The Mask Keeper

Chapter 10: The Appetite Knock

"Not in here," Voss said.

"I know." Theo lifted his hands off the carp. "I need the stove."

There was a two-burner camp stove in a plastic tub under the card table by the coffee maker. Wes Draper picked the tub up and carried it to the door before anybody asked him to, and then stood there holding it, having made a decision in front of witnesses. Marisol came back from the truck with a wrench and said the tank was chained to the tongue.

Theo took the stove around the end of the trailer and set it down in the floodlight, past the step, where the gravel gave way to mud and the mud gave way to the cut. He stopped well out of the cut. His shadow fell across the gravel, twice as long as he was. He licked a finger and held it up. The cold was coming from the far side of the trailer, so he turned the stove until the burner sat downwind of where the plates would go, and then took a pinch of salt and let it fall from shoulder height and watched which way it went.

"You're checking the wind," Marisol said. "With salt."

"It's what I had in my hand."

"There's a flag on the mast."

"Not at six feet."

The tank went on with the wrench and a hiss. He cracked the valve, got a blue ring of flame standing up off the burner, and brought it down until the ring lay almost flat, and then opened it again a hair.

On the cot, Nye's breathing was the third sound in the room, after the pump and the generator. His eyes had been open since four o'clock and did not do anything with the light in them, and Theo had stopped looking at them around five.

He slit the carp from the vent to the gills and took the guts out into the bucket the crew used for the pump rags, and set the bucket downwind of the stove, and rinsed the cavity out over the gravel from a jug, and dried the inside of it with paper towel.

Then he found the seam behind the gill plate with his thumb and opened it half an inch with the tip of the knife, and put the knife down, because the knife would cut it. Two fingers went in and found the end of the line and walked it up and out. It came out whole, a white thread the length of his hand, unbroken, and he laid it on the newspaper and folded the newspaper over it.

Marisol had come around the end of the trailer with her notebook open. "What is that."

"The mud vein."

"Most people leave it in."

"It tastes like the bottom of the river if you leave it in."

"It tastes like the bottom of the river anyway."

"Less."

She wrote something down.

He turned the fish and cut down the back of it from head to tail in one pass, and the ribs gave with a crack like a knuckle cracking, and the two halves went flat. The spine came out whole from the tail end. He put it in the bucket with the guts and washed his hands in the jug over the gravel, and then went into the bottom of the bag and came out with a bottle of rye that had a pour spout in the neck of it.

Hollis read the label from four feet away. "That's a hundred proof."

"It's rye."

"It's drinking rye."

"It's what my mother keeps."

Hollis thought about that and left it alone.

Theo poured a thin line of it down both halves of the fish and rubbed it in with the flat of his hand, and then salted them, both sides, more salt than looked reasonable, and set them skin up on the cooler lid with a weight on them.

"Thirty minutes," he said. "Maybe forty."

Quarles had his folder open against his chest. "How long does the whole thing take?"

"The cooking, an hour. The rest I don't know yet."

"An hour."

"He's been on that cot since four."

Quarles closed the folder and held it closed.

"His family doesn't know," Voss said. She said it to the clipboard. "Nobody in this trailer has volunteered to make that call."

Wes looked at the cot, and then at the gravel past the step, and said nothing.

The vegetables came out of the bag next: brown mushrooms, a knob of ginger, a bunch of scallions, and the foil end of a cured ham that had been in somebody's refrigerator since before the dig. He chopped them on the lid of the cooler, small, and kept them in four piles, because they were going into two pans and not one. Then he went to the cooler by the far door and lifted the lid.

"There's a chicken in there," Voss said.

"I know."

"That's tomorrow."

"He'll be awake tomorrow."

Voss looked at the cot and then at the fish and then at the man with the knife, and said, "Take it," and Theo took it.

He put the chicken in a pot with water and salt and set it on the second burner and put the lid on. Then he beat two eggs in a bowl with a fork and dragged the two halves of fish through it, skin and all, and by then the oil in the pan had begun to move. The first half went in skin down. The sound of it went up over the floodlight and out across the site. The tail lifted out of the oil by itself and stayed up, and the skin went from gray to gold in a way that could be watched, edge to edge, and the bones under it went the same way.

He did the second half, and then he had two pans going, one with the ham and the mushrooms and the ginger, one with scallion and butter and a spoon of the rye, and the smell went out past the trailer and up the track.

Two of the crew came around the corner of the trailer and stood with their hands in their pockets and did not pretend to have a reason.

Wes Draper said, "I said some things this afternoon I'd like to have back."

"Hold the light," Theo said.

Wes held the light.

The broth came up white and thick around the chicken and he turned it down. The tofu went into the last of the oil and came out gold and was set on paper to drain.

Quarles had come to the door of the trailer with his folder under his arm. "The literature on this is fairly consistent," he said, and he said it without raising his voice or his chin, the way he had said everything since four o'clock. "The oldest offerings are raw. You put the meat in the ground and the god takes what it takes of it. Then somewhere in the record people begin cooking it, and the smoke goes up. After that it stays cooked. The direction of travel is one way."

Theo turned the second half over in the pan. "We used cold food for a long time."

"Cold food is the standard in most places now. I'd have assumed—"

"Four years ago. After the demonstration, at home, the offering gets handed out to the visitors." Theo lifted the fish out and laid the two halves side by side in the tray, one dark and one pale. "They said it was better hot."

Quarles stood with that for a moment. "The visitors."

"People come through. They pay at the door." Theo set the pan down. "They had an opinion."

Quarles took his pen out and wrote something on the back of his hand, and looked at it, and said, "The direction of travel is not one way, then. I'll want that in the record."

Then the sauces, the red-brown one over the dark half, where it went on hissing and then stopped hissing, and the pale one over the other, where it sat and shone.

Cold would have taken six minutes. He had known that in the truck on the way over, and he knew it now, with the broth needing another ten. He had already made the choice and he did not go back over it.

When the broth had come down he carried it all in, Marisol with the pot and Wes ahead of him to move the lamp, and the steam got into the trailer before any of them did.

The long table had been cleared. He wiped it down, and set the folded cloth at one end of it, and out of the bag came a sleeve of thin bamboo plates, still in the plastic.

Hollis took one and turned it over and read the sticker on the bottom. "Compostable."

"It's bamboo."

"I can see it's bamboo."

He set the tray down and laid the plates out. The fish in two halves, one dark and one pale, side by side on one plate. The chicken in its broth in a bowl. The tofu. Two apples, and a paper box of small iced cakes from the grocery in town, opened and set at the corner.

Then the rye. He poured it three times. The first went out through the door, past the step, and the floodlight showed it going into the gravel. The second went into the small cup at the head of the tray. The third he drank himself, standing, and put the cup down.

He had lit one stick of the incense off the burner before he came in, and it stood in a tin lid at the corner of the tray, blue at the tip, no smoke off it at all. The heat came off the food and pushed up and lay against the ceiling of the trailer and had nowhere to go.

He made the hand form, the four fingers folded down and the thumb locked across, wrist straight, and struck the rim of the plate with the back of the folded hand, once.

It sounded like a struck cup. Porcelain, not bamboo. The note went up under the ceiling and got into the corners of the trailer and stayed there, and the second time it came back it was thinner, and the third time it was only in his ears.

The old name for it was the appetite knock. He did not say the name.

He had meant to lay the mask on the cloth at the end of the table, upturned, so the paint could be seen. The table was covered now, and the only clean dry place left was his own head. He took the mask out of the bag, where it had lain flat under everything else, and turned it once in his hands. It was lighter than it looked. Red at the brow and at the corners of the eyes, black down the middle in strokes that came down and out like feathers, and the red gone brown at one edge where a thumb had been over it for years. He set it on, back off his forehead, tilted, the ties loose down the side of his neck, his face still his face.

Voss had her phone up. She had been taking photographs since the tray came in: the plates, the cup, the tray from the end, flat and straight on, for the file. Then she looked at the screen for a second, and put the phone down on the table with the screen against the wood, and said nothing about it, and nobody asked her to.

The knock went out through the trailer and came back off the taped window and went out again. The pump knocked four times and stopped. Nobody moved. The steam came up off the plates and stood in the air between the tray and the lamp.

On the cot, Nye's eyes were open, and the light was in them, and they did not follow anything.