Pig-Out Inn (2 page)

My hands are so extraordinary that my sixth-grade teacher picked me to sign the whole Christmas pageant, even though I didn't know a word of sign at that point and two other sixth graders did, including a deaf one. In fact, while I'm laying it on so thick, I'll just mention that my mother heard about this modeling agency up in Omaha that's looking for hands for jewelry commercials, and she sent them pictures of my disembodied hands. But no word's come back yet.

As for the rest of me—well, I have the usual number of eyes and lips and so forth on my face, arranged in the customary pattern. I'm not pretty, except to my grandmothers, and I'm not a fright either, though my green eyes fire up when I'm furious, and I take on what my father calls my dragon demeanor.

I am much too fiery to be even a half-baked Quaker, but we're all hoping that maturity will help. Hoping, but not holding our breath.

Johnny is not a Quaker. He's what my father calls a lapsed Methodist, which means he hasn't been to church in twenty-five years, but if he had gone in all that time, it would have been to a Methodist church, probably. Johnny is a blustery tyrant but, underneath it all, a pretty good man. Johnny is
not
a good cook, however.

That was our first surprise when we opened the Pig-Out. Sure, Johnny studied about how to select cantaloupes at Butler County Community College, and how to design cute menus, and how to apply for a liquor license, but he never quite learned to cook.

“What the hey are you supposed to do with these slickies?” he asked, squishing five pounds of stewed tomatoes around in his hands.

“With a little of this, and a little of that,” Momma explained patiently, “they will magically turn into spaghetti sauce.”

Momma wasn't much of a cook either. But we had the famous Betty Crocker cookbook, and our first lesson was from the section “Cooking for Crowds.” I read aloud, Momma chopped and measured things, and Johnny performed the final artistic steps, such as moving the ten-gallon pots from the counter to the stove. Our first creation was a nine-pound gristly mess of chili that we put in the refrigerator and scraped three inches of grease off of the next morning. Then Betty Crocker told us how to bleed off the grease while it was still hot so that, voilà! we could serve Johnny's chili same-day fresh.

Truckers like chili; chili, chicken-fried steak, pork tenderloin, and hamburgers. Johnny, of course, hadn't ever cooked any of these, but Momma said, “Truck drivers are the salt of the earth. Let's feed them what they like best, because the whole country depends on them to get goods from one point to another, and nobody,
nobody
can drive with indigestion.”

We quickly got to know the regular customers, who'd seen probably six owners of the Klondike and were now training the world's first Pig-Out Inn owners.

There was Palmer, from the gas station across the street, whose wife was known as the worst cook in Wellington County. The other interesting thing about Palmer was that he had absolutely no sense of humor. None. Then there was Emile Joe Hunter, a trucker for P.I.E. who couldn't digest raw vegetables because of some operation he'd had once to lose weight, but it obviously hadn't done any good.

Emile Joe would get insulted when Johnny accidentally put lettuce on his sandwich, as if we were trying to poison him. “I'm never stopping here again,” he'd bark, and his jowls would shake just like a bulldog's. “Cook ought to be able to remember a simple thing like hold the lettuce.” But Emile Joe would come back time after time, because truck drivers have a real feeling for tradition, and the Pig-Out was like home to them.

Another regular was Pap Morgan, and every couple of days a man named Pawnee—maybe he was an Indian—stopped in and dumped a few complaints on us. Barbara and Bill Wanamaker, who shared the driving, would drop in for a cold drink or hot coffee now and then, and they'd bring in their sweaty baby in one of those pink plastic carriers that looked like a serving tray. They didn't eat much at our place because they were out to make a quick killing on the road before the baby got too big.

Here's how a typical on-the-job training session would go:

“The coffee's got to be thick as mud. You got to be able to taste the caffeine,” Bill Wanamaker told us. Like most truckers, Bill's left arm was a lot darker than his right. His right arm had a tic-tac-toe board tattoed on it, maybe that's how he and Barbara passed the hours on the road. “If you don't keep the coffee strong we're gonna be asleep at the wheel, and it's gonna make a bloody mess on the highway.”

“Hey, all you and your wife are hauling is peaches,” Pawnee said, “How 'bout if I splattered my load over the highway—dead sheep lying all over the place? The highway patrol would have to send out a crane to get those babies up off the highway before they started to smell.”

“Aw, come on, Pawnee,” Barbara Wanamaker moaned from a back booth. She was nursing the baby and had her back to us. She had pretty sun-bleached hair to her shoulders and jeans so tight that I wondered how she could bend her legs. “You're not going to kill a whole load of three-hundred-pound sheep with one crash.”

“Could,” Pawnee said defensively. “It's up to Dovi here. You keep that coffee fresh and hot and thick.”

“And tell that cook you've got back there,” Emile Joe said, “that it turns my stomach when he fries the hot cakes after the bacon. It repeats on me all the way to St. Louis, so I'm always chewing Tums. Oh, and be sure to stock plenty of Tums, unless the cook's gonna improve a whole lot in the next few weeks.”

“What's he talking about with the bacon grease?” Pap Morgan said. “I'll tell you what's missing from your menu.” He pulled one out from behind the ketchup bottle, flipped it open, and pointed to a blank spot. I tried to read what wasn't there, upside down. “Biscuits and red-eye gravy, that's what's missing.”

I didn't like the sound of it, but there was this sign on the wall that proclaimed “The Two Rules of Business,” and it said,

1. The customer is always right.

2. If the customer is wrong, refer to Rule 1. So I asked about red-eye gravy.

“Simple,” Pap Morgan explained. “You fry up the bacon in a big black skillet. You never, ever wash out a cast iron skillet. Just scrape it out with paper towels. So, you fry up the bacon, then you pour a little flour into the grease after the bacon's out, and you mix it up good to thicken it, and while it's piping hot you pour it over fresh biscuits. It's out of this world. Hangs in the gut for the whole trip, too.”

“Why's it called red-eye?” I asked.

“Plain and simple, it's the bacon flecks that look like your standard bloodshot eye. Best stuff I ever put my tongue to.”

We penciled it in on the menus, and it was a hit. I tasted just the tip of a spoonful of it once and gagged.

THREE

The first few weeks in the restaurant business were tough but not hard, as I used to say about the times tables in fourth grade. I think fourth grade was in Chillicothe, Missouri, but I may be wrong on that.

Well, the point is, we had good teachers and learned pretty fast how to run a place like the Pig-Out, which is why we weren't blown right out of the water on our second Saturday, when the Army landed.

At eleven o'clock that morning a convoy of three trucks pulled up into our parking lot and dumped out thirty-two khaki-clad men. All of them were hungry and wanted hamburgers and shakes. All of them also wanted the key to the men's room.

“Forty-eight burgers, Johnny,” I yelled into the pass-through window. “Six well, fourteen medium, twenty-three medium rare, and five still breathing.”

I heard Johnny muttering to himself back there. “Slap the burgers on the grill, Johnny.” Plop, plop, plop; a row of flat little pellets dropped onto the sizzling grill. “Grease the buns, Johnny,” he reminded himself. “Buns. Holy shee, Marilyn, who expected the whole U.S. Army?”

“Hold your horses, Johnny,” Momma said calmly, poking her head into the pass-through. “I'll send Dovi to the walk-in for more buns.”

Ordinarily I did not like the walk-in freezer. It made my head ache right behind my ears if I stayed in there too long, which I had a tendency to do when things got hectic out front. But that day I didn't mind the walk-in because it was at least 99° in the restaurant kitchen, and 109° outside. You had to walk out the back door and across this gravelly place to get to the freezer. If you didn't have shoes on, you ran, or else you fried the bottoms of your feet. My mother said I ought to be able to take slightly crisp feet. She saw a yogi once, a guy who wore a diaper, like, and who danced across some hot coals, but they couldn't have been as hot as rocks baking in the Kansas summer sun.

Well, anybody with half a brain wouldn't go barefoot from the kitchen to the walk-in, and besides, there was a law against working in the diner in bare feet. They must have thought your feet had more germs than your nose or something, which is ridiculous, because anyone who's taken your basic eighth-grade life science, like I did last year, knows about the diseases you get from the dripping human nose.

But, as my father says, I digress.

So, I pulled six dozen buns from the freezer and pushed the walk-in door shut with my hind end, the same one I used to keep the screen door from banging in the kitchen. “Here you go, Johnny. You're back in business.” I could hardly see him over the smoke from the burgers.

“What am I gonna do with iceberg buns? My burgers are ready to walk,” Johnny roared. He roared because the Army was so loud in the other room, and he roared because he usually roared.

“Relax,” my mother crooned, with four feet of foil between her and the dispenser. “We'll wrap them up and put them in the oven.” She turned the oven up to 500°. “They'll be warm in no time.” Warm? It was hot enough without the oven to fry burgers right on the counter.

Well, next we had to face the milkshake ordeal, so Momma and I started an assembly line: squirt the syrup into the bottom of the four metal cups, plop the ice cream in, pour on the milk, shove the whole mess up into the mixer, and who cared what splattered all over the counter and wall because there were always four more milkshakes to go.

The Army guys could have helped, but oh no. They sat around with their knees spread like sailors and their feet wrapped around the bottoms of the stools, or else they shoved each other around in the booths, or pounded the juke box to coax out at least twelve quarters' worth of country, everything from Tammy to Willie singing about being on the road again, which is where we wished the Army was.

And the toilet kept flushing. “We'll go broke on the water alone,” my mother moaned into the strawberry syrup.

I passed out milkshakes like I was dealing poker.

“Hey, this isn't chocolate,” one guy complained. He couldn't have been much older than I was.

“Hu-uh. We're doing all the strawberries now.”

“But I ordered chocolate.”

“Well then, trade with somebody,” I said impatiently.

“But you haven't done any chocolates yet,” the next guy reminded me.

“Please, mister, please, don't play B-17,” Olivia pleaded from the juke box. I grabbed the shake away from the kid. “Who ordered a strawberry?” By now my mother had four more shakes ready. Oh, we were rolling. But we were way behind in sloshing mayonnaise on the buns, and then there were the onions and pickles to think about as Johnny piled up naked burger plates on the pass-through.

Momma dashed over to drop a few chips on each plate, and we started sliding them down the counter to the first soldier on the end.

“This is a real class joint,” said some guy smashed in the back of a booth.

“Anything for our men in uniform,” Momma said sweetly. She was the one who used to counsel draft resisters during Vietnam. Those days, everyone she touched ended up in Canada or in jail. A new flock of burgers came tumbling out with top buns toasted crisp and bottoms soggy wet, but who had time to worry?

We were on the vanilla shakes now, and both Momma and I were sticky to the elbows.

“You picked a sad time to leave me, Lucille,” wailed Kenny from the juke box.

“Lucille had a lot of common sense,” Momma muttered.

In spite of Johnny's hamburgers, the Army wanted dessert. They cleaned us out of banana cream pie and chocolate layer cake and were settling for our famous Baby Ruths, which had been around so long that if you tried to snap one in two it would bend like a boomerang.

Everyone said that the food and service were terrible, and that they'd be back the next Saturday, and finally the invasion was over, less than an hour after it started. Momma and I were left to sort through the rubble. There were ketchup and mustard puddles everywhere, pickles plastered to the tables, peanuts from Baby Ruths ground into the floor, and potato chip crumbs working their way down into the cracks between the backs and seats of the booths.

Momma wiped her hands on her apron, which did no good because little rivers of ice cream were dried all the way down her arm. “We could apply for a grant as a disaster area,” she said, while Johnny slammed dishes around in the big washtubs in the kitchen. “You know, Dovi, sometimes I think we're not suited to being restaurateurs.”

“Holy shee,” Johnny yelled. “Getta loada this.” We both dashed into the kitchen, and there was Johnny holding up a plate at arm's distance. On the plate was a plastic and wire pink thing that looked like false teeth, only it had no teeth. I recognized it, because I saw half a dozen just like it every day in the lunchroom at my last school. Dorri even wore one.

“That's a retainer,” I said, laughing.

“What the hey does it retain?” asked Johnny, disgusted.

“Teeth. After the orthodontist is through with them.” I was guessing that it belonged to that one kid who didn't order strawberry. “I'll just wrap it up in a napkin. He'll be back for it.”