Dark Maze

chef’s clothes with black hairs curling out from his collar and cuffs.
    “Hey, you see the picture of Luis in the paper, eh, Hock?” Pete said, as he reached our table. Wanda set down the plates with her customary groans, then she waddled off to another booth. “My own busboy—his picture in the newspaper! Oh, he got something on his ball! Like you, Hock, when you was a boy around here, remember? Hey, maybe Luis got so much on his ball he buy me out some day.“
    “You without a coffee shop?” I said. “Where would you spend all your time, Pete?”
    “I give up this city with the criminals! I leave all to you. Old Pete retire in nice sunny Florida.”
    Not having the heart to tell him about nice sunny Florida these days, I asked, “Where is our bright young man of the hour this morning?”
    “Luis? He work late today. Night shift.”
    It finally occurred to me by the way Pete was talking to me while he was mostly looking at Ruby that maybe I was not the mam reason he had come by. I took a bite of my eggs on a slice of toast. Pete stared at Ruby and smiled. I said, “Pete, I’d like you to meet Ruby Flagg.”
    Pete took her hand and kissed it and said, “I don’t like I see Hock alone by himself so much.”
    “Neither do I,” Ruby said.
    Pete said to me, “She is such a pretty plum. You don’t do nothing to make her run away, you hear?”
    Ruby said, “Don’t worry, Pete, he’s still got a lot on his ball.”
    “This one I like her okay, Hock,” Pete said, beaming at me and then Ruby. “But she don’t eat so good like you-Bring your Ruby here, I feed your jewel right.“
    “ I will,” I said.
    Pete slapped my shoulder with one of his big hammer hands. “You are lucky man!” he said. Then he returned to his kitchen, trailing behind him the aromatic wake of fried onions.
    “I’m glad he approves,” Ruby said.
    “So am I. He’s important to me. I’ve known Pete just about forever,” I said. “Sooner or later, he’ll tell you my biggest secret, which he’s already told everybody else in the neighborhood.”
    “And, the secret is?”
    “Pete claims I’m his long-lost son. From the days he was a young cook in the Greek navy, and he jumped ship at Dublin one fateful day, then took up with a colleen who only broke his heart by stealing away to America with his baby boy. Which brought him here, of course, in search of myself.”
    Ruby laughed, and so did I. Then she spooned up a small bit of her peach-colored melon. I watched it slide between her lips. And for a wonderful second or two, I shared Pete’s myth of carefree days in the sun, Ruby and I, somewhere far beyond New York.
    “No wonder you eventually came home to Hell’s Kitchen,” Ruby said. “Your heart always lived here, didn’t it? The wonder is you ever left.”
    Yes, that was true. Then why had I never uttered, even to myself, this obvious truth of me? And how had I lived so many faithful years with the likes of Judy McKelvey, with whom I could never share a proper shame for our common childhood streets, no matter how I tried?
    “I remember the first time I was ever in this very place,” I said.
    “Tell me.”
    “My mother took me to the doctor that day. It wasn’t pleasant, but I was brave. Afterward she brought me here to Pete’s, for a reward—a Coca-Cola and an egg-salad sandwich. And that was the finest meal I’ve ever had. Thinking about it now, I can still taste it.”
    “Some day I want to hear all about your mother and the two of you living here. And your father, too...“
    Ruby struck my hollow place.
    “... I mean your real father, Hock. The handsome soldier in the picture frame, who looks so much like you. What about him?”
    My mother’s words were ever the same—repeated exactly so—when I was brave enough to ask about a man she would never mention; whenever I would simply ask, “What about Papa?”
    “Your papa went off in a mist, that’s all there is to it; it hurts too much to speak of him as if he was ever flesh and blood and bone to me.” That much, and little more, until her boy’s bravery faded. She died when I was a full-grown man, in my first week of being a cop. Among other things, my mother left me the picture of a young soldier never returned from his war, and my own hollow place.
    I told Ruby all of this while she stared quietly at me.
    Then she said, “I’m sorry, Hock, but shame on your mother.”
    Had I not said this same secret thing to myself?
    “Your father