LUNCH AT CLAUDETTE’S

Sample from Firing Pin: 7+1 Stories About A Gun That Don’t Fire

Toledo, OH 

4/2/2009

12:22:31

You won’t find any reviews for Claudette’s restaurant on the internet. There aren’t any crowdsourced reviews, IRS forms, or records in any Department of Health database. If you know how to find it, it’s because someone told you where it is.

Wolf drove through the neighborhoods on Toledo’s North End, across the uneven, cracked, and potholed patchy vitiligo pavement. The leaves weren't on the trees yet, still looking withered and naked. The things Wolf drove past were unremarkable in that part of town. A pile of tattered roof shingles on the curb, old and unloved houses, half of them abandoned and boarded up with particleboard. Trash in the streets, plastic grocery bags, a dozen diapers, a busted clothing drier on a lawn, something white and smashed that was probably porcelain, fast food wrappers and cups and straws blocking a gutter and small pools of dirty melted snow collected in the streets. A few cars on the street had garbage bags for windows and expired tags, rusted and dented. Wobbled and bent chain-link fences separated the houses, threaded with brown, twisted, dry vines. Planks of wood propping up awnings over entryways in stark defiance of city regulation and physics. Yards with still unraked dead leaves from last year, and big trees, older than anyone living here, old enough to see this place when it wasn’t like this. The best maintained and most loved thing in this neighborhood was a roadside shrine for a dead little girl. Flowers and stuffed animals stacked high and a sign saying, “We Miss You Angel,” and a photo of her glued onto a white-painted wooden cross. Wolf wondered, Was Angel her name or was she an angel to the people who mourned for her?

Wolf slowed to a stop. The Crown Vic in front of him had stopped in the street, the engine still running. A young man leaned into the passenger side window and talked to the driver. On the porch of the nearest house, two men sat on a couch, color-coordinated with the guy on the road. They pointed suspicious eyes at Wolf; that same look the cops give them when they drive down this road. When they finished their business in the street, the car began moving again and Wolf could too.

Two blocks further along and Wolf could see he was close. His car started making a grinding noise, and he could smell something coming out of the heating vents. He pressed on the acceleration, but it wouldn't give any speed. He used the remaining inertia to park it by the curb.

He turned the key and silenced the engine. He leaned forward, head on the steering wheel. “Not today. I don’t need this shit today. Fuck.”

He rolled down his window and reached for the outside handle to open his door because the inside one didn’t work. He rolled his window back up, locked up, and walked towards Claudette’s. Two blocks away.

Wolf got out his phone. He pressed PTT on his Nextel. “My car broke down. Can somebody gimme a lift back to work?“

“Where you at?” asked the voice of a co-worker.

“I’m bout to pick up some lunch at Claudette’s.”

“I can be there in like 15.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Hook me up with a tamale, aight?”

“I got you.”

An old 2-story house with a fenced-in yard, much older than the grotesque geometry and palette of the homes they built in the 70s. There were more cars parked out front here than anywhere else on this street; all Ford F150s and Dodge Rams. A neighbor directly across the street from Claudette’s was on her phone, angry about something. “I’ve called you nine times! Nine times! I’m sick of this! I’m sick of it!”

He walked up to the house over the dry, crunchy, brittle grass of the front lawn. He could just barely smell the allspice and cumin and pork fat on the wind and he heard some music, Si Tu Vois Ma Mère, with a disarming clarinet and soothing standup bass, and lyrics lullabied by an angel. He let himself in through the fence gate into the backyard and closed it behind him. The yard was tight with plastic lawn furniture, not one piece of it matching another, arranged in tables like an actual, legal restaurant, a bottle of Frank’s on every one. The chairs were filled with men who work outside and dress for the cold; tan overalls and neon yellow vests, eating their lunches on paper plates and smoking a cigarette or a Djarum and enjoying a beer and not talking too much. A bit of peace and dignity, 25x20 feet of it, hidden behind some fence. One of the countless gray market businesses in Toledo, committing crimes too minor to bother the police, but not too minor to conjure the health department if one of Claudette’s diners or neighbors snitched.

It would be a chilly day for lunch outside but there was a big grill smoking something good and spitting out charcoal heat and the sliding glass door to the kitchen was open and the steam and warmth of a home kitchen fryer, a deep pot of collards, and smoked trotters, all bled out into the yard. The music was coming from a small CD player on a coffee table in the yard’s corner.

Claudette came out with a tray and fed some men. She was headscarved with a red and orange bandana, and when she found Wolf she gave him a surprised smile and said, “Hey, you. I barely recognized you! Haven’t seen you in a little while, boubout. Ki jan-w ye?”

“I been alright, marabou.”

“Ooh,” she smiled big and white, “You been learning to flirt in creole?” her eyes narrowed with a playful suspicion.

Wolf took a seat in a canvas camping chair with drink holders in the armrests, in front of a ping-pong table with two guys already dining at the other end.

Wolf smiled at her. Claudette asked, “You cut the beard off?”

“Yeah. Thought I needed a change.” He touched his bare face.

“And I don't think I've seen you in glasses since you in middle school.”

“Ran out of contacts. Back to these.”

“You lookin’ good. We made some changes to the menu, alright? I’mma help these folks and I’ll be right back.”

The menu was a printout on a piece of paper, smudged and oily in the corners from other diners’ hands, and just had printed on it:

Empanada $3

Tamale $3

Riz et Pois Rouges $2

Collards $2

Street corn $1

Cornbread $1

Pecan Pie $3  Cracklins $1

Beer $5

Kool-aid $1

Claudette came back and asked, “What you need, boubout?”

“What’s in the tamales today?”

“We got some goat that was on sale from that halal butcher up there by the free clinic. Tastes just as good as beef. That mixed up with chicken.”

“How about the empanadas?”

“We out of empanadas already.”

“Alright, I’ll have four tamales and collards and a beer.”

“You got it, boubout.”

“Hey, uh, is D here?”

The light in her smile faded a bit. “I haven’t seen him yet today. Probably still in his room.”

“Is it alright if I go inside and visit him?”

“Yeah, baby. Of course. I’ll bring you your food there.”

Wolf stood up and walked through the sliding glass door into the kitchen. The girls were busy making food, and the room was warm and steamy and full of chit-chat and jokes and laughter.

Wolf breezed through the kitchen and found the door to the basement, and walked down the creaky wooden steps. The place was glowing neon pink like a strip club, from the LED strips that wrapped the walls near the floor. D was sitting on a plaid-patterned couch, a controller in his hand, his face lit up by the TV’s glow.

“D.”

D paused his game. “Aw shit, I didn’t recognize you at first. What’s up, man? You look weird.”

“What’s up?” Wolf raised his hands a bit and cocked his head. He let the question hang in the air, but D said nothing. He just gave stupid cow eyes. Wolf answered his own question, “What’s up is you said you’d have my money.”

“Oh, that? Yeah, yeah.” He returned to playing the game.

“D!”

“Yeah?” he said, keeping his attention on the game.

“I’d like my money, please.” Wolf spoke a little more loudly than he’d intended.

“Oh. I guess you’re here for that? I thought you were here to hang out,” he said, as though Wolf’s words hurt him.

“I gotta get back to work in a minute. Bro, put that shit down. I bought your car out of the tow yard and I gotta make rent tomorrow. Come the fuck on.”

D paused the game, stood up, walked to the bed with a sleeping bag for a blanket, sat on it, and pressed his thumb on the bio-ID lock on a fire-safe next to it. When the light turned green, he opened it and removed a blue plastic grocery bag, closed the safe, then walked up to Wolf and handed it to him.

Wolf took it and it felt heavy. He reached into it. His eyes got big when he felt it.

“What’s this?”

“That’s your money.”

“Does this look like money to you?”

“Yeah.”

“This ain’t money! Money is made of paper. This is a gun!” He held it up to D’s face so he could see it up close.

“That’s not a gun. That is a nickel plated 45. Sell that for money.”

“I don’t want a gun, D! I want money!”

“I owe you a thousand, right? That thing will sell for 2 Gs easy! That’s more than I owe.”

“Sounds like you’re just handing me a job you should be doing. Why don’t you go sell it if it’s worth so much?”

“I don’t know anyone who needs a gun, but you do. You got people who are into that, right? Like those militia guys up in Michigan.”

“Militia guys? The fuck are you talking about? That’s Romeo’s thing.”

“That’s what I’m saying, though. You know a guy! You got connections. Okay, sure, it’s a little extra work for you, but you make double what I owe!”

“Does every fucking thing with you need to be a problem?”

“Psh. What’re you even talking about?”

“Every damn thing with you. I bail your car out after you were in jail over the weekend. I come to get what you owe me and you’re giving me a fucking gun and an errand to run instead of my money. It’s always some shit like this with you, man! Every damn time.”

“Hey, I thought this was a good deal for you, okay? I’m sorry.”

Wolf rubbed his eyes, then looked around the room for something else worth money that wasn’t a gun. A shiny new laptop computer, opened up and sitting on a humming chest freezer. He pointed at it. “That.”

“What?”

“That computer. Where did you get that?”

“Um, well…”

“You got money for a fucking laptop but no money for me?” Wolf tossed the gun bag onto D’s bed, then walked over to the laptop and folded it shut and unplugged it.

“No, wait, you can’t take that! It’s not mine.”

Wolf stopped. “Whose is it then?”

D didn't want to answer.

"Whose, D?"

“Brittany’s.”

“Jesus, man. You back with Brittany? What is it with you and that crazy girl?”

“She fucks good, man. I don’t know.”

“She a fucking nightmare, bro.”

“I know.”

Wolf set the laptop back down and walked up to the bed, and picked up the blue bag. “Where’d you even get this thing?”

“A guy.”

“What guy?”

“Just some guy.”

“What fucking guy, D?”

“Chris.”

“Which Chris? Chris Babcott or Cocktail Chris?”

D didn’t say anything.

Wolf pointed at D accusingly and pursed his lips and breathed out slowly through his nose and chose his next words carefully and spoke them slowly. “Tell me you didn’t get this gun from Pretty Chris.”

D shrugged.

“Oh my god. You did, didn’t you.”

“Yeah, so?”

Wolf pressed his palms to his temples and squeezed his eyes shut.

“What?” asked D.

Wolf raised a finger like he was about to lecture the boy, but he stopped himself before saying another word. His hand formed a claw, and he closed it slowly like he was strangling the air until it was a fist. He closed his eyes for a moment and relaxed and said, “This time you have outdone yourself, D.” Wolf turned and headed towards the stairs with the bag and gun.

“What’s the big deal, man?”

“You know goddamn well. Which is why you didn’t want to tell me where you got it.”

Wolf started walking up the stairs, and at the top, he bumped into Claudette. She said, “I got your food ready.”

They both heard D call up from below, “You gonna hang out and play Tekken, though? Wolf?”

“I’m sorry. I gotta go,” said Wolf to Claudette, not D.

“Stay and eat.”

“No, I’m sorry. I gotta get back to work. Could I get that to go?”

Claudette made an exaggerated pout. “I’ll forgive you,” she said and smiled. He followed her back into the kitchen. She poured his plate in a styrofoam container and put that into a plastic bag saved from a grocery store. “No one leaves my home hungry.”

“Can I go out the front?”

She nodded and her mouth smiled, but not her eyes. 

Wolf took the bag and walked to the front of the house towards the big wooden door, and Claudette headed back to the kitchen. When Wolf opened the door, he saw the two police coming up the walkway. He slammed the door shut and locked it.

“Shit!”