The Garlic Knot

My name is Wendell Cameron, I'm twenty-eight years old, and until last Sunday I thought the strangest thing in my life was the smell of transmission fluid that never fully comes out of your hands. I've worked at Navarro Auto Repair since I was 22. It's steady work. You lift a thing, the thing is heavy, you fix the thing, somebody pays you. I like problems with edges on them.

My wife Hillary is twenty-nine and she runs the front of house at Sofia's Trattoria, which is a cramped Italian place on the corner of Delmore and 9th. Red-checkered tablecloths, a neon sign in the window that buzzes loud enough to hear from the parking lot. She started waiting tables there when we were dating, worked up to manager, and she talks about the restaurant the way other people talk about a kid. Sunday brunch service is her whole world. So when her phone rang at six in the morning on that Sunday, I already knew what it was going to be before she said it.

"Bruce called in sick," she said, sitting up in bed with the phone still against her ear. "Sick sick or fake sick, who knows. Sofia's already in the kitchen and she's in one of her moods. I need somebody on the steam table by seven."

"You need me to cook."

"I need you to warm things and put things on plates. There's a difference and you know there's a difference." She was already pulling on her jeans with the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear. "I'll owe you one. A big one. I'll do the dishes for a month."

"You already owe me a month of dishes from March."

"Two months, then." She hung up on me, which is pretty normal.

I don't cook. Let me be upfront about that, except that's a lie, because I do cook, badly, at home, mostly things that start in a freezer bag. But I'm not useless around a kitchen. I've picked up kitchen-adjacent skills over the years just from eating dinner at Sofia's staff table after Hillary's late shifts, and also because Sofia hired me six years ago to do one shift a month as a prep cook when she's short, which almost never happens because nobody ever quits Sofia's. The pay is bad and Sofia feeds you like you're family. So I said yes, because the answer to Hillary is always yes, we've been married two years and I've learned that.

The kitchen at Sofia's is about the size of my garage, if my garage had a walk-in cooler, a steam table, and a grease trap the owners of the building pretend not to know about. The exhaust hood roars over everything. Sofia stands at the saute station like a general, five foot nothing, wooden spoon in her hand, using it to point at things. She looked at me when I came in at seven and said, "Don't touch my knife roll," and that was the entire training.

The first two hours were fine, honestly. I warmed things. I put things on plates. I learned that the steam table has hot spots and cold spots, like a car with a bad thermostat. Hillary came back once to drop off a ticket and kissed my cheek and said I looked cute in an apron, which I'll take.

Then at about ten, the back door opened and Claude came in.

You meet a lot of suppliers working at a restaurant, and they're all a little odd, but Claude is odd in a way I've never had a word for until recently. He's some kind of age in his forties, tall, gray coat no matter the weather, and he's been delivering to Sofia for twelve years, which is longer than I've known the place. Mushrooms, squabs, live eels, things that Sofia pays cash for and never explains. He carries crates like they weigh nothing. He calls everyone "friend" and it never sounds friendly.

"Morning, friend," he said, setting a crate down on the steel prep table with a thump. "The eels arrived lively."

Sofia paid him without looking up. Hillary was in the dining room. I was alone by the cooler with my coffee, and that's when I heard the eels.

Now, I want to be careful here, because I know how this reads. But the crate was talking. Not the crate itself, the eels inside it, a low wet muttering, and when I leaned over the slats, I could pick out words. They were insulting each other. One of them said the other one smelled like pond scum, which, fair, they were eels. Another one said something about Claude's mother that I'm not going to repeat. They held opinions, is what I'm saying. They had a lot of opinions and no volume control.

"Claude," I said. "Your eels are talking."

"They do that." He was coiling up his delivery strap, not even looking at me.

"They're insulting each other."

"They insult everybody. You, me, the fishmonger in the city, the Pope, probably. Eels are honest, friend. It's their one virtue." He finally looked at me, and he had the look of a man who has been waiting for exactly this conversation for a while. "Go on. Flip one back on the ice. They hate that."

I don't know why I did it. That's the honest part. I reached into the crate, and the eel I grabbed was about two feet long, slick and heavy and cool, and it said, clear as anything, "Put me down, you big-thumb idiot," in a voice like a man talking through a wet rag. I flipped it onto the bed of crushed ice at the bottom of the crate the way Claude said, and it swore at me for a solid thirty seconds. Real creativity in the swearing. Then it wriggled back into the pile of its cousins and kept muttering.

I stood there with my hands hanging at my sides. The exhaust hood roared. Somewhere out front, Hillary laughed at something a table said.

"Twelve years I've been coming here," Claude said, "and you're the first one who heard them before I said a word about it. Most people need it explained. Most people need a lot explained."

"I need a lot explained right now."

"Sure. Here's some." He leaned against the prep table with his arms crossed, and I noticed for the first time that his coat didn't have a single crease in it anywhere, which is not a thing coats do. "I deal in more than groceries, friend. I deal in skins. Skins that fit. I could put you in that eel's skin for one hour, and you'd wear it like a coat, and you'd keep your own mind the whole time. You'd hear what eels hear. You'd feel what the water feels to them."

"That's insane."

"Probably. Here's my wager. One hour in the skin, no screaming, and I'll cover every fish order Sofia needs for a month, free, top quality. You scream, and you work my Sunday deliveries for a month, no pay, and we never speak of it."

"That's a terrible bet."

"It is. It's a terrible bet and you're going to take it, because you're bored, friend. I've watched you for six years. A man who can hear eels insult the Pope is a man who needs the rest of his life to be more interesting." He smiled, and his teeth were a little too even. "One hour. Starts when the skin closes over you."

I looked at the crate. One of the eels had gone quiet and was watching me through the slats with a small black eye, and I swear on my truck it nodded at me.

I should have said no. I want that written down somewhere, that I knew I should have said no. But Hillary had called me cute in an apron and Bruce was probably hungover at home, and the truth is Claude was right, I was bored, I'd been bored for years, and here was a door out of it with wet slats and a bad attitude.

"Okay," I said. "One hour. But if I grow gills, you're explaining them to my wife."

"Deal," Claude said, and reached into the crate.

Claude picked the eel up out of the crate like it weighed nothing, and it swore at him too, which apparently was just how it talked to everyone. He carried it into the walk-in cooler and set it on a shelf between a bucket of fennel and a case of butter, and I followed because my legs had decided to go along with this before my brain finished arguing.

"Straight through," he said, and made a gesture with both hands that I can only describe as pulling a zipper in the air.

There was no zipper sound. There was a sound like stepping into a puddle, and then the cooler got bigger, and then everything got bigger, and then I understood that I was on the floor of it, and I was about two feet long.

The first thing I felt was cold. Not cooler cold, mud cold, the deep kind of cold that lives under rocks in a river and never leaves. My skin drank it in. That's the only way I can put it. I was built to drink it in, and I had spent my whole life not knowing that, which is a strange thing to learn at twenty-eight in a restaurant walk-in with a head of lettuce watching you.

"Time starts now," Claude said from very far above, which was just him standing there, but everything was very far above.

I want to describe the hour honestly, because people would ask about it later and I never found the words. Here's my best try. Being an eel is mostly patience. You don't have hands, you don't have a to-do list, you don't have a phone buzzing with a guy named Del at the shop asking if you looked at a carburetor yet. You have a long body that knows how to be a long body, and water-sense running down your whole length, and a jaw that opens wider than you'd think. I slithered back behind the shelving into the pantry corner where the floor was damp and dark, and it felt like home in a way that scared me more than anything else about it. The cold dampness wasn't unpleasant. It was correct. Somewhere in my new little eel chest I understood that mud is a fine place to be and I had been wasting my whole life upright.

I pushed along the baseboard, under the gap behind the potato bin, and the pantry felt like a canyon system. Every draft was a current. I could read the room by feel, the fridge motor humming through the tile, the drip from the ice machine, a mouse path along the wall that I followed for a while out of professional curiosity. The mouse path smelled fantastic, by the way. I did not act on that. I want credit for that.

I heard things too. Not words like the crate eels, more the shape of things. The exhaust hood through the wall like surf. Sofia's wooden spoon knocking twice on the steam table edge. Hillary's voice out front, muffled, doing her Sunday brunch thing, calling back an order, and hearing her through eel ears did something to my head I still can't fully sort out. She sounded like weather. Good weather.

The hour ran out with a soft feeling like a sock turning itself inside out, and then I was sitting on the cooler floor in my own knees, my coveralls loose around me, cold air on my human face, breathing like a man again.

Claude was leaning on the door frame. "Well?"

"I didn't scream," I said. My voice came out rough. "So do I get the fish order thing, or what?"

"You get the fish order thing." He had his arms crossed and that even-toothed grin. "How was it? People always want to know how it was."

"Wet," I said. "And quiet. Mostly quiet." I got up, and my legs worked fine, which was somehow the most disturbing part. "And I could hear the ice machine through the floor. Like the whole building was talking through its feet."

"That's how everything talks, friend. Most skins just muffle it." He wrote something in a little book that hadn't been in his coat a second before. "Same time next Sunday, maybe. I get some interesting stock. You never know what you'll hear in it."

He was gone before I could answer, out the back door with his crate, and the eels were muttering something that was probably about me.

I finished the shift as a normal man would. I burned two crab cakes because I kept thinking about the gap behind the potato bin, and Sofia whacked me with the spoon for it, and I deserved it. At three we closed, and Hillary counted her drawer with her reading glasses pushed up on her head, and I stood there at the hostess stand shifting my weight like a guy who had something to say, because I had something to say.

"So," I said. "Weird morning."

"Weird how? Besides Bruce ghosting us and you burning crab cakes, which I heard about through the wall." She clicked the register shut. "You've been acting funny since your delivery guy left. And you've got mud on your knee and you haven't been under a car since yesterday."

She had gotten good at reading me over two years of marriage. Six years of knowing me total, married two, and somewhere in there she'd built a map of my tells. I was a book with a clear cover.

"There's a guy," I said. "Claude. Delivers for Sofia. He does... other things. And I kind of. Okay, I spent an hour as an eel today. On purpose. It was a bet."

I had rehearsed several versions of this on the drive home in my head, none of which went past her reaction. None of them had prepared me for her actual reaction, which was to take her glasses off, set them down slowly, and say, "Like a whole eel? Moving around?"

"Slithering. In the pantry. Yeah."

"How big?"

"Two feet, give or take."

She sat down on the hostess stand stool. Then she stood back up. Then she said, "Okay, walk me through it, because I need the whole thing," and I walked her through it, the talking crate, the bet, the mud-cold hour behind the potato bin, the mouse trail, hearing her voice like weather. I told it all standing in a closed restaurant at three fifteen on a Sunday while she made a