Sundown at D'oro Pizzeria

CHARLES EDGRET / PART ONE

He lifts his head as the neon signs flicker and smear their chemical glow across the windows of D’oro Pizzeria, deleting the last data of light scrolling off the setting sun. From where he stands behind the cash register, Charles Edgret can see the advertisement he had made that very weekend, carefully printing the letters in alternating black, green and white on a square of orange poster board—a bold choice that color, but he felt the bright, cheery shade was more impressive, more inviting, more apt to catch the attention of any casual passerby—and taping it to the windowpane facing outward.

After closing on Sunday night, Charles stood in front of his restaurant at its location in the darkened strip mall between a Korean barbeque joint and a coin-op laundromat, and admired the sign he had created, straightening his tie as he mouthed the words:

D'ORO PIZZERIA MIDWEEK MADNESS!!!

WEDNESDAY NITE SPECIAL

4:00 TO 10:00

ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT SPAGHETTI

ONLY $8.99

“With a deal like that,” he reasoned aloud, “who could refuse?” and made sure he had scheduled enough kitchen staff and servers to accommodate the expected influx of customers. Yet even though he’d invested in candles, cloth napkins, wicker baskets for the signature garlic bread and red-and-white checked place settings for every table, Wednesday night had come and gone with only two new patrons—a twenty-something couple who pushed noodles around their bowls for five minutes until shoving the dishes aside and ordering a Hawaiian pizza to go—and a solitary woman who asked for directions to Applebee’s and, once informed, left without another word.

Now, Friday evening in late September, Charles watches the empty sidewalk outside of D’oro Pizzeria, his eyes probing for guests that never materialize as the sun vanishes behind the horizon and the streetlamps embedded between the fronds of the palm trees in the strip mall parking lot sputter on.

THE ENGINEER

Awash in heat and sweat and the dark gristle of night knotted around him, the Engineer enters D’oro Pizzeria, black eyes darting back and forth as if to suggest that before this night he’s never set foot in the establishment. Charles Edgret stands up straight and applies the smile he rehearsed for hours at a time in the bathroom mirror and reserves for loyal customers. He seats the man at a table near the front of the restaurant below an autographed, 8 x 10 portrait of Andrea Bocelli in concert at the Hollywood Bowl and a flood of neon coming off the windows.

One of D’oro Pizzeria’s few repeat patrons, the dwarfish man has been in California a little over two months. He spends his days crawling through boilers with a flashlight in one hand and blueprints in the other, and his nights in a Best Western hotel room playing round after round of sudoku and solitaire and thinking about his home and friends in Ohio.

The Engineer’s face is the color of fresh cantaloupe, dome-shaped skull covered in a sparse blonde fuzz. Whenever Charles sees him—every Friday evening since July—the man sports the same shirt, a gaudy Hawaiian number given him by some jokester of a colleague to be worn on “those hotter ‘n hell SoCal nights.” The shirt is yellow, with hibiscus flowers flowing across the shoulders and down his torso. A topless hula dancer adorns each sleeve, and the rayon is stained with grease and marinara.

Guaranteed to provide D’oro Pizzeria with some free advertisement in the dry-cleaning and laundry markets, Charles thinks.

“Three cheese calzone,” pipes the Engineer, without a glance at the menu.

This is the dish the Engineer requests each and every Friday night, and in his most private moments Charles imagines himself having the courage to say: “The usual?” before waiting for the order to be given. Instead he envisions the Engineer arriving back home in Ohio, standing at a coffee machine in a breakroom and regaling his coworkers with tales of what was—without question—the highlight of his last business trip out to the west coast: “Yeah, place called D’oro Pizzeria. Check it out if you’re ever out that way. They make this three cheese calzone that’ll knock you flat. Helluva nice dude runs the joint.”

“Don’t go virginal with the red sauce, hoss, savvy?” Charles hears the Engineer address his back as he walks to the line to place the order. “And make it extra chee-ee-eesy.”

THE TRANSPLANTS

Mercedes pushes their plates to the table’s edge as Charles sweeps by with a carafe full of ice water.

“We’ll take the check now, boy,” she croaks, sand spilling from the crusted ring of her lips and roaming across the checked placemat. Her hair is only hinted at, breasts nonexistent, flesh opaque beneath a veneer of blotches and veins. “The service in here, Harv. Honestly, I never.”

The reanimated corpse sitting opposite Mercedes sucks at his cheeks and pokes the wedge of his tongue into a corner of his mouth. His eyes bulge from their sockets, and from his cranium tufts of brilliant white hair spar with the feeble glow emitted from the candlelight, as his shoulders jut through the green frock coat he wears, and sweat courses through the arroyo of his throat.

“Uh,” says Harvey.

“Things were different in Reno, vastly different. Folks knew how to mind their Ps and Qs for one thing, and the dining service was much better. And whatever happened to early bird specials? What have they done with the early bird specials? In Reno, people catered to, to, their clientele.” She taps one lacquered fingernail against the rim of her glass. “Had to ask”—tap tap tap —“three times for a straw.”

“Uh,” says Harvey.

“And the garlic bread, Harvey,” Mercedes continues, “like they’re rationing it!” She twists her head this way and that, watches the Engineer lift water to his mouth, catches sight of Charles’ white oxford shirt as he darts behind a pillar. “For who? You and I, we’re practically the only people here.”

“Uh,” says Harvey.

Mercedes slides the glass over to join their plates, balls up the cloth napkin, drops it onto Harvey’s empty dish, and smooths out the creases in her purple smocked dress. When she looks at her husband, her Harvey—the man she fell in love with fifty-three years ago when he pulled her from the wreckage of her Subaru and a wayward forklift smoldering on the Geiger Grade turnpike, following him to New York to Texas and back to Nevada, marrying and raising a family with him in the suburbs of Reno—she can tell that by the far-off look in his eyes he’s not listening to her, his responses only reflexive, that he’s retreated to the frontier in his imagination which she used to know so well but can no longer access with him.

It has been this way for the past five years, ever since they left Reno and their church and children and grandchildren for the coast of California, Mercedes staring at the stark white walls in their condo and airing her grievances while Harvey surrenders to the visions of the wild west playing in a constant loop across what’s left of his mind, both of them waiting to die among the reek of exhaust and saltwater and a long way from home.

“Harv?”

“Uh,” says Harvey.

Watching him sitting across from her—greased-over forehead reflecting the neon, saliva coating his bottom lip, lost in the western movie unspooling in his brain—Mercedes swears she can almost smell the gunpowder scorching the air, hear the crack of rifles and the shrieks of damsels in distress, see the strangers ramble in with the rain and ride out with the sunset.

“Harvey, can I ask you something?”

“Uh,” says Harvey.

“Well, what I want to know,” Mercedes says, “is after all these years, do, do, do you still—”

“Lookout!” Harvey roars.

Mercedes recoils in her seat as Harvey extends both skeletal index fingers and levels them at an imaginary adversary. Dust blows across his Velcro LifeWalker sneakers and he narrows his eyes, drawling: “Ah reckon Ah jes’ mighta knowed you’d show yerself ‘round these ‘ere parts ‘fore long.”

“At your convenience,” Charles says, bowing slightly at the waist and setting a check between the couple. He lifts their plates from the table and shuffles them onto one arm, unaware he’s stumbled into the scene of a potential shootout until a rangy shadow falls over him.

“Jes’ hold it righ’ there, cowpoke.”

Standing before Charles, Harvey lowers the barrels of his fingers and aims them at the uneaten portion of cacao e pepe stuck to Mercedes’ plate. The hammer of both thumbs cock back. “Ah reckon y’all got somethin’ Ah could bring the lil’ lady’s noodles on home in, t’ain’t that so?”

Harvey holsters his fingers and sits down as Mercedes recovers herself, satisfied that her honor has been defended. Now this is the virile and compassionate wrangler I married! she thinks, as Charles slinks away.

CHARLES EDGRET / PART TWO

Charles watches them, the two geriatrics, studying their unsteady maneuvering with something close to pity—the way he witnessed his own father slowly navigate the hallways in his home a day before his heart seized up and he expired—as the woman clutches her husband’s elbow with one hand and wrestles the styrofoam container with her other. They somersault in a confusion of bones like tumbleweeds to the door and disappear through it.

With a dish rag and off-brand bottle of all-purpose cleaning solution, Charles walks over to the vacant table, spying the tip wedged under the bread basket; one two-dollar bill folded in half. He stuffs the money in his shirt pocket, removes the stained place settings, sprays the table three times and slings the rag down, rubbing away at the traces of the two customers he knows, even if they live another hundred years, he will never see again.

The Engineer’s order comes sailing out of the kitchen in a cyclone of cook-steam, the plate rattling and trailing a skein of vapor as it voyages across the counter. Charles leaves the rag and bottle of cleaning solution on the table and retrieves the calzone, hearing the shuffle and bleat of Chicano rock surging from the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Depositing the plate in front of the Engineer, Charles catches a glimpse of movement just beyond his advertisement and the window’s blurred neon. For a moment he entertains the notion that he’ll see a familiar face, someone who’s been to D’oro Pizzeria before—maybe that single mother who came in last week with her two daughters who sat mute all though the meal until the panna cotta was served and they fell upon it like jackals—and due to the classy-and-yet-not-too-classy ambience and savory food, were unable to resist returning a second time.

Charles scurries over to the cash register and slides behind it, the smile reappearing as he’s able to make out the shape of a figure approaching the door.

THE STRANGER

The front door swings open wide and Charles—the smile decaying on his lips—examines the man as he enters. It is no one he has seen before.

The sounds of night—clattering of palm fronds, hum of streetlights, the sibilation and drone of traffic shooting down the interstate—follow him in. A deep navy baseball cap rides the man’s bulky head, the words NO DICE silk-screened across the front of it, and black-and-gray curls come slithering out from beneath the creased bill. The white t-shirt he wears is pasted to his body with sweat, and his face is a map of grooves, furrows and lines that have no clear direction and are too numerous and errant to be named. His cargo pants carry a film of construction dust, and the baked, chalky stench of it fills the restaurant as the door wheezes shut.

The Stranger hovers in front of Charles and says: “Pie, tout suite, guy,” in a voice that sounds much too saccharine to be issuing from his roughhewn, craggy features.

“We don’t, uh, serve pie here,” Charles replies. He sees in his periphery the Engineer glance up, fork in one tiny fist, his mouth working at a colossal chunk of calzone he has managed to cram it with. Recalling the pitch he had designed to convince his brother-in-law to invest in D’oro Pizzeria, he says: “This is an Italian fine dining establishment. Our cuisine features pizzas, pastas, desserts and other fare from the Eternal City and points east. Tonight, our specials—”

“Come on, guy, pizza pie,” the Stranger says. “Let’s go, look alive, pizza pie. Let’s make it a large one, pepperoni and sausage.”

Charles flushes red and hates himself for it. He knows the Stranger can see the evidence of the blood as it invades his cheeks, blooms across his forehead and seeps into his hairline, and imagines the Engineer watching as well, his opinion of Charles Edgret to his coworkers changing from one of admiration to disdain: “Dude that runs the joint? Kind of squirrely, if you want to know the truth. Weak. Spineless.”

“Pepperoni and sausage pizza, large,” Charles says. “Will that be for here or to go?”

The Stranger’s head bobbles on his thick neck and orbits his torso as he surveys his surroundings—the tables and the chairs, the candles, the neon signage in the windows stabbing splinters of multi-colored light into the walls, the ceiling and floors—as if coming all at once to the realization that he’s indoors. “Huh? Whaddya mean, guy? For here or to… huh?”

“Meaning will you be taking the order home with you or dining here?”

“Well, she-eee-it,” the Stranger says. “I mean, taking it out. Of course. I mean, w-what, what the hell?”

“Okay, that’s one large pepperoni and sausage pizza, to go.” Charles punches the order into the cash register. He can feel the sweat on his fingertips burst like jellied insects on the keys. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

The Stranger snorts and tugs at his hat.

“But wait," he says. "Ain’t this Domino’s?”

CHARLES EDGRET / PART THREE

Once the Stranger leaves with his cardboard box of pizza and the Engineer—slamming his fork against the table with a bang! and draining his water glass—rises from his chair, places a ten-dollar bill beside his empty plate and goes leaping through the front door, Charles gathers the dishes and takes them to the kitchen.

The cook—who has been operating in the kitchen since D’oro Pizzeria first opened for business six months ago, preparing the food and washing the dishes and cookware, and whose name Charles can never seem to remember and knows it has been too long a time to ask without causing embarrassment to them both—has already signed out and left through the back door. Charles turns off the music still leaking out of the radio and goes to the stainless steel sink.

Hot water, as hot as he can stand without melting the flesh from his hands, squirts out of the faucet, and he runs the plate under it, scrubbing off the marinara and chipping away at the hardened cheese with his fingernail, adding the fork into the process and setting both items on the drying rack to be used again when they open on Saturday.

Charles hauls the trash out to the dumpster behind the restaurant, observing the blackened sky clenched around its cache of stars. The wind picks up, and Charles can hear the chirring of the palm trees, buzzing of streetlights and far-off hiss of vehicles on the freeway as the smell of eucalyptus blows past him, sour and cloying.

He locks the back door and toggles the set of switches on the wall, shutting down the kitchen lights and the tubes of the overhead fluorescents. Blue-black phosphenes squirm across his field of vision, and he clamps his lids tightly, waiting in the darkness of the dining room for the strobing after-images to fade.

When he cracks his eyes open, the first thing Charles sees is his own reflection in the windowpane, a tangle of neon surrounding his face where it floats just beneath the level of his advertisement.

He imagines himself ripping the poster board down, smashing through the glass, cackling maniacally as he shreds the ad into a thousand pieces and flinging the whole affair into the night sky to gather and fall like radioactive snow, forming glowing orange drifts across the parking lot. He’ll leave town, leave D’oro Pizzeria to its own fate, drive north, the information of the road eroding under his car and fusing with the glow of his taillights drilled like bloody holes into the past.

Charles laughs coldly at the thought, turns off the neon signs, steps outside, and locks the door behind him.