Tree Roots

            One Wednesday in the spring, the dishpit drain backed up again and flooded the kitchen during the lunch rush, forcing kitchen staff to grumble as they filled orders and servers to wince as they sloshed carefully about to ensure that all the ahi niçoise and prime rib burgers got to their proper tables. Because of the weekly Vintners Club event, Wednesday was now Tati’s favorite day to come in and micromanage the restaurant, but for the duration of peak chaos he stood near the rinsing station by the door to the bar looking about with aloof bewilderment at the action when he could have availed himself of the opportunity and delivered a plate or two or refilled a water glass or five.

            Eventually, Chef Junior set two plates of steak frites in the window of the service island and snapped the last ticket from the clip band and threw it in the garbage. “What do you think, boss?” he called out across the kitchen as he wiped his hands on the standard yellow rags draped over his left shoulder. “Should we call a plumber this time?”

            Tati directed his lost, wide eyes across the kitchen while Concepción and Renzo looked up from their work to share a glance.

           “Where’s Almo?” Tati suddenly asked.

            “Bathroom break,” Concepción said.

            “Huh,” Tati muttered, looking around as if seeing the kitchen for the first time. Then he focused on the beef tenderloin plates. “Are these for Kieran and I?”

            “You got it,” Junior said.

            Tati nodded quickly. “I’ll tell Max to come get them,” he said, eyeing the sloppy floor around the edges of the rubber mats.

            “I’ll take them to you,” Chef Junior said, stepping through the muck around to the other side of the island and removing the plates and handing them over to the owner.

            Tati took them. “These plates are cold,” he observed.

            Chef Junior was nodding. “Yeah,” he said, “the three tables you seated after lunch there used up all the plates in the warmer.”

            “Huh,” Tati said, looking down at the identical presentations of seared filet mignon paired with shoestring fries and tabasco ketchup. “Isn’t there supposed to be something green on these? I thought we talked about putting something green on every plate.”

            Concepción held out a gloved palmful of blanched green beans.

            “No, thank you,” Tati said. He walked toward the short hall to the bar as Almo turned the corner and gave Tati a big grin. “There he is,” Tati said, stopping short. “Why is the kitchen flooded again?”

            Almo tossed up his hands. “I told you before,” he said. “The tree roots, man, they come up from underneath the building.”

            “You haven’t been rinsing corn silk down the drain again?” Tati asked.

            Almo chuckled nervously. “Ah, but I told you that, too,” he said. “There never was any corn silk in the drain.”

            “When we called the plumber before,” Tati said, “he came and looked and said it was corn silk.”

            “Ah,” Almo said with a finger in the air like a triumphant attorney, “I see what you’re thinking, but there are actually two reasons why that’s wrong. It’s flooded like this six times since the plumber came back in January, and on some of those occasions we didn’t even have no corn on the menu. Not only that, but it wasn’t corn silk. It was the tree roots.”

            “Come on, Almo,” Chef Junior said, “admit that it was corn silk that one time.”

            Almo held up his hands. “I’m not going to admit that,” he said. “It isn’t true.”

            “Tree roots,” Tati said, frowning at Almo.

            Almo nodded encouragingly. “Not big roots like you’re thinking,” he said. He held up thin fingers and wiggled them about. “These are long thin ones. They suck up all the water.”

            “Photosynthesis,” Renzo said, also nodding, as he jet a spray of water at some metal pans in the dishpit.

            Tati looked over from his cooling pair of tenderloin plates at the racks of dripping pans surrounding the dishwasher. “Photosynthesis is in the leaves.”

            Renzo set another pan to dry on the rack.

            “Water comes up from the roots, man,” Almo said.

            “Yes,” Tati said, eyes wide at him, “and it goes into the leaves.”

            Chef Junior waved a hand once in the air. “Corn silk or tree roots,” he said, “we need to call the plumber again.”

            Tati eyed the kitchen and then exited, saying, “I’ll call my guy.”

            After a moment, Almo inhaled deeply and began washing his hands at the rinse station.

            “Water is an important part of photosynthesis,” Renzo noted as he nested several dried plastic tubs together and scooted them up onto the top rack.

            “He doesn’t know what’s going on,” Chef Junior said, shaking his head. “You guys got all the corn silk off before rinsing, right?”

            Concepción nodded and pointed at the tall trash can at the end of the cold side of the line where, in the glancing depths, angles of light emerged from melded strands of fiber. “In here,” she said. Then she dumped the palmful of haricots verts in as well.

            Chef Junior scratched his head and jabbed the fat straw of a tall plastic sports bottle into his mouth. “Whew,” he said after a big swallow, shaking his face as if to shed excess water even though there was nothing but a few flecks of sweat still lingering amid his short, spiky hair. Then he grinned over at Almo, who was digging around in the cooler. “Tree roots.”

            Almo stood straight, still facing the cooler.

            “It’s probably a blockage that has to do with the grease trap,” Chef Junior suggested.

            Almo resumed searching the cooler.

            “Not tree roots,” Chef Junior continued. “The closest tree is probably fifty yards away.”

            Almo turned, holding three similar metal sixth pans swaddled with tight plastic wrap. “They have long roots, man,” he said, placing the containers on the cutting board at the cold side. “I’m not fucking with you. These old trees can have roots that go on forever.”

            “Right,” Chef Junior said, nodding. “Endless roots.”

            Almo held up his hands and shrugged. “Don’t get mad at me,” he protested. “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”

The Meatloaf in the Grease Trap

            That evening, when the unimpressive dinner rush had clearly already peaked, Jux was finally preparing to focus on cleaning up the various cutlery, plates, bowls, and service containers that had accumulated while he’d worked the cold side.

            “We’ll have to drain it slowly,” Jux said, staring down at the basin at the dishpit under the sinks, where a relatively clean wide white plastic filter sat just beneath the end of the filled sinks’ collected drains. He looked over toward the cold-side cooler. “I can clean that out a bit between bursts,” he suggested.

            Abuse pulled a shimmering veil of plastic wrap from a long industrial roll across the long cutting board and then plopped down a deep sixth pan of thick, cold coconut curry soup. “Super,” he said, drawing the end of the wrap up over the top of the pan and sealing it with a pass of wrap from the other side. He severed the wrap against the serrated bar along the packaging and swept the excess wrap into secured folds around the pan’s edges. “If we’re quick, we can probably be out of here right at ten, if not before.”

            Jux stared at the drain.

            It wasn’t until just after eleven that all the water had finally made its way down the drain from the sinks without flooding. In the meantime, Jux and Abuse had taken a few smoke breaks out back and complained about the fact that their friends and loved ones were already having a great time at Gloomy’s without them. But by the time eleven came around and it became clear that their evening would not be as debaucherous as one or the other might have hoped, their attention was back on the drain, which was finally emptying.

            “You know what?” Abuse asked. “Fuck it. No need to wait for the plumber.”

            “Whatever do you mean by that?” Jux asked.

            Abuse crouched over the floor between the dishpit and the cold side of the line. The pocked rubber traction mats had already been removed and sprayed down, so now the kitchen’s floor was seen as it truly was—grimy industrial false tile in places bracketed by secret hatches. These floor compartments were generally well-sealed, as they were often associated with plumbing or electrical wiring. Between the dishpit and the cold side of the line, however, was a particularly large patch of flooring that was nothing less than a removable hatch large enough to accommodate a most corpulent human. Abuse pried up an octagonal cap, revealing a grimy circular recessed handle.

            “Here’s what’s going to happen,” Abuse said as he fingered the thin handle. “This cover swings up your way and reveals the grease trap. Don’t step on the cover to look in.”

            Jux nodded.

            “You’ve got to step around it,” Abuse insisted. “This is not what you want to be in.”

            “I’ll step around it,” Jux promised.

            Abuse stared up at him. “You should also know that this isn’t going to be pretty.”

            Jux nodded.

            “I’m not kidding,” Abuse said. “It’s Lovecraftian down there. A big fucking meatloaf.”

            Jux scowled at the hatch. “We’ll see about that.”

            Abuse was right; once the lid came off the grease trap, the visible contents were sickening and did, in fact, look like a giant meatloaf simmering in a tepid, rancid haze.

            “That’s terrible,” Jux said, a damp forearm pressed against his face. He began to take a step but quickly repositioned his foot so as not to step on the open face of the cover.

            “You got to step around,” Abuse insisted again.

            “Yes, yes,” Jux said, skirting the cover and gripping the sinks as he stared down at the meaty tongue wallowing in the sloppy dregs of the yawning maw of the grease trap. “What is it?”

            “Nobody fucking knows, dude,” Abuse informed.

            “Oh, shit,” Jux said, eyes gaping at the horror.

            “Yeah,” Abuse said. “It’s mostly fat of some kind or another. So that’s what that looks like.”

            Jux was shaking his head. “Has it always been like this?” he asked, staring at what in the shadows cast by the cold side of the line appeared to be a movement vaguely like the shifting of tendrils between meaty sections of the pulsating glob. His grip on the edge of the sink tightened as he leaned in to look closer.

            “That’s enough,” Abuse suddenly said. He held a palm up at Jux, who pulled himself back toward the sink so that Abuse could reach across and tug the cover back up and over onto the hatch, concealing the monstrosity with a final click of the handle back into its recession.

            Jux righted himself with a hand on the sink.

            “You have to be careful with this,” Abuse warned.

            Jux was staring again at the floor, where the seams around the hatch on the floor now seemed painfully obvious. “I’ve been walking over that all this time,” he muttered.

            Abuse nodded. “It’s like that around here,” he said. “You should know that.”

            Jux closed his eyes and pressed his lower back into the rim of the sink. “Knives come and go.”

            “Not that again,” Abuse protested. “Not about the knives.”

            “I am telling you that the knives are just a part of it,” Jux said.

            “It’s,” Abuse stressed, “not about the knives.”

            “Right,” Jux said.

            “And that’s why we have to separate fantasy from reality,” Abuse explained. “We think there are monsters all over the place here because shit doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, but really it’s just incompetence. The thing you’re walking on here is a compartment in the underground plumbing that’s designed to catch the fatty shit that floats. That’s the only monster in there.”

            “It’s not Cthulhu,” Jux said.

            “It’s pronounced ‘Cthulhu,’” Abuse corrected, “as I’ve told you before. And no, this is not Cthulhu. This is a pit of rancid fat, and we’re standing on it. Remember the dump? Long time ago?”

            “I don’t like thinking about that,” Jux said.

            “That was a slice of this meatloaf,” Abuse said. “And Jessup used to say it was good like an artesian sourdough starter. Sick shit.”

            Jux winced and drew a hand from its tight grip on the edge of the metal sinks. A thin stripe of blood careened down his palm. “Fucker,” he muttered, flexing his fist to keep the slit closed.

            Abuse snagged a dangling strip of paper towel. “Let me see that,” he said, leaning in like a surgeon entering the operating theatre.

            “That will not be necessary,” Jux said, pulling away. “I’ve been cut here before, and this time it wasn’t even a knife. This is nothing.”

            “I’ll tell you what it is,” Abuse said. He folded the length of paper towel once and then again before jabbing it down on the ticket spike on the line window by a transparent plastic sixth container of dried peppers. “Hm,” he muttered. He steadied the base of the spike with a palm and with his other hand yanked the punctured folds of the paper towel back up from the spike. He studied the edges.

            “You going to draw on that?” Jux asked.

            Abuse crumpled up the pierced folds of paper towel and tossed them in the garbage. “Too thin.”

            “So what is it?” Jux asked as he walked to the rinse station.

            “What?” Abuse asked.

            “I said it was nothing,” Jux said as he ran gentle cool water over the slice on his palm, “and you said you’d tell me what it is.”

            “But what are we talking about?” Abuse cried.

            “That’s what you’re supposed to tell me,” Jux said. He stripped a section of paper towel from the mounted dispenser and wadded it in his palm.

            Suddenly a stack of large, drying transparent tubs shifted on the clean side of the dishpit, dislodging something from the rack and sending it clattering into the left sink.

            Jux swung around in terror.

            “Don’t worry about it, dude,” Abuse advised. “It’s just a ladle. Get yourself patched up and let’s get out of here.”

            Jux sighed and took the first-aid kit down from a shelf above the rinse station and opened it on the prep counter. As he picked through the individually-wrapped bandages and packets of antiseptic, Abuse peered back into the sink for a moment and then took out a long, serrated bread knife. Abuse glanced over at Jux, who was busy dressing his wound, and then nonchalantly walked past toward the magnetic knife rack above the deep fryer and mounted the knife quickly and quietly.

            “Did you just put a knife up there?” Jux asked as he secured a bandage over his palm.

            “Hm?” Abuse asked. He already had an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.

            Jux looked up. “It was a knife, wasn’t it?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

            “Bread knife,” Abuse muttered with lips closed around the cigarette.

            “And that’s what just fell into the sink,” Jux continued.

            Abuse nodded.

            Jux closed his eyes. “Let’s go to Gloomy’s.”

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