Hot August Nights

David Ah Lum was eighteen and washing dishes in the back of a casino coffee shop the first weekend the whole town filled up with old cars, and he did not understand yet that the weekend was going to decide his life, because at the time it only looked like the pit closest to the dish machine was going to run him into the ground before Sunday.

They had put a name on it that summer. Hot August Nights, the marquees said, and the papers said, and the flyers taped in the casino windows said, some new promotion to fill the slow week before Labor Day, and it had brought a river of automobiles into Reno, the cars people had been young in, Bel Airs and Thunderbirds and Chevys with the chrome kept up like church silver, cruising the streets under the arch in the warm dark while grown men and women leaned on the fenders looking twenty years back at themselves. David had watched some of it on his cigarette breaks in the alley, the parade of it going by the mouth of the alley, and it had nothing to do with him. He had been born in 1968. The cars were somebody else’s youth, polished and driven slow through a downtown that was, the rest of the year, beginning quietly to worry about itself, the casinos studying the news out of Atlantic City and the talk of card rooms coming to California and wondering how long the only game in the West would stay the only game. None of that reached the dish pit either. In the dish pit there was only the machine, and the racks, and the heat.

The kitchen ran him because the kitchen was slammed. The tourists came off the streets at all hours wanting eggs at midnight and club sandwiches at four in the morning, and by Saturday two of the line cooks had walked, the way line cooks walked, and the man who ran the mornings, a heavyset Filipino named Aguilar who had cooked on ships before he cooked in casinos, stood in the middle of the blowup on Saturday night looking for hands. He looked at David the way you look at a thing you are about to use because it is the thing within reach.

“You can read a ticket,” Aguilar said. It was not a question. “Come cook.”

David said he was the dish. Aguilar said the dish could wait, the dish did not walk out the door, the eggs walked out the door. He put David on the flat-top next to him and stood over him for ten minutes and then less than ten minutes and then he was gone, back to his own station, and David was cooking, actually cooking, on the busiest night the room had seen, and the strange thing, the thing he would try for years afterward to describe and never quite manage, was that the noise went away. The window was six tickets deep and then nine and the printer never stopped and the room behind him was a wall of sound, and inside all of it there was a place that was completely quiet, which was the eight inches of steel in front of him and the eggs on it and his own two hands. He found he knew where everything was without looking. He found the tickets arranged themselves in his head into an order, this plate and then this one, the toast dropping at the right moment, the whole small machine of it running through him. He was good at it. He had never in his life been told he was good at anything with his hands, and here it was, arriving at one in the morning over a flat-top, unasked.

He got off at seven Sunday and walked out into the cars.

They were everywhere by then, lined along Virginia Street, a show of them parked in a lot with the hoods up and men bent into the engines, and the sidewalks were full even at that hour, and David walked through it tired past the point of tired and lit up underneath the tiredness in a way he could not sit still with. He was supposed to start at the university in three weeks. That had been the plan his whole life, the plan the way the mountains were the mountains, not a thing you decided. He came from people who had planned. His great-great-grandfather had laid the railroad these cars were now crawling beside and had stayed and opened a laundry when the other men rode on. His great-grandfather had kept the temple lit after the old Chinatown was gone and there was almost no one left to keep it for. They had held on and held on and pushed each generation a foot further up, and the foot further up, for David, was supposed to be a degree and an office and clean hands, and he stood in the street among the beautiful old cars knowing with his whole body that he did not want it, and not knowing how a person said that to a family that had bled to earn him the chance to want it.

His grandmother was Helen. She was seventy-one and she had worked the USO downtown during the war and she still ironed a tablecloth like she was being graded on it, and when David came home that morning she was at the table with her tea and she looked at his ruined shirt and his burned forearm and she did not say anything for a moment.

“They had you cooking,” she said. She could read a kitchen off a person the way she read weather.

“Two guys quit. Aguilar put me on the line.”

“And?” She was watching him carefully now, the way she watched a thing she already half knew.

He wanted to lie to her and could not find the lie. “And I was good at it,” he said. “Grandma, I was really good at it.”

She turned her cup a quarter turn on the saucer. Out the window the cars were still going by, somebody’s cherry-red memory rolling down the street with the windows down and the radio playing a song older than David was. Helen had come up in a family that did not say soft things and did not, as a rule, bless a hard road when an easier one was on the table. He waited for her to tell him about the university, about the clean hands, about how far they had all come so that he would not have to stand over a grill at one in the morning.

“Your great-grandfather,” she said instead, “could press a collar so it looked like it had never been worn. Sixty years, and the collar was the collar.” She looked at him. “Nobody made him love it. He just did, and it showed in the work, and the work is what people came back for.” She stood and took her cup to the sink. “You’ve got three weeks before you have to tell anybody anything,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

He went down the hall. Behind him he could hear the tap running and the cup being washed and set in the rack, and out front the engines idling, and under all of it, faintly, from the direction of the flat-top he had left an hour ago and could already feel himself going back to, the quiet.

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