SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER TWO

TWO

The words “dinner rush” were indeed a farce.

By the time Exitus’s burger and frog sticks were passed through the service window by a cheerful—albeit sweaty—Adam the Cook, only one other person had entered the Airstream diner to join He of the Times and Apple Pie (the slice now down by half) and Sir Afraid of Butterflies.

The woman, whose hair was the precise burnt orange of the lines in her plaid work shirt, came rushing into the diner around six o’clock. She made her way loudly through the door laughing-snorting-wheezing and running her ivory fingers through her messy hair—or maybe the thick curls were always in such a state of disarray and were therefor quite orderly, Exitus had no way to tell. Either way, the girl (all appearances were telling to the notion that she might not have been any older than Exitus) she was being rather rude as the huffing from He of the Times and Apple Pie would have attested to.

Red, all but skipping over to the counter beside Exitus, giggled one final time and waved to Mary. Mary, visibly weighing the options of making another two pots of coffee, grunted.

“Wind’s really startin’ tuh whip out there,” the red-head observed as she raked her fingers through her tousled locks once more. The Airstream seemed to moan in agreement.

Mary turned away from the coffee pots and laughed at the girl. “Oh, Becca. Your hair.”

“The theatre’ll be dark,” Becca retorted. “Besides, it’s a zombie fest. How many people are gonna be payin’ attention tuh my hair?”

There was a clatter of silverware as Adam’s voice floated out of the service window. “A lot if your afro’s blocking the screen.”

Becca snorted, an unappetizing sound that much resembled a pig being smothered. “Hush now. You’re juss jealous you can’t come with me, bein’ stuck there behind that stove all night.”

“Yeah, and I have your mother to thank for that.”

“So the boss thinks you’re the greatest cook around, you should be proud.”

“I’d rather take my girl to Zombie Fest.”

Mary refilled Exitus’s water. “Adam, you can’t take your girl to Zombie Fest if you don’t cash any paychecks now, can you?”

Silence.

Becca drummed her stubby fingers against the counter top. “Well, I just wanted tuh stop in and see how things were goin’.”

“Slow,” Mary replied. “Frank and what’s-his-name over here, Exit, have been the only afternoon customers who’ve stayed long enough to collect a decent bill.”

At this point in the conversation Exitus was halfway through his burger—squirting a puddle of ketchup onto his jacket. With a sigh he took up his napkin and began to dab and the offending spot. “It’s Exitus, actually.”

Becca turned to look at this funny little man sliding ketchup all around his good—and only—jacket. “What the hell kinda name is that?”

“Becca!” Adam scolded from the kitchen.

“No, it’s okay.” Exitus set his soiled napkin down and frowned at the dark spot on his chest. He looked to Becca, leaning against the counter in her over-sized work shirt and roomy jeans. “I think it’s a good name, myself. Kind of a joke, really. How many people would understand Tod with one D right off the bat?”

“Understand?”

Exitus pointed toward the window. “You saw Genevieve, didn’t you? My hearse?”

“So you’re the one ridin’ around in that thing? Shoot, I thought Death mighta had a flat and came in tuh use the pay phone.”

“She is not a thing,” Exitus replied hotly. “She is my home.”

Becca laughed. “Home? You live in a hearse? What are you, some kind of pervert who likes tuh make-out with dead people, or somethin’?”

“Don’t be crude.” Exitus looked back at his dinner plate, poked at his cold fries. “That hearse was my uncle’s and it was left to me in his will. I choose to live out of it as I travel the country to save on motel costs.”

The red-head looked as though she’d eaten a cockroach.

“It’s actually not that bad at all. I sleep on top of the attendant’s seats. They fold down, you see, and with a board running over the seats I don’t fall down between them.” Exitus ate the cold fry he’d been poking at. “I’m really not as grim as that might imply.”

“Oh, no?” Becca asked, playing with a stand of hair. She wrest it from her head and then began to nibble on the root with all the concentration of a toddler working on a sucker.

“No—” and what he really wanted to say but didn’t because he had been raised too well: “Surely that’s a medical condition, what you’re doing there. If you don’t stop you’ll wind up with a large bald patch at the top of your head. Such pretty hair it is, too; all red and wild like you stuck your head in a blender.”

Becca let the blaze orange hair fall to the floor. “You just sleep in a hearse and I’m not suppose tuh find that at all grim?”

Exitus shrugged one shoulder. “My parents neglected to spell my name with an extra D and I’ve been cursed with Quick Death ever since. My rocket scientist friend, seeing as how he was the only of our Goth—” and here Becca screwed up her face in confusion.

“Goth? A special term for special people who don’t like other people who aren’t nearly as special as they? A large percentage of the Goth population confuse themselves with pin cushions and/or dress in all black. Would paint their organs black if they could and I think some of them do try. Characterized also by either dry, satirical wit or a hair-trigger, über violent temper—sometimes both. Typically have an immeasurable intelligence which brings us back to their disdain for the human race; their fellow humans are just too stupid to waste breath on.” Exitus gestured with a limp fry. “Contrary to popular belief some Goths actually don’t throw their fists up and scream ‘Hail Satan!’ Those are the Satan Worshipers, there’s a slight difference. Anyway, Chad was the only one of us taking German and thought it would be fitting to call me Exitus. I’ve been going by that ever since. A guy named Quick Death riding around in a hearse, what’s not to love?”

“Everythin’?”

“Becca.” It was Mary’s turn to scold the inhibited daughter of the Lidia in Lidia’s Diner.

Exitus eschewed the waitress with his hand. “Dead things make me feel icky.”

“So?”

“A guy named Quick Death—who’s afraid of dead things—riding around in a hearse. Get it?”

Becca paused, looked out the window at the hearse in the parking lot. “No, not really I don’t.”

“Yeah, not too many people do. How’s that for irony?”

“Ira—what?”

“I-ron-ee.”

Becca nodded. “Right.” She turned away from Exitus and waved to Mary. “I think I’m gonna leave now. Zombie Fest starts in forty-five minutes and it’s a long drive tuh town. I wanna good seat.”

“Put your Brewers cap on,” Adam called from the kitchen, “or those moviegoers are going to commission Exitus to put you and your afro six feet under.”

“I’m actually a handyman. I unstick windows, paint doors, fix plumbing, but I don’t dig holes.”

“’Cause then you’d run the risk of comin’ across a dead vole.”

Exitus pointed his finger at Becca. “Exactly.”

A harsh laugh came from the curved booth with the magnificent view of the bathroom.

“See? He gets it.”

“You just set about finishin’ your burger, Mr. Death,” Becca directed and then stole Exitus’s unused straw, which she tapped on the Formica counter. She then proceeded to lean forward across the counter, put the straw to her lips and blow. The white wrapping of the straw flew off toward the golden cow Exitus had almost completely forgotten about since receiving his evening meal.

The paper wrapping made it about halfway to the cow’s forehead and then careened to the floor.

Becca sighed. “Better luck next time. Hundredth time’s a charm, right?”

Mary walked over to the service window and bent down to pick up the straw wrapping. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“I know, but it’s tradition.”

“We’re in a recession, Rebecca, in case you believe the fodder in the newspapers about possibly, maybe, speculatively being on the 50 yard line of one. The shipping costs of getting those straws to this God forsaken piece of flyover country—”

Becca held up her alabaster hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… But you know that every time one of us is gonna leave the diner we gotta blow the paper at Harold.”

“Well, then maybe we need a new tradition.”

Exitus swallowed the last bite of his Jack Benny on the hoof. It went down his throat like a simonized brick. “Harold?”

Becca was never going to find a decent seat in the theatre now. “Yeah. Harold.”

“You named a cow Harold?”

“Why not name a cow Harold?”

Exitus took a few sips of his water. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe because Harold is a masculine name.”

“What’s your point?”

“That is my point.”

Becca scoffed. “Must you drag your conversations out like a parade float weighed down by twenty fat dancers?”

“The only conversations I get are with my Dad’s old dashboard ornament, so you’ll have to forgive me.”

“I don’t really wanna. What’s your point?”

Exitus started to consume the last of his cold and soggy fries. “A cow is a female. It has udders and teats with which the farmers get milk. It births little baby calves. You named your cow Harold, a man’s name. Now that up there could be a heifer, a baby boy, but a heifer does not have udders. Besides, heifers grow up to be bulls and bulls are used to impregnate—”

“I hate that word.”

“Okay. Bulls are mated with cows to birth calves, unless the farmer has the bull, er, neutered. If the bull is neutered it then either becomes an ox for drafting or a steer to be used for meat—to be recalled by the USDA for their lackadaisical inspection techniques. Unless the slaughterhouse is kosher, which is a kind of an oxymoron, don’t you think? A kosher slaughterhouse? Anyway, they’re bombarded by PETA and that’s hell enough. So, my point is that the name Harold for a cow which is obviously not a heifer is wrong.”

Becca laughed. “You don’t get out much, do you?”

“What are you talking about? I travel the country, I’m out all the time.”

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER ONE

ONE

Death lived out his late uncle’s 1953 Superior Cadillac hearse.

Much to the boy’s chagrin the name permanently etched onto his birth certificate was Tod Quick, and if school had ever taught him anything it was that Tod meant “death” in the Germanic world. Everyone had their cross to bare, it seemed. At least he hadn’t been born looking like a Picasso painting—now that would have been a severe impediment indeed.

Anyway, this boy named Death truly did prefer the quarters of a hearse to any building. This wasn’t to say that Tod, who went by his nickname of Exitus since high school, was a rather psychotic axe murderer with a pension for romancing his victims in the back of a death coach, nor was he a satanist who worked at a funeral parlor merely as a cover, as an easy course to human sacrifices.

Exitus was rather put off by dead things and he had a very hard time working a toaster. Bread screamed when in his presence.

The hearse, too, was pathetically docile. No corpses had been carried in the vehicle since the early seventies, when Exitus hadn’t yet been considered to be conceived. Even then the only exciting, half-celebrity it carted to the cemetery was one local eating champion: Ed “The Glutton” Browne, who died of a massive coronary over a plate of hot dogs when just one shy of winning the coveted Golden Stomach award, which as the name implied was in the shape of a human stomach. In the nineties, on a very special occasion, the hearse had come out of retirement to tend to Exitus’s uncle. Monty Quick had been fifty-nine years young, more of a father to Exitus than his own father because his parents had kicked the bucket long ago in a freak automobile accident. Monty wasn’t exactly what one would call mature; he tossed out whoopee cushions until the bitter end—in his case the bitter end being the bar stool of a very drunk and extremely ornery biker.

That had been seven years ago last month, when Exitus was sixteen and the thought of traveling the country in a hearse was humorous. Now, at twenty-three, he couldn’t imagine life any other way. Though sometimes the annoyance of it all drove him close to insanity—assuming he was ever sane to begin with.

Because the hearse, whom Exitus had christened Genevieve, rolled out of the shop with an obscene lack of options—yet unequivocally beautiful—it was a glowing testament to Exitus’s willpower than he hadn’t long ego decided to sew himself a hat of squirrels and run through the woods proclaiming himself the long lost son of Davey Crockett; it got awfully quiet in a hearse without a radio.

Exitus had never been one to rattle off show tunes; his singing voice eerily resembled the death mewls of a moose sliding down a hill slathered with Crisco. American roads, especially the long and winding back stretches Exitus chose to drive, had a wonderful tendency to stretch on for ever and to while away the hours he found it very relaxing to talk with his father’s old hula girl. Talk to, rather. It would be a bit creepy if the plastic dancer actually spoke.

The hula girl had swung her hips since Exitus had been a chubby, bumbling little boy with a serious lack of RV legs. His father, Jeffery, bought the hula girl in 1982 on his honeymoon in Maui and placed it smack dab in the middle of the RV’s dashboard. Tonya, his wife and in three years Exitus’s mother, hadn’t been too keen on the idea of a scantily clad woman bouncing like that on the dashboard of her wedding gift from the New York law firm. Time had only intensified those hostile feelings.

Exitus remembered how his mother, may she rest her pretty little head in peace, always schemed to get rid of the thing; “accidentally” throw it in the oven during the self-cleaning cycle, “accidentally” throw it to the ravenous raccoon by the campsite’s lake; and he could understand why. Jeffery took to calling the hula girl Laka, which was Hawaiian for gentle and tame. The plastic lady was anything but.

Laka was cast to have the provocatively girlish pose of “Aw shucks, the flower in my hair is beautiful”. The flower was red, nestled atop her right ear. She rested her head against her left arm, behind her head as with her right. With a shy smile on her face and a yellow lei barely covering the naughty bits of her chest (which were otherwise hidden by a red bikini top), Laka should have come across as flirtingly demure. Her eyes were stern, however, painted to have a condescending tone which questioned everything that Exitus did.

“Are you sure you want to take that next right?”, “Why don’t you just stop and ask for directions, you’re obviously lost”, “Is it proper for you to pop your gum like that?”, “Really, must you pop your gum like that?” All while jerking back and forth as the hearse ate rural back roads and highways.

She was a pill, the equivalent of every man’s nightmare: a nagging wife boiled down and built up again in a plastic, dashboard ornament form that refused to die. Twenty-eight years and Laka was still going strong.

Exitus’s mother should have thrown her out the window long ago, said to hell to the divorce papers Jeffery would have countered back with. Of course, then their son wouldn’t have anything to talk to.

The annoying qualities of Laka aside, Exitus regularly had conversations with the hula girl and while he might have been insane for doing so, it was better than nothing at all. So, as he pulled to the curb beside Lidia’s Diner in rural Wisconsin with a growling stomach incensed at the idea of eating yet another packet of salted peanuts, Exitus looked for guidance.

He wasn’t too keen on making a pit-stop, for he was anxious to get to the Mustard Museum he’d read about on a wonky roadside billboard several miles back. He sat in the hearse staring at the brochure from his most recent fill-up weighing his options. His stomach might have been sick of salted peanut packets, but he still had a box of pop-tarts in the back, maybe one more granola bar if in fact he hadn’t eaten the last one. He could manage to dig up something, save his money and make good headway to the museum before calling it a day and retiring to the hearse’s attendant’s seats.

Exitus’s indecision was cumbersome, and so he looked to the seven-inch plastic woman—who merely stared back at her companion with the unwavering cross-eyed hardness Tonya Quick had abhorred.

“But it’s the Mustard Museum for Chrissake,” Exitus said more to his stomach than anything else.

Laka swiveled her grass skirted hips to the rhythmic purring of Genevieve’s engine. “Stop being such a child,” her angry cross-eyes seemed to say.

With a sigh Exitus muscled Genevieve off the shoulder of the road and into the packed-dirt parking lot of Lidia’s Diner, a mirage in the fall sun of a 1970s Airstream trailer restaurant. The silver siding gleamed in the weak sunlight as Exitus wished for what surely was the millionth time in his life that he had the arms of Arnold Schwarzenegger—that or the funeral director to whom Genevieve originally belonged hadn’t been such a penny-pincher.

Power steering was taken highly for granted these days.

With the hearse safely parked in the swatch of dirt in front of the diner, with the trees all sighing in relief that the idiot kid driver could handle the beast well enough as to not drive it into them, Exitus killed the engine and left Laka to brood alone. He didn’t bother to lock the doors or roll up the driver’s side window, for it was his experience that most carjackers were around his age and any normal child coming across Genevieve would be instilled with a slight amount of fear. It was also a wee bit hard to steal a 1953 hearse without getting caught; there weren’t exactly many of them running around fifty-five years after being assembled.

Wiping a swath of dried mud off Genevieve with the sleeve of his shirt, Exitus smiled at the somber late afternoon.

His favorite time of year was this, what he called Dead Fall—the small window of time between the picturesque autumn of orange and red to the endless snows of winter. The trees were barren, the sky grey, the grass zapped of any color. The world looked like a black-and-white photograph, holding strongly the promise of rebirth and change. A black-and-white photograph also wonderfully devoid of butterflies.

Exitus Quick harbored a strong aversion to butterflies and to the news anchor Katie Couric; he was much less grim than his name implied.

Unless there was a case of winged death inside the diner, Exitus walked through the unnaturally warm Dead Fall day and up the steps of Lidia’s Diner, the sign in the window proclaiming that it was ALWAYS OPEN. The “always” being so strong, Lidia must have been convinced that when Armageddon came the four horsemen would not throw her pewter shoe from the Board of Life, oh no, but be so happy with the coffee at the Airstream diner that the death figures would make it a permanent Home Base. Someone had a mighty big case of hubris.

Inside the diner, like outside, there were no butterflies. In fact it was a very nice-looking place. Tiny, but nice. The walls were a rich creme-color and the linoleum floor spotlessly clean; the sit down counter (stretching the width of the diner in the shape of a top-hat) gleaming white, the plush red bar stools rust free and the shining booths against the north wall and east butt of the Airstream whole and without flaws. The kitchen, from what Exitus could see from the serving window and swinging door, was cramped yet well-kept. The bathroom, as seen from the window over the curved back booth, was a quaint outhouse-style building. Its one bathroom door was free of rude graffito.

Misplaced elevator music played softly from the overhead speakers, an easy-listening version of what might have been “Like a Virgin”, but Exitus didn’t mind. It was better than Laka’s coldness. A tone-deaf monkey with a tracheotomy would have been better than Laka’s coldness.

Free of a particularly brutal plastic hula girl, Exitus continued to survey the diner.

There was a man sitting in the last booth, the one which looked out at the bathroom, reading a newspaper and neglecting his slice of apple pie. Exitus was about to take that uneaten foodstuff as an omen, was about to run back to Genevieve and force his stomach to process another packet of salted peanuts, when a woman popped up from under the counter and waved a faded blue dish towel.

“Welcome!”

The shock of this peppy woman jumping into the quiet picture, seemingly coming straight out of nowhere with that towel in her hand and a large grin on her face, knocked Exitus further into silence. He wasn’t used to sudden loud noises, not when he spent most of his days in a hearse absent of a radio with only a plastic hula girl for company—and the annual eight O’clock phone calls from Aunt Lily, the ring tone muffled by the well-insulated glove box in which she had hidden the cell phone when her lone nephew flew the coop one month ago.

Exitus smiled weakly and sat down on a stool in front of the service window—if Mr. Times back there wasn’t eating his apple pie, Exitus wanted to be able to partially see what all went into the food served at this ALWAYS OPEN eatery. If the people here ground newcomers into hamburger meat, it would be nice to have some forewarning.

As Exitus sat down, the cheery waitress in her robin’s egg uniform all but running over to this stranger with menu in hand, Genevieve’s owner and Laka’s only friend received another shock.

Holding sentinel above the service window was a solid gold Holstein. It was roughly the size of a small dog and gazed out between twin pillars of milk jugs (circa the dawning of the age) with a melancholy smile that suggested of many wasted years. In fact, the smile was so depressive that the longer Exitus studied the creature in the haze of gentle Muzak, the stronger his urge to find the nearest lake and drive himself into it.

It wasn’t overtly evil, the cow, didn’t have a satanic pentacle tattooed onto its forehead but, the way it seemed to leer down at Exitus with that pathetic smile screamed of evil. What kind of evil, he didn’t know, though he liked the idea of the cow coming alive at night and chewing the toes off of all the bad little girls and boys in town. Or maybe one of the teats acted as a kind of secret switch that when pulled opened up the gateway to Hell where unsuspecting travelers were tossed into as sacrifices in hopes of keeping the DMV run by disgruntled demons leased out by Satan. Or it was a lightening rod for peoples’ fears and at any moment it would open up its Eeyore-ic smiling mouth and vomit a torrent of colorful butterflies upon Exitus Quick (and Exitus he would proceed on doing with a rather girlish scream).

The cow continued to stare sadly across the trailer and at the bathroom door as the waitress arrived in front of Exitus. “You’re just in time, little man,” she said. “We’re about to gear up for the dinner rush.” A joke, surely.

Exitus looked away from the demonic cow and at the waitress, whose name was Mary so long as she hadn’t killed the real Mary somewhere out back and assumed the name because this impostor was wanted in twenty states for clubbing hitchhikers to death with a candlestick in the shape of John Cleese exercising one of his silly walks. In a very stable manner, she smiled and placed a menu in front of Exitus.

“I haven’t yet taken down the afternoon specials,” she said and nodded her head to her right. “If you can even call them ‘specials’.”

Exitus looked to where Mary was directing and saw the menu board. Written in pink chalk were the lunch specials: grilled cheese with tomato basil soup, cheeseburger, barbecue pork.

“We also have a very nice cucumber soup,” Mary added.

The cow commanded all the attention; it cared not for Exitus to hear about cucumber soup or barbecue pork. He looked back to the golden bovine and once again felt another deep pang of yearning—a want to reach out and tear the glistening white name tag from the blouse of the peppy-if-not-psychotic woman before him and destroy his eardrums. The cow’s giggling was dreadful.

Maybe it was trying to plot the course in which the butterflies would fly after attacking a helpless diner with only a tired wallet to use as protection. It must be giggling at the image of a terrified Exitus scrambling to his hearse, diving into Genevieve through her open window and desperately trying to hand crank said window closed as hundreds of thousands of millions of butterflies poured into the death cab to drown its young owner in a sea of colorful wings.

How ironic.

“KID NAMED DEATH AFRIAD OF DEAD THINGS AND DIES BY BUTTERFLIES IN HIS 1953 SUPERIOR CADILLAC HEARSE HOME, see page 8F”.

It was just a cow. Oh, if Laka could see him now—the hip swiveling doll would stare at him with such cross-eyed intensity as to make him keel over from the shame of his overactive imagination.

The boy named Death forced his worried eyes again away from the cow to address the waitress, who may or may not have been Mary. She looked like a Mary, though: sweet young face with hands betraying her age, wrinkled and strong enough to wield a John Cleese-in-Silly-Walk-Mode candlestick. Exitus preferred Michael Palin himself, but if this woman really did bludgeon poor saps to death out back by the old oak tree, well he thought it wise for his health if he kept that to himself.

He need not look at the menu set before him, for the lunch special prices were too good to believe and his stomach had been calling out for a burger for days. He would simply have to risk food poisoning.

“A cheeseburger, please, ma’am, with bacon if I can have it,” he finally spoke if only to prove he could. “Passed through a warm room. Fries, too, please.” For a boy raised in Idaho he was lacking in his potato consumption.

Mary turned to the service window. “Ya hear that, Adam?”

A voice bellowed out of the hole in the wall, “Jack Benny on the hoof, frog sticks.”

Taking the menu from Exitus, Mary set it in her apron pouch and disappeared beneath the counter for the second time since he met her. She came up again with a a napkin wrapped set of cutlery, which she set on the place mat—plain white paper, no mazes or word seeks or dot-to-dots. “Anything to drink, hon’?”

“Water’s fine.”

Mary nodded and fetched her customer, just in time for the evening rush, his beverage of choice. The glass, which she set down beside Exitus’s left hand, was plastic with an ugly raised design reminiscent of the sixties or seventies. It was the same muted gold as the cow above her head.