by Chris Lynch
She was describing an exact dream I had had over and over.
“You told,” Alex said as he walked through the door again with two bowls in his hands.
“I didn’t tell anything,” she said.
“I hope you didn’t spoil it.” He plunked the bowls in front of Ma and Frankie, then came back with two more, plunked one down in front of Mikie’s place, and then his own. Everybody was served but me, even the guy who wasn’t here yet.
Then he came in with mine, setting down a heaving, hissing bowl of the most intense soup I had ever sat in front of.
“Dig in, everyone,” Alex said. “It’s a little thrown together, I’m afraid, a little rushed. But it’s based on callaloo soup, something I found during my time living in Jamaica. I hope you like it.”
“You lived in Jamaica?” Ma asked.
Alex just nodded, then scooped a big load of soup into his mouth, watching to see that everyone did likewise.
And it was incredible. The soup seemed to have a thousand flavors going at once. There was some crab in there, some haddock, big chunks of chicken and little ones of bacon. I recognized my old pal garlic there, and his buddy onion. And then it all became murky. I couldn’t tell what more was going on because I couldn’t slow down enough to work it out, but much more was going on.
The crowd was unanimous about the soup. Everybody slurped and made those moaning, semiword sounds as they thanked and praised the chef without insulting him by slowing down.
Until I did. There were big glasses of water in front of each of us, and a pitcher in the middle of the table, and good thing, too, because as I passed the halfway mark of my bowl, there was a cumulative effect coming on. It was getting hot.
Quite hot.
I put down my soup spoon and took up my glass. Drank half the water down, cooling the heat. I put down my glass, surveyed the crowd to find everyone eating comfortably, then picked up my own spoon again.
Then put it down again.
I finished my glass of water, poured another, then drank half of that.
“Are you all right, Elvin?” Ma asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Kind of hot. Fine, though.”
Alex laughed, like we were sharing a joke. “Oh ya, me and your dad, we always liked the hottest stuff. Especially your dad. I’d be on the floor crying from some chilies he found in Mexico on vacation, while he’d be chewing on them like they were gum and laughing like crazy. It was something, I wanna tell ya. I thought maybe you had the taste like the old man so, ya, yours and my soup’s maybe a little feistier than the rest. I could take it back, though, Elvin, because I am very sorry if it’s not what—”
“No,” I said, the last sips of water already evaporating with the heat. “No way, don’t you touch my soup. I love feisty. I can’t get enough feisty.”
“Really?” Ma said.
“Really?” Mikie said.
“What’s the big deal?” Frank asked, yet again surprising me by coming to my aid. “The guy’ll eat anything.” And still, I don’t know why I kept being surprised.
Regardless, I was going to finish my soup. It wasn’t that spicy anyway, the way really obvious foods burn your tongue right away. This was smoother, subtler, more sophisticated cuisine here, and I loved it. I could see why my dad would have loved it.
“Pass the water please.”
“Tell us about Jamaica, Alex?” Frank asked.
“Jamaica,” Alex said as he stood, after he’d tipped up his bowl and emptied the contents into his wide mouth, “is hot. Great food. Great spices, great music. It is true that the hotter the climate, the hotter the food, and the closer I have ever come to the equator, the more singed I got.” He went around collecting bowls. “As you will see in a minute, when you taste my jeweled rice from Iran, to go alongside my own concoction, Vietnamese chili-roast chicken-lamb burgers.”
“Oh my God,” I burped. I actually burped the words. I achieved something else with that sentence: I expressed two 100 percent contradictory feelings at once and completely meant them both. Oh my God, that sounded like fantastic food, and I was already opening extra salivary glands to handle the rush, and Oh my God, more spice when my own saliva was already beginning to burn me.
I was also last finishing my starter, and told Alex to take the other bowls while I finished.
“You sure?” he asked quietly, a look of concern on his face. “You don’t need to finish, Elvin. I won’t be insulted. You already ate most of it.”
“I’m sure,” I said gently, whisps of flame escaping through my nostrils.
He left and came back with plates stacked expertly on each arm like a pro waiter. He served all around to more gasps of appreciation.
As he circled around to my end of the table, I gasped as well, though it was a different sort of thing.
But I finished. In Alex’s own style—and probably my dead dad’s—I tipped up the bowl and emptied the hissing remains down my gullet with a flourish. As I handed over my bowl, I made a loud ahhh sound that could have been interpreted a number of ways.
“Well done,” Alex said with a big, beaming smile. “I guess you liked it. You might be your father’s boy after all.”
These are the moments. These are the moments that cause me trouble. I believe I have a fully functional if sometimes hi-de-hee kind of a mind, but really the times when I have caused myself the most problems have been the times when I let some small emotional stimulus enter the situation and cause my heart and my mouth to huddle together on a plan and leave my mind completely out of it.
“Oh, the soup was excellent,” I said. “But to tell the truth, I usually like my food spicy.”
I smiled up at my uncle as broadly as he smiled down at me. I don’t know what he thought, with my forehead and upper lip sweating away before him, but I wanted to slap all my teeth out.
“Weh-hell,” Alex said, shaking his head, “this train’s a-comin’ atcha, boy,” and he rushed excitedly toward the kitchen, but not before poking me in the stomach with his finger.
“I don’t know exactly what redemption is,” Frankie said as he pushed himself back from the table and patted his stomach, which still looked sickeningly flat to me, “but I vote for you to get it, just for the food.”
Alex rumbled out a hearty laugh, but looked down at his plate and picked at his pie with his fork.
“You don’t get a vote, Frank,” said Mikie. “But ya, Alex, your food is really great, man.”
“Thank you,” he said, still not looking up.
I took a sip of my tea. Chai tea. Even that was spicy. It went over my tongue like it was trying to claw its way back up as I swallowed. My shirt was soaked in sweat. My underwear was soaked in sweat. My socks were soaked in sweat. I was kind of sweaty. I had been to the bathroom three times already as my body processed about seventy-eight spices and seeds and colors it didn’t recognize. I ate a large meal and lost weight.
But I did it. I felt good. Well, not physically good. But good.
“Thank you, Alex, that was truly superb,” Ma said.
“Ah,” Alex said, waving his hand.
Mike and Frank got up to go. They said their thank you’s and see ya’s and all and made their way to the door, where I should have seen them out. I wasn’t really up to it, so fortunately Ma’s manners took over for me.
Anyway, I wanted to stay where I was.
We sat directly across from each other, at the opposite ends of the rectangular table. I stared at the top of his head while he stared at his plate.
“What if I decide I don’t want to give it to you? What you came for.”
He looked up. He smiled hard again, even though he appeared not to want to.
“Your father could be a real difficult piece of work too.”
I wished he would stop that. “Stop that. Maybe I’ll just say no. What then?”
“You know, Elvin, it’s a funny notion, redemption. I’m not even entirely sure you can say no to me. Even if you want to. Not sure if a person can
decide to give it or not give it. All I know is, I need it. And it involves you. So we’ll see how it goes.”
Alex and I just looked and looked at each other then. I was trying to see stuff, as much stuff as it was possible to see in a person from the other end of a table, but that was probably just stupid. He was looking into me, though, and I couldn’t help but feel he was doing the better job of it, getting more out of it. I thought for a second he might cry from the look of him, and I started sweating madly again after I had just cooled down.
“You are a very good cook,” I blurted just as I heard my mother shut the front door.
“Thank you,” he said. “I am sorry, Elvin. I’m gonna fix everything.”
“Everything’s not broken. Don’t bother.”
3 The Devil’s Haircut
LIKE MOST PEOPLE, I sweat buckets on the average day. But this sweat was something special. I woke up sweating. Five times. I changed my T-shirt three of them. Felt like I was sleeping on a slick sheet of plastic, which I probably should have done.
When I finally got up for good, I went to the mirror and saw a wreck. Not the wreck I usually found there either. This one was pasty faced and sunken eyed from under-sleep.
And worse, much worse. The hair. My God, the hair. It was as if my head was soaked overnight in a teriyaki marinade, then baked in a clay oven, the result being metallic, yet frayed at the same time like one of those World War II army helmets with the netting on top.
How did he do it? This was an evil genius like I had never encountered, and I had encountered most of them. Somehow my mad uncle had concocted spicy potion food that not only burned me top and tail, but miraculously turned my boring but normal hair into his own rusted ragtop overnight.
“No,” I said to my reflection, which stared back at me from the very spot where Frankie’s perfect mug had floated just a day earlier. “No, no. Do I not have enough handicaps already? Isn’t it just shooting fish in a barrel, to make me socially untouchable? Well then, come on, Lord, work me over; it is your day, after all... so do bring it on. Why not give me a couple extra legs, or maybe move my butt to my forehead.”
“I couldn’t help but hear...,” came the unwelcome voice from the other side of my door.
But of course.
“Oh, so you’re still around. I thought maybe your work was done here.”
“Nah. My work is just starting. And from the sound of the blaspheming I’m hearing from in there, it may take more than I’d imagined.”
Uh-oh.
“Could you repeat that please?”
“What, that my work was just beginning?”
“No. The other part.”
“About your Sunday morning blasphemy?”
“Mmm-hmm, that’s the one. Thanks.”
I decided to address this latest development in the great test that was Alex in the way I address most things.
I huddled silently in my bedroom, hoping he would just go away.
“Well, if you want to talk about it, I’ll be around,” said Alex after an impressive seven silent minutes.
But I did not want to talk about it, my blasphemy, or any other it. I didn’t want to even see Alex when I got out there, and now I was sentenced to seeing him anyway, in my own mirror.
I had thought about it through the night, through the sweating and changing, through the toilet visits, through the rolling around in bed looking for sleep, finding sleep, then wanting to lose it again because of the dreams. I had thought about my new life here, the one my uncle Alex hauled through the door just yesterday when he stepped back in out of the netherworld of his fake death.
It worried me, I had to say. It made me think about what I was happy enough not to think about for a long time. It was staring at me now, out of my own mirror, looking less like me than yesterday, looking more like my uncle, who looked much like my dead dead father.
It made me, as many things do, afraid. But unlike most of those things, the scary stuff Alex brought was possibly stuff that already had my name on it.
So did I have to take delivery?
“Ma, I’m going out,” I called loudly as I slid open my bedroom window.
“Elvin,” she called from downstairs. “Out where? What are you doing?” She sounded a bit worried, which she usually manages not to be despite my behavior.
I was a little worried myself. It wasn’t a huge way down, but my view from my bedroom window looking straight down to the patchy lawn below looked like a paratrooper’s training exercise. Not only had I not ever tried going out that window even in my devil-may-care younger days, I couldn’t ever remember opening the thing wide enough to accommodate my head in these devil-cares-very-much-indeed more mature years. I knew my abilities, and this amounted to a suicide attempt.
So I was forced to retreat and run the gauntlet of the stairs.
“What am I doing? What are you doing?” I insisted when I found Alex and my mother dressed up for something and ready to go out. On a Sunday, well before two P.M.
“We’re going to church,” my mother said.
When I was a kid I had this tic where when someone would say something to me that I found incomprehensible, I would repeat all their words in my head and make it all the more noticeable by moving my lips like a five-year-old ventriloquist with an imaginary dummy.
We’re going to church....
“What’s that he’s doing?” Alex asked my mother as if I couldn’t be spoken to directly.
“Stop that, Elvin,” she said. “And what is that you’ve done to your head?”
“I didn’t do anything to my head,” I said, feebly trying to cover the whole mess with one hand while pointing my accusation finger at the true culprit. “He did.”
“What did I do?” Alex asked, almost giggling.
“Elvin, for goodness’ sake,” Ma said, quite definitely giggling, “what could Alex have done to your hair?”
“I don’t know. But it had something to do with the food. My body has been acting very strangely....”
She giggled more.
“And then I woke up with hair... like his,” I said with the conviction of a big TV detective who had uncovered the murderer no one else could uncover because the crime was so insanely complicated and implausible.
“Why are the pretty ones always crazy?” Ma asked the air. Not for the first time.
But because she was a veteran of my stories and my style, she didn’t bother trying to work out my logic but did tip a glance toward Alex.
And she started giggling all the harder.
“My God, that’s what it is. It is the same hair.”
I thought she was having a very good time for somebody who was going to church. Alex smiled indulgently, but didn’t seem to be having quite as much fun. Me, I thought my mother was taking a very serious issue way too lightly.
“We kind of thought you might like to come along,” Alex said.
“I don’t usually...,” I said.
“So, neither do I,” Ma said. “But I thought it might be nice, for a change.”
“You know I don’t like change, Mother,” I said sternly enough to straighten her out, but not enough to frighten her.
“Oh God, no, not Elvin,” she burbled, warmly tugging at Alex’s sleeve. She was finding me irresistibly amusing with him here, like somebody who had been waiting ages to tell all her old jokes to somebody who hadn’t heard them yet. “He wouldn’t change his underwear if I didn’t make him.”
That was patently untrue.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” said Alex. “But change can be a very good thing, Elvin,” he added alarmingly.
“So,” I said in nonresponse, “you’re a Jesus guy then?”
Ma switched quickly from her airy voice to her growl-sigh. As a guy in a peanut butter helmet, what did I care?
“Sure,” Alex said confidently. “Jesus is a friend of mine.”
“And so you’re going to introduce your friend to my mother.”
“Alex,” Ma said,
tugging him toward the door, “you don’t have to hang around to be grilled by my impolite son. We’ll be late.”
“No, that’s okay. Elvin, you are a sharp, inquisitive boy. Healthily skeptical. I admire that no end. Like your father.”
I was still trying to figure out how I felt about that. I zip-banged in every direction whenever he said that about me and my father, but I could not for the life of me tell you whether it was a good or a bad feeling. Only that it was a big, fast, shake of a feeling.
“I like Jesus, and Jesus likes me; that’s a fact. It’s a relationship we both keep in perspective, though, if you know what I mean.”
Of course I did not know what he meant.
Ma opened the front door, blew me a kiss, and headed out. Alex pulled a tweed cap off the coatrack and mercifully covered his head. I stood there, making sure to look him in the eye because that seemed somehow important, even though I was still a little off balance about things.
A relationship we both keep in perspective, if you know what I mean.
He came back and patted me on the cheek. His hand was very warm. “That’s right, keep repeating it. You’ll work it out.”
“Keep repeating what?”
“We’ll talk later, okay?” he said. “Just you and me. About stuff. About everything. You can grill me all you want. And maybe I can grill you.” As he said the last bit, he did the thing, backing away and sticking me with one more poke in the belly.
“If you do that one more time...,” I growled.
Right, growled. I didn’t sound anything like myself. I kind of scared and impressed myself.
He grinned hard, and for the first time I noticed he was missing most of the teeth along the right side of his mouth.
Grilling Alex didn’t sound like a bad idea at all. Who was he, poking me in the belly all the time? I knew I was a little portly. But that was my issue. I didn’t need any reminders, and I didn’t need any help, either.
