The Alligator Diner: A Shocker Fiction Series (4)

Part IV: Stirring the Pot

Previously: Business at Meera and Sam’s diner is good, thanks to a mix of alligator meat and sheer luck.

The fact that business was if not booming then at least rolling along made me feel personally worthy, and it felt good to feel personally worthy. The default, after all, is for bad things to happen, and when bad things happen to us we tend to blame ourselves. Or maybe I’m projecting. Anyway, as the alligators kept popping up in our kitchen, Sam and I decided to enjoy our good fortune and “invest” in another bottle of booze, on the house. We went to the liquor store like a couple going to the jeweler for their anniversary.

“You choose, Meera,” Sam told me in a kingly fashion. “I’ll pick the next bottle. I believe there will be a next. Knock on wood and inshallah and everything, of course. How dumb would I feel if I talked like this and ended up jinxing us? Anyway, pick your poison.”

I chose Dewars. Sam paid in cash and we then proceeded out the door and into the street. It was 11 PM in early December and far colder than usual. It was maybe a few degrees below freezing but to our bodies, accustomed to heat, it was so bitterly cold that standing outside felt like taking a beating; all we could do was cower and whimper. As we started speed-walking back to the diner I could feel the pavement through my shoes — black-on-black Converse low-tops I’d worn nearly every day for two years, and which were well into their progress towards complete disintegration. Instead of a coat I was wearing a flannel shirt and over which I had draped a men’s XL polar fleece quarter-zip that I had stumbled upon at Goodwill. My hair had grown too long and straggly, barely maintaining its textural integrity from lack of conditioning and oils, but its sheer mass formed the last element of my defense against the cold. Sam shivered in a parka and my high school sweatshirt. His regular trips to the barbershop kept him looking sharp but left his head cruelly deprived of insulation.

“Anyway, about the revenue,” I said, “do you feel…totally ethical about how we’re generating it? We’re not exploiting people I don’t think, but isn’t our business model just vicious animal cruelty?”

“I don’t think our business model is animal cruelty! I’m not saying this because this because our… ‘meat wholesaler’ has been a stroke of luck, but there’s no way what we do is worse than factory farming. Right? The animal lives its life free, probably, and then we — or, well, you — kill it quickly and cleanly.”

“And I guess if we just let them run amok they could go on to eat someone,” I said.

“Yeah. Or they could eat us!”

“Or just take a bite out of us, and we’re uninsured, so that’d be it.”

“It’s thanks to you they didn’t even come close to eating us. You were really quick on the draw. And brave.”

I didn’t know how to accept the compliment so I just mumbled thanks and stared at my feet as I walked.

Granbury Boulevard was deserted. Under the few functional streetlights you could see plastic bottles and bits of paper swirling aimlessly in the wind down the sides of the road — there weren’t so much sidewalks around here as curbs interrupted by parking lot driveways and intersecting roads. Not a single car drove by; there was just the wind cutting through vacant strip malls that had once boasted an IHOP, a Payless Shoe Source, a Ford dealership that sold only F-150s, an Old Navy and a Hooters, or some equivalent combination. There was no hint of homespun Americana on this road, just a set of activities with which to while away all 24 hours of your day in places where the passage of time wasn’t perceptible.

We finally got to the diner. We rushed inside, shivering, and turned on the blue and yellow neon “open” sign before finally pouring ourselves richly deserved drams of whiskey.

The Dewars was strong but it tasted smooth as vanilla compared to all the other alcohol I’d ingested lately. Its warmth coursed straight through my insides with a slight harshness, as though I’d been licked by the flame of a lighter. I shrugged off my fleece sweater and undid the top few buttons on my flannel; the cold air felt refreshing and not icy now.

At a leisurely pace, we set up for the graveyard shift, drinking as we went: we put the coffee on, beat eggs, sautéed peppers and onions for home fries, crisped up turkey bacon, defrosted the frozen hash browns. Soon we were done and returned to the front to lounge around. I paced back and forth; Sam downed his drink as he perched on one of the bar stools by the lunch counter.

“Meera?”

“Yeah?”

“I meant what I said. You saved us with your knife. And your quick thinking. If you hadn’t been there I’d be dead. I’m lucky you walked in for lunch that day.” I stopped in my tracks but couldn’t look up at him, embarrassed again.

“Thanks.” Then more words came out, thoughts previously formed and pondered but not intended to be spoken: “I’m glad it’s you I’m in this weird situation with. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know how I’d manage to do…whatever it is we do.” I was meeting his eyes now. He was looking intently back at me.

At that moment a few customers came in — four white teenagers, two boys and two girls. They sat down in a booth and brought them menus and introduced myself. One of them, a dark-haired boy with broad shoulders, asked me where I was from. I pulled myself up to my full five feet four and three quarter inches and made sure to drain myself of any errant irritation or emotion before I answered: “Here in Yamasee. Grew up in San Leon Heights,” I said. “But I was born in New York. So, are you in high school?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Freedom Academy.” The new charter school.

“I see. How is it over there? Is Ariana Clark still teaching? Maxine Carson? Stephanie Orozco?”

“I had Carson for social studies,” chimed in the girl next to him, who had clearly flat-ironed her blond hair and missed the entire back of her head. “But she and a bunch of other ones got fired. We have school four days a week now. And on Fridays we have mandatory volunteering at the government buildings or some other job for a few hours and then we can just leave.”

“Excuse me, what? What do you do there? Do you just work for free?”

“Yeah. It’s gonna look good on our resumes. They’re internships.”

“That’s wild. Not to sound like an anti-drug PSA, but you should be in school.”

“What’s it to you? You’re not even from around here,” said the other girl, who had brown hair and tadpole-shaped eyebrows.

“I am, actually. I already told you that. Are you ready to order?”

They got two orders of fries and chicken nuggets plus a diet coke, a vanilla coke, a cherry coke and a regular coke. I couldn’t help but feel, call it a teacher’s sixth sense, that they were fucking with me with their coke orders and were going to say I’d messed up. But when I brought their food they were deep in conversation and tuned out my presence, the way people often do with service workers, so as I put their cokes down they all snickered but otherwise ignored me.

They were talking about one of the new companies in town, Bio Solutions Inc. Two of them had parents who worked in their warehouse. The blonde girl had eavesdropped on her father saying the factory did mind-machine interface testing, specifically clinical trials on humans. Based on the results of her internet research and her snooping, she seemed convinced that “random townspeople are getting snatched and experimented on with no regulations.”

It all sounded pretty far-fetched. Had I been a Fox Mulder type I would have instantly jumped to connect these experiments to the disappearances in town, but I’ve always been more of a Scully. Still, I cleaned the tabletops that didn’t need cleaning for awhile just to stick around and listen. Purely out of curiosity of course.

The kids paid (no tip; who could have seen that coming?) and left. It was dead silent all around except for the buzz of the lights. Sam ran the dishwasher while I scrubbed the flat-top and emptied the grease trap. When I was finished I cleaned the coffee maker at my own pace but mostly just watched him put away the clean dishes and silverware. He turned back and caught me staring.

“Did you hear what those kids were talking about?” I said, just to make conversation.

“Anything interesting?”

“They’re convinced illegal experiments on humans are going on at the Bio Solutions factory.”

“Could be. They are some kind of biomedical tech company. But you seem skeptical. And then again, here you are telling me about it.”

“I just thought it was weird enough to share, OK? I have no idea what to believe.”

“Well what did they say about the factory? This could be something. They‘ve got to have some kind of shitty labor practices at least. Do you think—”

“I need to go to sleep,” I mumbled and walked away.

I got to the supply room, undressed, and flopped onto the bed, trying to drift off, trying not to think of anything. But a knock on the door startled me mid half-sleeping reverie.

“Meera? Are you asleep?” Sam said.

I didn’t answer. He didn’t knock again.

To be continued…