A Cast of Killers

by Gallagher Gray

  "About time you showed up," she growled through the bars. "Where's the other volunteer?"

  She was obviously taking charm lessons from Auntie Lil. "I'm not the regular volunteer," T.S. explained faintly. "My Aunt Lil dragged me down here at the last minute to help out."

  "I'm not surprised. Your aunt appears capable of anything." The woman primly unlocked the gate and the crowd moved back obediently, their eyes following T.S. inside. "She's quite the organizer," she added nastily, leaving no doubt that it was the kindest description of Auntie Lil that she could possibly dredge up.

  T.S. followed her through a narrow concrete tunnel into a low basement room reminiscent of the barren cafeteria of a poor school on the wrong side of town. The room stretched out with a dreary sameness: a too low ceiling, harsh fluorescent lighting, scuffed linoleum of a vague brownish tint, rows of long, collapsible tables lined with bright aqua plastic chairs that cracked and sagged and were studded with worn black spots.

  Dusty plastic flowers in empty glass jars adorned the center of every table. A handful of earnest young people were quickly setting out cutlery and paper napkins. He had entered a time warp. Both male volunteers had long, frizzy ponytails held back with rubber bands and were wearing tie-dyed T-shirts with faded jeans. The two women wore their long, straight hair parted in the middle in a style not popular since the 1960s. Their long flowered dresses were equally out of date. And, T.S. acknowledged sadly, their concern for the hungry was considered just as old-fashioned by many.

  Steam and chatter beckoned him around a far corner where he discovered just how apt the name "Hell's Kitchen" could be. Behind a low counter lined with cafeteria-style rails, Auntie Lil bent over two enormous pots that billowed forth steam above a huge, industrial metal stove. Another woman sniffed at the strange-smelling brew with her. Just then, the grumpy woman who had let T.S. in the gate, elbowed both women aside without apology and withdrew several large pans of corn bread from the oven. It was a domesticated version of the witches' scene from Macbeth, made even more bizarre by the imposing figure of a priest who hovered at Auntie Lil's elbow, peering over her shoulder.

  Unseen, T.S. advanced to a few feet of the group and watched with familiar amusement. Auntie Lil was making a major production of tasting the bubbling stew, he knew, and the supporting players had taken the stage.

  At eighty-four years old, Auntie Lil had the energy and physical presence of a woman thirty years younger. She had never been slim but neither had she ever been fat. Sturdy was the best way to describe her. She was of German stock, as her strong chin, rounded face and large apple cheeks clearly implied. Her bone structure made heavy wrinkling nearly impossible, but her skin, while pink and glowing with good health, was crisscrossed with fine lines over its rosy surface. Her eyes were clear and a steely blue. They did not twinkle with old lady amusement as some people thought at first, but sparkled instead with a stubborn inner fire (as everyone soon discovered). Her mind was sharp and her physical abilities still impressive. After more than sixty years of working in the fashion industry, Auntie Lil had acquired an innate nimbleness and confidence of movement that defied old age. She believed in acting first and thinking later. Her hands were large and rawboned, yet still skillful enough to thread a needle on her very first try.

  Although Auntie Lil had devised patterns for the world's most expensive dresses, she preferred pants suits above all other forms of attire. Today, she was dressed in bright red knit trousers and a matching tunic. She had wrapped a multicolored jungle print scarf around her thick, white hair. After many years of wearing it long, her hair had recently been cut and it escaped from under the scarf in wiry curls to bounce in wild disarray. Brightly painted, carved wooden fish earrings dangled from each ear and her feet were encased in thick white socks and Moroccan leather sandals. As usual, she was a walking United Nations, splashed with enough bright colors to discourage the entire research team of the Eastman Kodak Corporation.

  "More chili powder?" the robust priest asked Auntie Lil earnestly. An abundant crop of silver hair curled about his massive head in leonine splendor. His features were strong and authoritative, lacking any hint of meekness or piety, and he was very tall. He was also built like an aging linebacker. His stomach strained out against his priestly garb below a massive bulldog-like chest. He looked like he should have been quaffing quarts of brew in an Irish pub, instead of supervising little old ladies in a New York City soup kitchen. He was a veritable giant of a priest and, T.S. admitted to himself, a good choice for coping with the sometimes physically dangerous demands of running a church in the inner city.

  "Perhaps just a touch more chili?" the priest meekly suggested again, when no one bothered to answer him.

  Auntie Lil shook her head firmly and raised one arm in an imperious command for silence. She rolled the stew about her tongue and lifted her eyes toward heaven as if seeking divine guidance.

  "A touch of cumin?" the priest tried desperately. "Or a little curry, perhaps?"

  "Are you insane?" Auntie Lil asked calmly. He was but a mere speck of humanity, her tone implied, attempting to interfere with the divine creation of great cuisine.

  "Ah ha!" Auntie Lil smacked the enormous spoon on the stove's metal surface with a bang. Her assistants jumped back in surprise and everyone in the room turned to stare. "More onion!" she declared with celestial inspiration, one finger pointed at the ceiling.

  The priest nodded his head in solemn agreement, but the grumpy matron cutting corn bread scowled furiously before banging her knife on the counter with great irritation and pulling several large onions out of a drawer. She plunked them angrily on a cutting surface and began to chop with the homicidal vigor of an ax murderer. T.S. knew at once that she had been the Queen Bee of the kitchen before Auntie Lil had arrived. No wonder she had hated him on sight.

  The priest noticed the woman's distress. "Thank you, Fran. As always, you're such a help," he murmured, patting her shoulder with the kind of cautious enthusiasm you'd reserve for an unknown Doberman Pinscher. But the priest's automatic praise was more than enough for grumpy Fran. She turned her face up at the priest and beamed a radiant smile back at him, eyes filled with adoration. Her happy expression transformed her broad face into one that held hints of a former, perhaps even startling, beauty. The priest beamed back at her while the rest of the kitchen staff clanged past without taking any notice.

  "Don't just stand there, Theodore," Auntie Lil suddenly commanded T.S. from across the room. "Help me with this chili."

  "Nice to see you, too. Aunt Lil," he replied, giving her leathery cheek an affectionate peck. "Don't tell me that Father Whoever is foolish enough to have actually turned you loose in the kitchen? Haven't those poor people outside suffered enough?"

  She handed him a potholder. "I'll have you know that this a secret chili recipe brought back to me by a genuine cowboy from Santa Fe in the thirties."

  "That's good. All those cowboys waiting outside are going to really love it."

  She ignored him. She was good at that. "Father Whoever is Father Stebbins. If you're not going to go to church on a regular basis, at least show it some respect. Perhaps he'll put in a good word for you upstairs."

  T.S. tasted the chili and gasped for air. "He'd better make it quick. I think I'm going down." He grabbed his throat and staggered back against a sink already filled with an enormous pile of dirty dishes. Auntie Lil was incapable of entering a kitchen without leaving behind conditions that could qualify for federal disaster aid.

  "I suppose you think you're amusing." She handed him a glass of water and stared intently at the pot. "Perhaps I should cut it with a few more kidney beans."

  He shook his head vigorously. "Why bother? This could solve the mayor's homeless problem in a single afternoon."

  "Really, Theodore, I asked you down here to help, not gloat." Auntie Lil handed him another potholder and directed him to move one of the enormous pots to a back burner. He paused in his task to allow the ever-suffering Fran
to scrape in her load of massacred onions. Despite himself, his stomach started to rumble. It did smell good, in a kind of diabolic and dangerous way.

  Auntie Lil then ordered him to retrieve a huge container of cooked rice that was stored in a large walk-in freezer at the rear of the kitchen. "Mr. Chang donated it," she explained. "He's got a small takeout joint on the corner."

  That was Auntie Lil. Put her in a new neighborhood and she instantly picked up the local slang. T.S. expected her to start talking about a "fast score" at any moment.

  For nearly thirty minutes, she dogged him, sending him here and there in search of loaves of bread, pots of beans, more rice and a mountain of grated cheese. "You're looking well, Aunt Lil," T.S. told her when she finally allowed him to stop for breath. "All this ordering me around certainly seems to agree with you."

  "Of course I'm looking well. I keep active. You don't see me wasting any of my time in front of a television set." She marched across the room and corrected the placement of forks on a nearby table while the other volunteers watched in amusement.

  The hungry hordes did not stampede in. They shuffled in slowly, almost shyly, the obvious regulars taking the time to show newcomers where to go. The line snaked obediently toward the cafeteria railing while the volunteers took their places behind the counter with practiced competence. T.S. wandered past them, searching for Auntie Lil but, as usual, she managed to outflank him. She gripped his elbow and steered him to a spot behind a huge pot of chili, abandoning him before he could protest. Naturally, it was the hottest spot in the room and it both smelled and felt like his imagined version of the darkest depths of Hell. The odor of fiery chili peppers tickled his nose and made his eyes water as he stepped into place. Fragrant steam instantly assaulted him, fogging up the reading glasses he wore. The very last thing he saw before his temporary blindness was Auntie Lil taking a place at the front of the line.

  How typical. While he sweated in Hell, he could listen to her greeting each person as if this were an afternoon tea party and she were the proud hostess. He wiped his glasses with the edge of a potholder and they instantly steamed up again. Only this time—unnoticed by T.S.—a lone kidney bean clung to the exact center of his right lens like a dark and deformed eyeball.

  "How nice of you to come today," he heard Auntie Lil tell an unseen person. "Please feel free to eat well. We have plenty." There was a murmuring and she began again with someone new, demonstrating that she had the unerring instincts of a successful dictator—stick to the public relations and let the others do the dirty work.

  T.S. could feel his hair begin to curl from the dampness and his stomach took a peculiar dip in response to the spicy aroma. He kept waiting for his glasses to clear but the chili seemed to have taken on a life of its own, spewing up steamy cloud after cloud like an angry volcano about to erupt.

  "Excuse me, sir, but I am hungry. Do I get to eat or do I simply stand here and smell it?" The new voice was seductively female, full of hidden meaning and ringing with inflection. The enunciation was perfect. Clearly, it was a voice trained for the theater.

  T.S. picked the useless glasses from his face, sending the kidney bean flying onto his shoe. He kicked it off with as much dignity as he could muster and folded the glasses into his back pocket, assuring himself that he did not really need them. At least not much. In fact, he'd been hoping to keep their recent existence a secret from Aunt Lil anyway (who hid her own behind a cushion on her couch).

  His vision cleared. He had expected a young woman, perhaps a beautiful actress down on her luck. He found a frail old lady instead. She was so thin and pale that she gave the impression of being translucent, at first. Blue veins glowed behind parchment-like skin and only her face seemed to be successfully holding back the pulsating emergence of inner organs and blood vessels. And this was only because she wore what looked to be a full pound of makeup, expertly applied but in far too heavy proportions for the daytime. Not to mention the current decade. Her eyebrows had been plucked and were heavily outlined into startling dark thin arches. Her lips were drawn too wide for her frail face and were filled in with a deep scarlet that made her mouth look more like a wound than a feature. Dark eyeliner outlined both the upper and lower lids of small black eyes, and her rouge was applied in tiny crab apples on either side of a patrician nose.

  He blinked. She was a vision from a 1940s movie, with the barely contained, too desperate animation of a background extra hoping to catch the audience's eye. Even her seemingly calm waiting was imbued with an overly dramatic patience.

  "They each get a ladleful for starters," the young woman serving rice beside him said helpfully. She was holding out a plate of rice and he took it automatically, plopping chili on top before handing it, in turn, to the waiting woman.

  "Thank you" the old lady murmured. "So sorry to have disturbed you." She took her plate and sailed regally down the line toward the basket of corn bread, leaving T.S. to wonder just what her hidden meaning might have been. Sarcasm, he suspected.

  "That's Adelle," the rice volunteer informed T.S. "She's sort of the head of the regulars here."

  She was also the hungriest, T.S. decided, when he spotted her for what must have been the fourth time in the line. How could she be eating all that chili? My God, the thought was frightening. Until he realized he wasn't seeing Adelle again at all—he was seeing different versions of Adelle. There was an entire team of old ladies, it seemed, who wore heavy, stagelike makeup and dresses that had not been fashionable since the days of Eisenhower. They all spoke in cultured, trained voices and held themselves as tragically erect as queens on their way to the gallows. What in the world was going on?

  Two such women stood in line staring at T.S. with blatant curiosity. They looked like seductive grandmothers dressed to kill for a social occasion scheduled many decades ago.

  "He looks a bit like John Barrymore in My Dear Children, don't you think?" the first one asked her companion.

  The companion snorted skeptically and surveyed T.S. "You think everyone looks like John Barrymore," she finally said. "It's time you got over that little fling, my dear."

  "But he does look like him," the first woman replied stubbornly. "Look at that chin."

  The companion was still clearly unconvinced. "Let's hope he knows his role a little bit better than our dear Mr. Barrymore," she said archly.

  "How dare you say that?" The first woman turned to her friend, blocking all traffic and apparently not giving a hoot. "He was charming in that show. Marvelous, in fact."

  "Marvelous?" The second old woman shook her head firmly and looked behind her at a grime-coated bag lady for support, receiving a crazed glare in reply. "The man didn't even know his lines," she finally countered. "Only God knew what was going to come out of his mouth each night. He thought he was in a different play every night of the week."

  "I am not one of the Barrymores," T.S. interrupted firmly, before the argument escalated into hair pulling. "And my role is to serve you lunch." He plopped the chili on their plates and they took his hint with ill-disguised irritation at being rushed in such an unseemly manner.

  "You're right," the first old lady sniffed to her friend. "He hasn't got John's dash at all." They moved primly down the line.

  T.S. didn't have much time to ponder the insult. Too many people were waiting to eat. He soon got the hang of ladling out chili and, although a few people mentioned that it certainly smelled spicy, there was no one who complained about either its taste or its peculiar dark brown texture. He was just getting into the swing of things—accept plate, plop on chili, turn quickly, hand it over—when his rhythm was interrupted.

  "That's Franklin," the rice volunteer told him, pointing out the next person in line. "He gets two big scoops of chili. He needs it."

  Franklin certainly did. He was an enormous black man. Not enormous as in big for a human being, but enormous as in big for a bear. He was well over six feet tall, broad faced and broad shouldered, with deep brown skin that exactly matched
the mysterious tint of Auntie Lil's chili. He was dressed in overalls that seemed at least as large as a double-bed quilt and he wore a baseball hat turned backwards over a crop of gray-peppered hair. His hands were massive and the size and texture of baseball gloves, but he waited patiently as T.S. piled on the chili, accepting the plate with shy politeness.

  "Thank you, sir," he said, nodding his head before rumbling on down the line. The use of "sir," not to mention its second syllable, confirmed Franklin's Southern upbringing. What was he doing in New York City? If not for his size, he'd be eaten alive.

  The hungry faces soon stretched back into one long blur of worried brows, tightly knit mouths and murmured automatic thanks. Just as T.S. was scraping the bottom of the vat of chili, Father Stebbins appeared toting another one. T.S. was assaulted by a fresh explosion of steam and received, much to his amusement, one of Father Stebbins' paternal pats on the back.

  "You're doing fine, son. Bless you for helping. God loves a cheerful giver," the priest murmured before moving on to other, more important tasks.

  Meanwhile, Auntie Lil was still there at the juncture of the line, handing out trays and welcoming all to what she implied was some sort of marvelously exclusive street soiree. T.S. had to admit she was good at it, she didn't miss a beat. Not even when it came to grasping those hands that were coated with a thick, oily paste of city grime, accumulated through months—and maybe even years—of not bathing. The befuddled and mentally ill bearers of those hands clearly were in no shape to take care of themselves. And yet they wandered the streets. T.S. wondered how they survived.

  At last, the final hungry person had been served, and several reserved with what remained. Auntie Lil wandered over to help T.S. dish out the final portions.

  "I think my chili was a rousing success, don't you?" she asked T.S. proudly, as usual not shy about fishing for compliments.

  "You've found the perfect audience for your culinary talents," T.S. admitted. "Starving, hungry people who haven't had enough to eat to know any better."