Now They Call Me Gunner

by Thom Whalen

  * * *

  Nothing happened the next day to improve my mood.

  On Friday morning, a guy was waiting at the back door when I arrived. Someone from my class. I think his name was Halliday, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t remember seeing him at the graduation ceremony, but there were a couple hundred people in our class and I was up front with the honor students so he might have been there or he might not.

  Based on his attitude in the hallways between classes, I’d bet not. He wasn’t a big guy so he overcompensated by acting like a bad ass. More ass than bad. His kind weren’t big on academics.

  “You work here, too?” he asked when I leaned against the wall by the door.

  I was feeling pretty surly, myself, facing the jerk who had been tapped to take my job. “You’re the new meat,” I said, not bothering to inflect it as a question. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I’d said to anyone before, much less someone who probably made a habit of beating up math whizzes like me.

  “You going to open the door?”

  “That’s not how it works,” I said, deigning to explain anything to him.

  “How does it work?”

  “We wait.”

  And wait we did, in silence, until Randal pulled up on his chopper almost half an hour later.

  “You Halliday?” Randal asked.

  “Yeah,” the guy said.

  Randal looked at me as he unlocked the door. “Get him started.”

  I was tasked with training Halliday to take my job. Rubbing that salt in my wound did nothing to improve my attitude.

  After I told Halliday to write “10:00” on his time card, I chucked him an apron from the pile of cleans.

  He put the strap around his neck to hold the bib up and let the hem hang below his knees.

  I shook my head. “You have to wear an apron. You don’t have to look like your grandma.”

  He looked at me like he wanted to punch me out but restrained himself. He didn’t want his first day on the job to be his last.

  I would have taken a punch for that. Of course, it was early in the summer and I hadn’t been punched by a grown man yet. I didn’t know how bad it could hurt.

  I held up my apron and showed him how I folded the hem up to the waist and tucked the bib into the pocket that was formed.

  He did the same.

  I tossed him a paper hat from the box and left the office. I trusted that he could figure out how to put it on his head himself.

  I set him to chopping onions, hoping that he’d cry a river. If he cut off a finger because he was blinded by tears, his short order career would end on the spot.

  No such luck. After a few minutes, his eyes were red but his fingers were all intact.

  I had to finish off the onions. Half were minced too fine and the other half sliced too coarse. “You have to make the pieces more uniform.” I chopped the larger pieces down to size.

  He looked at me like I was speaking in a foreign tongue.

  That was my first inkling that this new meat wasn’t going to be aging in Elsa’s kitchen for long.

  At day’s end, when I sent Halliday out to mop the front, Randal said, “Out back.”

  I followed him out the back door into the darkness behind the restaurant.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “About Halliday?” I asked back.

  Randal rolled his eyes in the dark. I could see his whites gleam by the streetlight down the block. “Of course, about Halliday. He going to be any use?”

  “Not much.”

  “Good men are hard to find,” Randal said. “I want you to take Wednesdays off.”

  “I take Tuesday’s off. You take Wednesdays. You want to take Tuesdays off?”

  “No. I still take Wednesdays. Now you take Wednesdays off as well as Tuesdays. The standard work week is five days with two days off.”

  “I don’t want two days off. I need the money.”

  “Okay. You can start working on Tuesdays as long as you take Wednesdays off.”

  I was confused. “What day are you going to take off?”

  “I still take Wednesdays like always. I said that already.” He looked at me in the darkness like I was an idiot.

  “If you and I both take Wednesdays, who cooks?”

  “Mrs. Everett and Halliday.”

  I shook my head. “Neither one of them knows what they’re doing in there.”

  “Everett does. She’s slow as hell, but she knows the menu. Even Halliday can keep up with her.”

  I had to agree with that. “I pity the customers.”

  “Only tourists come in on Wednesdays.”

  Nobody pitied the tourists. It was their fault for coming to Wemsley. And any local who was foolish enough to come in when Mrs. Everett was cooking would get what he deserved. I understood that logic. “I don’t get it. You hired Halliday so that we get the same day off?”

  “I’m going to have a serious problem real soon now. I need someone to watch my back. I’m going in country, and I need a door gunner.”

  “What?”

  “You had my back when Albertson was interrogating me. You did good. I appreciate it. I’m going to need more of the same.”

  The phrase, door gunner, stuck in my craw. “I’m not going to shoot anyone.”

  He rolled his eyes again. “We’re not stepping into any firefights. We’re just going to do a little recon. Map the terrain. You’re a smart guy. I need you to help figure out what’s going down. That’s all. Just keep your eyes peeled and tell me what you think.”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” I said.

  “Sure you can. Don’t sweat it. It’ll be easy. I’m in a fix and buddies got to watch out for each other.”

  From the way he said it, I knew that I was hearing another of Randal’s rules: Buddies got to watch out for each other. There was no arguing with Randal about his rules. They were carved in stone.

  In his mind, it was already a done deal. I was his door gunner now. Whatever that meant.

  This was the first time that one of Randal’s rules applied to anyone besides himself. That was strange. Randal’s rules applied to Randal. That was probably the first rule in Randal’s list. Randal’s rules apply to Randal. If he had a rule that buddies watched out for each other, that meant that he was watching out for me more than I was watching out for him. I found some reassurance in that.

  More important, he had called me his buddy. I’d never been buddies with a guy as cool as Randal. In fact, I had never been buddies with anyone who was the least bit cool. There was no way that I could say no to being Randal’s buddy.

  “So you got three days to get Halliday up to speed,” he said. “I’ve already told Everett that you’ll be taking Wednesdays off and that Halliday’ll be ready to prep for her.”

  “I don’t want two days off a week. I need money for university.”

  He frowned and the reflection of the streetlight disappeared from his eyes. “Yeah, you want two days off. You need a day to spend with your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “You should work on that.”

  “Okay.”

  When I went back inside, I had to re-mop half the front where Halliday had somehow managed to mop more grease onto the floor than off it.

  Turning this fuck-up into a cook’s assistant in three days was going to be a tall order.

  I suspected that being Randal’s door gunner was going to be a lot harder than he had implied. But, at that moment, I couldn’t guess how hard.