Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [50]
We didn’t stay long. Sam and I had gotten jobs washing dishes, and our shift started soon. Jimmy laughed at something Sam said, then he walked back to his lawn chair, most of his limp gone, but the big stick still in his hand like something he wasn’t quite ready to do without.
CAPTAIN CHRIS’S was a family restaurant overlooking the Merrimack on Water Street. On Friday and Saturday nights, it was crowded from five till closing, and it was one of the places Pop would take us to on our Sunday visits with him. It was air-conditioned, and the floors were carpeted and the tables were covered with rose-colored linens and heavy silver, Muzak playing over the sound system. From wherever you sat, you could see through the tinted windows the river moving by thirty feet below, and now I worked there in a kitchen that was hot and loud and crowded. Between the flaming stoves and the serving counter were four cooks, men in white who never stopped moving. They called out orders to each other, filled gleaming plates with baked haddock or stuffed lobster or prime rib, dropping a cruet of tomato and lemon onto the side, a sprig of parsley, then shouting for Doris or Ann Marie or Nancy to pick up!
And these women my mother’s age, professional waitresses like Sam’s mother, were dressed in a uniform of skirt and apron and white soft-soled shoes, and they would whisk the plates from under the warming lights of the counter onto loaded trays they’d heave over one shoulder, then punch open the swinging doors for the muted cool of the restaurant. Busboys would roll in a stainless steel cart, its rubber tub full of dirty dishes they’d quickly scrape, then load onto plastic trays, pushing them onto the conveyor belt for one of us to spray down before it entered the machine and came out steaming clean on the other side for another dishwasher to heave and carry back through the side doors to the busing station where he’d stack plates on a shelf, cups and glasses, sort knives and forks and spoons into the right trays, then push the empty tub into a stack of others in the corner and run back into the kitchen to do it again and again and again.
In the back were full-size stainless steel sinks for pots and pans and that’s where Sam spent most of his time in an apron scrubbing bits of fish and potatoes, pasta, grease, and meat off of the bottoms and sides of massive containers. My job was to either load the machine or unload it, and I liked how hard it was to do well, how fast and efficiently you had to move, how quickly I broke out in a sweat and how much like a workout it became. That summer, the man who sprayed down the dishes and worked the machine was a drifter named Charlie Pierce.
Tall and scrawny, his arms scarred with blue tattoos, he was deep into his fifties and had thin gray hair and a coarse voice, though we never heard it much because he rarely smiled or spoke to anyone. Whenever there was a lull in the shift, he’d take a cigarette break out on the back stoop. He’d pull off his white apron and drape it over the railing, then light up a Raleigh and squint out at the river, exhaling smoke through his nose, taking his time.
One night very late, the cooks gone, the last of the waitresses too, it was just me and Sam and Charlie Pierce. Sam and I were wiping down the steel counters, and Charlie was mopping the floor. The transistor radio near the sink was playing, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
We kept working and the singer kept singing over and over how she’s leaving on a jet plane and Charlie straightened up from his mopping and shouted, “So fuckin’ leave then!!”
Sam and I started to laugh, but Charlie was staring at