Where the Walls are Soft…

In case you missed it: Part I - The Waitress

Word to the Wise: I strongly suggest waiting to read this if you’re about to eat, just ate, or, ulp, are in the process of eating - especially if it involves eggs; or in Suzi’s case - aigs.

Ruby had got into a comfortable rut, between working the chicken farm and running The Dump on the weekends. The farm was doing well, considering she had more chickens than she could reasonably deal with herself, and yet couldn’t afford to hire help. The kids, surprisingly, were more than willing to deal with gathering eggs and cleaning coops, and her mother, even more surprisingly, took over the slaughtering tasks. She was very efficient, and once told Ruby that she enjoyed it immensely. Ruby was shocked, and asked her mother how it was possible to actually enjoy killing chickens, especially considering the mess and noise involved with the sheer numbers of doomed birds being dealt with. Her mother shocked her even more with her explanation. She laughed - an evil, disconcerting kind of laugh, Ruby thought - before she replied.

“I don’t mind saying, Ruby, that there’s a lot of people over the years that have ticked me off to no end,” she said, and went on to say that while she was busy with the “wet-work”, as she called it, she was actually imagining all the people she held grudges against, in place of the chickens. She would sling each bird over the chopping block and stretch its neck before cutting its head off with the small axe Ruby kept for this purpose. Then she would set the decapitated chicken back on its feet and it would strut away, spouting blood. The next in line would be walking around headless, too, before the first one fell over.

“I like to see how many I can get dancing at a time,” she told Ruby, laughing that evil-sounding laugh again. “I had eight or nine going at once, last time. I’m getting faster.”

Ruby was aghast, and never spoke to her mother about the chickens again. It was bad enough knowing what she was thinking now during the “wet-work”, when Ruby still had to be around for the rest of the business of the slaughtering. The dead chickens would be gathered up and their feet tied together, and then hung upside down to finish draining. Once drained, the birds were dunked into boiling water to make the plucking easier. That done, Ruby left the side yard. Her mother did the actual “cleaning” of the chickens; Ruby couldn’t stomach it, especially after learning about her mother’s vivid imagination.

She still had her weekend job at The Dump, partly because the farm was only large enough to generate enough eggs and poultry to sell in the immediate area, and partly because every time she tried to quit, Judd Gulley would give her a raise. Every small stipend made it a little easier to decide that she could stick it out among the drunks, but it was never long before it came to where some idiot would do something to make her want to quit again. Most times, the idiot was Judd Gulley, himself. Take the “whiskey games”, for example…

Judd kept a barrel of “swish” in the back store-room, along with the “real” barrels of not-so-high-class whiskey he bought from a local bootlegger, and cases of beer. Judd was nothing, if not cheap, and selling bootleg whiskey saved, or rather, earned, him a lot of money. The swish was a watered-down version of the bootleg, and it wasn’t sold to his customers; he kept that for himself.

He started out drinking swish on the nights he was on duty. He stopped into The Dump two or three times a shift while driving up and down the highway, to “check the crowd”, as he told Ruby, but it was really to suck a few back. He did that for a long while, until, one night there was a pile-up and another OPP officer showed up at the crash site and figured out that Judd was working while tanked on moonshine whiskey. Ruby still hadn’t the foggiest notion how he’d saved his job, but it was sometime after that night that the swish-barrel showed up.

Now, when Judd came into The Dump while on the clock, Wally McDonald in tow, Ruby served him swish. Wally, not being an officer of the law, drank the high-octane version, and/or beer (mostly and), and rode shotgun three sheets to the wind.

No one, not even Wally, knew about the swish-barrel. Judd was a proud man, and most proud of the idea that he could drink any other man under the table, even if he had to cheat to do it. It wasn’t long before he was drinking swish on the nights that he didn’t have to work, as well, because he’d figured out a way to make even more money out of his clientele.

He invented a drinking game. The rules were simple. If you wanted in, you bought a shot, and threw a dollar into the pot. You drank your shot. Then you bought another shot, and threw another dollar into the pot. Several more times. If you were still standing, and hadn’t puked yet, or run out of money, you bought another shot. Sometimes, you played against Judd, and sometimes you played against Judd as well as everybody else in The Dump. Judd was always the last man standing, and so he always won the take. He made money hand over fist; nobody got in the game without a dollar for the pot, and Judd didn’t let anybody run a tab.

Ruby figured that the only reason the idiots kept playing was they were generally too drunk to realize that Judd wasn’t drunk. Every night they played, they were certain that someone would topple the champ. And every night they played, Ruby spent the majority of her shift mopping up vomit, while Judd crowed over his winnings.

Wally never played, not having any money of his own, but sometimes The Little Drunk would throw a dollar or two in. Ruby couldn’t decide if she preferred The Little Drunk playing the whiskey game or not; when he played, he went up to his room sooner, and so got out from under her feet, but that meant that he lay in a wet straw tick longer. She couldn’t change it with him in it, and it had got so that she couldn’t quite get that room to let go the smell of stale urine anymore.

A lot of the time, too, when The Little Drunk played the whiskey game, he passed out in the bar, which meant Ruby had to drag him up the stairs at the end of her shift. It was on one of those nights, that she finally hit her limit - again - and gave Judd Gulley what-for; this time in front of his customers, and she regretted it almost instantly.

It had looked, at first, as if it would be an easy Saturday night, as far as Saturday nights at The Dump went. There weren’t many “regulars” there at all; there was a charity “Donkey Baseball” game scheduled for the next afternoon, and a lot of the fellows who would normally be at The Dump on a Saturday night planned on playing.

It was close to 1 am, and Judd was off that night, so he’d been in the bar since before it opened, swigging back swish, and bemoaning the small crowd; all were drinking slow tonight. Church in the morning, and the thought of Donkey Baseball kept them from carousing much - nobody wanted to endure a hangover and a pack of obstinate donkeys.

It didn’t surprise Ruby at all when Judd stood up and called out, “Howsabout a game of whiskey, boys?” to the few that were present. Nor did it surprise her when they all jumped at the chance to see the champ whipped, finally. After all, Judd appeared to be more in his cups than the rest of them combined. Even The Little Drunk bought in.

The game was going for an hour when the first man fell. Before he fell, though, he upchucked, right on the table. His timing couldn’t have been worse. Ruby had just set down a plate of hash and runny eggs in front of Wally, who wasn’t altogether too tight, as of yet, but the smell of his supper, coupled with the sound of the loser retching, and followed by the sight of his supper landing next to Wally’s own plate, was all it took for Wally to bring up what was left of his lunch - all over The Little Drunk, who had quietly fallen asleep in the chair beside him.

Ruby hit the roof.

“Judd Gulley, you have ticked me off for the last time!” she hollered, but even as she yelled at him, she was starting to clean up the mess. She got a pail from behind the bar and began to scrape the mess off the table and into it.

Judd, along with every man in the bar, including Wally, having proven that “better out than in” must hold true, began to laugh riotously. Ruby slapped Wally with the dishrag.

“You oughtta be ashamed of yourself! Look at this mess! And if you think I’m gonna put Wilson to bed in that condition, Judd, you have yourself another think coming! I have had enough! I quit! I won’t put up with this business one more minute!” All Ruby wanted to do was stomp out the door, but for some reason that belied her own words, she continued to clean the table as she quit her job.

“Now, Ruby….” Judd laughed, in a cajoling voice, as he went behind the bar, himself. “You know we’re just playing.”

“Just playing, my patoot!” Ruby yelled back, beginning to mop the puke off The Little Drunk’s shirt. “You get that drunk outta here!” She pointed at the passed-out loser of the game.

“In fact, all of you just get the hell out! This is the last time I clean up a mess like this! Go!” She hadn’t noticed Judd coming back from behind the bar, handcuffs in hand, until it was too late. Before she knew it, Judd had placed one cuff around the skinny wrist of The Little Drunk, and the other around one of Ruby’s own. She was surprised into silence.

Judd laughed long and hard, along with the rest of them. “Why, Ruby, you can’t quit! How would I ever get along without you? Here’s a little bonus for you,” he said, as he swept the money pot from the center of the table, and tucked the bills into Ruby’s apron. “I’m gonna take Reg home, now. Let’s go, boys. I’m gonna close up early, and give Ruby a chance to cool off and clean up some. She’s had herself a rough shift.”

And with that, Judd and Wally hiked Reg up off the floor and half-walked, half-dragged him out the door, the rest of “the boys” trailing behind, leaving Ruby stunned, and hand-cuffed to The Little Drunk, who slept in his chair, oblivious.

TO BE CONTINUED

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under The Waitress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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