Ella Dean is a (chanteuse) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-28 06:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | james potter, white rabbit |
Who: Shane A & Ella D
What: Stains and food.
When: Pre-Sam, pre-Chloe Kingpin.
Where: The diner
Warnings: Language for Shane?
It was the kind of place no one was looking up online for reviews. You stumbled over it, or you were hungry and on the look out for laminated menus stuck up in the window so people could shuffle bills around in the wallet to work out paying before they sat down. The booths were low, dark blue plastic leather that squeaked as people slid in, and the air was processed cool that smelled of burned toast and of old coffee beneath whatever was on the grill in the kitchen. It was noisy, despite being mostly empty. There was a radio, tuned to a local station that had an abundance of adverts that blared between tracks, and a comfortable clatter from the guy in the kitchen and the bus-boy who was laying tables in the turnover between the early morning crowd and the real lunch hour. There was a old woman, her hair rinsed blue, bent over the newspaper and a single plate of toast nudged to one side, her coffee forgotten as she read the obituaries. There was a man and a kid young enough that Ella put him at grandson, excited enough by eating anywhere that wasn’t home that he was clambering up the back of the seat and peeping at passers-by from the window. The grandfather looked mortified and indulgent in equal measure; she figured that was how grandparents were supposed to be. The counter was cheap formica on top of plyboard painted to look like wood. There was a glass jar of cookies to the side of the cash register, and a hand-lettered sign that informed anyone that they were a dollar each. They didn’t look particularly appetizing, crumbling in the bottom of the glass jar, but there was more of them than there were tips in the optimistically-labeled jar on the other side of the cash register, that had a lot of change, mostly pennies and a couple of dollar bills. It felt like most places that were cheap enough to eat in, like a place for the temporary and the passing through rather than any permanence, but the mood even if it was dulled down beneath the static between tracks on the radio and the noise and voluble swearing each time the door swung clear on the kitchen, was light. It was comfortable, a place you could buy something filling and cheap and quick, and be gone. The woman in the polyester-blend blue was not stood at the counter. The pot of coffee (cooling slowly) was set down on the top of one of the booth tables close to the cash register, and she was sat with her elbows on the table top, in the curve of the booth itself. She was tan, the faint warm color had the wash to it of being impermanent, of fairness that had given over to the Nevada sunshine, and the blond hair was knotted up haphazardly, a pen shoved through the mass of curls. The grandfather and his son, they didn’t need a thing, and the woman with her obituaries, she had two cups and she was done, something about her kidneys. Ella had learned that on the first shift. This was the dead-time, the quiet between the early morning plates slid over the hatch between kitchen and seating area and what felt like a hundred people in at once, and the lunch when everyone did it again. The book folded in her hands had a cracked spine, and the pages were yellowed-old, secondhand cheap. It was mid-morning and Shane felt like shit. His rib still hurt like hell, even after he'd taped it the fuck up until his torso looked like a goddamn mummy's, and he was hungover. Tired, aching and purple, he parked his chopper, its roar silenced from top volume, out front of the run-down dive. He knew the place, had been stopping by for the errant breakfast or dinner for the past fifteen years or so. It was like home -- not that it was fucking cozy and his fucking mom was there, but it felt familiar, all cheap off-teal plastics that peeled back from foam booths and formica tables that kept the customers nameless, creased and greased wallets and sad fucking faces. It felt timeless, like maybe it was 1989 and he was skipping school for wet, floppy french fries, ordering two big baskets. He'd done that. Gotten two to dump them in his backpack and scram before the 45-year-old waitress, the red dye job who thought she was fucking 20 in her denim skirts, came back with the check. She'd throw a shoe at his head as he went, if he was slow, and call him all kinds of fucking names. She called him fucking piss-drinker once. At the time, it had been especially hysterical. Maybe you had to be there. Course, he didn't feel fuckin' 14. He felt 38 and like his head was full of sand and nails and some jackass with a drumset, and weighed about 300 fucking pounds. Dry-lipped, hunched against the friendly glare of the sun, Shane entered the esteemed establishment with a bang of cheap metal and screen scrap. He was dressed per usual, but looked a helluva lot fucking worse. His hair was flat from his helmet and he hadn't washed that fuckhead's blood off his knuckles yet, or the dirt that accompanied it. The man wiped his mouth with his hand and took a booth in the back, away from the windows, where quiet settled in these service industry twilight hours. He shook out his leather jacket, tossing it carelessly onto the table, and unfolded his legs, long and blue. He took up the laminated menu and tried to read it, but the words moved like snakes on the page and his head was fucking pounding. Finally, he shucked it into the empty seats across the table, leaned back against the foam folds, and groaned with his hands over his eyes. There were no fourteen year olds roaming the place scouting out a free meal. No waitresses with dyed red hair; there was another waitress when the place began to jump, lipstick thinning into the feathery cracks around her mouth and curls lacquered thickly with cheap hairspray and the flat, white shoes that were sold in outlet stores along with scrubs for nurses. But she was at home, with her grandkid. Ella had seen photographs, crackling in plastic coating, hauled out along with a handful of hard candies and two packets of crumpled cigarettes from the bottom of the plastic handbag. Now, there was just the one waitress, sat in the booth nearest the window and kitty-corner to the counter, who slid the book back across the counter with a guilty push from her fingertips and who stopped once on route to pour fresh coffee into the half-full cup the grandfather had pushed out of harm’s way. The feet that approached the table were not in the heavily-cushioned soles of the white, nurse’s shoes most service-industry stalwarts bought with the sixth week’s paycheck, succumbing to comfort in long hours over linoleum. They were cheap tennis shoes, the kind bought at the grocery market to save the couple of bucks from Target, and there was a splash of something that looked like hot sauce staining the toe orange. The man in the booth smelled like old booze and stale nights, as familiar a cocktail as bass cutting through music, steady as a metronome, and watered champagne poured into flutes. Nothing was said. A hand stretched out into the frame of his vision had his eyes been open—a plastic watch, yellow strapped, with a Mickey Mouse face ticking on over the bluish veins of the inside of her wrist—and turned over the chipped china cup on its saucer. Coffee splashed, oily and dark, a generous centimeter for milk. Silently, two thin paper brown packages of sugar were laid alongside the spoon. The smell of coffee clung to the polyester long after she was done on shifts. It didn’t come out, Ella imagined she smelled the fry-cook’s entire repertoire clinging in the fibers, in the wispy blond curls on Beth’s head from that first kiss after work. She kept clothes in the back now, but the pervasive scent of fat, and grease, of burned toast and curling bacon, invaded beyond the locker’s door. Beneath that was the faint trace of something flowery, not strong enough to be perfume, likely soap or shampoo, and the grocery-store familiarity of baby powder. She leaned away—the smell retreated rather than sound, the shoes were quiet on the sticky squeak of floor—and retrieved the menu in the tips of her fingers. It slid stickily back down to the table-top. A pause. “You want something?” Quiet. He didn't hear her approaching. Some people had those fucking squirrely hangovers where you hear every last fucking thing, from footsteps to church mouse's prayer, but Shane, today, wasn't one of those people. His shit was wet cotton and molded, acoustic metal lining his skull, reverberating the sounds of his own body back out and through his muscles, cramping them, making his temples feel like fucking collapsing. His brain would feel better out in the open on the table is what the shit was telling him. He disagreed. But there was still going to be a debate. So, no, he didn't fuckin' hear the waitress approaching, no matter how practical her shoes or how impractical the spinach-colored floors were. He was shifting in the booth when the outside sounds permeated through the inner-din. But, first it was the unpeeling scent of instant coffee that got him to open his eyes. It was slick and greasy, in a pot you could get from a fucking Walgreens, but it was hot and right now that was enough. He sat up a little more then, one of the waitress' flute-white arms bridging over him to slide the menu—shick!—back into its slot on the metal catch-all that sat with condiments, salt & pepper, and jelly against the wall. He knuckled the beat of his right temple and sniffed. He looked up through the day-after haze, through the night's shit-cheap drinking and bottle breaking, and met the young woman's eyes. "Toast. Wheat." His voice was raw from cigarettes and bad sleep. He coughed into a closed fist, letting his gaze stray to the grandfather and the kid. He coughed again and looked away. The coffee wobbled in the cup, the surface a quivering oil-slick. She stood to the right of the booth, polyester-cotton crackling over nylon; if she was wearing make-up it didn’t look like it. A beat. The paper rustled out from the waistband of the uniform, it fitted badly, like it was made for someone squeaking another fifteen pounds onto the scale. It sagged at the throat and at the bust, the waist hung loose like wrinkled, poly-blend blue skin. There was a stain, the hem of the uniform, three splotches spread like a constellation creeping down toward her knee. She held the pad, the pen shoved in amongst all that blond, retrieved. It was practical, rather than an affectation, then. She’d seen rich folks’ hangovers, sopped up by eggs, thick slices of bacon redolent with grease, that were cooked in hotel kitchens, sent up with a sprig of parsley and a bill that said they should come covered in gold leaf. Lain propped up on her elbows in thread-counts that ran up to the thousands and watched men who wore suits like shed snakeskin on the hotel floor, ate like they’d been starving. The man in the booth smelled like the morning-after-the-night-before with an edge of ashy smoke, his voice a heavy rasp. No one was concerned about health with a head full of last night pounding it out with today. Wheat toast. “You want something else with that?” She didn’t say honey. The South was contained, a spilled drop of syrup, was in her voice like a fly caught in amber. The pad retreated. She didn’t need to write down toast. “The guy in back, he’s good at…” A pause. Silence. He’d seen the menu. He was old enough to get himself into trouble, blotting up whatever it was with a handful of toast you paid three bucks for when you could make a whole loaf for a dollar at home. Ella couldn’t remember nights like those. There’d been a headache the day after Thanksgiving, an echo of her heartbeat inside her head. Nothing like. She was still talking. It took a minute to register. Shane felt at his vest for his sunglasses, knowing they were fucking somewhere. He had his head down, chin to his chest and eyes swept away from the sweet fucking family scene across the diner. At least the old man was feeding his fucking kid's kid. But he didn't find the sunglasses. He came up empty-handed. He'd worn them in, hadn't he? The fuck? He looked up at the woman like it was the first time he'd realized she was really fucking there. She was small and blond and young and Southern, her pale uniform only bringing out the tracery of veins in her arms where they created isthmuses and islands. The shift was too big on her, loose and baggy, like it belonged to someone else whose nametag was still pinned to the chest and she was here as some kind of bad fucking switcheroo joke. She jittered. Not outwardly, but she came at him like a fucking butterfly. Moving out of the way. Putting things where they belonged. Offering something, then changing her mind. Too fucking flexible, too ready to run despite the way she planted her feet on the tiles. "Good at what?" It was a gruff question, not necessarily rude, but it was brusque. Shane spoke with New Jersey vowels cramped together, like a fucking family in a tenement building, aired only some after 20 years, but his voice was… we'll say distinctive, mumbling at times, and today, raspy as fuck after a night of beer, tequila, and chain-smoking. Dirt-rimmed nails scratched at the lapel of a buttoned pocket. Shane turned his attention back to finding his sunglasses. Eventually, he gave up. He put one hand across his eyes a moment. When he pulled it away, pushing hair away from his forehead, he dropped the hand to his lap and resettled in the booth. "Yeah. S'fine. Whatever." He groped at his clothes; they looked grime-encrusted. She had the name of the laundromat, other side of the parking lot on the tip of her tongue but it bled away to nothing, honey on the back of her teeth. She closed her mouth. Whatever it was he was looking for, he didn’t find it. Her voice had faltered, but she stood square in the stained tennis shoes and the pad was re-secured, the cardboard back looped through the stringy apron tie wrapped around her waist, criss-crossed at her front. He wasn’t Vegas. She was beginning to learn the open-sky sounds, long and flat like desert. Ma’am, drawn out, low, through the nose. A tag dimpled the fabric, up the top of the uniform. It dangled, too heavy for the cotton, thin from washing too many times. It was red plastic, the letters should have been gold, but the paint had flaked away, freckled the name. Frank. No one noticed a name-tag, until they tried reading it. She’d started out pinning them back to front first, but the management had said the name had to be readable. They never said whose. She had begun to take hers back, from broadcasts and newspaper print, from the sound of it in Max’s mouth coupled together with disappointment and resignation as if they were triplets. She liked it. Ella didn’t want to share it with people who’d stopped by for coffee and a stack of pancakes. He looked bad, hand flung over his eyes like strip lighting was bright desert sunshine. Like maybe that night was trying to get up and crawl out from down his throat; Ella rolled her chin across her shoulder, looked toward a scuffed door at the back of the room. “Restroom’s that way,” she said. Quiet. There was a glint there of something like humor in that, it was hidden low; her lips twitched once. It was worse outside. Brighter, more inclined to mess with what looked like a real long night, maybe enjoyable. “Good at bacon.” She folded her hand over the warm dip of her elbow, tucked it in tight against her body. An assessing look, frank. “Maybe you-all want to stick with the toast.” Frank. Shane looked at Frank. She was easier to look at under the dim, fly-buzzing lights than out the window. Sunlight pressed against temples, jabbing a fucking finger into the tender spot just to make the man want to lie his head down on the table. He tried to ignore it and the way it tickled on his vision and slanted from panes across the floor, reaching with the arms of a motherfucking kraken. The restroom bit got a laugh. It was short and rough. Mostly an exhalation of air through the nose with force, but you could tell Shane thought it was amusing. For the first time that morning, his scowl cracked softly into something else. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was something caught in purgatory between it and a frown. The night had been enjoyable, he guessed. Long. TV screen flickering blue and yellow and white tubes on stained, check chair, the one with the chewed leg. There was a round table in the foot of space between "kitchen" and "living room," and it was there that he'd started. Shane spent most of his time by himself, when he wasn't working, and even with the sudden, miraculous appearance of family, his habits hadn't changed. They didn't want to see him. He was like their fucking useless parents. He liked to drink. Last night he'd felt fucking friendly enough to go out and break a bottle over some fuck's head. Some dipshit who'd run his truck into Shane's bike in the parking lot. -- He didn't particularly care that the motorcycle was hit. But the man had gotten out, belligerent and in his face, and the bottle seemed like the best solution. So maybe it wasn't enjoyable. Not really. It was a night. Just enough of a night that he couldn't bother peeling the top from a tin of beans for lunch. Frank had a stain on her uniform. Near the hem. Dark. Could've been blood, could've been food. Could've been fucking coincidence. "You best just get me the toast." Shane pulled the cup of coffee nearer and, on elbows over the table, let the steam wind up and around his head. The warmth felt pretty fucking good. She recognized the sound for what it was. Her mouth didn’t move, but her eyes warmed over, lukewarm like the coffee swirling around the bottle of the pot. It was dregs now, the grit of burned grains swashing up the sides, held low in her hand. She wasn’t old enough for lines and wrinkles, but her face held the impression of having smiled often before, like a blank piece of paper indented from written-on previous sheets. The lack of one fitted poorly, like the shift. Every last button was done up, right to the neck. She wasn’t thin, even if the shift was too big. She just didn’t fit, the same way it didn’t. The tennis shoes squeaked away from the table’s edge. Maybe it was the floor, speckled like whomever decorated the place forty years ago had taken into consideration the likelihood of food spatters, the kind of spills that didn’t come up at the single, distracted pass of a mop over the floor in the middle of a busy night. Maybe it was the cheap plastic rubber. The shoes squeaked away and they paused once, at the empty table of the lady who’d pushed her coffee cup away. The bell hasped against the door once, a single noise broken as the door slammed back into place. Ella startled. It rode up her upper arms and the back of her neck, involuntary movement a squeak on poorly cleaned linoleum, the jerk of her fingers against the half-picked up cup. There was a soft, crumpled green bill tucked under the saucer; she gathered that up as well as the cup and retreated to the back window. The man in the window bent low to talk to her. With her back to the room, the empty coffee pot resting out on the hot plate, the faint sense of tension fled. Jamie, the guy in back, cracked the kind of joke that Max would have laughed at, all bawd and harmless filth, and she laughed, once—brief, withdrew her head from the window and left the dirty cup sitting there, until Jamie drew a careless hand out and dragged it in, with a clatter of what sounded like more than china, pans as well. She had gone back to her book when the man leaned out on his elbows and called, very deliberately in her direction, ‘order up!’. There was no laughter this time, but when she turned her head away from the window, she was smiling. It dissipated like a child’s soap bubbles, as she passed the empty tables. The plate slid down onto formica with a careful click. Frank walked away, squeak, squeak, squeak, like she treading on one helluva sad mouse. Shane sunk lower in the seat, legs still crossing under the length of the table, feet pressed like fossils into the plastic of the booth across the way. His spine rested comfortably enough, but his ribs gave him grief. He grit his teeth and ignored them. He sipped the coffee, slowly, painfully (because any exertion was painful)—before it went cold as he watched, eyes glazed, the workings of the diner, as he'd done countless times before. It was a regular fucking factory. One that should've been abandoned long ago, but that kept working through some sort of black magic, because it sure as fuck was run with ambition. He watched the way the rusty gears of people ground into one another, the waitress moving to get her tips as the door slammed, and the cook saying something to her through the order window that Shane could imagine well enough, even though he couldn't hear it. Shoulderblades pressed into foam and he laid his head back. He closed his eyes. He didn't know how much time had passed, but the darkness cracked at the whip of a man's voice and the shell fell away in jagged pieces. The light came back in in a swift, bastard of a coup. Shane's mouth was dry. He made a sound of irritation. Frank left her book and smile to fetch the plate of toast. The man in the booth, leather and cotton crinkled together from nights on the floor or in the bed, depending on whether or not Shane took them off, sat up properly, rubbing once more at his eyes as the waitress came up to deliver the food. He didn't say thank you. It wasn't in his vocabulary, at least not often. There was a nod, a sniff, and then a low, grumbled, almost distant: "You try vinegar on that stain?" His face was slack as she passed, not soft but rubbed clear; everyone looked different asleep. She wondered if he had a bed to go to, if maybe the motel on the next parking lot, a couple miles down the highway was where he came from. There were all kinds who stumbled out onto the gravel after, not enough bills in their pockets for much else and a choice between this and a Happy Meal knock-off, fluorescent lights and plastic cheese coating the back of your teeth. Sympathy flickered briefly, like a candle with a wick burned down to the stub, and then blew out. If he was, maybe he’d done something to put himself there. She looked surprised. It pulled at the blue eyes, wrote itself in the cast of her mouth. Her hands worked, her fingers curling in and out of loosely held fists at her side. The nails were unpainted, but shaped. She’d given up nail polish along with the soft dresses that worked along the tops of her knees, the long hair and the braids. She’d woken up one morning and reached behind her to plait it all back into the heavy, unthinking comfort of the mass down her back and been momentarily, strangely bereft. She didn’t miss the nails. There was something animal-wary in that blue, before she blinked and it washed itself away. She looked down at the skirt. The nylons were wrinkling; orangey-tan, bought three in a pack in the drug-store in a size bigger than she needed. They hadn’t had hers. The cotton stretched over her knee, Ursus Major in blackened spots, frilled at the edges by salt and scrubbing and peroxide and laughing exasperation, into something that had taken the color right out of the blue. She looked at him, one long second. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Didn’t work. It’s a real bad stain.” He wasn’t a rich man with a Harvard education but the question slid in too close. It implied knowing in the space between distance and happenstance. Ella no longer liked coincidence. Serendipity had been reduced to frozen chocolate in a city now far away. She darted one look at the residual safety of the booth with the book and the clatter of the kitchen. The retreat was quick. She left the book behind. Whatever bill should have been cashed out for toast and coffee, it came free on the house. |