Carlie's Cantina
By Ryan Dalton
Carlie’s outside the cantina, leaning against the frame of the open door and blowing her smoke back inside. She’s been wearing a loose plastic glove on her smoking hand for two days straight and it’s taken on the same color as her hair and her skin, like a microwaved corn tortilla. Some poor fool pulls up, takes one look at her--with her bared teeth and raisin eyes--and pulls right back out. He can take a hint: Carlie’s Cantina isn’t that kind of cantina. Carlie’s Cantina isn’t a cantina at all.
Before, they didn’t even pull up. But lately the neighborhood has been changing, gentrifying. And with all these new kinds of people coming in, Carlie’s having a tougher and tougher time getting by. Not because rent is going up, not because people’s tastes are changing; those are cantina problems. But because these new people can’t take a hint.
Like the next guy, who stumbles out of the startup office across the way, almost eats shit just stepping off the curb, then walks right through midday traffic without ever taking his eyes off his phone, like he’s too important to die. It’s about a hundred degrees out and he’s wearing a hoodie but he still looks cold.
“Table for one,” he mumbles as he takes a limbo step under Carlie’s outstretched arm and into the cantina. “Table for one?” he says again once he’s inside. He says it to nobody, because nobody is in there.
Carlie waits, doesn’t move a muscle except the ones she uses to smoke. She stands in the doorway, blowing her smoke inside, until she’s taken her cigarette down to the filter. Another car pulls up, a whole family, and while everybody’s still unbuckling their seat belts Carlie flicks her cigarette butt right across the windshield. The car’s occupants jump; the pistons of the door locks drop, and the car pulls out again. No one says a word. They can take a hint.
Carlie heads inside once it’s clear that Hoodie Guy isn’t coming back out. She finds him sitting at a four-top just outside the swinging kitchen door, facing away from it, towards the side bar. He’s still staring at his phone. Through the glass inset in the swinging door, Carlie sees the girl she hired, Silver, watching. Silver’s hair is curly black, except for an arrow-straight cord of silver above one temple that disarms everyone who doesn’t know her. The silver comes in faster than the rest, so fast that Silver spends half the day trying to keep it pinned up.
Silver holds up three fingers, then points at Hoodie Guy. Carlie shakes her head: no.Silver shrugs, pushes her way through the swinging door. Before the door can swing shut again, Carlie sees her new guys in the back. They’re still working, one of them running a band saw and the other stuffing a soiled Hawaiian shirt into a garbage bag. Both Carlie’s guys are red to the elbows and stooped with exhaustion; no one came to work today thinking they’d have to do two. No one was getting paid to do two either. They’d only had to do the second one because he couldn’t take a hint.
Silver walks over to Hoodie Guy’s table. He’s wiping it off with a napkin he must have brought with him, because not one of the napkin holders in Carlie’s Cantina has — or ever has had — a napkin in it. Silver says nothing; she just stands there with her hands at her sides, one of them in a yellowed plastic glove like Carlie’s. It’s the uniform.
The move Silver is doing is called Dixie: she’s mouth breathing, and staring at a spot six inches behind Hoodie Guy’s eyes, like she’s a movie villain who’s been clubbed over the head but hasn’t yet fallen. Not that all the moves have names. Just this one and Double-Dixie.
“Have a menu?” Hoodie Guy asks, using a second napkin to push the first across the table. Silver doesn’t answer; she drops her jaw further, leans on the table, goes Double-Dixie, like she’s a movie villain who’s not going to fall over after all. She makes an effort to breathe into the guy. But if he feels it or tastes it he doesn’t let on: Silver has already disappeared to him. The feeling reminds Silver of when she used to wait tables, for real. Maybe Hoodie Guy was actually looking to eat. The thought of it makes Silver shudder.
“He’s not a cop?” Carlie whispers as she hands a menu over the bar.
“I don’t think he’s a cop,” Silver answers, pulling the silver cord out of her face.
“You did Dixie?”
“I did Dixie, I did Double-Dixie.”
Carlie looks over Silver’s shoulder at Hoodie Guy. “He’s just a dumbass?”
“He’s just a dumbass.”
“How are the guys doing in the back?”
“Tired. They didn’t plan to do two.”
“Nobody planned to do two.”
“They did two though,” Silver says, a bit defiantly.
“Well,” Carlie dismisses her, “let’s try and not make it three.”
Silver hands Hoodie Guy the menu. He’s a bit too thoughtful, a bit too considerate, as he looks it over. The menu at Carlie’s Cantina has a single heading:
DELICIAS
Deliciouses, Silver thinks, every time she sees it. There are six DELICIAS on the menu, but four of them have been blocked out with electrical tape. The guy turns over the menu to look for more, but the back is blank. He does it again, more quickly this time, like there might be some other DELICIAS that scatter swiftly in the light. “Tamales,” he says.
“No tamales,” Silver answers, and waits. Carlie’s Cantina has run out of both tamales and electrical tape, for the same reason.
“The final delight then,” he jokes, causing a full inch of new silver to sprout out of Silver’s temple. She pins it up. “Enchiladas.”
By the time Silver has walked back around the bar, Carlie has the enchiladas in the microwave. Two minutes thirty leaves them frozen on the inside and steaming on the outside; five minutes even and they mineralize so hard and sharp you can cut glass with them.
“Are the guys about done at least?” Carlie asks Silver, watching the stuttering turn of the enchiladas through the stained window. Silver shrugs, reaches for the door of the microwave, but Carlie stops her. “No, not until two thirty, so the outside is hot.” Carlie knows that making bad food is like cooking, while making terrible food is more like baking. With one, you can improvise a bit; with the other you have to get it just right.
When it’s time, Silver dumps the enchilada onto a dinner plate, with a sound like she’s calling a toast. The plate she chose is printed with an elaborate nativity scene. Sheep and a trio of angels look on as Mary tends to the enchilada in its manger. “That’s nice,” Carlie smiles, scooping a handful of olives from a filthy tub on the bar to block out the faces. “Better.” She pauses a moment, reflects. “Different.”
“Is that safe to eat?” Silver asks, plucking a long silver hair, tying it in a bow, and laying it neatly across the enchilada.
“Which part of it?” Carlie replies. One of her guys, the bald and sweaty one, who she calls Two-Minutes-Thirty, is peering through the window, wondering what’s happening. He holds three fingers up to the window, then points at Hoodie Guy. Carlie can tell that he’s exhausted, but he’ll do it if he has to. She shakes her head: no. “Two-Minutes-Thirty,” she mumbles, wondering how somebody so cold could sweat so much.
Silver puts the plate and a fork in front of Hoodie Guy, then waits a moment to see what he might do. “Kinky,” he says, eating the olives and taking a look at the nativity scene. “Extra salsa?” he asks, without looking up. “I like it spicy.”
“You won’t need it,” Silver dismisses him.
“I like it spicy. Very spicy.”
“It’s spicy enough.” Silver is already walking away when she says it.
“Extra salsa,” Hoodie Guy says again.
“You want to take this?” Silver asks Carlie. “I’ll go speed things up in the kitchen.”
Carlie grimaces. Most people would’ve taken a hint by now. She finds a couple of ketchup packets in a drawer, tears off their corners, and squeezes them into a paper cup. A triangle of reflective plastic winds up in the cup too; Carlie squeezes out another ketchup on top of it. When she brings the ketchup to the guy at the table, he doesn’t even look up; he just turns over the cup, waits for the ketchup to come down.
Two-Minutes-Thirty waits a while, then takes one long step out of the kitchen, ducking through the doorway as he goes. In each hand he’s holding a tied-off black garbage bag. When he sees Carlie staring hard at him from the bar, he freezes, his face not fearful but not comfortable either. His mouth is open and loose, like an enchilada you tore in half with your hands. The bags bulge and swing, like they’re full of liquid, which they are. People are mostly liquid. Carlie shakes her head no; he backs away slowly, like you would from a mountain lion or a bear. As he recedes into the kitchen, he knocks his head on the doorframe, grunts. The swinging door closes, catching on one of the garbage bags; Two-Minutes-Thirty keeps pulling the bag, but there’s something solid caught outside the door. Something hand-shaped, maybe a hand.
With her own bag hand, Carlie pulls a pen and pad from her shirt pocket and writes out a bill. The particulars aren’t important; the important thing is to not encourage repeat patronage. She figures sixty ought to be enough. Plus tax. Call it seventy.
Hoodie Guy’s finished the enchilada--ice, olives, and all. He’s already reviewing Carlie’s Cantina on Yelp by the time Carlie gets to him. She hands the tab in his direction, but he doesn’t even look up; he keeps typing with one hand while he fishes out a credit card with the other. Through the glass on the swinging door, Carlie sees that now the other guy, who she calls Five-Minutes-Even, is pulling on the caught bag. He’s burnt to a crisp, as usual.
Carlie takes the card back to the counter and waits a minute; she’s got nothing to swipe it in. This is still a cash business, hers. When she hears the sound, she looks at the card, and has to laugh. As it turns out, the sound of a garbage bag splitting is a dead ringer for the sound of a credit card swipe. On the floor below the kitchen door there’s now quite a bit of blood, somewhere around one person’s worth. It’s spreading quickly towards Hoodie Guy’s table. Too bad for him; he almost made it.
The thing that looked like a hand through the bag wound up being a hand. A small hand, wearing a big ring, like a high school graduation ring. Something that you’d notice, something that you’d remember. Carlie remembers that when she noticed the ring earlier, before her two Enchiladas even did the second guy, she said: take that off and get rid of it. But they didn’t. It’s hard to find good Enchiladas here, no matter what kind of cantina you’ve got. And gentrification’s only making it harder.
Five-Minutes-Even is still standing in the glass, embarrassed. He holds up three fingers, points towards Hoodie Guy. Carlie nods: yes.
Okay, he mouths. He presses the door out a few inches, pushing the hand in the process. The stone on the ring scratches across the brick. Sorry, Five-Minutes-Even mouths through the glass once he’s finally retrieved the hand.
“You don’t need to sign,” Carlie says to Hoodie Guy as she hands his card back. He’s still writing his review, even with blood pooling behind his feet. Taking a step to the side, Carlie avoids the blood herself. It’s coming out at an angle, forming a long red V. “What a way to find out your floor is warped,” Carlie thinks. If Carlie’s Cantina were really a cantina, she might need to look into it. As things stand though, it’s not a huge problem.
Hoodie Guy is already slouching, and once the blood hits the soles of his shoes he slides halfway out of his chair. He pulls himself back up, crosses his legs, winds up with a bit of blood on his hand, who knows how. One thing you learn in cantinas like Carlie’s is that the stuff gets everywhere. “Napkin?” he mumbles, apparently out of napkins.
Both Enchiladas are now in the kitchen window. Carlie can’t hear it all, but she can hear enough. Five-Minutes-Even tells Silver, “if Carlie wanted three, she should have said so. She’ll have to pay for it, I don’t just do this for fun, she’s not the only one that’s gotta make rent around here. If she’s got a problem,” he says, “she can do it, but she can’t, is why she has us.”
Two-Minutes-Thirty says, “well at least you have rent control, do you know what a one bedroom costs here now? Doing a third I’m gonna get caught in traffic, again, and you know nobody pays for that.”
Silver says, “if you two Enchiladas would’ve respected the front of the house in the first place there wouldn’t have been two, much less three.” They roll their eyes, then grumble a bit over who’s going to take the lead. Two-Minutes-Thirty says, “I’m more than happy to do this one, I’ll do them all day long.” Five-Minutes-Even wants it too, not for the money, for the pride.
“Rock-paper-scissors then,” Silver says. The Enchiladas nod. Both of them hit scissors. They do it again, and both hit scissors again. They shrug at Silver. “What?” she says. “Just do it again. Like it’s so hard.”
On the third time, Five-Minutes-Even has paper and Two-Minutes-Thirty has scissors. “Like I said,” Two-Minutes-Thirty says, “I’ll do them all day long. Scissors beats paper,” he goes on, pulling a pair of polished shears from a magnet on the wall.
Hoodie Guy’s still typing up his review when Two-Minutes-Thirty comes up behind him. Carlie sees it in the corner of her eye, sees that Two-Minutes-Thirty won rock-paper-scissors again, and she wonders whether he always chooses scissors, just to have an excuse to do another one that way. Maybe he doesn’t even know that about himself, the poor Enchilada, frozen on the inside and steaming on the outside.
Carlie leans in, watching Hoodie Guy typing, even though she’ll have to change her clothes again, wash the bag on her hand again, if she’s going to stand this close. She could always read the review later, but there’s something authentic about doing it this way, watching him eat his last meal, speak his last words, in a sense. And if Carlie’s not keeping things authentic around here, who is?
So she watches. He writes: Came down to Carlie’s Cantina having read all the good reviews, about how this is the last place in town to get certain jobs done, what with all the old places that are juice bars and pilates studios now. But maybe not anymore. I did everything you’re supposed to, ordered the thing I was supposed to, sat where I was supposed to, no dice. As far as I can tell, they’ve updated too, and I get it—you’ve got to pay the rent somehow and the margins just aren’t there anymore for certain kinds of services.
But the good news is, they’re selling a new kind of hit and it’s enchiladas like I haven’t had since that place on Piedmont, the one with the little flags at the tables you’d pull up to tell them you needed something, got turned into an arcade or whatever it is now. It’s that good. But don’t just take it from me, I’ll let my plate speak for itself:
It’s before Carlie’s even finished reading the review that Hoodie Guy’s leaning back to take the picture, and it’s before the review has sunk in that those gleaming scissors in Two-Minute-Thirty’s hands have started on their way down, with no way to stop them. The photo Hoodie Guy’s trying to take, the one he never gets to take, is of a plate so clean you’d hang it on your wall at Christmastime. All the little faces—the sheep, the shepherds, the wise men, the angels, Mary and Joseph—look on, celebrating. Behold, their eyes seem to say, if you can take a hint, what’s beyond the final delight.
THE END