I didn’t think it was funny, though. The bloom of the umbrella hid him from me completely as he staggered backward with his free hand flying up to the place where I’d hit him, and I didn’t like not being able to see him. In fact, it terrified me. Not that I wasn’t terrified already.
I grabbed Diane’s wrist and yanked her to her feet. She came without a word, took a step toward me, then stumbled on her high heels and fell clumsily into my arms. I was aware of her breasts pushing against me, and the wet, warm clamminess over them.
“Eeeee! You boinker!” the maître d’ screamed, or perhaps it was a
“boinger” he called me. It probably doesn’t matter, I know that, and yet it quite often seems to me that it does. Late at night, the little questions haunt me as much as the big ones. “You boinking bastard! All these radios! Hush-do-baba! Fuck Cousin Brucie! Fuck YOU!”
He started around the table toward us (the area behind him was 336
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completely empty now, and looked like the aftermath of a brawl in a western movie saloon). My umbrella was still lying on the table with the opened top jutting off the far side, and the maître d’ bumped it with his hip. It fell off in front of him, and while he kicked it aside, I set Diane back on her feet and pulled her toward the far side of the room.
The front door was no good; it was probably too far away in any case, but even if we could get there, it was still jammed tight with frightened, screaming people. If he wanted me—or both of us—he would have no trouble catching us and carving us like a couple of turkeys.
“Bugs! You bugs! . . . Eeeeee! . . . So much for your dog, eh? So much for your barking dog!”
“Make him stop!” Diane screamed. “Oh Jesus, he’s going to kill us both, make him stop!”
“I rot you, you abominations!” Closer, now. The umbrella hadn’t held him up for long, that was for sure. “I rot you and all your trulls!”
I saw three doors, two of them facing each other in a small alcove where there was also a pay telephone. Men’s and women’s rooms. No good. Even if they were single toilets with locks on the doors, they were no good. A nut like this one behind us would have no trouble bashing a bathroom lock off its screws, and we would have nowhere to run.
I dragged her toward the third door and shoved through it into a world of clean green tiles, strong fluorescent light, gleaming chrome, and steamy odors of food. The smell of salmon dominated. Humboldt had never gotten a chance to ask about the specials, but I thought I knew what at least one of them had been.
A waiter was standing there with a loaded tray balanced on the flat of one hand, his mouth agape and his eyes wide. He looked like Gimpel the Fool in that Isaac Singer story. “What—” he said, and then I shoved him aside. The tray went flying, with plates and glassware shattering against the wall.
“Ay!” a man yelled. He was huge, wearing a white smock and a white chef’s hat like a cloud. There was a red bandanna around his neck, and in one hand he held a ladle that was dripping some sort of brown sauce. “Ay, you can’t come in here like-a dat!”
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“We have to get out,” I said. “He’s crazy. He’s—”
An idea struck me then, a way of explaining without explaining, and I put my hand over Diane’s left breast for a moment, on the soaked cloth of her dress. It was the last time I ever touched her intimately, and I don’t know if it felt good or not. I held my hand out to the chef, showing him a palm streaked with Humboldt’s blood.
“Good Christ,” he said. “Here. Inna da back.”
At that instant, the door we’d come through burst open again and the maître d’ rolled in, eyes wild, hair sticking out everywhere like fur on a hedgehog that’s tucked itself into a ball. He looked around, saw the waiter, dismissed him, saw me, and rushed at me.
I bolted again, dragging Diane with me, shoving blindly at the softbellied bulk of the chef. We went past him, the front of Diane’s dress leaving a smear of blood on the front of his tunic. I saw he wasn’t coming with us, that he was turning toward the maître d’
instead, and wanted to warn him, wanted to tell him that wouldn’t work, that it was the worst idea in the world and likely to be the last idea he ever had, but there was no time.
“Ay!” the chef cried. “Ay, Guy, what’s dis?” He said the maître d’s name as the French do, so it rhymes with free, and then he didn’t say anything at all. There was a heavy thud that made me think of the sound of the knife burying itself in Humboldt’s skull, and then the cook screamed. It had a watery sound. It was followed by a thick wet splat that haunts my dreams. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t want to know.
I yanked Diane down a narrow aisle between two stoves that baked a furious dull heat out at us. There was a door at the end, locked shut by two heavy steel bolts. I reached for the top one and then heard Guy, The Maître d’ from Hell, coming after us, babbling.
I wanted to keep at the bolt, wanted to believe I could open the door and get us outside before he could get within sticking distance, but part of me—the part that was determined to live—knew better.
I pushed Diane against the door, stepped in front of her in a protective maneuver that must go all the way back to the Ice Age, and faced him.
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He came running up the narrow aisle between the stoves with the knife gripped in his left hand and raised above his head. His mouth was open and pulled back from a set of dingy, eroded teeth. Any hope of help I might have had from Gimpel the Fool disappeared. He was cowering against the wall beside the door to the restaurant. His fingers were buried deep inside his mouth, making him look more like the village idiot than ever.
“Forgetful of me you shouldn’t have been!” Guy screamed, sounding like Yoda in the Star Wars movies. “Your hateful dog! . . . Your loud music, so disharmonious! . . . Eeeee! . . . How you ever—”
There was a large pot on one of the front burners of the lefthand stove. I reached out for it and slapped it at him. It was over an hour before I realized how badly I’d burned my hand doing that; I had a palmful of blisters like little buns, and more blisters on my three middle fingers. The pot skidded off its burner and tipped over in midair, dousing Guy from the waist down with what looked like corn, rice, and maybe two gallons of boiling water.
He screamed, staggered backward, and put the hand that wasn’t holding the knife down on the other stove, almost directly into the blue-yellow gasflame underneath a skillet where mushrooms which had been sautéing were now turning to charcoal. He screamed again, this time in a register so high it hurt my ears, and held his hand up before his eyes, as if not able to believe it was connected to him.
I looked to my right and saw a little nestle of cleaning equipment beside the door—Glass-X and Clorox and Janitor In A Drum on a shelf, a broom with a dustpan stuck on top of the handle like a hat, and a mop in a steel bucket with a squeegee on the side.
As Guy came toward me again, holding the knife in the hand that wasn’t red and swelling up like an innertube, I grabbed the handle of the mop, used it to roll the bucket in front of me on its little casters, and then jabbed it out at him. Guy pulled back with his upper body but stood his ground. There was a peculiar, twitching little smile on his lips. He looked like a dog who has forgotten, temporarily, at least, how to snarl. He held the knife up in front of his face and made several mystic passes with it. The overhead fluorescents glimmered liq-339
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uidly on the blade . . . where it wasn’t caked with blood, that was. He didn’t seem to feel any pain in his burned hand, or in his legs, although they had been doused with boiling water and his tuxedo pants were spackled with rice.