I thought I'd never make it through. You're doin' real good. My first time, I couldn't even read the menu. The letters, they all were swimmin' at me. I thought I was goin' to bust through the window.
Two guys, they had to take me out 'cause I couldn't sit still. You're doin' a good job, Les." If Les had been able to notice anything other than how much his hands were now trembling, he would have realized that he'd never before seen Swift not twitching. Swift neither twitching nor bitching. That was why Louie had brought him along —because helping somebody through the Chinese meal seemed to be the thing that Swift did best in this world. Here at The Harmony Palace, as nowhere else, Swift seemed for a while to remember what was what. Here one had only the faintest sense of him as someone crawling through life on his hands and knees. Here, made manifest in this embittered, ailing remnant of a man was a tiny, tattered piece of what had once been courage. "You're doin' a good job, Les.
You're doin' all right. You just have to have a little tea," Swift suggested.
"Let Chet pour some tea."
"Breathe," Louie said. "That's it. Breathe, Les. If you can't make it after the soup, we'll go. But you have to make it through the first course. If you can't make it through the double-sautéed pork, that's okay. But you have to make it through the soup. Let's make a code word if you have to get out. A code word that you can give me when there's just no two ways about it. How about 'tea leaf for the code word? That's all you have to say and we're out of here. Tea leaf. If you need it, there it is. But only if you need it."
The waiter was poised at a little distance holding the tray with their five bowls of soup. Chet and Bobcat hopped right up and got the soup and brought it to the table.
Now Les just wants to say "tea leaf" and get the fuck out. Why doesn't he? I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here.
By repeating to himself "I gotta get out of here," he is able to put himself into a trance and, even without any appetite, to begin to eat his soup. To take down a little of the broth. "I gotta get out of here," and this blocks out the waiter and it blocks out the owner but it does not block out the two women at a wall-side table who are opening pea pods and dropping the shelled peas into a cooking pot.
Thirty feet away, and Les can pick up the scent of whatever's the brand of cheap toilet water that they've sprayed behind their four gook ears—it's as pungent to him as the smell of raw earth. With the same phenomenal lifesaving powers that enabled him to detect the unwashed odor of a soundless sniper in the black thickness of a Vietnam jungle, he smells the women and begins to lose it. No one told him there were going to be women here doing that. How long are they going to be doing that? Two young women. Gooks.
Why are they sitting there doing that? "I gotta get out of here." But he cannot move because he cannot divert his attention from the women.
"Why are those women doing that?" Les asks Louie. "Why don't they stop doing that? Do they have to keep doing that? Are they gonna keep doing that all night long? Are they gonna keep doing that over and over? Is there a reason? Can somebody tell me the reason? Make them stop doing that."
"Cool it," Louie says.
"I am cool. I just wanna know—are they gonna keep doing that?
Can anyone stop them? Is there nobody who can think of a way?'
His voice rising now, and no easier to stop that happening than to stop those women.
"Les, we're in a restaurant. In a restaurant they prepare beans."
"Peas," Les says. "Those are peas!"
"Les, you got your soup and you got your next course coming.
The next course: that's the whole world right now. That's everything.
That's it. All you got to do next is eat some double-sautéed pork, and that's it."
"I had enough soup."
"Yeah?" Bobcat says. "You're not going to eat that? You done with that?"
Besieged on all sides by the disaster to come—how long can the agony be transformed into eating?—Les manages, beneath his breath, to say "Take it."
And that's when the waiter makes his move—purportedly going for the empty plates.
"No!" roars Les, and Louie is on his feet again, and now, looking like the lion tamer in the circus—and with Les taut and ready for the waiter to attack—Louie points the waiter back with his cane.
"You stay there," Louie says to the waiter. "Stay there. We bring the empty plates to you. You don't come to us."
The women shelling the peas have stopped, and without Les's even getting up and going over and showing them how to stop.
And Henry is in on it now, that's clear. This rangy, thin, smiling Henry, a young guy in jeans and a loud shirt and running shoes who poured the water and is the owner, is staring at Les from the door. Smiling but staring. That man is a menace. He is blocking the exit. Henry has got to go.
"Everything's okay," Louie calls to Henry. "Very good food. Wonderful food. That's why we come back." To the waiter he then says, "Just follow my lead," and then he lowers his cane and sits back down. Chet and Bobcat gather up the empty plates and go over and pile them on the waiter's tray.
"Anybody else?" Louie asks. "Anybody else got a story about his first time?"
"Uh-uh," says Chet while Bobcat sets himself the pleasant task of polishing off Les's soup.
This time, as soon as the waiter comes out of the kitchen carrying the rest of their order, Chet and Bobcat get right up and go over to the dumb fucking gook before he can even begin to forget and start approaching the table again.
And now it's out there. The food. The agony that is the food.
Shrimp beef lo mein. Moo goo gai pan. Beef with peppers. Doublesautéed pork. Ribs. Rice. The agony of the rice. The agony of the steam. The agony of the smells. Everything out there is supposed to save him from death. Link him backward to Les the boy. That is the recurring dream: the unbroken boy on the farm.
"Looks good!"
"Tastes better!"
"You want Chet to put some on your plate, or you want to take for yourself, Les?"
"Not hungry."
"That's all right," Louie says, as Chet begins piling things on Les's plate for him. "You don't have to be hungry. That's not the deal."
"This almost over?" Les says. "I gotta get out of here. I'm not kiddin', guys. I really gotta get out of here. Had enough. Can't take it. I feel like I'm gonna lose control. I've had enough. You said I could leave. I gotta get out."
"I don't hear the code word, Les," Louie says, "so we're going to keep going."
Now the shakes have set in big-time. He cannot deal with the rice. It falls off the fork, he's shaking so bad.
And, Christ almighty, here comes a waiter with the water. Circling around and coming at Lester from the back, from out of fucking nowhere, another waiter. They are all at once but a split second away from Les yelling "Yahhh!" and going for the waiter's throat, and the water pitcher exploding at his feet.
"Stop!" cries Louie. "Back off!"
The women shelling the peas start screaming.
"He does not need any water!" Shouting, standing on his feet and shouting, with his cane raised over his head, Louie looks to the women like the one who is nuts. But they don't know what nuts is if they think that Louie's nuts. They have no idea.
At other tables some people are standing, and Henry rushes over and talks to them quietly until they are all sitting down. He has explained that those are Vietnam veterans, and whenever they come around, he takes it as a patriotic duty to be hospitable to them and to put up for an hour or two with their problems.
There is absolute quiet in the restaurant from then on. Les picks at a little food and the others eat up everything until the only food left on the table is the stuff still on Les's plate.
"You done with that?" Bobcat asks him. "You not gonna eat that?"