Aftertaste Page 13

  “I’m sorry. I get nosy sometimes. I’ve only ever worked for Frenchy’s, so other people’s jobs are really interesting to me. Do they own the plot the house is on, your boyfriend and his business partner?”

  “They do, yeah.” Galavance’s pulse is racing.

  “So there’s no money coming from the house until they sell it, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re basically the sole breadwinner, then.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I am. I mean, yeah. It’s just me.”

  “Must be tough. There aren’t many alternatives outside of food service for girls who only have a high school education.”

  Galavance is about to snap, “How do you know that?” until she realizes anyone in an assistant manager’s position or higher can look up how much Galavance makes, or see a copy of her driver’s license, her address, her work history, her social security number, everything. Galavance’s entire tiny life probably wouldn’t fill a whole page.

  “I want you to succeed,” Patty says. “I want Frenchy’s to be the means by which you attain it. I don’t want to fire you.” Galavance watches as Patty’s reflection moves away from the bathroom door, into the room. She sits on the corner of the bed, the springs squeaking under her. She sits in profile, watching the carnage on TV. A man’s head gets a bullet through it and because it’s that kind of action movie, brains splatter the camera. Patty doesn’t so much as blink at the make-believe murder. She turns the big wooden spoon in her hands, sitting forward, the gunfire opening another man’s arm, taking off his hand and sending it flopping across the movie set warehouse floor. Patty’s face creases, a tiny smile hitching up.

  Letting the curtains fall back, Galavance faces her. “If it means keeping my job, I’ll do it. I agree. I still don’t understand why it means I’d get fired if I didn’t—”

  “Glad to hear it,” Patty cuts in. She remains on the bed, watching a henchman getting hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. “Now let’s make some stroganoff.” Patty gets up and turns off the TV as she passes it. Now the room is silent, and there’s only the hum of the city, just outside the hotel’s walls—but so far away.

  Galavance makes herself follow Patty back into the bathroom-turned-kitchen. The low-tide smell hits her again like a wall. Patty puts a hand on Galavance’s shoulder and gently guides her around, turning them both in a circle, until Galavance is the one farther away from the door. Patty closes it behind them, standing in front of the door, that big wooden spoon in her hand, still, fluorescent lights buzzing angrily overhead.

  “I’m glad you agreed,” Patty says. “It feels good to know I’m no longer alone on this. It’s been hard, keeping this secret.”

  “That the recipe for stroganoff comes on the side of Hamburger Helper?” Galavance says, hoping to diffuse the tension.

  “Not this kind. I asked so many questions about where your boyfriend and his business partner have their house and whether or not he’s told you about the location because it’s crucial to keeping this recipe available to Frenchy’s. See, food company distributors give a discount to their bigger clients. The major fast food chains can ask for a lower rate because they give the distributors so much money. Frenchy’s used to be one of those, like I said. Now, since we’re closed so many locations, the snake at the distributor—the same we’ve had for decades—has decided to hike up the price.”

  “That sucks,” Galavance says for a lack of anything better to add—while eyeing the knife roll and trying to decide on which one, if she has to, she could use to defend herself against Patty.

  “It does suck,” Patty says. “And since success relies on innovation, I’ve been appointed by corporate to find a new means of acquiring meat.”

  Galavance can feel her face drain. The tips of her ears, her lips, and fingers all go numb. “Uh, what?”

  “I used to hunt muskrat with my father. I don’t know if I ever mentioned that in my initial interview, but like I knew you only had a high school diploma, corporate knew I knew my way around a rifle. That or they just knew I’d do anything it took to get the job done—that I’d learn to use a hunting rifle, if need be. Either way, I was the right woman for the job. I’ve been making many trips to South Carolina and, now, North Carolina. I thought it was crazy, at first, taking boat-rides out into the swamps looking for something I was sure was made-up. But frog legs are expensive, and our distributor, like I said, decided to jack up our price even more than it already was. I had to do something.”

  “They sent you here to find the Lizard Man?” Galavance’s heart was throwing itself against her ribs like it was trying to escape a burning building.

  “Not the Lizard Man, Miss Petersen. A six-foot frog-man, or frog-men, seen all over North and South Carolina. I’ve bagged forty-three so far. And while the meat’s been a hundred percent free, we still can’t chase the reek out of it. It was a small miracle what you did with the stuffed peppers, but that’s just one item on the menu, and with something like stroganoff, where the use of lemon juice is impossible—”

  Galavance’s eyes move to the mixing bowl on the counter. Then the small pile of pink dice, thawing, a pink puddle under them. Then the tub. The red slime crawling toward the drain. Then, in her mind, all the sausage she had seen the cooks fry up over the past few months, putting it over salads, over rice. All those greasy, empty plates Galavance had taken back to the dishwasher. Then, hitting her like a second ton of bricks, she recalls what she snuck out of the leftover fridge and took home to Jolby. And what she’d eaten, herself, so many times, by the forkful from Jolby’s Styrofoam plate. What she’d eaten earlier that morning, all those samples yesterday. “We ate that. I ate that … and it was … ?”

  “When they’ve fully turned, there’s nothing human to the meat.”

  “But it was human once. Meaning if it was, it still sorta is.” Nausea explodes deep in Galavance’s belly. “Oh, God.”

  “It’s called total physiological transmogrification. The Culinary Inspiration Team brought in a genealogist to test it, then an occultist, and finally one of the nine wizards from the Chattanooga branch of the Unholy Union Coven. And they all agreed. It’s 100 percent amphibian. I have to kill them fully changed into their frog-man state, of course, but if I do, any trace of human goes away, Galavance.”

  He wasn’t lying. That crazy asshole she hit with her car wasn’t lying! Galavance laughs, despite herself. Of all the things that pop into her mind, of course Saelig Zilch would be what rises to the top. Clarity, or total denial, shoves aside her mounting nausea. “So are you working with him? Is he like the location scout or something?”

  Patty’s face twists. “Who are you talking about?”

  “The other guy looking for the Lizard Man.”

  Patty’s eyes widen. “Who’s looking for the Lizard Man?”

  Shit. “Nobody. I mean, I heard someone at the gas station the other day saying that someone was asking—”

  Patty stomps forward over the cold tile floor. “Who was it? Did he speak to you?” Patty snaps, and Galavance can feel her hot breath on her face. “Who’s he with? McDonald’s? Burger King? They’ve got spies everywhere.”

  Galavance tries backing up, but the back of her legs hit the rim of the tub. She does not want to fall into that muck and tries to push Patty off.

  “Who was it?” Patty roars, shaking Galavance. “Who was it? What was his name? Was that the son of a bitch at Whispering Pines? Is he there now?” Galavance’s ear rings as Patty smacks her upside the head with the wooden spoon. “Speak, you uneducated little skank, speak!”

  “Let me go!”

  “Tell me, tell me! Everything is riding on this meat staying a Frenchy’s-exclusive source! If we get it tasting better, we can refresh the brand and get some real buzz going—but none of that will happen if the King or the Clown or that freckled-faced cunt beats us to it first!”

  Even if Galavance did know where Zilch was and wanted t
o say, she couldn’t—not with Patty’s hands closing around her throat. She feels the trapped blood swelling in her cheeks, numbing her tongue. She reaches to the side—knocking over the hot-plate, the set of skewers, grabbing up the first thing in reach.

  Bringing it up in a swing, the pot collides with the side of Patty’s head. Her short fingers soften their iron grip. Free, Galavance pushes Patty and the regional manager slumps aside, hitting her head a second time—this time on the toilet rim, en route to the floor. She lays still, on her side, and a line of blood begins to trickle out of her hairline.

  Galavance is still holding the cook pot by its handle, expecting Patty to spring back to her feet at any moment. But sticking around to see if and when she wakes up would definitely be a bad idea.

  I have to find Jolby. If Patty were to show up at the house, likely with that rifle she was going on about, demanding to know about Saelig Zilch, and Jolby got lippy with her, there would no saying she wouldn’t use the same excessive force again. Galavance saw Jolby get in a fistfight once, after school. He’s no fighter. Whereas Patty, Galavance just learned the hard way, was one scrappy little shit.

  Galavance steps over her boss’s unconscious form and out of the bathroom. She uses the wall to find the door, and falls out into the hotel hallway, the carpet burning her knees. Getting up, she runs the labyrinth of the Hilton’s carpeted corridors, passing door after identical door, taking the stairs instead of the elevator when she finds them, and out to the lot. With her khakis so tight, she struggles to free her car keys.

  Following the sound of breaking glass, some of it raining down on her, Galavance looks up—above, Patty, in the gap of smashed window, leans out, blood running down her face, bringing the rifle scope up to her eye.

  Galavance gets her car unlocked and pulls the door shut just as a bullet sparks off the asphalt where she’d been standing. She fumbles and screams at herself trying to stick her key in the ignition. A second bullet thwaps through the roof of her car, piercing the passenger seat’s cushion—a small puff of free foam rising from the smoking bullet hole. Dropping her pink getaway into gear, Galavance floors, tearing it over the curb and across the Hilton’s manicured lawn, out onto the street—and is nearly bowled over by an approaching pickup truck. The traffic scatters. She rips through the next red-light—who cares anymore if Patty sees her do it—and hits the interstate, never letting her foot off the gas.

  At 110, she flies through traffic, jinking from one lane to the next, dodging even the most daringly lead-footed. Dialing Jolby, she pinches the phone between her shoulder and ear to keep both hands on the wheel. She nearly rear-ends a motorcycle who, unlike her, wants to obey the traffic laws. She barely missing splattering him across the pavement, just as the phone rings for the fourth time in her ear.

  “This is J-Boy. Leave yo message, ho. Peace.”

  “Jolby, it’s Gal. Are you at the house? I need you to go home immediately. Bring Chev if you have to—it’s not safe there for either of you.”

  Zilch wasn’t lying. He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t lying. Galavance’s hands slide to ten and two on the wheel. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”

  Her bowels, on the drive, have turned to liquid. She’s so scared and so panicked that she wonders if she hasn’t already gone in her work pants. Parking in the yard instead of the driveway, she hops out, bursts in through the front door. “Jolby?” She didn’t even think to check for his car in the driveway—she just wants to see him, his face, her boyfriend. Not in the kitchen. Not in the living room. Nothing, nobody. She pushes open the bathroom door, finds it empty, and stands before the commode unsure of which end to point toward the bowl. She pulls down her pants and sits. It’s awful. All she can think about are all the stuffed peppers she’s eaten. All of those leftovers. Then, all of those customers who’d eaten it, too. She gets up off the toilet seat, turns, and throws up.

  After, she takes off her sick-spattered clothes and washes her hands and face and brushes her teeth three times. She can barely keep eye contact with herself in the toothpaste-spotty mirror. I’m a cannibal. I didn’t know it until twenty minutes ago—so does that excuse it? Is it okay that I didn’t know? When she balls up her ruined clothes and goes to toss them in the wastebasket, she steps on the pedal to lift the lid and sees something, inside the trash, move. She recoils, drops the clothes on the floor, and nearly sends herself out the bathroom window. But she has to see. In her underwear, ready with her hairbrush to bludgeon whatever may be inside, she reaches from as far away as she can to press her big toe on down the trashcan pedal that will flip up the lid again. Galavance cranes her chin out, peeking down inside the plastic bag, looking for whatever it was amongst the greasy, yellowed Q-tips and balled tissues …

  She spots a tangle of medical tape and sullied cheesecloth. The bandage Jolby had wrapped around his wrist earlier, maybe. She reaches in with her brush, gives it a bump. Nothing. Angling some of the bristles under the bandage’s edge, she flips the mess of gauze and tape over. Please just be mice. If they had mice it would be no big surprise. Jolby eats in bed constantly and—Galavance is sad to admit to herself as she suddenly remembers—her first step onto the bedroom floor after waking that morning had been right into an unfinished plate of congealed SpaghettiOs.

  The bandage is bloody inside, and it’s not just blood, but these clumps of things like dark stringy scabs. She peers down closer, leaning and feeling the veins jump out in her forehead and neck. She looks into the bandage, the loose weave of the cheesecloth. And there, among the dried red and brown flakes of her boyfriend’s blood from an injury he said he got at the job site, are tiny strings, squirming. Galavance moves her head to one side so the bathroom’s naked lightbulb can shine directly on them.

  Galavance stands up and gives a whole-body quake, unable to control herself, then heads back down the hall, still shivering. She was already shaking from the ordeal with Patty. She checks the trailer’s deadbolt, twice, before going up the hall to the bedroom to get changed. She has to pass the bathroom to do so and peers in as she passes. The tiny worms have not escaped the trash can. After putting on jeans and a T-shirt, whatever’s within reach, it’s on her trip back to the kitchen—giving the bathroom wide berth—when she pauses in the living room, and that’s when it hits her—bam.

  If those heartworms at the vet’s office in the jar came from a dog, then what if the worms in the trashcan came from Jolby? What if he’s got some kind of intestinal … weirdness going on? What if it’s from the sausage? What if I have those in me, too? She tries to tell herself she hasn’t eaten nearly as much as Jolby has over the time she’s worked at Frenchy’s. On her lunch breaks, she would often opt for a protein bar and a soda. Very seldom, other than this morning of course, did she eat that much Frenchy’s. But all those taste-tests they did. Fuck. Nausea hits her in a foamy orange wave. She can’t help remembering how the squeaky bits of sausage felt as she chewed them. How it tasted as she swallowed.

  What if that was how the Lizard People were made? Patty did say something about them transforming. So unless it was a curse, some family blood-thing, that meant … Jolby has it. And maybe that’s why Patty, like Saelig Zilch, were both so interested in the wetlands near Whispering Pines of Picaresque Bay. She has to sit on their hand-me-down sofa. She holds her head in her hands and stares saucer-eyed at nothing, her mind practically smoking. This isn’t good.

  She flinches when she hears, up the hall, the metallic clatter of something falling over. She’s left the bathroom light on and from the couch she can see the waste basket, rolling on its side, peeking out of the bathroom at her.

  When she heads back up the hall, she’s prepared, with two hair ties and a paper towel made into a filtration mask. She has on big rubber dishwashing gloves and has wrapped herself in Saran wrap. She keeps her eye on the trash can—which is still, for now—and snatches up her can of hairspray from the counter. Then, from her pocket, her Bic. She shakes the can, stepping forward,
spraying a tongue of fire into the mouth of the trashcan. The plastic bag liner melts, and the Q-tips burst into double-headed torches. Jolby’s bandage takes the fire, the old blood inside bubbling and turning thick and black. The worms inside twist and curl, go crispy, and finally still once they’re curls of ash.

  Proud of herself, Galavance steps back, the hairspray can still in her hand. It’s hot. The nozzle, she notices, still has a finger of a flame going. The push-down part is melting and the flame, suddenly, grows a little bigger—and makes a soft, agitated pop.

  Fearing she’ll lose her hand if it explodes, she tosses it into the tub and starts the shower. Pulling the shower curtain aside, she realizes, is stupid, because if the can detonates it’s not like a millimeter of vinyl is going to stop aerosol can shrapnel. The can lets off a soft thud and she peeks behind the shower curtain, squinting against the showerhead’s back-spray. The can is still burning and now part of the shower wall is black. The flames are small but they grow quickly, up the shower wall, to the drop ceiling. Trying to adjust the showerhead does nothing. Something whooshes next to her and suddenly the bathroom wallpaper is on fire—and rapidly spreading.

  “Shit. Stop,” she tells the fire, snapping a towel at it. “Stop.”

  It doesn’t listen.

  Backing out into the hallway, Galavance stares as the bathroom fills with white smoke and the fire takes the rack of towels, then the shower rug and the toilet paper still on its roll. The garbage can, on the other side of the room, is still burning and contributing to the blaze from the other side. The flames meet in the middle and the room is engulfed. Galavance jumps as the smoke alarm starts screaming, telling her something she already knows. She feels in her pockets for her phone. Then, from the burning trash can, she hears her ringtone go off. She’d forgotten her stupid piece of shit flip-phone in her work pants. Great.

  Chased out by a whoosh of smoke, Galavance shoulders her way out onto the Astroturf-carpeted patio and takes a few long strides across the driveway and into the yard in her bare feet. She moves her car down to the end of the driveway, away from the house. There’s no use in yelling for help, so she just stands, leaning on her car, watching, waiting for the people on the side of the street to call the fire department. Not that there’ll be anything to save once they arrive. A friend of hers used to call double-wides matchboxes. Once a fire reaches that cheap insulation they’re all made with, you can say goodbye to anything inside. Fifteen minutes and they’re down to their metal frame. Seems accurate so far. Not that Galavance is particularly interested in timing her home’s destruction right now.