Zesty's (Part 1)

Zesty’s

Simpering grills wallowed in the center of a kitchen hued with musty sorts of greens, reds and purples. Reggae music skipped and stuttered in the back of the two rooms from the needle on a ridged CD player. It was a warm summer night with empty streets and broken glass that fell from the hands of the melancholy jays, slugging on drearily, who couldn’t seem to find the beauty of the simple, coastal city. At the clean cut hour of seven o’clock, the gumbo pot brought up spicy fumes that stirred up the ramshackle neighborhood. The scent always lingered as I woke up, polished up, and set off to hit the books so that I could read with the glass-side sunset of the library. Before I could round the corner, the neighboring woods spoke cold words to me. I never spoke back, for I, Reggie Lowe, swore to my bones as I padded the narrow, rounded tar of Mendez Street that I would never cross the overgrown trails of Silverslip Forest.

Silverslip was named after the wet, clumpy clay called slip that lined the muddy Chestnut Creek and glinted off the sun. There, a pair of onyx black arrowheads gleamed from the mulch, near an old pine who looked like it had a lot to say about the twin treasures it held. Perhaps, if someone would listen, they’d know to whom the pair once belonged. They’d know who last left the trail of knobby footprints that led down to the forest’s fearsome thicket, where the bushes clumped like cotton, the prickly branches hung low and the wind doesn’t catch like the waiting claws would. 

Two marbles clunk together as they found their way to the bottom of the wooden bowl. As the amount increased sequentially the noise was a déjà vu to the pop rocks from his uncle that crackled under his feet. The sound was replaced by an unsettling murmur as converse soles slid through the gray carpet and skidded to a stop by the leg of my table. The skull necklace hung limp on her wrist like the straight black hair that flowed to her waist. Her neck was tied with a red bandana, acting as a canvas for the ivory glass of the bone. The eyes were nonexistent; tiny black nothings just to further pronounce the lifelessness of the trinket. There was a small crack where an ear would have been, but it would remain unnoticed if not for the smoothness and perfection of the remaining parts. She told me her name, Archie Coleman, how she worked at Zesty’s Gumbo Pot downtown and how she traced my father’s footprints down to the woods. This is the first time she had spoken to me in the pristine Portman Library. Usually, she just played marbles with the druggies in the back, little glass balls bouncing around while I looked through the eyes of Dorsey Munce. I had seldom before saw how serious and roguish her face looked, just like my fathers, and how stern her lips locked like her words were of the utmost value. That was the day I think sunk into the smooth sands of love when I touched her dark hands as she passed me two onyx arrowheads. However, it was also the day I lost my father down in the thicket of Silverslip.

Archie stooped down on my table, hands widespread. She was humming something I recognized from her friend’s miniature speaker in the back they jacked into an outlet by unplugging one of the book search engines. No one used those search engines though, it was a small, pleasant store and the forty-something lady, Mrs. Fawn, up front would always cheerily help you find “Your best-fitted book!” She always slipped me the new arrivals of Munce before she hung them out on the black-wood shelves. Like the daring Mrs. Coleman, who hung around my seat whilst chewing something I prayed wasn’t tobacco and her friends peering around the corner at us, I was a regular. We were hitting it off, I think. She told me how she rented an apartment on Prospect Boulevard and I told her about my private corner on Mendez, right by Zesty’s.

“Archie, you ever have something brought back to you that you didn’t even realize was lost, then take it for granted.”

“Yeah… Cray Pradsley. He was nice and all, maybe a bit too nice. I guess he slipped away when I wasn’t looking, off with his other popular friends. By the time I realized he’d been missing, he said he didn’t want to hang around people with a bad reputation. I miss him sometimes. But he comes around when his friends least suspect. I guess he said that for show. I don’t know, he’s just there now, but barely ever. It seems the same with him back, or with him gone.”

“Ah, an ex?”

“Psssh! No, I’m not into guys.”

“Oh…”

She stayed a while in silence, studying my every feature. I watched her back. Her hoodie had a sulfur canvas and on it was the appearance of black ink blotches and another skull, a bit ruddy and not as pristine as the marble one that was swaying slightly from her leather cord necklace. Her jeans were as dark as her inky waterfall of smooth, cascading hair. Her converse shoes were a pale ash color, with two stitched-in, snowy white stars on the outer sides. Her heart-shaped face was clear of make-up, and her mocha eyes oddly made me crave the warm inner hug of a latte from the French Roast Cafe. Tan skin stretched over her skinny limbs like khaki pants. She sat down beside me and asked what I was reading. I told her it was Dorsey Munce and she said she enjoyed her books as well, but that the 
newest copies were always taken before she could get her hands on them. I felt a tad guilty.

“I haven’t seen that copy before.”

“Yeah, well… I just happened to snatch it from the shelves as Mrs. Fawn was putting them in.”

“Oh, I see… You must have had to come here really early to get the ones she put up.”

“Yup.”

I cut the book talk short as the guilt started to ebb at my throat and crack my voice hoarse. It was a silly thing really, but I felt bad for Mrs. Fawn’s favor towards me in regards to the kids in the back. I weighed in back to my father and his whereabouts, not that I really minded what the old boozehound was up to. It was not unlike him to wander into the forest a couple beers later on the lively Friday nights. That was probably my mother’s reason for leaving him, even if London was a bit overly dramatic.

“What is your concern with my father and how do you know it was him?”

Archie told me how she came upon the footprints and thought nothing of them until she saw the arrowheads. She talked of how she met my father at a bar one late night and he had told her all sorts of stories about the arrowheads and native-Americans. She knew my father was making them up but they were exciting and pleasant to listen to, especially when he was drunk and laughing his head off. Eventually, my father told her about me and my mother, when he was more intoxicated than usual. It was then that he told her about my “literate habits, good work and how proud he was”. She told me she figured I was the son because of my daily appearance here and I was painfully reminded I look just like him. When she asked how often he saw his son, he condoned that it was barely ever and that he thought it best not to see me because I’d be ashamed of him, not that I didn’t think it true. One dark hour she didn’t find him inside the bar and thought nothing of it, in fact, she was happy the old man had stopped drinking so much. I asked her why she went into the forest and she quickly retorted why wouldn’t she. Perhaps her mother had never warned her about the forest like mine did before she left. She said I should go find my father with her, to which I responded that I would never go into Silverslip. Her face went blank and she began to realize she was seeing a different person than what my father made me out to be. This sparked up a bit of hostility on her side with rhetoric lines like, 

“Don’t you care about your father?”, “He always said good things about you.” and a low blow with, 

“He was such I nice man, I don’t understand how his son could be so cruel.”

“The last time I saw my mother she warned me never to venture into Silverslip and I intent to listen.”

“Fine, if you won’t find him then I will.”

I watched her exit the library in a livid fashion and saw her friends cast glances at me in distain. The clanking of marbles and distasteful music resumed but the air was uneasy and Munce was beginning to dissolve into meaningless words and her philosophy seemed to skid short and fall flat. I looked over the cover, unable to process the paragraphs inside. It was eye catching, exciting; a swirling blue orb in front of a background of futuristic looking things behind ones and zeros. Propaganda.

Perhaps it was her exciting arrival into my life that short day, that single moment and our long conversation about our lives that made my life seem dull in comparison. Perhaps Munce didn’t satisfy me like she used to, but I kept up my studies. A few extra points were -+geography books. The marbles didn’t stop clinking but now they were daily mementos. Zesty’s Gumbo Pot remained the same, though. I always went to the library full and pleased. I never saw her there, so I assumed she had quit. Looking back, I don’t remember her ever serving my table before I met her, either. When eight hit, I went off to class and when three hit, it was back to the books until my job at six. A few years had passed before I saw her again, a time when a bachelor’s degree was hanging in my room but my job was still the same, a photo scanner at Digi-tell. I never quite knew what I wanted to do with my life or my degree but Digi-tell put food on the table. Her hair was cut, shaved on one side and chin length on the other. A silver ring pierced her lip and her eyebrows were shaved on the outer sides with a thin line. Her eyes were the same though, chocolate coffee. I didn’t see the girl I saw before in them and I don’t think she ever found my father. Perhaps she appreciated him more than I ever could.

It was at the back of Zesty’s. I was going through the alley as a short cut to the bus stop when I found her taking out the trash at the back of the building. I figured maybe she was a garbage girl until I noticed her pearly uniform and chef’s hat. She didn’t look at me with the hostility she had at the library, instead she looked at me like a stranger. Then she left me, back into the kitchen. I silently wished her the best before I went on my way. Some things weren’t meant to be.