Husk

by Dave Zeltserman

  When my work finished at four, I found a spot a block away from which I’d be able to watch for the cook leaving the restaurant. I knew that with $2,000 in his pocket, he’d be going straight home once he left work – that he’d be too afraid of somebody taking the money from him to do anything else. As long as he didn’t have a car, I’d be able to follow him wherever he went. If he had a car, I’d be out of luck, and I’d have to hope he’d been telling me the truth. I knew there was probably some truth in what he’d told me. His story about knowing someone who could get people like me the legal papers we needed was most likely true, since he was too dull-minded a cheater to come up with such a story himself out of the blue. So while I had little doubt he knew someone like that, I also had little doubt that he was planning to keep my money for his own purposes.

  A few minutes before five, a heavy, bald man entered the restaurant, and from his demeanor I guessed he was going there to work and not eat. I further guessed he was there to take over the cooking chores. My guess turned out to be correct, as a few minutes later the cook I was waiting for came out of the restaurant. He looked guarded and secretive as he turned and walked in the opposite direction from where I was standing. He didn’t notice me as I followed him to the subway station, nor as we rode on three different subway lines.

  When he got off the last train and exited a subway station in the Bronx, I continued to follow him. I made sure to keep nearly a full block’s distance behind, and he continued to appear oblivious to my presence. He stopped once to enter a liquor store, and when he left five minutes later he carried what must’ve been a celebratory bottle. After another three blocks, he appeared to arrive home as he trudged up the steps of a tenement building. I raced to catch the entrance door before it closed and locked, which I was able to do with half a second to spare.

  The building had four floors, and it had both an elevator and a staircase. I guessed the cook had taken the elevator, so I took the stairs, and I caught a glimpse of him as he came out of the elevator on the third floor. He walked in my direction but didn’t see me during the brief moment when I poked my head out of the stairwell, nor when I hid in it and listened for a door being unlocked and then opened. Once I heard that sound I waited a second, and was able to see him as he closed his apartment door behind him.

  I walked over to it, and noted the apartment number. After I left the building, I checked the list of residents by the security buzzer, which provided me with the name of the cook.

  Now that I possessed my own secret for satisfying the cravings, it seemed pointless to continue searching East Flatbush for the thick-jawed man, who had probably also discovered this very same secret, so instead of traveling to Brooklyn I took the subway back to Queens. It was almost seven by the time I got there. Jill and I had arranged to meet back at her apartment at eight o’clock. Originally, I had planned to cook her dinner, but I still didn’t know how to do much more than make pancakes, oatmeal, and rice and beans, so I decided to use some of the $4,000 I still had from Sergei’s money to treat her to a nice meal at a nearby vegan restaurant. Instead of waiting for Jill at her apartment, I headed back to The Cultured Cannibal so I could satisfy my curiosity about what exactly they served.

  The same skinny woman was working again as a hostess. She had painted her lips even redder, and now also wore black eye paint on her eyelids and rouge on her cheeks, which made her face look even more gaunt. As I approached her, she gave me another enigmatic look but didn’t say anything.

  I counted $200 from my wallet and placed it on the platform next to where she stood.

  ‘That’s more than twice what you charge for your cannibal stew. I’d like a serving to take with me. I’m fine if when I eat it it’s not heated to the proper temperature or served the way your chef wants it.’

  She didn’t bother to do so much as glance at the money, or even look down her nose at it. ‘If you pester us any further, I will call the police,’ she stated in a flat, emotionless voice. ‘Now leave and do not come back.’

  I was flabbergasted. I was sure she was going to take the money. That’s what they do in their world. Even though I now had a way to keep the cravings satisfied, I’d hoped the cannibal stew was what I thought it was, so I wouldn’t have to do anything as demeaning and repugnant as act as a strange woman’s private vampire the next time the cravings demanded feeding.

  I picked up the $200 I’d placed on the platform, and as I returned this woman’s blank stare I promised myself that if I ever needed to commit an act of savagery to satisfy the cravings, I’d find her. Though I doubted that I’d be able to wring much blood out of her skinny body.

  After leaving The Cultured Cannibal, I found a spot on the other side of the street from which I could discreetly watch the restaurant’s entrance. But I wasn’t being as discreet as I thought I was, because after no more than fifteen minutes (at which point I’d seen four people enter the restaurant, none of them my kind) a police car pulled over to the curb and the officer behind the wheel leaned toward me and yelled through the open window, demanding to know what I was doing there.

  At first I was simply perplexed and wasn’t sure that he had meant to yell at me, except that he was staring straight at me and there wasn’t anyone else for him to be yelling at. Was it really against the law in their world to simply stand on a sidewalk, minding your own business? But then I’d had that other police officer disturbing me simply for sleeping peacefully by a small lake.

  ‘Hey you, what’s your problem? You don’t speak English? Or are you just stupid?’

  There was no doubt any longer that he was speaking to me. There also wasn’t any doubt from the way his eyes had slitted and his nostrils flared that he was getting furious at me for not answering him right away.

  ‘What law am I breaking?’ I asked.

  When I said that, his face reddened and he all but blew steam out of his nose.

  ‘You’re going to try me?’ he demanded. He turned off the engine of his car, and nearly fell out the driver’s side door in his haste to approach me. ‘How about being a public nuisance?’ he said when he was less than two feet from me, his breath strong and smelling like sour milk, his hand resting on his nightstick. He nodded toward The Cultured Cannibal. ‘The people at that restaurant think you’re planning to rob one of their customers. How about I bring you in for suspicion of robbery, and see what we find?’

  I couldn’t let him do that. They’d find all the money I had in my wallet, and when I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer for why a dishwasher making $140 and thirty-three cents a week (after being cheated by Chris) had that much money, they’d accuse me of committing a crime. They probably wouldn’t accuse me of killing and robbing Sergei, or the other killings I’d committed, but they’d find a crime for which they could get a conviction. This police officer was thicker in the middle and more burly than the other officer I’d killed, but I’d be able to kill him just as easily if needed.

  ‘I didn’t know I was causing any trouble standing here, but I’ll leave now, officer. Besides, I have a friend waiting for me elsewhere.’

  Fortunately for both of us, he didn’t make any effort to stop me. If he had, he’d have been another one of them who ended up dead and I’d have had little choice but to go into The Cultured Cannibal and kill that skinny woman with the grotesquely painted face. The one who for whatever reason had decided to cause me trouble simply for wanting to taste their stew. And how in the world did she know I’d been standing out here?

  If I’d killed them, then I’d have had to hope that nobody else witnessed either of these killings, because if they did and they got a good enough look at me to help the police come up with a drawing (or worse, took a photograph of me), I’d be losing Jill just when I’d discovered a way I could stay with her.

  TWENTY-SIX

  It didn’t surprise me when ten o’clock in the morning rolled around and the cook hadn’t shown up for work. That fact did seem to agitate Chris, who ten minutes later a
ll but accused me of being in some sort of conspiracy with the cook.

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t seen you two sneaking outside by the dumpster. What have you two been talking about?’

  At first I was going to ignore him and continue scrubbing the pots that had piled up, but after some consideration I decided there was no point in doing that.

  Without bothering to turn to look at the one of them who was cheating me so blatantly, I said, ‘He wanted money from me.’ After another moment of consideration, I added the lie, ‘As a loan.’

  ‘Did you give him any?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Even though my back was turned to him, I could feel the heat rising off of him as he fumed.

  ‘That rotten sonofabitch,’ he swore. ‘He hit me for an advance on his pay, and like an idiot I gave it to him out of the goodness of my heart. He ripped both of us off.’ He shut up to gnash his teeth. Then, his voice even more bitter, he said, ‘I’d bet anything he gave me a phony address. And a phony name. We’re never going to be seeing that bastard again.’

  The idea of this cheater loaning anyone money out of the goodness of his heart was laughable. I was sure he’d planned to get something out of it. I didn’t bother telling him that he was wrong about neither of us ever seeing the cook again.

  Chris tried to bully the other cook into staying longer, but this one insisted that he had to leave by ten thirty as he had family commitments he couldn’t break. At ten thirty, Chris tried bullying him further, but the cook took off his apron and handed it to Chris, then left without saying another word.

  Chris vented out a number of angry profanities aimed at both cooks – the one who’d left at ten thirty, as he said he would, and the other one whom I was better acquainted with. After several minutes of this, one of the waitresses deposited a food order on the counter and Chris had no choice but to tie the apron around his middle and take over as cook. I had the sense that he did a poor job, because only a short time after he took over at the grill one of the waitresses brought back a plate, telling him that the customer had complained that both the eggs and the bacon were overcooked. Even though my back was turned to him, he must’ve sensed me grinning over his humiliation, because he barked at my back, first accusing me of loafing (which I hadn’t been doing, as I was still scrubbing the last of the pots that had piled up from the morning rush) and then ordering me to clean the toilets since I obviously didn’t have enough work to do. I enjoyed a moment of imagining him being trussed and gagged, then stuffed into a burlap sack. But I held my tongue over his pettiness, and did as he ordered.

  At four o’clock Chris was still behind the grill, and sweating heavily. Throughout the day I felt him glaring my way whenever one of the waitresses returned a plate of food that a customer had complained about, usually because it was overcooked. When I took off my apron after the completion of my workday, I once more felt him glaring at me. But whatever he thought of saying, he held his tongue.

  I took the subway to the station in the Bronx where the cook had gotten off the other time, and walked to the address I’d followed him to previously. I waited near the entrance until an elderly woman lugging a two-wheel cart filled with groceries approached the door. After inserting a key to unlock it, she struggled with both the door and the cart. I rushed forward and held the door so she could drag the cart into the building more easily. She smiled at me and thanked me, and I kept the door from locking as she trudged to the elevator. I waited until she disappeared inside the elevator, then entered the building and used the stairs to make my way to the cook’s apartment.

  He must’ve been waiting for someone else, because he had a big grin on his face when he answered the door after I knocked, and his grin quickly turned sickly as he blinked his eyes several times, not quite making sense of why I was standing there. As it dawned on him that I must’ve followed him from the restaurant to his home, he manufactured a display of outrage.

  ‘You spied on me,’ he spat out, his words thicker than any other time I’d heard him speak. He wasn’t simply glowering angrily at me as I’d caught him doing in the past, but he had both hands clenched into fists and his face was contorted the same as a wild beast might do when trying to scare off a more dangerous predator. ‘Go to hell, and fuck you and your two thousand dollars. You lose that for spying on me.’

  He was a large man and must’ve outweighed me by eighty pounds and, although a lot of his weight was fat, he still had thick, beefy arms and even beefier hindquarters. But, as mentioned earlier, I have a lot of strength in my chest, arms and hands, and I’d put bigger and stronger ones of them into my sacks. So when he tried pushing the door closed on me, I pushed the door hard into him, sending him stumbling backwards into his apartment. I followed him in and his eyes opened wide with surprise. This time, his outrage was fully genuine.

  ‘I’m going to bust your head open,’ he swore. ‘You piece of shit, thinking you can push your way into my home. I was going to help you, but now I’m going to bust your stupid, ignorant head open.’

  He didn’t move, though, and as he stayed rooted to the spot where he stood, a cautiousness crept into his eyes as he tried to make sense of how I was able to overpower him with as little apparent effort as I had done with the door. Since I knew all along that he had been planning to cheat me, I felt no anger over this, not even over his insolence. But I was beginning to feel wearied by his behavior, the same as one of them might feel after being confronted by a small, yapping dog. I unmasked myself and let him see me for what I truly am, making sure he knew the singular purpose that he and his kind serve. A deep primordial fear woke within him, and as his horror grew he shrunk backwards.

  ‘What are you?’ he whispered.

  ‘I am the one who will hunt you down if you don’t deliver me what you promised,’ I said, my true self completely unmasked, my voice as cold as death. ‘If you think you can cheat me, you’re wrong. Same if you think you can run from me. I’m better at tracking down ones like you than you could ever imagine.’

  This last part was a lie. I’d probably have been no better than any of them would have been at tracking him down, but I was certain that in his panicky, horror-stricken state he’d be too frightened to test me.

  At first, when I unmasked myself he stared at me as one of my kind might’ve stared at some terrible raging wildfire threatening to consume our homestead, but I’d become too awful to gaze at for long. Instead, he looked away and focused on a spot on his worn-out mottled carpeting.

  ‘You spying on me got my temper up,’ he said. ‘That’s why I said what I did. But I didn’t mean it, I wasn’t going to cheat you—’

  ‘You’re quite a liar. You were never planning to go back to Chris’s restaurant. If I hadn’t tracked you down, I would never have seen you again.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ He shook his head fiercely, still making sure not to catch so much as a glimpse of me. ‘That’s not true. I swear that’s not true.’

  He was lying, and he realized that he was doing a poor job of it so he stopped talking. I’d read in newspapers and magazines about severance packages in their world. Chris would never have given him one, so I guess he decided to cheat one out of me and Chris. As he waited for me to say something, his face grew more sickly by the second, and it wasn’t just out of fear but the realization that he wasn’t going to be able to keep the money he’d stolen from us.

  ‘I want what I paid for. My birth certificate and social security number. And I want them by tomorrow.’

  He looked like he was about to start bawling. ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I need time.’

  ‘How much time?’

  He shook his head. He didn’t know, because he hadn’t talked to his friend yet, as he’d never planned to give me anything.

  ‘Does a friend who can get you these documents actually exist? Or was all of it a lie?’

  ‘I promise I have a friend who can do this, my brother. I swear it.’

  He tried calling me his brother to put us
on friendlier terms, but he knew that, whatever I was, I wasn’t close to being his brother, and the words cracked and nearly crumbled as he tried to say them.

  ‘Call him now.’

  He did as I asked, probably grateful to do anything to get his mind off what he’d seen when I unmasked myself.

  ‘Al, I need the same you did for my cousin,’ he said, once the other phone picked up. Over his phone, I heard a man with a deep, heavy voice ask who was calling. ‘Yeah, it’s me, Garfield.’

  There was more talking on the other end, most of which I could hear. It seemed to be along the lines of asking what was wrong – why was the cook sounding like he was about to piss in his pants? If Al had been in the room with us and had seen the carpet growing wet by the cook’s feet and smelled the stench of urine, he’d have known that his question wasn’t as funny as he might’ve thought.

  ‘Nothing wrong, brother’, the cook lied. ‘I just need a favor.’

  ‘Birth certificate and social security number,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ the cook said. ‘You hear that? Birth certificate and social security. How much?’ He lowered his voice, hoping I wouldn’t hear him. ‘Five hundred?’

  They dickered back and forth before reaching a price of $900. Along with looking terrified, the cook seemed relieved he was still going to make eleven hundred dollars from the transaction, but also nervous that I might demand some of my money back. I didn’t care that the cook was charging me more than twice the amount the birth certificate and social security number were going to cost him. I had agreed the price and, besides, it was Sergei’s money I’d be using. Before he ended his conversation, I said, ‘When?’