splat chapter twenty-seven, part one

SPLAT CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN, PART ONE

 

Suzie sat on the couch and thumbed through the channels, looking for something to pass the time before she had to get ready for work. She passed the Weather Channel, where some guy in a yellow slicker and a falling-apart umbrella was standing at some railing overlooking the water, screaming into the microphone about winds and rains. It was another hurricane; they were one every two weeks now. She turned back and watched until the satellite picture came on. Atlanta was too far inland to be threatened by hurricanes, but once in a while one came up this far on its way to Europe, and favored the area with a foot of rain. Those were great days for Suzie. Richly textured feeder-bands racing by, the curve of the storm visible across the whole sky; balmy air you could feel; all that rain. What bliss.

But the show bored her after a few minutes, because the presenters were all pretending this hurricane was as dangerous as Katrina, and the satellite photos showed it to be a wimpy thing aimed at a relatively vacant part of the coast. So she raced through the channels until she got to the Cartoon Network, and spent a mindless half hour or so watching the Powerpuff Girls fight cartoon evil. She liked their eyes.

She was feeling lonely by the time she had to get ready for work. She checked Alex's room as she passed, and found he'd recently tagged his walls with black paint in thick letters. Gave it even more of a cave feel. She couldn't tell if his bed had been slept in or not, because of course he never made the bed. Hell, he never washed the sheets. And half the time he went to sleep fully clothed, so what was the difference? She looked closer at the new tag. It said Gloria.

She remembered the new uniform requirements as she retrieved her skirt from where she'd kicked it the night before, and the thought of having to raise her skirt for a bunch of lecherous rich white men filled her with hate. Then she had an idea.

She went back into the living room and rummaged around in the stash of tools until she found the staple gun. Folding her skirt to the required length, she stapled the new hem, happy to see when she turned it right side out that the staples made a nice, neat, shiny metal row three inches in. That'll show them. She dug out a pair of black tights, jettisoned into a corner of the closet many long months ago when she was going through a punk phase. They had big runs in them, but she'd runned them on purpose, as part of her punk look, and decided that they suited her current attitude nicely. Never mind high heels, tho. She briefly considered wearing her Doc Martens, but in the end wore her regular black runners.

She drove past the burned house in daylight. It was still dripping and smoldering. It sagged and moped in the sun. The smell was overpowering. People had died. People she passed all the time.

She noticed, when she went to clock in, that there was nobody at all she recognized in the kitchen. Only Manny, who slithered in and crept out, trying desperately to escape notice.

She followed him out to the trash room. Standing shivering in the refrigeration, she asked him where the cooks were, and what was going on.

He looked around furtively. Suzie quickly examined the walls and ceilings for cameras, and wondered if they were bugging the trash room. 'They're all gone,' he said, sorrowfully. 'Chef made them all take a piss test when they came in this morning. He warned them last night before they left, and half of them didn't show up this morning. The ones who came in, they all failed the test, and the cops took them away.'

'Then who are those guys out there now?'

He looked darkly at her, then shrugged, and went back to his work.

Chef was being very hands-on out in the kitchen. He was prepping and cooking, supervising and teaching a batch of new cooks. Suzie could see that he was happy being involved with his new staff. These workers listened to instructions, not like the Black Mafia that just did it their way no matter how many times he showed them how to do it.

Suzie paid close attention to the Sous-chefs in toque hats that stood around watching. Guards, eh? She noticed one whispering to himself, and wondered if they had headsets built into their toques. She decided the strange-looking wire whisks they carried were stun guns. But she couldn't see enough to figure it out, as she slid past them and scampered up the stairs.

Tonight was a whole different setup. Casual Dining was closed, and all hands were diverted to the ballrooms on the main floor, where they were setting up for the annual Founders' Ball.

Suzie went into the pantry and checked out the function sheet. The Ladies Slipper Ballroom was being set up for a buffet, and the Southern Sportsman Ballroom for dancing and drinking. The function sheet laid out the room setup and the linen order, detailed the menu, and listed the hors d'oevres that were going to be passed around on trays.

Suzie checked out the rooms. Porters were setting out the dining tables and the buffet tables in the Ladies Slipper Ballroom. She could see indentations on the rug where the hand truck had been wheeled in with table tops stacked up on it. The tops had been centered on steel pedestals, and looked ugly and utilitarian without their linens. She counted twenty ten-tops. Tuxedoed porters were bringing in chairs that Suzie guessed were rented for the occasion, at least 200. The bare bones of three serving stations were being set up in the corners of the room for the prime rib and other things that needed to be portioned on the spot by a Sous-chef. Two bars were being laid out against the long walls.

Suzie watched new porters setting up a long, snaky mess of tables down the center of the room, with a tuxedoed guy in sunglasses and a walking stick watching them from a corner. The Service Manager was directing the process. 'Over a little, no, less, that's right, now look, it wobbles, we've got to level this table here, no, don't put that there yet.'

Suzie went over to the Southern Sportsman room and saw four bars being set up in the corners of the room, and watched a team of new porters setting out big parquet squares on top of the rug to make a stage and a dance floor. They were setting up a dozen hi-boy tables around the dance floor, where partiers would leave their drinks to go dance. There were also six ten-tops randomly placed in the middle of the room with linens draped to the floor and chairs being brought in. There were a lot of ironwork pyramids and pedestals along the walls, with workers twining kudzu vines and flowers around the grillwork. How festive.

She wandered back into the other ballroom and helped cover the tables. White undercloths went on, stained and holed from years of use, and then heavy fancy gold rented table linens that went to the floor all around the tables. Totally elegant, if you didn't look underneath.

When the tables were covered, the waiters sat down and started folding piles of napkins, talking about the horror stories.

A black waiter took her turn. 'It was a gig over at the Marriott Marquis on Peachtree,' she said. She was middle aged, and had the air of never being surprised by nothing. 'It was 240 medical students from over at Emory. Some conference. Breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days. We spent a couple of hours setting it up, and the moment we opened the doors, they charged in. They about ran us over stampeding to the buffet tables. The rudest bunch of kids I've ever met. The same behavior every meal.'

The other waiters made sympathetic sounds.

'I'm never doing one of those again,' she said, shaking her head. 'I couldn't bring myself to go in on the Friday morning. And the agency woman called me up at home and said, ''I thought you were going to work with me.'' And I said, ''Working with you is fine, but what about working with me? You sent me on a suicide mission. And you didn't even give me extra to make it easier to bear.''' The waiter looked around. 'And do you know, she got this regret thing in her voice, and told me she didn't think she was going to be able to use me again.'

The other waiters tisked and clucked, nodded and frowned. Waiting tables was a thankless job. She looked around, appreciating the support. 'I hope she doesn't call me. I don't need it.' They all grunted.

Everyone folded another dozen napkins each. The pile in the center of the table was getting small. The Service Manager came along with a plastic bin, and everyone stopped to pile their folded napkins into it.

The woman resumed. 'I'm getting old, not stupid,' she said. 'I'm working smarter. My old club where I worked, they made us take full trays into the dining room. Ten full plates on them, heavy stoneware plates, with lids, and we were supposed to go in there with them balanced on our raised hands.'

Her listeners uttered shocked and dismayed sounds. She was a tiny woman. It was so unfair to overburden people like that. 'They insisted, absolutely insisted we do it that way. Well, I couldn't do it. I had to go in holding my tray with both arms, and that really screwed my back up.' She reached for more napkins. 'When I was twenty I could lift ten plates. But now? Four is the most.' She considered it. 'Yeah, four.'

'I'm telling you,' someone agreed.

She shook her head at the memory. 'You know what I mean?'

Someone else added, 'I hear that.'

'That's what I'm saying,' she finished.

The napkins were all folded, so the waiters all got up and finished setting the tables, laying out gold placemats at each setting, lining up empty wine glasses, arranging napkins in the center. Somebody went around to each table with a gold centerpiece of flowers. Somebody else went around with little votive candles and lined them up around the centerpiece. They spent time covering the buffet tables with cloth and gold linen, and the same for the serving stations, but finally everything was done, and it was still a good hour before the function started.

The Service Manager called them all together in the Southern Sportsman Ballroom, where they stood around looking stately in their formal clothes. The new porters joined them, strangers in tuxedos, silent and watchful. Their shadowy supervisors stood where they could keep an eye on them.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' he said. 'Welcome. And welcome to all you temps. Thanks for being here tonight to help with our most important do of the year.' He looked at the function sheet. 'Tonight we're going to be having 470 guests, and they'll be mostly interested in drinking and dancing. The band goes to eleven-thirty, so expect to be here until twelve-thirty or so.' Everyone shifted on their feet.

Then he read off a list of names, assigning people to pass hors d'oevres in the Ladies Slipper, others to pass hors in the Sportsman, the older black guys to work the bar, the temps to pour wine and help out, everybody to clear empties off the tables. He mentioned that the porters would be acting as beverage and food runners, keeping the bars and buffet tables stocked. Suzie found herself on the canapé detail in the Ladies Slipper Ballroom.

The Service Manager clapped his hands and checked his watch. 'Okay, people, we've got fifteen minutes to eat dinner. Go on down to the kitchen, and I'll see you back up here at 7:15.'

They all filed down the stairs into the kitchen, where the cooks had put trays of food on a prep table. Everyone lined up and took a paper plate, grabbed a bun out of the plastic bag, and then picked over a tray of burgers. Suzie judged that they'd been run through the oven to cook, and wondered about their quality. They sat, already cool, in a slime of congealed blood and fat, sagging and pitted, dry and tough looking. Utility grade meat, yum.

Suzie looked at what else there was to eat, and decided she just needed to go ahead and down the crap they were serving. She found a burger in the middle of the stack that looked less overcooked than the others. Then she scooped up a spoonful of baked beans out of a tray and drained the watery sauce out of it. Stretching them with water, or just making sure they didn't congeal while they heated up?

She wondered, too, about the tray of tater tots, which nobody had bothered to stir while they were in the oven. They were crisp and crunchy on the surface, but all stuck together in a white pasty mass inside. There was a tray of something green and white and lumpy at the end, and it might have been artichoke dip and it might have been a gelatin dessert, and though some nudged it with its serving spoon, nobody dared to try any.

They all trooped over to the Kudzu Room and crammed into folding chairs around the folding tables. The temps took their chances with the drink dispenser, and complained about the drinks coming out all carbonation and no taste. Everybody else got water from the tap and complained that it tasted of chlorine. No pleasing people, eh?

Forty waiters and porters sat at three long folding tables, eating delicately in their formal clothes, their bow ties unhooked and slung around the back of their tuxedo shirts, dangling through the loop at the back of the neck.

The porters ate in a group, not looking up. They ate fast, and after nodding to the guard, got up for seconds, like they really enjoyed the food. Nobody noticed the kitchen knives they stashed in their shirts while they were out in the kitchen.

They all looked with considerable envy at the few waiters who brought food from home. One had a salad. One had a sandwich. Somebody brought a container of Brunswick stew and cornbread. They were enjoying their food. The others all anticipated stress-induced heartburn, and no time at all to think about it, no time to go sit in the servants' quarters and let their stomachs settle.

A sad looking little black waiter was talking about some place she'd worked where some employee had mixed up the cleaning chemicals and accidentally spilled them on her hand. She showed the scars to the others, who looked horrified. She told how she had to go to the hospital. It swelled up, and she couldn't work, and had all sorts of doctor bills - $225 for the emergency room, $83 for one drug, other expenses. When she came back to work and told the manager about it, he didn't believe she'd been burned on the job. 'I got to tell you I don't believe you, he said.'

The waiters exploded. Yolanda looked stern. 'But it's Workmans Comp,' she explained. 'You get injured on the job, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. You have a right to file a claim.'

The woman looked at her plate. 'He said he'd take care of it. He made me give him the paperwork.'

'Did you give him originals?' somebody asked quickly.

'Do I look stupid?'

There were sighs of relief. 'How long ago did it happen?'

She looked doubtful. 'It's been two months.'

Yolanda said, 'You have two years to file, but you'd best do it sooner than later.' She shook her fork in the air. 'You have to file. He won't do it for you.'

'But he'd said he'd take care of it,' she protested. 'I don't want to go back to him about it. I don't like making trouble.'

She frowned. 'But he's not going to file. If there's a claim filed against the Club, then they have to pay out, and he's Management, so he'll do anything to avoid paying. You have to file yourself,' she insisted.

'I'll do it Monday.' She wasn't looking at anybody when she said this. She wasn't convincing even to herself. She didn't like confrontation.

They were all done with dinner. Burping, they tossed their plates and cups into a huge garbage can next to the break room door, and trooped back upstairs to the ballrooms. And then it was time to open the doors and let the guests stream in, heading for the bars.

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next, the fan hitting i promised