Chapter 21 Levi #2
Tex looks out at the water, where the last of the color’s draining off the bottom of the sky.
“Me and Stormy get to come out here whenever we want,” he says.
“Any night of the week. Stand right here and watch that happen, free of charge, as many times as we’re handed it.
Tourists figure it out for one week a year, and they clap every time, like the sun went and did it special, just for them.
” That big shrug. “Figured they had the right idea. Something that good, a man ought to clap. So we clap. Don’t cost a thing to say thank you for a thing that was already free. ”
I don’t say anything back, because there’s nothing to say to it. And because it got in under my guard before I ever thought to raise it.
The gratitude isn’t what gets me. The stopping to notice is.
I’ve spent years being aimed. Pointed at a stage, loaded onto a bus, set down in front of a microphone and a wall of lit-up phones, hauled through my own life like freight.
Tex never forgot to stop and notice. He went and built an entire life around remembering.
“Hey, Sheila,” I call through the open doors. “You got a pen back there behind the bar?”
She brings one out without a question, clicks it, sets it on the rail beside my beer, and goes back in. She doesn’t ask what for. I appreciate that more than I’d ever tell her.
There’s a short stack of cocktail napkins on the rail. I take one off the top and I write a line down because I want to keep it.
It’s nothing. A handful of words.
Stood still long enough to watch it go.
The kind of line that used to fall out of me by the dozen, back before I learned what they fetched on the open market and what it costs you to sell them off one at a time.
I fold the napkin into my pocket. There was another line about a door left open so I could breathe, a few days back. I wouldn’t write that one down, because it’s personal.
This one’s in ink, in my pocket. I’m not refusing the pen anymore.
By the time I look up, the deck’s lost the last of the light, and the napkin would’ve been too black to write on a minute later anyhow.
I go inside and take a stool at the end of the bar, the one where the wall comes around. Solid wall at my back, the front door dead in my sightline. Tonight I hold that ground on one beer instead of a bottle, and it still holds.
Down at the far end there’s a guy in a wheelchair parked against the bar.
Must be the Mickey guy, Tex’s best friend.
Bay County Sheriff’s uniform, patch on the shoulder like he rolled in straight off a shift.
His eyes are on the door, same as mine. We trade the flat nod of two men who watch doors, nothing in it.
A cop parked just off my flank is about the last thing I came in here for. I keep half an eye on him and go back to my beer.
And then Sheila starts feeding me. It opens reasonable and small. A little dish of oysters, cold, six on ice.
“Course one. Start light,” she says, which I should’ve recognized as the warning shot it was. “Stormy worked up a special tasting menu for you. Chew them, baby. This isn’t a contest.”
Tex swings by before I’ve finished the second one.
He doesn’t sit. I’m learning that Tex doesn’t sit so much as orbit.
He works the room in loops, a table of bikers here, a couple of tourists there, and my stool is on the route.
This pass, he deposits two glasses of sweet tea and a handwritten card.
“Drink number four is sweet tea. Not negotiable. And this is the document. Stormy wrote out the menu progression this afternoon.” And he’s gone again, hollering somebody’s name across the room.
The card is small print. Fourteen courses, numbered. There are notes in the margins. Next to the gumbo it says “mind the roux, ask if too hot.” Course eight is nothing but the words “ten-minute pause.” The pause has a course number.
Courses four through six are listed as one entry. It says, “shrimp. fried, blackened, boiled. same shrimp.”
Course fourteen says key lime pie, and I flag Tex down on his next orbit to head that one off at the pass.
“Better warn the kitchen. I ate a whole key lime pie this week. Standing up, straight out of the tin. Dante caught wind of it and gave me a lecture about food groups.” Tex receives this like sworn testimony, repeats “a whole pie” to himself with something close to respect, and carries it off toward the kitchen.
Tex comes back around with a tray of empties. I show him the card. “No crab legs?”
He sets the tray down, walks behind the bar, reaches beneath the register, and comes back with a laminated map of the United States the size of a placemat. The state of Maryland is circled in red marker.
Oh, God, I’ve apparently pulled a lever.
“Sheila keeps this handy,” he says, “to show people where they can go get fresh crab legs when they ask. This is the Gulf of Mexico, Levi. It’s not Alaska, and it’s not Maryland.
Crab legs arrive in this county frozen, on a truck, from a boat that has never seen this water.
And a crab cake is a casserole wearing a seafood costume.
Nothing on that card Stormy wrote out was ever frozen. ”
“You laminated the map?”
“Had to. Sheila drags it out every day.” He files the map back under the register, collects his tray, and orbits off.
Sheila lands course two. A tub of pale dip ringed by saltine crackers that have been buttered individually.
“Smoked tuna dip,” she announces. “Tex’s recipe. On Dante.” She watches me load the first cracker. “Both hands, sugar. It’s not going anywhere.”
Tex materializes on the next loop. “The smoked tuna is Big Bertha’s work.
Bertha’s the smoker out back. She’s got a welded scar down her firebox from an incident we don’t dwell on, and she is the longest relationship of my life.
When she’s not doing brisket, she does tuna.
She’s got range. I’ve been in love twice. ”
“Is the second one in the kitchen?”
“Yes, sir, he is,” he agrees, and then a biker by the door yells something about a pool cue and he’s off to preside over it.
The gumbo is course three. Sheila sets the cup down and adds, half to me and half to the room at large, “This one’s on Dante.”
“You’ve said that about every plate so far.”
“And every plate it’s been true.” She’s already moving. “Eat your gumbo, baby. Stormy’s feelings will be hurt if you don’t eat it.”
The shrimp starts arriving. Fried, with a lemon wedge and cocktail sauce.
Then blackened, still hissing at the edges.
Then boiled, peel-and-eat, and with the boiled round Sheila sets down a whole roll of paper towels instead of napkins.
“You look like a man who knows what those are for,” she says, and I do.
Tex passes behind me mid-peel. “You’ve reached the same shrimp course,” he observes.
“Stormy named that stretch of the menu himself. ‘Same shrimp, three ways.’ Wrote it right on the card. The man refuses to market. Sheila calls it using up the shrimp before it turns. Between the two of them there’s not one ounce of decent marketing about shrimp and it’s still the best shrimp in three counties. ”
“I can’t eat all this,” I tell Sheila, as the boiled plate empties anyway.
“Sure, you can.” She doesn’t even slow down. “Dante said you’re not eating enough. Somebody’s got to set it right.”
“He said that? This is six meals already.”
“He might have,” she says, and disappears.
Course seven is deviled eggs, four of them, paprika dusted on like it was measured. Tex swings past long enough to say, “Deviled eggs mean it’s an occasion. Weddings, funerals, and tonight. There is no fourth category,” and swings away.
I’m beginning to feel like I’m in a cartoon, the way the kitchen door keeps swinging open with another course.
Then there’s the scheduled pause. Course eight, printed and scheduled, ten minutes of nothing. Tex arrives for it, leans on the bar across from me, and fills the scheduled nothing.
“Since you’ve got the time, you should understand what tonight is for Sheila.
” He drops confidential, which for him means slightly quieter than a lawnmower.
“About two months back, Dante sat right where you’re sitting.
Sheila brought him her sweet tea. Her sweet tea, Levi.
You need to understand what it means to Sheila.
And that Dante took one sip, set the glass down, slid it back across the bar, and said, and I’m quoting him directly, ‘The tea is too sweet. I’ll take it unsweetened, please, Sheila. ’”
He lets that sit like he’s just read a war crime into the record.
“He said please, Sheila,” Tex adds. “Like that made it better. She brings it to him unsweetened every time now. Sets it down like she’s serving him papers.
She has waited two months for a night like tonight.
You’re not a customer, Levi. You’re a correction that’s been waiting. Let me show you something else.”
He reaches behind the register and pulls off a little magnet that’s stuck to the back side. He slides it over for me to read.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
I grin at him. “I’m the revenge dish.”
“Her revenge is course number fifteen.”
He slaps the magnet back on the side of the register.
Sheila arrives with course nine as if summoned.
Brisket, sliced thick, a square of cornbread riding shotgun on top.
She clocks my sweet tea, half gone, and something in her face loosens about one degree.
“At least someone has sense,” she says. “You’re too thin, sugar.
We’re fixing that tonight.” And she’s gone.
“You’re in her will now,” Tex says. “That fast.”
The brisket is the best I’ve ever eaten. “Fourteen hours inside Bertha,” Tex says on a drive-by, “and the rub is my daddy’s, which makes it older than me. Sacred text. Nobody edits it.”