The Insides (2 page)

Her name is Olive Krueger; she goes by Ollie; her signature, made in haste, is an elongated, runny O.

Even though Ulysses’s beard has gotten a little gray and wild, and even though his teeth are as crooked as they’ve ever been, he is still, Ollie thinks, one awfully handsome man. His short-sleeved work shirt, patterned in a pink
strain of lumberjack plaid, is worn tight across his chest: the sight invites her to remember what his body looks like, even though the memories are part of a thicket which is not without thorns. She turns away, hands the chickens off to Guychardson, her co-worker, a wiry Haitian with a rockabilly hairdo, who has emerged from the kitchen to help with the unloading. When she turns back, Ulysses catches her eye, gives her the look that asks if he’s invited to stay for a minute. She gives him the look that says OK.

It’s a qualified OK. Not:
OK, come on in, hang out as long as you want, like everything’s normal, like we’re back to fucking again
; more like
OK, you can stand with me, here in the loading zone, for exactly as long as it takes me to smoke one cigarette. Don’t talk too much
.

And he doesn’t. They don’t have that much to say, these days. She doesn’t want to talk about the past, and the future, in the absence of either of them making some major change, just looks the same as this. So all they’re left with to remark upon is the present.

Ulysses leans on the railing, squints up at the segment of hazy sky visible between the buildings. “Supposed to be in the nineties again today,” he says.

“Fucking August,” Ollie says.

She looks over her shoulder: Guychardson’s still inside. She takes Ulysses’s collar in her fist. Because they’re unobserved, she feels at liberty to pull him away from the railing, pull him in close, kiss him ferociously on the mouth.

This is a thing she does with him only sometimes, often enough to be familiar but not so often that either of them can allow it to settle into an expectation.

She uses her tongue. He tastes like violet: it’s that gum he’s always liked. She probably tastes like a Marlboro Red. She never really enjoyed this style of vigorous kissing but she knows that Ulysses likes it, and she likes thinking that giving him a taste of her will give him something to remember as he heads back upstate. She likes thinking about him wanting her from 150 miles away. She might not even want him any more, but she still wants him wanting her. She’s not entirely sure what that means but she doesn’t feel like figuring it out right now, not at this point in her life.

And then she feels eyes on her. She breaks the kiss, looks over to see a Greek guy wearing a nylon Red Bull jacket coming up the stairs at the end of the loading dock. Greek dude is scowling, which makes her vigilance kick on: thanks to her fucked-up youth she still can’t see someone scowling at her without trying to reason out exactly why, trying to figure out what exactly is coming at her. She suspects that what’s coming at her, in this instance, is some racial shit, especially if he thinks she’s a white woman, which he almost certainly does. White guys, like Greek dude here, don’t always like it when they see white women making out with black guys, like Ulysses here. So it could be that. Or it could just be his face’s default demeanor. She repeats a thing that Donald used to tell her: not everybody is your enemy. You live in a city, he would say, sometimes people are grumpy for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Regardless: this man’s appearance means that more meat has arrived. She slaps Ulysses on the shoulders and grins at him by way of goodbye, and once he’s strolled back
to his Buick she takes Greek guy’s clipboard and signs for six skinned and hollowed goats. Guychardson returns, and the two of them load goats up on their backs and head into the kitchen, out of the heat of the day.

Part of their job is to make all this meat go somewhere. She passes the three walk-in refrigerators without a look; space is at a premium in there and the carcasses are too large to fit. The rule at Carnage is that nothing goes in the walk-ins until it’s been sundered. So instead she loads the carcass into the dumbwaiter. Guychardson is right behind her: he loads his goat next to hers in the dumbwaiter’s double-wide car, and punches the button that kicks on the motor. Ollie heads downstairs.

The building used to be part of the waterworks system, or something; Ollie’s not up on her New York City infrastructure enough to be able to say for sure. All she knows is that the Carnage basement is a huge length of semicircular tunnel, lined in clammy antique tile. Once the tunnel went somewhere, she presumes, but now it terminates at both ends in crudely masoned brick walls. Beneath her feet, ovoid grates mark out eight-foot intervals on the floor; through them she can hear the distant sound of water, running through some vast dank sequence of caverns beneath Manhattan. Above her are the hooks.

The room—windowless, subterranean—stays cool all year, even now, in the long, sweltering stretches of summer. Part of the reason Jon and Angel even set up in this building in the first place, as the lore goes, was because they saw this room as a quick-and-dirty solution to the problem of where to put all the meat they were going to need in order to make
this venture work. Install some hooks on a track in a vast cool space and you got a start.

She lifts the goat. She can do this a hundred times a day: she’s six feet tall and has her father’s Germanic-peasant arms. She also has her mother’s welter of wild curls. In a perfect world these would be minor entries in a long list of gifts she’d received from her parents: in this world, though, they’re the two best things she got.

She returns to the dumbwaiter, where there are two more goats for her. This repeats until all six goats are on hooks, and then she heads back upstairs to start working on the pigs.

Storing meat in a cool basement is strictly short-term. If it’s down there for more than four hours it starts to attract raised eyebrows from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and if you run a restaurant called Carnage which uses “meat reenvisioned” as its high concept, you’d better be reliably getting DHMH to give you sheets of paper with a giant letter
A
on them or you’re pretty much fucked. So the next part of her job is to take whatever heap of meat is on hand and reduce it down to manageable pieces, ideally pieces that demonstrate some level of finesse, pieces the chefs won’t bring back to you and wave in your face while calling you a talentless abortionist.

She fishes her battered, seven-year-old iPod out of her apron pocket and slams it into the SoundDock that she keeps on the highest shelf in the prep area (Guychardson, who’s about five foot four, can’t meddle with it up there unless he gets a stool). She punches play on the work playlist, which kicks off with Swans. “Raping a Slave.” As the kitchen fills
with thudding, dirgelike percussion, she pulls her knife kit out from under her station and approaches the prep table, where Guychardson has arranged four sides of pork.

Together, they butcher.

She saws her side into thirds, grunts as she works the saw through the aitchbone. Takes the middle section and separates it: chops, ribs. Saws the chops from the backbone, then switches from saw to trimmer as the music switches from no-wave pummel to annihilatory black metal shredding. This mix is eight hours of the kind of music that keeps you from thinking about yourself too hard, which is why she likes it. Guychardson whistles a jaunty melody over the top of it, possibly to annoy her; when she looks up he is pretending to play a set of ribs like a xylophone. He looks like something out of a macabre old-time cartoon. She smirks, in spite of herself, and goes back to finishing the chops; she slaps them down on a twelve-inch platter and racks it in the end-loading cart. She removes some belly fat and plops it into a steel bucket: Angel will turn it into something tasty later.

She gets the loin out and drops it on another platter, racks it, moves to working on separating the bacon from the ribs. She spares a glance at Guychardson’s work at the other end of the prep table, notes that he’s begun on the rear third of his side, cutting out the hams. That’s her least favorite task to perform on any pig; it takes time, and breaks up the flow of the work. She envies Guychardson his pace. He’s faster than she is. At that part anyway.

They only work together two days a week, Friday and Saturday, prepping for the really busy nights. The rest of the week Guychardson’s at a Caribbean joint somewhere in
Brooklyn and Ollie’s on her own here. But even though they spend only two days a week together, they’ve developed a rivalry. They race. They track who’s ahead, who’s made more animals disappear into the walk-in, who’s produced more finished cuts. It’s friendly, sort of. Or, more accurately, it has the surface appearance of being friendly. In reality there’s an edge to it. Guychardson wins almost every night. She thinks he must be cheating.

The competition has left its mark on her. At the end of one shift last winter, she was going too fast, trying to catch up, and she took off the edge of her left pointer finger, leaving a quarter-inch sliver of flesh on the surface of the prep table. She clicked her tongue once against the roof of her mouth and closed her eyes, and when she felt the blood begin to well out she clenched her right hand around the wound as if she could unmake her mistake through the application of pressure alone. When the chefs figured out what happened they poured her three shots of whiskey and made her stick the finger into a chafing dish full of kosher salt. She remembers the scream she let out. She doesn’t remember what happened to the tiny filet of finger-meat; it amuses her to think that it might have ended up accidentally swept into a sausage bucket and served to some unsuspecting customer.

Before that, about a year ago now, just after she’d first started working with Guychardson, she’d asked him how he was able to bone out the hams so effectively. He gave her a grin she immediately thought of as
shit-eating
and said, “I’m a man, baby.” She has tried to make herself believe that he’d said
I’m the man
, but he hadn’t: she knew it then and she knows it now.

I’m a man
. His stupid answer comes to mind at least once each time they work together, percolating up unbidden through the layers of scorching drone that her SoundDock fills the kitchen with, through the work, which is supposed to ground her, keep her mind from wandering. And each time they work together—every Friday and Saturday—she reaffirms that his answer is bullshit. Being a man has nothing to do with it. He’s tiny. She’s bigger than he is, she’s stronger than he is, and she’s pretty sure there’s no other kind of inherent male advantage that could be helping him in this particular arena. And frankly, his technique isn’t any better than hers either, at least as far as she can tell.

She takes a quick glance across the table, watches him separate a tough joint. She narrows her eyes, inspecting him.

Maybe it’s his knife. He uses this weird knife in his kit for almost every task. The weird thing about it is that it has no spine; both sides are sharpened to an edge, like a fucking dagger or something. It’s got no bolster to speak of and the handle looks like he cut it out of a piece of oak with a saw; the whole thing looks like he might have made it in shop class when he was a kid. It makes no sense. She can’t see how anyone could get good action off that thing. But it’s clear that he cares for it. He doesn’t leave it at his station at the end of the day; he takes it with him, in a special lacquered box that only holds the one knife. So maybe there’s something about it.

Maybe his knife is magic.

She’s spent a lot of her life around enough people who used magic to cheat the world. She’s done it herself, though that was a long time ago, and she tries not to think about
it too much, these days. And on an average shift, she stays busy—so it’s pretty easy to keep from thinking too much about anything.

They work. They wheel filled racks into the walk-in. They drop the hocks and hams and bacon into the big brining buckets. They replenish the prep table with more meat from the basement. Angel and Jon show up. Jon, a curly-haired pirate-looking Caucasian, sticks his head in for only a second, beams a smile at them, then heads back to the front kitchen, where he will spend an hour or so planning the day’s specials out on a whiteboard. Angel, a slender guy, half Puerto Rican, half Cuban, sits in the rear kitchen with them for a couple of minutes, watching them appreciatively. Watching her. Even without turning away from the task in front of her, she can feel something in that look. An invitation. Hers to respond to or to ignore. This note in the look is something new. It started about a month ago, which, she notes, somewhat uneasily, lines up almost exactly with the date Angel’s wife moved out.

Don’t shit where you eat
, she tells herself this afternoon, as she tells herself every afternoon, when she feels the invitation in Angel’s look. But on some other level she already knows that it’s going to happen, that she will accept the invitation eventually, whether she wants to or not. It’s just a matter of time. But she makes herself not think of that. Instead, she imagines smoking a cigarette. She imagines it in great detail.

Ollie’s playlist moves into its final songs, long pieces of Louisiana sludge rock. The basement is finally empty now, the walk-ins nearly full. She’s lost the competition
again. Neither she nor Guychardson remark upon it, but she knows that he’s noticed, and she knows that he’s noticed that she’s noticed. A couple of the cooks and the lead servers have shown up, congregating around Jon’s whiteboard. Laughter and easy talk. Somebody’s turning leftover bison into the family meal.

And at the end of that final hour she jams her iPod back in her pocket and joins everybody in the main kitchen and listens to Jon and Angel talk the staff through the plan for the night. Half-listens, really: her work for the day, at this point, is done. Sometimes, if they’re shorthanded, she’ll work an additional shift, but they don’t need her tonight, so she wolfs down an enormous bowl of shepherd’s pie and cleans up her knife kit and dunks her apron in the laundry bin. She receives a few claps on the back from the friendlier cooks and heads out through the service entrance. She has the cigarette she fantasized about earlier, her second of the day. She’s trying to quit. Guychardson follows her out, lacquered box under his arm, and with one wave back over his shoulder at her he disappears, into the waning light.