Unless she had a cat, I wasn’t a fucking psychopath.
The restaurant would be an easy kill. Things in the digital age live forever. People don’t want to try new things, they want to try things that other people like. A bad review, an unfortunate happening in the local news. It wouldn’t take much to keep people away, empty is a type of dead.
Couldn’t do that first, not if I got the job. Once the restaurant died it would be hard to stay in her life. But if I don’t get the job, I could spend my time killing it, rather than Erin. Take it slow, enjoy that sunshine. I was confusing myself, so I got some amazing fish tacos and drank until I passed out.
Grief Journal
DAY 8
&
nbsp; Now that John was dead I needed a replacement friend, not someone to commiserate with but someone to be on my team and take my side even if it didn’t make any sense. Guys pretend to love their friends equally—the truth is that I don’t even like some of my friends. The dull lights in my best friend constellation are necessary, corporations need janitors. Except Jason, he’s a moron.
Charlie and Hank met me at the hotel when they got to Richmond, my room looked down on Capital Square. It’s a city that works so hard to remind you of the past that it doesn’t look like it has a future. Colonial river cities are cockeyed and tough to navigate. A grid of modern co-work spaces and coffee shops are retrofit on top of horse paths, a few stubborn, crooked streets meander through the graph to confuse everyone who visits.
The three of us went for dinner at Alt Bar down one of those gnarled chutes the night before John’s funeral. I’m sure the guys who weren’t invited were jealous. Funerals create a strange culture where the ancillary mourners jockey for positions next to the truly bereaved. I picked the restaurant based on their website which told me they served steak and had a cavernous dining room. When guys go out with other guys it isn’t about mouth pleasure, it’s about atmosphere. Women want to feel secluded when they eat, men want to feel important.
The hip food, the flash food was being made around the corner at 5155 where Erin was chef. It was hailed as a gastronomic revolution and a sick part of me wanted to taste her ideas as a way to try and put some of her mind in my mouth and understand why she’d taken my friend. At that point Erin was being held at the county jail without bail. I remember calling 5155 to make a reservation and I figured I’d play dumb if I was found out. What made me hang up the phone was thinking about the way Hank and Charlie would react if Erin’s name was printed somewhere inside.
