This is one of the Five Winners of the Waffle House Contest in Volume 7 of SumFlux. Come find the menu here: carte du jour.
He stood inside the door too long, letting the yellow light take him apart and reassemble him as a tired public tube: badge, gun, oesophagus, stomach, liver, large intestine, shoes. The Waffle House clocked him instantly. It had seen cops before. It had seen worse than cops. It had seen honeymoon tubes, skip tracer tubes, linemen tubes after hurricanes, girl tubes crying into hash browns, boy tubes too drunk to find the floor, trucker tubes buckled over coffee, nurse tubes with dead swollen feet, preacher tubes with lipstick and acid reflux on their clerical collars, whole family tubes traveling through the night in silence. The place sat by the highway with its windows shining like a tank of warm water, attracting moths and crustaceans, anything with a brain that could register a source of energy.
At the far end of the counter sat the old con tube. Beige sport coat gone soft at the elbows. Straw hat darkened with sweat. Waffle, eggs, bacon, grits, hash browns scattered and covered, a bowl of chili he had no earthly right to order at that hour, and coffee black enough to reflect him as a photo negative. He avoided looking at it. He cut the waffle square by square, as if disarming a device.
The cop tube took the stool two down. The waitress tube came over with the pot. She was hard and narrow with silver hair pinned back and a face built for night shifts. Her name tag said SEROSA. She filled his cup without asking.
“Menu?”
“No.”
“You eating?”
“No.”
She looked at him. “Suit yourself.”
The old con smiled into his plate. The cop did not turn his head. “Open the trunk, Earl.”
Earl chewed. His jaw clicked, cartilage and old crimes grinding American grain into paste. “Morning to you too, Dempsey.”
“It’s not morning.”
“It is in here.”
That was true. Outside, night worked the ditch water and the unseen logistics of a consumer economy. Inside, morning had been manufactured and kept hot. Coffee ran. Waffles browned. Eggs trembled. The grill hissed and spat. Behind the counter, the jukebox slept with its little Waffle House songs sealed inside it. The cook tube scraped the grill with a metal blade. Broad arms shining. Paper cap. Priest of the flat-top. Every few seconds he pushed grey ribbons of grease toward the trough, and the trough accepted. Intake, heat, transformation, residue.
“You followed me from Macon,” Earl said.
“Before Macon.”
“Atlanta?”
“Before that.”
“You boys are getting better.”
“Open the trunk.”
“Already did.”
The cop looked at him.
“Empty,” Earl said.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“No. Belief wears out the knees.”
Serosa filled Earl’s cup. The cop watched the black stimulant enter the old pink tube lined with ulcers: lips, tongue, throat, valve, stomach, acid. Everything went somewhere. Evidence moved. Money moved. Bodies moved. Guilt moved. Food moved. The world was traffic between openings, and everybody wore a face so they would not have to admit it. Two booths behind them, a pair of young tubes sat over hash browns. The boy had a tattoo crawling up his neck and the jittery hands of somebody who had recently stolen something small and meaningful. The girl kept one hand in the pocket of her red jacket. The cop had seen the pistol shape. Earl had seen it. Serosa had probably seen it before either of them and chosen not to waste her very limited energy.
“Those two are going to rob the place,” Earl said.
“Maybe.”
“You going to stop them?”
“Maybe.”
“Hell of a word.”
The boy tube kept looking at the register, then the cook, then Serosa’s back pocket where her tips made a tired little bulge. The robbery was already happening in him before the gun came out. A crime begins earlier, before it even happens, in the muscles, in the dry mouth, in the animal calculation that says another tube contains the energy you need and therefore must be squeezed.
Earl buttered another waffle. “Kids. Look at them. Little stickup tubes. Late to the business. This whole place is taking. Flour out of wheat. Sugar out of cane. Oil out of the ground. Eggs out of hens. Hours out of Serosa. Cartilage out of that boy at the grill. Dollars out of men with nowhere better to leak what’s left of themselves. Then you and me come along and call one part of it crime because somebody forgot to write a receipt.”
“You always did talk when cornered.”
“I ain’t cornered. I’m seated.”
“You crossed state lines with contraband.”
“I crossed state lines with an appetite.”
“You’ve been moving packages thirty years.”
Earl hacked out a dry laugh. “Everybody moves packages. Look around.”
The cook cracked three eggs one-handed. Yolks hit steel and looked up yellow. In a booth, a fat work-shirt tube ate with the solemn despair of a machine fuelling before another shift. Fork down, fork up, mouth. Down, up, mouth. Beside him a woman slept with her cheek on her arms, a hot cookie cooling beside her. The room pulsed with digestion. Syrup glued the table edges. Salt waited in glass. Hot sauce stood red and obscene in its bottle.
The boy stood. Nobody moved except Serosa, who sighed. The girl stood too. Her hand came out with the pistol, small and black and trembling.
“Register,” the boy said.
Said. That was the sad part. He meant to shout. You could hear the missing yell. The cook stopped scraping. Earl kept eating. The fat tube paused with a fork halfway to his mouth, then seemed to decide that whatever happened, the eggs would be worse cold, and resumed.
“Everybody stay cool,” the boy said.
Earl lifted his cup. “Son, this is Waffle House. It was never cool.”
The girl saw the cop for what he was. The badge was under his jacket but badges leak through cloth. Her eyes widened. She said the boy’s name, or a version of it, an intimate syllable. The boy turned. The gun in her hand tracked his panic. The room tightened around the barrel. There are moments when a place reveals its skeleton. This was one. The Waffle House became an organism under threat, all its pipes and reflexes exposed. Serosa’s hand moved under the counter. The cook shifted his weight. The cop’s fingers loosened around the cup. Earl put one final forkful of waffle into his mouth and closed his eyes as if accepting communion.
Then the jukebox clicked. Nobody had touched it. Some old mechanism inside it woke, or some ghost quarter completed its fall. A bright dumb song began, a woman singing about Waffle House coffee and coming home. It was so stupid, so tender, so mechanically sincere, that the boy flinched as if his mom had walked in on him. Serosa opened the register. Ding.
“There,” she said. “Take it.”
The boy stared at the money. It was not enough. That was visible on his face. It would never have been enough. No drawer in the world contained enough to fill the hole that had brought him there. The girl saw it too. She turned into a frightened child without changing expression.
The cop said, “Put it down.”
Earl turned slow. “You take that money, you got to run. You run, you got to eat. You eat, you got to shit. You shit, you got to stop somewhere. And when you stop, there he’ll be. Or somebody like him.” he nodded at the cop, who sat there, clenched. The boy lowered the girl’s wrist. The room exhaled through mouths, vents, nostrils, grease ducts. Serosa took the pistol and laid it beside the waffle iron.
“You still paying for the food,” she said.
The boy sat down and put his face in his hands. The Waffle House swallowed the crime and began digesting it. Earl ordered more food.
“Don’t,” the cop said.
“Two eggs over easy. Double hash browns. Scattered, smothered, covered, chunked. Sausage. Another waffle. Grits. Toast.”
“You got a hollow leg?” Serosa said.
“Hollow everything.”
The cop ordered too. Patty melt. Hash browns capped and peppered. More coffee. Then toast with jelly because there was no pie and Serosa said it was close enough for men like them. Plate followed plate. Coffee followed coffee. The cook kept converting dead matter into motion. Beige architecture. Pork strips. Egg suns. Cheese melting over potatoes until they shone wet. Outside, rain came harder. Somewhere south, roofs came off houses. Somewhere north, a truck folded across the interstate and men waved flares at the dark. The Waffle House stayed open. Earl never opened the trunk. The cop never asked again.
By dawn the counter was crowded with plates. The old con and the cop sat shoulder to shoulder, enemies by profession, brothers by plumbing. The young robbers kept eating. The fat tube ordered more eggs. The sleeping woman woke, asked where she was, and accepted coffee as an answer. Serosa brought the check, then left it facedown between them like a warrant nobody wanted served. Earl opened his mouth.
“You still taking me in for processing?”
Written by Stephen Prime
Sum Flux - Volume 7
We received a whopping helping of thirty-eight submissions to the contest, each judged anonymously, and the range was banquetorial. And yet, somehow, every single one of these wildly different Waffle Houses was shot with the same cinematic filter. You could almost believe thirty-eight writers had met up under the same 3am fluorescents.
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Earl was so well done. All of them were great portraits but there was a lot of character in Earl’s Waffle House line and I think he’ll stick with me the most
The image of the tubes gripped me from the start, then I relished in all the other ones. Incredible atmosphere