Cape Cod Noir Read online

  “So you motherfuckers speak English?”

  “Yeah, buceta, but the owner don’t know that,” the line cook said. He was wrapping blue electrical tape around the handle of a set of tongs, marking his pair. He came out from behind the line and stuck out his hand. “Gleason. That’s Rener on grill and Marcello with you.” We all shook hands.

  “Vai toe man o cu,” I said in Portuguese. Fuck you. Like I said, I’d been on the line before.

  These guys worked clean. They didn’t do lines to keep going or show up high. They’d take their shift drink out back when we were done for the night, but that was it. Hell, I was the only one who smoked butts back there. They just worked and called the waitstaff buceta to their faces. It was their only recourse.

  The Cape Cod summers did that to them. Falmouth’s population was exploding, the stress and long hours boiling with it. Going through work shirts like they were disposable because they got filthy so fast. Jamaican community expanding for the season. The Cape Verdeans battling with the Jamaicans for jobs and with knives at house parties. Eastern Europeans in on work visas cranking out eighty-hour weeks. I once worked with two Bulgarians mowing on a golf course who did five a.m. to three p.m. at the course and then went to Stop & Shop from four until two a.m. to stock shelves. Every day for four months. Then they went home to Bulgaria and bought apartments, cars, and set up a computer business. That’s all they wanted, a little place of their own in the same building as their parents and enough to get them out of the cracks.

  But the Brazilians. The Brazilians had originally come to the Cape because of the language. The Portuguese were already here. Now, the Brazilians worked like dogs, kept their heads down and saved, figuring they could work hard and long enough for ten years to move back home and retire.

  “Man, in Brazil,” Marcello told me one day, “I had a bike and a girl and the beaches, man. Your beaches here don’t know. In Brazil there are guys who come up to you and sell you beer out of a cooler and the girls are walking. Man, here people just lay around and you can’t drink or dance. Here I just work and there are no girls, man.”

  “Yeah, but you’re making money.”

  “Money, yeah, man. But there are no girls. What do I say to American girl, man? I know English only for kitchen. What do I say when I want to go out with them? You want special salad? Man, you have it easy, you speak English.”

  “Your English is fine.”

  “Marcello’s right,” Gleason said. “You have it easy.”

  “What are you talking about? You run the line. You make more money than me.”

  Gleason just laughed and went back to making demi glace.

  DePuzzo used to run the line, but then he got Gleason. Gleason was fresh to the Cape, called up by his brother who thought he could get him a job at the fish market where he worked. He showed up to the Cape, but it turned out there wasn’t any work at the market for him. Gleason beat doors for two weeks before DePuzzo took him on as a dishwasher. All the time he was spraying dishes and racking them, DePuzzo taught him the details of prep cooking. How to move fast, how to set up the line for the service so that they didn’t start calling for more ingredients until the end of the night. DePuzzo worked Gleason up a little at a time, knowing that he needed the money and wasn’t dealing drugs out of the back of the kitchen or snorting up his paycheck like the last two cooks. There’s a lot of coke on the Cape, bad during the summer, even worse during the winter. It’s cold and there’s no one. You lose a lot of line cooks that way. You lose a lot of college girls that way. I got lost that way.

  Gleason worked his way up, and about the time he made prep cook, Rener and Marcello came aboard. They all knew each other back in Brazil. DePuzzo showed them the ropes, let Gleason teach them some, and kept his kitchen tight. He skimmed off their paychecks but they were working on other people’s Social Security numbers so they didn’t say anything. That’s how they do it. They come in on a visa and when the visa runs out and an employer asks for a Social Security number to keep INS and the IRS happy, they get one from another Brazilian who’s been in the country for a while.

  Marcello kept on about that bike and that girl. But damn if he didn’t work refinishing furniture all day and then come into the kitchen, two hours before dinner service. He had the ten-year itch too.

  “What about you, G?” I asked Gleason one afternoon. “You saving up to go back to Brazil?”

  He didn’t answer. He just pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, looked at the screen, and quickly shut it. He turned away from me.

  “Hey buceta,” Rener said. “You working like us. You saving to go back to Brazil?”

  “Yeah boy,” I said. “You and me. We’re gonna dance in the fucking streets when I get enough up. Car-knee-val!”

  I bent at the waist, put my face halfway to the ground, and stretched my arms to my side like I was a swallow in flight. I pointed the index finger on my right hand toward the wall and stiffened my whole body. I shook the hell out of my leg and jabbed that finger like I was trying to poke through the air.

  “This is my car-knee-val dance, boys. This is how I’m gonna do it when we go back to Brazil.”

  They laughed.

  “You crazy, man,” Rener said. “You get no girls you dance like that in Brazil.”

  Gleason just shook his head.

  By then, I could joke with them like that. Fifteen hours a day in a summer kitchen, no one to talk to but the guys working next to you, all of you dependent on each other, and you get close, tight, real quick. Some don’t, of course—they take ego in and rub everybody wrong. Those people never last, or they end up in serious shit with the other cooks. I once saw two Jamaicans take a white kid fresh out of Johnson & Wales into a restaurant basement, bend him over a flour sack, and paddle the shit out of him with a baker’s peel. They had been in that kitchen five years and this boy comes fresh out of cooking school, gets put on as prep cook, and starts talking shit about the “untrained Jamaicans,” slowing them down on purpose. Two days of that in the summer rush, and he got that baker’s peel so bad he wouldn’t sit for a week. Some nights while I was doing my bid, I’d hear crying on the tier and I’d swear it was that same college boy crying from the basement between the thwacks of a baker’s peel, like a wet hand slapping a stomach.

  But after I got out, I was just another motherfucker humping his shit for a p.o. and trying not to get violated right back. To hell with ego. You can’t get those seven years back. So I just rolled into DePuzzo’s and tried to laugh and keep those Brazilians laughing. In the heat and with DePuzzo, it was all we had.

  DePuzzo came up on the Cape. I remember having some kids with that last name in some of my high school classes. On the Cape, everybody knows everybody. Or is related to them. He spent his summers working in the kitchens on Main Street, saving money for fifteen years until he could set up a place of his own. From day one, it’s been busy. Small joint, damned good food. And he takes care of the locals. Sends them a shot of homemade whiskey after their meal. Doesn’t even answer when the tourists or summer residents ask what it is. Summer residents aren’t local no matter how long they’ve lived here. You don’t shovel snow in the winter or deal with the ice storms, you aren’t local. Simple.

  Way I began to see it in those first weeks in the kitchen, DePuzzo, at some point, had been a good guy. Stand-up. The kind you’d buy a two-buck beer for at the Elks on Wednesday and then ask after his kids. But then, after he got Gleason and those guys, he figured on something else and let it go.

  I saw how far he’d come when he was set to pay my second paycheck. I’d never seen the first. He said some of it went back to him for training and the rest went to my p.o. for a finder’s fee. Guess I knew then how I got that job so damn quick. And what was I gonna say? He’d just pick up the phone, call my p.o., and they’d make some shit up and violate me right back. When you’re leaving prison, some guys will yell at you from the tiers, “Stay free.” I intended to do just that.


  Second paycheck, I figured he was gonna skim me again. Instead, he put an envelope in my hand and walked out to the front of the house. I heard him calling for the two busgirls. Eastern Europeans. They didn’t speak to me too much. Sometimes that’s how it goes, front of the house keeps to their own unless they need something special or there’s a complaint. Anyway, I opened the envelope and it was all there. I still heard him calling for those two girls. I stuffed the envelope into my pocket and got back to work. I made a ricotta spread, then I remembered I had to go across the lot to a small garage where we have extra refrigerators for storage. I needed lemons. I headed out the back door and across the lot. When I opened the side door to the garage, there was DePuzzo, his back to me, ass to the wind, arms behind his back holding another envelope while one of the Eastern Europeans sucked him off. When he heard me open the door, he held her head with one hand, looked over his shoulder at me, and winked. Then he flicked his wrist so I could see the girl’s paycheck in his hand. It was pretty clear, the whole thing.

  Back in the kitchen, side by side with Marcello cutting mushrooms, I told him about it.

  “Every time,” he said, “or he doesn’t pay.”

  The next day, he came in to pay the kitchen guys. He waited the extra day because he gives them cash and doesn’t want to take too much out of the bank at once.

  He came in wearing jeans and a white Oxford open to his solar plexus. A thin gold chain snaked through his black chest hair. He had four stacks of bills rubber-banded in his hands. That next-day smell of booze came out of his skin in the kitchen heat. Ray-Bans on, he stood at the edge of the line next to the standing oven, slapping the stacks of bills against his palm.

  The Brazilians knew exactly what to do. They all got in line in front of him, the dishwasher first. I watched from the corner, mashing potatoes. The dishwasher stepped forward and DePuzzo dropped her stack of bills on the floor. Without looking him in the eye, she bent and picked them up, and walked back to her stack of dishes. Rener stepped forward in her place and looked DePuzzo right in the eye. Guess being twenty-eight still meant something. DePuzzo twisted a sick smile and slapped the last three stacks against his open palm.

  “Buceta,” he said, and dropped the stack on the floor. Rener flinched, looked down, then bent and picked it up.

  Marcello bent and got his.

  Gleason was last in line, and I could see the base of his neck getting red. His jaw muscles corded as he ground his teeth. His head was tilted, his eyes shaded by his greasy kitchen-use Red Sox cap. He opened his cell phone, peered at the screen, closed it, and stepped up. He didn’t look DePuzzo in the eye, but didn’t look at the floor either. He just stared at DePuzzo’s throat, head raised enough so the boss could see his face, his grit, but not his eyes beneath that cap.

  “Stick your hand out,” DePuzzo said.

  Gleason looked up.

  “I said stick your hand out.”

  Gleason raised his right hand slowly, and opened his palm. DePuzzo held the stack above the palm like he was going to drop it right there. He waited a second. Then he tossed the stack on the rubber mats and said, “Who the fuck you kidding?” as he walked out.

  Every day, the Brazilians and I listened to bootleg favela hiphop at top volume, or Jota Quest, or even Brazilian sertaneja music. I dug it. I was learning new tunes. Every day trying to crack a joke, trying to keep the dishwasher from yelling at us. She didn’t like us cursing and trying to make it light before DePuzzo showed up. They stopped saying buceta to the staff’s faces after they saw he knew what it meant. And every two weeks the Eastern Europeans went out back and the Brazilians picked their stacks off the floor. DePuzzo always handed me my money in front of the Brazilians. He figured it would turn them on me, or at least make things tough. He should have known better, he used to work the line.

  One rainy Saturday, I was opening with Gleason, trying to rip through the prep work before the lunch rush. Rain means people don’t go to the beach. They go to restaurants for lunch to bitch about wasting their vacation time. I was cleaning a halibut. Gleason was staring at the screen on his phone again. He hadn’t put any music on yet. He was just standing and not paying much attention.

  “That the ten-year plan?”

  He glanced at me, the spell broken, all of him coming back from somewhere. He shut the phone and placed it on top of the industrial shelving above the buffet-style water heaters where the soups were kept warm.

  “Ten-year plan,” he said. “Saving every day.”

  “Going back to Brazil,” I said.

  “Going back to Brazil, buddy.”

  But there was something in him that reminded me of when we reach for something just beyond the fingertips. Like the first night in a cell, trying to shake the names out of your head because they’re over the wall and just thinking about them makes the time grow.

  “What about you? What you saving for?” he asked.

  “Same as you. Except it’s not in Brazil.”

  “You want out of here?”

  I looked at the floor and felt jail.

  “Yeah, G, I do. But I’ve got three years before they’re off my back. Anyway, who’s gonna hire an ex-con?”

  Gleason nodded. “What you do to go to jail? You never say to me, man.”

  I looked away. “I was trying to save every day a little more quickly.”

  He nodded.

  We worked through the morning and beat the lunch rush. Marcello and Rener came in later and the four of us got through the prep hard and fast and then took a break out back. We sat in chairs beneath the awning over the back door listening to the rain. The waitresses and busgirls were busy up front folding napkins and talking. Gleason and I weren’t any closer since the morning, but we weren’t any farther away.

  That was when I heard the car tires squeal. I—we—knew. And I think all our guts dropped.

  DePuzzo came tearing into the lot in his BMW X5. His windows were closed for the rain, but Van Halen was blasting so loud I could hear David Lee Roth’s voice nice and clear. He gunned it across the lot, jammed on the brakes, and slid into a little turn to pull the car up in front of us. We weren’t quick enough to get inside.

  He shoved his door open and lurched toward us. A blond girl with bug-eye sunglasses leaned back against the passenger seat. She turned the music down so she could hear.

  “What are you lazy motherfuckers doing?” he screamed. He got right up on us and stared. We got to our feet.

  “Just taking a break before service,” I spoke up.

  “Shut up,” DePuzzo said. He was drunk. Shit-stone drunk. His nostrils were red. A little of that Great Equalizer to straighten out the head.

  “But …” I said, not knowing where it came from.

  “I said shut it, or I bounce you back up to that butt-fucking prison in Norfolk.”

  Prison did it. I looked down when I should have looked up. I could look up in prison to stay alive, but on the outside?

  “Motherfucker,” DePuzzo said to Gleason, “I leave you the kitchen to run and this is how you do it? The fuck.”

  Gleason started to say something, then put his hand in his pocket around his cell phone. His jaw was set, his neck red.

  “I said, the fuck you think is going on here?”

  The girl sat up in the passenger seat, smiling at the cokehead show.

  DePuzzo was so angry we couldn’t move.

  “I pay you motherfuckers for what? I should can your asses now for this shit. Lazy spic motherfuckers.”

  Rener and Marcello stared around him, but Gleason looked right at him. He started to raise his hand, as if to pause the moment, but DePuzzo stepped closer, stopping it.

  He was too fast. I didn’t even see his hands move. I just heard the hard thump of bone on flesh and saw Gleason go down, blood and saliva bubbling out of his mouth. He spit and I heard the rattle of a tooth hitting the pavement.

  DePuzzo moved quickly. He crouched and slugged two rights to the side of Gleason’s head. The b
one sound made me sick. His ring cut a gash above the temple. Gleason went sea green and puked. DePuzzo drove the tip of his loafer into Gleason’s ribs. They cracked, and then he stood and looked at the three of us.

  “The fuck you gonna do, jailbird? The fuck you gonna do, you motherfucking illegals? Get the fuck back to work.”

  Gleason puked again in the rain. He moaned. I bent to pick him up. Rener and Marcello stood frozen with fear. I heard the X5’s door slam, the girl laugh, and the tires squeal.

  Gleason spent the night on the line, taking hard stares from the waitresses and puking into the trash can as he worked the sauté pans.

  The next day we didn’t joke or laugh. No music. Just headdown work. Gleason’s face still held some of that green color, and he winced each time he turned or breathed too deeply. The morning and afternoon rolled on like that, silent, like the space his tooth left behind.

  Gleason worked the whole shift, on the line again. The waitresses stared, and the three of us doubled our efforts to take some of the strain off him. We got through. I washed the line down with Marcello, and we took our shift drinks out back. DePuzzo hadn’t shown at all.

  Gleason was sitting with Rener in the parking lot next to the storage garage on chairs they’d dragged from the restaurant. I walked over. They stopped talking and peered at me. Rener said something to Marcello in Portuguese, and he turned around before he caught up to us. Then Rener stood up, stuck his hand on my shoulder, and walked toward the kitchen. Gleason nodded at the chair Rener left behind. I sat.

  I had my shift drink in silence. Gleason watched. When his hands moved, I flinched. He drew his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open.

  The screen showed two tanned young kids with dark hair and black eyes, a boy and a girl, smiling in a posed photo, the beach all around them.

  “Ten-year plan,” Gleason said. “They’re mine. Twins. We talk every day. They’re eight.”

  I nodded like I understood. But I didn’t have kids. I hadn’t left home to work for them while they were still in the womb. I didn’t know shit.