Stateway's Garden Read online

  “Gimme a pound of salami!” one person said. “Half pound of cheddar cheese!” came from another. “Lemme have two pounds of the corned beef!”

  The black people standing behind me, most of them seeming older than my mother or even Ms. Rose, yelled orders with such aggression that they couldn’t be served fast enough. I watched the meat move to and fro in the large glass case like I was studying fish in an aquarium. I shuffled through the small crowd of maybe ten or twelve people, looking for the accented figure of my mother. She was nowhere around.

  I walked past the crowd and into the part of the store where the cash register routinely rang the prices of cold items being purchased, eventually finding a door that led to the other side of the meat cooler.

  “Hello there,” a man whose face I couldn’t see said quickly. “Can you push that door closed behind you?”

  I did. Then, I leaned against the wall, wondering if I should move any farther. There were two men in the area, both dressed in white aprons and paper hats pulled tightly over small Afros, with the puffiness of their hair just escaping along the sides.

  “I’m Isaac,” the man closest to me said. He had a broad and brown beard; surely it was never combed. His teeth were spaced every which way, with at least a centimeter or so between each. This, however, stopped him from smiling none as he looked at me. There were so many stains of red blood along his apron that I’d swear he was killing the animals out back himself. “You must be Joanne’s other boy,” Mr. Isaac said while facing a table. He held a knife similar to something Norman Bates would have, using it to cut meat into sections of four.

  “So how you doing, li’l man?” the other guy said in the distance. I never saw his face, only the back of his head and the tilted paper cap as he talked to customers. His job was obviously to make certain of their satisfaction.

  “I’m all right,” I replied.

  “You’re different than your brother,” Mr. Isaac said while slicing meat. “Kinda quiet. An observer.”

  At that time I didn’t know what the word meant, but I assumed it was something positive because he smiled at me warmly, his big eyes matching mine, revealing the same teeth Ms. Rose had earlier. “I like your style,” the-man-with-no-face-and-a-tilted-paper-cap said. He continued moving meat and cheese from Mr. Isaac’s table to where the customers were. He wrapped each item, no matter how large, in white, crispy paper, taping it neatly closed. Then he would use a skinny black marker to write random numbers along the paper before handing it to the customer.

  “Come over here, li’l observer,” Mr. Isaac said. “Hey, you know what? My brother’s boy was supposed to be about your age.”

  “You have a brother? I have a brother too.”

  “Yeah, I do, li’l man. You sure look like him a lot too. He’s gone now though. Did some stuff he shouldn’t have. Won’t come home for another two years I think.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. But, when I stood close to Mr. Isaac, I realized that his skin color matched Ms. Rose’s, which matched mine, and our noses were shaped similarly. “I’m going to teach you about cutting and selling meat,” he said with pride.

  “Yeah, do that,” the-man-with-no-face-and-a-tilted-paper-cap said. “Li’l man will like that.”

  I couldn’t help but continue to stare at Mr. Isaac’s beard. It looked like it could stash a loaf of wheat. Mr. Isaac moved closer to the stainless steel table, allowing his bloody apron to rest on the edge. He walked through another slim door, which was to the right, and reappeared with a hunk of meat. The lever on the door must have been invisible because I hadn’t noticed it.

  “Do you know what kind of meat this is?” Mr. Isaac asked while pushing the door.

  “Ham?” I actually heard my eyebrows lift when I replied.

  “Nope.”

  “Salami?”

  “Nope again.” He then repositioned himself at the table. “I’ll give you one more guess.”

  “Ground chuck?” I said.

  Mr. Isaac smiled again. “You’re a real smart one.” He turned to the-man-with-no-face-and-a-tilted-paper-cap. “What boy this young knows about ground chuck?”

  “I learned it listening to my mother at the grocery store,” I answered, slightly embarrassed.

  “Well, it’s not ground chuck. It’s corned beef. This meat is expensive too.” He took my left hand and stared me in the face as though he was thinking about something serious. Then I turned to face the table with him.

  The store had grown quiet for some reason and the-man-with-no-face-and-a-tilted-paper-cap was turned around, whispering to some woman on the other side of the counter. Mr. Isaac tore a piece of rag stored under the counter and tied it skillfully around my waist.

  “The cleaner your apron is, the less work Ms. Rose will believe you have done,” Mr. Isaac said while pointing. “I usually get the thawed chicken from the freezer the moment I come in. I then drown my hands in it and smear the blood across the front of the apron.” He began demonstrating with his dry hands. “Saves lots of arguments later.” Mr. Isaac hit the switch on the side of a large silver machine located at the back of the table, and a sharpened circle in the center began spinning aggressively. “This is a dangerous piece of equipment I’m teaching you about, li’l man. Watch me carefully.” He snatched a chunk of corned beef and began feeding it to the machine’s mouth. It made a whistling sound, as if it was thanking us for the meal, and pieces of corn beef thin enough to make notebook paper jealous fell to the table. He repeated the motion about five times before pausing.

  “You watching?”

  “Yep.”

  “You ready to try?”

  “I think so.”

  Mr. Isaac probably allowed me to slice every piece of meat in the store that morning. I was sure to move slowly, in the constant and balanced pattern he detailed, keeping elbows pointed outward. He said this made it so you wouldn’t remove a finger accidentally.

  We took a breather after each meat was prepped.

  “Have a bite of this,” he said.

  I began to realize why a turkey sandwich was one of the prizes of food lovers. The meat tasted as though it had been smoked in a chimney; it had none of those ugly black pepper spots found in salami; it wasn’t salty like cheap bologna; and it wasn’t as bad for you as Mr. Isaac repeatedly explained ham and bacon were. I chewed and chewed and chewed, but at that age I was terribly clumsy and dropped a few pieces on the floor.

  “Don’t pick that up!” he blurted as I reached down. Then he pointed with his forehead to each corner of the room. There was a rectangular shaped box in each nook, painted a coarse version of black with a wide opening on each end. “It’s dangerous to touch anything on these floors,” Mr. Isaac continued, staring at the rectangles. “We got them things bad.”

  That’s when I noticed the dingy-brown tint of roaches spreading along the outer rim of the black boxes. There were little babies and even pregnant adults with the hatch-ready egg dangling from their posterior. These weren’t the roaches I was comfortable with from our buildings. Nah, they were tougher: some were still in the boxes alive, twitching, maybe even wiggling loose, antennae twisting as though they were looking for the radio signal that could free them all. I bent down and saw just how many roaches were pasted to that glue. There was barely a free spot on the inside of the box. Mr. Isaac grabbed a can of white spray with no letters along the metal, and flooded the spot where I dropped turkey meat.

  “Make sure you clean the spot good,” the-man-with-no-face-and-a-tilted-paper-cap said. He then continued whispering to the woman. When I moved back to the table, standing on the stool where the slicer was, my mother came in.

  “Hey, Joanne,” Mr. Isaac said before she fully entered. “How you been?” He smiled so brightly through his beard that the gaps between his teeth seemed to widen.

  “Shut up with the nonsense, Isaac,”
she said. “What you in here doing with my child?” She turned, then moved swiftly toward me, checking herself in the mirror first, and yanked me from the stool. “Don’t you think that’s a bit dangerous for him?” she asked with her face solid. There were a few small lines forming along her forehead.

  “Smart as this boy is? Nope. He’s fine,” Mr. Isaac responded.

  “How stupid of you.” My mother then began untying my makeshift apron with her fingertips, frowning at him the entire time.

  “I was just trying to teach the boy something cool,” Mr. Isaac replied to her scowl.

  “I don’t need you teaching him anything.”

  “No one was even watching the boy,” the-man-with-no-face-and-a-tilted-paper-cap said without turning. “We were just trying to help you out.”

  Mother stared at the back of his head while she stood me straight. She refreshed the pain by snatching my arm—same place—with a lot more force than ever used when dealing with Jacob. She pulled me through the door. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

  I had forgotten what things looked like on the outside after being in the meat room with Mr. Isaac for so long. The lobby of the store was now filled with people and Mother held me by the shoulder, making certain I couldn’t get away. She turned me in so many directions that I was slightly dizzy.

  “Hi, Joanne!” some man yelled. “You’re so good-looking!”

  “Hey, sexy Joanne!” another said, while planting a kiss on her clean cheek.

  “That top is looking groovy on you!” a third one stated. She smiled each time they spoke, adjusting her appearance in anything that could produce a reflection.

  The middle of the open area where Mother stood was the cleanest place in the store. It was like a four-squared stage. To the left there were six racks filled with small bags of Vitner’s chips that would’ve been perfect with some of Mr. Isaac’s turkey meat. There was a window with plastic glass revealing packs of candy bars, and straight ahead, before you turned the corner, was a deep-freezer I hoped held strawberry and vanilla ice cream. The freezer wasn’t used for anything like that. Because at six years old I was still small and light enough that my mother could lift me easily, cupping her hands in my armpits, and she used the freezer as a babysitter, plopping my thin body on top. My shoes were probably dangling four feet from the floor.

  Maybe I sat there forty minutes after she walked away. Customers passed like I was a piece of furniture. Even Mr. Isaac and the-man-with-no-face-and-a-tilted-paper-cap walked by, both pretending not to see me, but I noticed them and the cigarettes in their hands. I began kicking the backs of my shoes against the plastic of the deep-freezer.

  “Sitting there, you look just like my son did when he was your age,” Ms. Rose said as she came around the corner. She was so nimble that I didn’t even hear her coming. “Now, jump down from there.”

  I hesitated while looking down at the four cleanest squares of the floor, pausing dramatically like I was preparing for a Michael Jackson video, and secretly hoping that at the moment my shoe tapped the tile, the squares would begin to glow brightly. But if my mother returned to find I wasn’t where she left me, I knew I’d receive one of those forceful blows that removed Jacob from his feet that morning.

  “I don’t think I should move, Ms. Rose.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I can handle your mother.” She took my hand and I slid easily from the top of the freezer. We turned the corner, exiting from the front area of the store. We passed another freezer on the left, a bit larger than the one used as a babysitter, and Ms. Rose walked briskly into another room across the hall. She did her previous thing of pointing and directing the employees: neck firm, face forward, abrasive dialogue.

  “Come in here, li’l Tracy,” she said from inside the room. I was standing in the hall, hoping my mother hadn’t noticed me missing. “Come in here, son,” she said again, with a bit more force. “Hurry.”

  I peered around the corner. She was standing against a wall on the right, next to a counter opening similar to the meat room where Mr. Isaac worked.

  “Hi,” I said shyly.

  “You hungry?” Ms. Rose asked.

  “A li’l bit.”

  Even after a few slices of turkey, my stomach was growling with such volume that I couldn’t have lied if I wanted to. She turned to me, nose and dark skin shining like Mr. Isaac’s minus the beard. When she pointed to the area behind us, I realized why the store was such a moneymaker.

  There were four deep fryers lined against the far wall like soldiers, making oil crackle and jump. Steel racks dripped with grease from French fries; some had pizza puffs; others held chicken wings breaded with such crisp thickness the customers probably never reached the meat.

  “Make him a plate, L. D. Sutton,” she said to the man standing by the fryers. She said his full name like he was president of the United States.

  For some reason, he stared at me in the way Ms. Rose did when we first met. He walked close, kneeled in front of me, held my face by the cheeks in his right hand, and began to repeatedly tilt my head to each side. He then began plucking and pulling at the skin on my face. It was like he was trying to get my teeth to show or something. He put spit on his pointing fingers and ran them across my eyebrows.

  “I sure will do that,” Mr. L. D. Sutton finally replied. “Yep, I’m going to make him one of my special burgers. Just wait, you’ll love it.” Then he turned to me and smiled the way Ms. Rose did, the same as Mr. Isaac.

  I nodded.

  Mr. L. D. Sutton moved to the center of the room, snatching a meat patty and slapping it on the square grill that seemed to be an extension of the table. I’d never seen anything as colorful as the fire as it exploded into the air. His face began to gleam as he teased the flame, flipping the meat every twenty seconds or so. His beard was as disorganized as Mr. Isaac’s, just not as thick.

  “You want B.B. sauce on it?” he asked, motioning me to move closer.

  “You know everybody wants B.B. sauce,” Ms. Rose stated firmly. “That sauce has kept us in business the last ten years.”

  “You know that ain’t true,” he said rather timidly.

  “What’s B.B. sauce?” I asked.

  Mr. L. D. Sutton looked at me like he had been waiting for someone to ask that question for eight months. Although he was sweating over the fire, darkened skin shining from its moisture, he was as calm as could be.

  “You’re gonna just love this,” Ms. Rose said.

  Each time she turned to us standing by the grill table, she grabbed a paper bag I assumed was filled with hot dogs glossed with mustard and onions and relish, or those pizza puffs with sausage and cheese mix oozing, and certainly they contained helpings of French fries waiting for ketchup. She then would turn back to the counter, taking money into a register while handing customers those same paper bags that now included grease stains. She exaggerated every single motion and glanced at me each time for pause, making certain I was paying attention.

  “Stand closer to me, li’l Tracy,” Mr. L. D. Sutton instructed. “B.B. sauce is what we put on orders that request it. Most of the time we even charge a quarter more if they want us to put extra on the side.” He handed me a stack of small clear containers with lids and a big jug of maroon-colored sauce. “Pour enough to fill each one of these, then put a top on it.” Mr. L. D. Sutton scratched his beard and gathered the black pepper, salt, ketchup, hot sauce, barbecue sauce, and an onion. He placed them in the center of the grill table. “I can tell you’re smart enough to catch on to this,” he said. He mixed ingredients like a witch over brew, and within a few moments there was another large jug of sauce.

  “Why do you call it B.B. sauce?” I asked as he decorated the burger with lettuce and slices of tomato almost as thick as a bun. “What does B.B. stand for?”

  “Such a smart young boy,” he said. Mr. L. D. Sutton rubbe
d my cheeks like he had known me since I was born. “B.B. is just short for barbecue. Since the sauce is a li’l bit sweeter than regular, I had to come up with something that sounded good. I just made it shorter.” He grabbed one of those containers I had filled, removing the lid and drowning the burger. “Here, take a bite.”

  It was like eating a hamburger dipped in Jolly Ranchers. “This tastes good,” I said.

  “Your brother doesn’t like them much,” Mr. L. D. Sutton responded.

  “I don’t think he’s smart as me.”

  “I see you let him try the sauce,” Mr. Isaac said while walking in. I noticed trickles of turkey meat in his beard. But his deep and familiar voice made my clumsiness return and I dropped the burger.

  Everyone’s head shifted to the floor, just staring. I began reaching down.

  “Don’t pick that up!” Ms. Rose yelled. She didn’t hesitate to give me the same scary-movie routine Mr. Isaac had done earlier with turkey, using her hands to point to overflowing roach boxes in the corners.