Buffet
“Buffet” is my original short story. It was originally part of a twelve-story manuscript intended for publication elsewhere. Screw it. Read it here first.
By John G. Stamos
Buffet
John G. Stamos
Jesus. How much can she put away?
The woman sat with her back to Anderson, three booths away. She was average in terms of size and appearance. Fortyish. Shoulder length hair. Dishwater blonde. Nondescript in the face. And she could evidently eat. A lot.
He first noticed her when he walked in. How could he not? She was the only other customer in the place. And, besides the glassy-eyed cashier-cum-busboy who took his 14 bucks at the register and delivered a pitcher of water and poured him a cup of coffee when he first sat down, but who now seemed to have disappeared, the entire restaurant was empty except for the woman and Anderson. When she first made her way to the food, Anderson saw that she wore gray slacks, and he checked out her ass. Waste of time. Then her tits. Also average, in a brown pullover. Then he turned his attention to his own plate and forgot about her. Nothing there.
But he was paying attention to her now.
Anderson’s own food sat before him on his plate, cooling rapidly and entirely forgotten.
Anderson had driven well into the night along U.S. 50, after he’d launched from the parking lot of the Law Offices of Harold M. Schonn in Sacramento late that afternoon. The 911 chewed up the miles but the trip was already taking forever. He picked the Route 50 option because he thought that the desert scenery would do him good (and that he’d be able to run the Porsche flat out without the inconvenience of the posted speed limit). NYC was calling his name, and he’d been looking at buzzards. Shit.
By the time he found himself rolling through the middle of Nevada, it was after midnight and he knew his chances of finding an open gas station and a McDonald’s were slim. U.S. 50 was a road through nowhere while it stretched its way across Nevada. He was about to kick himself in the ass for about the hundredth time when the lights from the diner winked into view.
Big Ed’s All-Nite Buffet and U-Pump Gas. Even better than McDonald’s. Damn was he hungry. Evidently, screwing idiots out of their land worked up an appetite. Anderson giggled.
After he fueled up, he dropped the 911 into a space and hustled across the empty lot to Big Ed’s entrance. No other cars, so he was apparently the only diner on this chilly desert night. Good. He could eat whatever cheap crap this joint was slinging with his elitism intact. The thought of rubbing elbows with budget-minded buffet co-feeders around the old steam table at one in the morning made him blanch.
When he walked inside, the first thing he noticed was the dining room’s temperature. Warm and comfortable after standing out in the cold night air, filling his pig with premium. The second thing he noticed was the nondescript woman. So much for pigging out with privacy. He’d be sharing the dining room at Big Ed’s after all. A fly buzzed around the dirty bulbs of a fluorescent fixture in the ceiling.
The glassy-eyed busboy-cashier barely glanced at him. “Anywhere you want.”
Anderson took a seat at a booth in the only section of the surprisingly capacious dining room that was open to the dining public: a row of booths that ran along the diner’s grimy front windows, a few strides from the steam table and whatever waited there. The rest of the dining room’s seating areas were populated with tables with upside down chairs resting on their tops. The woman sat three booths away. Close enough for Anderson to see details if she was hot, far enough away if she wasn’t worth a second look.
Anderson got his first look at the woman, fore and aft, when she stood and walked to the steam table to load up, and returned to her booth with what looked like an enormous pile of food on her plate. He watched her from over the rim of his cup of tepid black coffee, and instantly decided that she indeed was not worth a second look. She sat with her back to him.
He got up and headed for the steam table. The stuff was unmentionable, but he heaped his plate with it anyway. God he was hungry. Once he got back to the city, he’d laugh about eating this shit with Levinson and Brandt over burrata and clams at Tavern on the Green. He heard another fly buzzing around the fluorescents in the ceiling over the steam table and watched it descend and make a lazy circle around his plate before once more rising to ceiling altitude. He looked down at the plate and wondered if the cashier-busboy was also the cook. He thought he could make out what looked like a darkened and deserted kitchen beyond a set of motionless swinging doors toward the rear of the diner.
When he sat down with his food, the woman rose and once more headed to the food table. She carried with her the now empty plate. What a pig. She’d wolfed down an entire heaping pile of the crap from the steam table in the time it took Anderson to rise, walk to the table, fill his own plate, and sit back down.
He looked out the window and saw his Porsche hunkering down beneath the arc sodium lights of the otherwise deserted parking lot. He turned his attention back to his plate and wondered absently where the woman’s car was.
He stabbed a forkful of what was purportedly turkey tetrazzini and raised his eyes just in time to note that the woman was returning to her booth with her plate, which was once again heaped with food. And again, she sat down with her back to him.
Anderson had done well enough with his real estate investments to score a new Porsche every three years, and an apartment in the 50s on Manhattan’s East Side. He’d started in the real estate game when he was in his mid-twenties, buying undervalued condominium units in buildings with lax HOA regs around his old neighborhood in Newark. He’d find the units (courtesy of a dirty pal in the Essex County auditor’s office), rent them out for a time (screw the owner/tenant ratio rules), and unload them for enormous profit. From Newark, he set his sights on the boroughs of New York City, particularly Brooklyn and Queens.
Anderson could wrangle a deal out of the unsuspecting and uninformed just as good as the next guy. A fool and his money are soon parted. Abso-fucking-lutely.
A section of Anderson’s plate was obscured by a sizable smear of something called Big Ed’s Enchilada Salad. He shrugged and scooped up a forkful. As he was raising the load to his mouth, he again saw the woman in the brown pullover rise from her booth. Using the john. Gotta be. After all that food, no wonder. But she once again carried her plate, which was now completely empty, to the buffet table, where she again heaped it with Big Ed’s steaming offerings. Was he seeing things? What the hell? What the hell? Three goddamn plates full of food in ten minutes? She returned to her booth, and Anderson stared at the back of her head. He watched her movements – eating movements – from his vantage point three booths away. Since she faced away from him, he could only guess at the mechanics. But he heard the sounds. Big Ed’s Enchilada Salad started to congeal on his plate. He heard another fly buzzing and looked up to see one landing on the fluorescents in the ceiling above the next booth. The cashier-busboy was nowhere in sight.
Over the years, Anderson’s real estate dealings brought him westward, and his Machiavellian tactics ensured his success, and emboldened him. And they would ultimately bring him to the offices of Harold M. Schonn, Esq.
It happened in this way.
By the time his avarice led him to the fertile grazing of California, Anderson had established a network of unscrupulous real estate brokers and corrupt government officials at every level in dozens of states, including the Golden one. When he walked into the Sacramento County recorder’s office one sunny spring day to openly slander the title of a terrifically undervalued parcel of unincorporated county land, he knew that he himself was golden. His stooge in the auditor’s office laid the details on him: 103-year-old-owner. Deceased. One doddering 79-year-old heir. A daughter in Seattle. Spinster. Reputedly on the threshold of dementia. She’d never know enough to dispute a $300K lien on dear old dad’s bequest.
The auditor stooge leveled Anderson a look. “You sure?”
Anderson stuck out his chin, pulled five 100s from his front pocket.
The stooge shrugged and stuffed the bills in his shirt.
“Recorder’s. Ask for David.”
David made it happen, and he too stuffed a folded stack of 100s into his own shirt. And Anderson walked out of the recorder’s office and into the California sunshine at least three-hundred large richer. The old bat in Seattle would never know, and never ask.
But evidently, someone did.
It wasn’t long before Anderson received certain certified documents at his own 3rd Avenue spread. Notice of a civil action, filed in Sacramento County by one of California’s most prestigious law firms, in one envelope. The intention to refer the matter to the FBI for a criminal investigation in the other, from the same law firm.
By September, it was all over. Harold Schonn was not only legit, he was good. And expensive. But by the time Anderson had walked out of his office and began the eastbound drive that would lead him to Big Ed’s joint in the black desolation of an empty Nevada desert, Schonn had more than earned his fee. Not only did he wiggle Anderson off the hook, he’d negotiated full ownership for him, for the price, ironically, of three-hundred grand, of the old bat’s multimillion-dollar property. Her lawyers were pissed, but she’d only wanted the problem to go away.
A fool and his money…
Rather, her money.
When she croaked, that paltry $300K would probably go to a goddamn cat shelter. Jesus.
Anderson remained seated at his booth, and his eyes were riveted to the back of the woman’s head. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to see her rise, plate in hand, and walk up to the steaming buffet table. He watched her carefully, and made not even the slightest attempt at discretion. He stared as she loaded Big Ed’s tetrazzini, enchilada salad, and three or four additional selections onto her plate until a massive, glistening mound steamed there. She carried that heaping plate back to her booth, and bits of the enormous pile dripped off onto the floor as she walked. Before she turned her back to him to sit down, she seemed to notice him for the first time. She looked directly at him, raised an eyebrow, and then grinned.
And she turned her back to Anderson once more, sat down, and began to eat. But this, Anderson did not notice. He could think of nothing but the woman’s grin. He felt sweat between his shoulder blades, and another fly frantically buzzed against the fluorescent bulbs above his booth.
As he knew she would, the woman rose in short order with her now empty plate, and once more walked to the buffet table. Anderson watched as, this time, she moved directly to the end of the table where the miniscule selection of deserts waited. She selected one chocolate chip cookie, placed it on her plate, and returned to her booth.
This time, she sat facing Anderson. She looked directly at him, and then began to nibble at the cookie with tiny bites, never taking her eyes from his. She didn’t even eat half before she returned it to the plate and pushed it away. At this point, she turned slightly, looked away, and with a desultory slowness, traced the tip of one finger from her ear to the corner of her mouth, and back again. She dabbed her chin with a napkin. Then she rose, and without another look in Anderson’s direction, turned her back and walked out the front door.
Anderson was shaking. Shaking and sweating. He crossed his arms on the table of his booth and buried his face in them. He was blasted to the core by this experience, by the woman’s soul-shattering grin.
He pressed his forehead to the cool Formica tabletop. His thoughts caromed within the confines of his skull but unerringly settled on the woman’s grin, and on one rainy summer afternoon from his childhood when he was stuck indoors watching a particular nature show on the television.
The head of the Dasypeltis, or Egg-Eating Snake, essentially dislocates into separate halves, as its jaws gape to engulf and swallow whole an egg, which is many times greater in diameter than the snake itself.
Here in this lonely diner, beneath remote stars glinting down from a cold and dark desert sky, the joy of Anderson’s recent bounty of ill-gotten gains was forgotten. Nothing mattered but the nondescript woman’s appetite, and her grin.
Still trembling, Anderson resolved to get his shit together. He sat up straight in his booth, closed his eyes and took a bunch of deep breaths, each one steadier and slower than the one before it. Better. Just get the fuck out of here and put this place – and that pig of a bitch – two-thousand miles behind you, and out of your mind forever. Anderson stood up, opened his eyes, and looked out the windows toward his car, waiting under the arc sodiums of the lot. The woman was there. Languorous. Leaning against the Porsche. She was staring directly at him. He froze for a moment, and became dimly aware that he was staring back at her. She made a gesture with her hands. Anderson stepped from the booth as a fly buzzed overhead. Then he walked out into the night.
“Buffet ©2022. John G. Stamos and The Renaissance Garden Guy
I hope you’ve enjoyed “Buffet.”. (The story. Not the food.) It was originally intended for publication elsewhere as part of a manuscript consisting of twelve short stories. I’m much happier with it debuting here. Thanks for giving it a read.
Cheers, and Happy Gardening!
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Oh my! This is eerily unsettling. My imagination is leading me to a dark place…She saved room for dessert…him?!? 😬 John, you’ve always been such a talented and creative writer! Thanks for sharing your gifts with the rest of us!
Oh, wow, Tina – thank you so much! I’m so glad you liked this one. It actually freaked me out a little, too, when I thought it up and started writing it. But it sure was a hoot to write! Thank you once again for your incredibly kind words, Tina. I really, truly appreciate it.
I absolutely loved every moment of this story!!!
You are such an incredible writer. Each story you write, is more beautiful than the other. Love your work ✍️❤️
Wow, Roxxy, I’m completely honored – thank you! This one was supposed to be in a book to be published/printed elsewhere. I decided against it, and published this story here in The RGG instead. This is its very first publication. I remember that I really had a blast writing it, and even got a little creeped out when I was thinking it up. I’m very happy that you’ve enjoyed it. Thank you once again, Roxxy. I really appreciate it.
John,
You are an excellent writer. Your skills continue to immerse the reader into the depths of your works. This is a fantastic short story. I can’t wait to see a published book, though your publishing here in The RGG is just as effective and equally good for readers.
Thank you so much, Rick. I cannot thank you enough for these incredibly kind words. I’m beyond flattered. In the case of this story, though the option was there to have this published in book form, I ultimately decided against it. I actually love publishing right here. It’s a pleasure welcoming an ever-growing number of readers and subscribers to The RGG, where not only my own creative works, but those of other excellent writers, too, are available to read. I thank you very kindly once again, Rick, for reading the story and for your incredibly kind thoughts and words.
Thankfully, the Golden Corral here went out of business.
Too scary.
Thank you so much, Lane. I feel sort of guilty telling you that I’m happy as hell that it scared you! I remember that I really had a blast writing it – it actually creeped me out when I thought it up. Seriously, Lane, I’m very glad that you liked it and I’m very grateful for your reading it. Thanks again.
Extremely cool! Reads like a perfect episode for the Twilight Zone. Just wondering how it ends. Loved it!
Thanks for reading it, Kevin, and thank you for the kind words. I actually sort of scared myself when I was writing it, but had a blast with it, anyway. So, how do YOU think it ends?
Oh my gosh! Shades of Ray Bradbury and other favorite short story writers that I picked up reading from my dad. This is my favorite of your short stories!
Oh, wow, Lisa – thank you SO much! I am beyond honored. I’m so happy that you liked it! I really enjoyed writing it, and I really sort of like it, too. Thank you once again – I really, really appreciate your kind praise, Lisa.