The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [18]
During the summer Sully moved a lot of steaks and chicken and shrimp. But his only food customers were tourists, and for most of them one meal at Sully’s was enough. The steaks at the Barge Inn cost seven dollars a copy and were on a par with those at the $1.49 steak joints on Times Square. His fried chicken cost five times as much as the foxy old franchising colonel’s and wasn’t a fifth as good. His shrimp were too long out of the ocean and a plate of four of them was priced at $4.50. His baked potatoes sat in the oven until they sold, however long that might take. Sully himself never ate at his own restaurant, taking most of his meals at a lunch counter on Main Street.
Complaints about the food generally brought a sorrowful expression to his face. He was a jowly, bearish man, a little puffy under the eyes, and he had as much trouble getting a clean shave as Richard Nixon. He had a barrel chest and an ample but firm gut. His whole body was thickly pelted with black hair. Each of his four wives had initially found his hairiness exciting, and each had gradually lost her enthusiasm for it.
Sully first married at thirty-eight, taking as a bride a girl of twenty-two. Since then he had traded in every five years or so, always selecting as a replacement a voluptuous girl between twenty and twenty-five years of age. Sully was now fifty-six and had been married to the current Mrs. Jaeger for a little over three years. No one earth expected it to last much longer.
Sometimes he became defensive when the quality of” the Barge Inn’s food was brought to his attention. “Listen,” he would say, “let’s be honest. I didn’t open this place for people to have a meal. That’s not what it’s for. This is a place to come have a couple of drinks and talk with your friends and feed cracker crumbs to the ducks on the canal. Summer weekends you do all this and listen to music. The rest of the time it’s the same program without the music. Now some people won’t walk into a place unless there’s food. They got to have food in front of them or they can’t enjoy theirselves. So all right. There’s food. They eat it, it fills their stomachs, it don’t kill them. They don’t like it then next time they can use their brain and eat somewhere else first, or for that matter they can stay out of here altogether. That’s all.”
He sighed now and took a long drink from the water glass that was always on the bar top beside him during business hours. The glass contained applejack, but it was neither the American commercial brand nor the imported Calvados that he stocked behind the bar. Twice a month a farmer from over in Berks County drove to Sully’s and delivered two gallon jugs of applejack, exchanging them for a pair of empty jugs and a twenty-dollar bill. The farmer was a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Gutnacht; he and his father and grandfather had been making applejack in the same old-fashioned way since long before Prohibition. Sully had been a steady customer for almost twenty years, during which time the price had gone from six to ten dollars a gallon. It was still cheaper than any taxed liquor available, but Sully would have paid three times the price if he had to. It was the only thing he would drink.
He set the glass down and shook his head. “This fucking town,” he said.
Hugh Markarian grinned across the bar at him. “A familiar phrase,” he said. “What brings it on?”
“Nothing in particular. Another of those?”
Hugh covered his glass. “No, I’m all right. I don’t think it’s such a bad town. Or were you speaking literally? I’m not sure there’s that much more fucking going on here than in the average town. It’s more visible here, of course, and perhaps it runs to more unorthodox forms, but—”
Sully leaned forward, elbows on the bar top. “You know what it is? Two kinds of people in the town, the young ones and the