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Babe Ruth's Piano
He was thinking, 'I should really ask... instead of reaching.'
"Can someone please pass me the butter," he said, "please?"
Someone passed him the butter.
Great. There goes yet another opportunity. That no one took. The three other people at the table went back to their meals after the butter wound its way down the table like a Chinese dragon.
In Mexican wave order, Bill's head went down first, back to his peas and cabbage, focusing intently on the little green balls rolling around his plate, still, in the aftermath of a stab at them before the butter passing request. Lansing, named not for any Asian ancestor (his parents were both Norwegian refugees) but for the city his parents settled near, thought he might be every so slightly near-sighted. He filed that away. He also noticed that Bill's fingers bore a soft sort of look – the kind of hands that had never touched dishes. Or, if they had done so they did it with gloves on, or with some kind of super-gentle dishwashing liquid. Lansing thought about it, but in the end didn't file that one nearly as prominently as the previous observation.
The second head to return to his plate was either Jim, or, more unlikely, Shim. When he wasn't waving them over his food like a magician, J/Shim had his hands in the general vicinity of his mouth, especially while he was talking, which often led people to believe his name was Shim when, in fact, it was Jim. His odd habit of conjuring his food – and watch as I wave my hands over this food and presto! it is a pigeon! — would have seemed rather graceful and airy, had Lansing not seen the ham-handed way he passed the butter down the table. Literally, too. And he didn't mean 'literally' like a lot of people used it: which is to say it was extra filler. A word to be thrown in when you were running a few beats low in your general conversational flow. In this case, Jim was holding a piece of ham in one hand when the butter headed his way, and, due to the drumstick in his other hand, passed the butter with a ham napkin. All in the vault, all in there.
The last in the butter passage was Kim. He had flinched earlier when Jim asked if he had heard the song by Johnny Cash called "A Boy Named Sue." Now, it wasn't technically by Johnny Cash, but that was what Jim said. Kim had said that he grew up on the mean streets of Boston. When pressed, it turns out he actually had grown up in Nashua, New Hampshire, but Boston was usually the closest landmark people recognised. Nashua didn't have too many actual mean streets, but some of them might have been considered ornery. Lansing surprised him by knowing that the Daniel Webster Highway took you further north into New Hampshire.
Kim was a pale, thoughtful person, and inspired comparisons with wraiths, but in the nicest possible of ways. He handed the butter over to Lansing with no sound, and he had the feeling the butter tray ran like a monorail through his fingers, sliding along on a combination of the ham-oil from Jim and his own preternatural grace. This was flagged in the vault. He would keep this one close.
Hours ago, after the initial introductions, the men were seated at the empty table, locked and loaded with plates, a full complement of cutlery, two glasses to eat seating, and clean napkins.
After sitting down, which was accompanied by a certain amount of noise and barking conversation from the chairs against the hardwood floor and the men being seated in them, the conversation developed a rather severe limp, which, within minutes had developed into a pretty bad case of gangrene, and the leg had to be amputated. Lansing imagined he could hear it ka-thumping along on the floor underneath the table.
The arrival of the food, a veritable banquet, lifted it again slightly, but it was finally, painfully, with his butter request that it gave up the ghost and died a quiet death beneath the table.
The door at the far end of the hall opened. It was The Man.
to be continued...
disclaimer:
I know, I know, you're probably tired, it's late, after all.
Throw on the sweatpants (or tracksuit, if you're like that), and kick back on the couch, you're done.
Thanks for playing along again, you've been a lovely audience. See you next week, bat-channel, bat-time. Ish.
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