Bronko and Lena catch the Q train on Canal and ride it to 57th and 7th. Lena usually enjoys the train, the motion and the time to herself, even if that last part is often interrupted by some rando who doesn’t understand headphones and a book are popular international symbols for “leave me the fuck alone.”
This particular ride, however, and her enjoyment of it are both hampered by the fact they each have a fifty-pound leg wrapped in wax paper slung over their shoulders. They’re also carrying their individual knife cases, and Bronko has a thermal satchel slung from his opposite shoulder.
“What did these legs come off of, Chef, a T. rex?” Lena asks, somewhere beneath Times Square.
“Ram,” Bronko answers.
Her eyes somehow manage to bulge and narrow at the same time.
“These are ram legs?”
“Yep.”
“Like, a dude sheep?”
“Yes’m.”
“Where the hell are there rams with legs this big?”
“Nowhere anybody vacations nowadays.”
Lena just shakes her head, shifting her steadily weakening frame under the giant appendage. Her next question is obvious, but then, she realizes, so is the answer to that question.
“Ritter?” she asks flatly.
Bronko nods.
“They get around, don’t they?”
“That’s their job.”
“Has anyone in Stocking & Receiving ever died doing that job?”
Bronko sighs. “Tarr, folks die doin’ every job there is. Crab fisherman or cubicle worker, it just takes one really fucked-up day.”
“So, does that mean ‘yes’?”
“It means there’s a lotta implied context in your tone I don’t rightly agree with, and I’ll thank you to let that be the final word on the subject.”
“Yes, Chef,” Lena says, without sarcasm.
“Thank you.”
They disembark, carrying their giant cones of carefully folded wax paper like a very fastidious caveman and cavewoman. Instead of walking across to the subway exit, Bronko leads Lena down the warning-yellow edge to the very end of the platform. Her steps slow as she watches his broad back begin to descend the unseen access stairs that lead into the subway tunnel.
“Chef?”
“Just c’mon,” he instructs her. “We’re not servin’ in the station.”
“Yeah, this seems much more sanitary, Chef,” Lena answers back, voice trembling just a little.
She reluctantly follows, her pulse racing and her glance moving suspiciously all around her, and she proceeds to violate every rule of subway patronage by trespassing beyond the platform. No one stops them, but she almost jumps as she spots, in the darkness below, a worker in MTA coveralls and a safety helmet and vest. He’s watching them descend. Lena’s body stiffens beneath her burden and adrenaline causes her veins to beat against her skin like the paddles of a pinball machine.
To her surprise—and immediate relief—the worker simply nods and gives a half-salute to Bronko as they pass in the tunnel below.
They follow a cement ledge several feet removed from the subway tracks, a few dull orange safety lights occasionally throwing their shadows against the wall, but otherwise they walk in darkness. Lena isn’t sure how far; she knows only that she’s following the back of Bronko’s chef’s smock like some great moving wall of white standing out against the pitch.
“I think this is it,” she hears Bronko mutter, more to himself than to her.
Lena stops walking. “You think?”
“There ain’t exactly street numbers down here, Tarr. C’mon.”
Bronko rounds a corner Lena didn’t even realize was there and quite literally disappears into the wall of the tunnel.
She finds herself jogging frantically to catch up with him, not wanting to be left guideless in the dark. She bounds around what turns out to be a narrow slit cut into the wall, almost like a smaller access tunnel. She spots the white of Bronko’s smock and follows it through the cramped space to where it ends in an equally cramped iron door.
“Ha!” Bronko triumphantly proclaims. “I was right!”
He pushes open the door with a great protesting shriek of grinding metal and ducks inside.
Lena follows, careful not to scrape the product over her shoulder against the walls or doorframe.
It’s some kind of disused workers’ quarters, or at least it appears so to Lena at first glance. There are cots draped with drab olive blankets and flattened pillows in the corners. Rows of small square lockers line the walls. A maroon patina has overtaken patches of the lockers’ original metal, but they seem to have suffered solely from age, not neglect. There isn’t a millimeter of dust covering any surface in the space. You’d almost have to describe it as clean.
Five bow-legged wooden stools surround a communal table in the middle of the quarters. There’s another angular table shoved up against one wall, beside a cracked porcelain sink. Not far from that is an old wood-burning stove with a pipe as thick and heavy as a small tree trunk running from its potbelly into the low ceiling of the quarters.
“So, is it time to ask who or what we’re feeding?” Lena asks.
Bronko hefts the ram’s leg from over his shoulder and onto the tabletop near the sink. He places his knife case and thermal satchel he’s also carrying beside it.
“Trolls,” he casually informs her.
Lena practically slams her ram’s leg down on the table beside his. “Trolls?”
Bronko nods, opening his knife case.
“Trolls.”
“All right, then,” Lena says, and asks no more.
She finds she’s become comfortably numb to receiving this kind of information.
“Butcher that big sumbitch,” Bronko instructs her. “Big-ass strip cuts, thick as you like.”
“Yes, Chef.”
Lena unzips her knife case and removes her largest, sharpest filet knife. She carefully unwraps the large, raw piece of ram and sets to work breaking it down.
Watching Bronko butcher meat is like watching a master surgeon perform an operation in a battlefield tent. His hands move with urgency, faster than she can keep track, but also with mechanical precision that defies such speed.
Lena works far slower but no less meticulously. While her cuts take four times as long to complete as Bronko’s, each one is machine-perfect.
When they’re finished, Bronko unzips the thermal satchel and begins piling nearly three-feet-long, thoroughly cleaned femur bones between the cuts of meat.
“Do you have a cleaver?” he asks her.
Lena half-grins. “Don’t you, Chef?”
In answer, there’s a whisper of metal kissing nylon and Bronko unsheathes a razor-sharp meat cleaver with an ergonomic handle.
Lena quickly realizes the handle bears Bronko’s name and it’s actually from his own line of cutlery.
“I asked you, Tarr.”
Lena nods, reaching into her knife case and retrieving not a meat cleaver but an actual full-sized camping hatchet.
“Jesus,” he says. “You and Cindy should really hang more.”
“We’ve been trying to, actually.”
“I guess nothin’ brings women in an office environment together like a succubus ensnaring all the men in said office and trying to murder everyone.”
“Most of us, anyway. Have you talked to Jett since all of that went down? She was pretty fucked up.”
Bronko only nods, offering no further comment on the subject.
“Break these fuckers here down lengthwise,” he says, referring to the femur bones. “We’re going to roast and extract the marrow.”
Lena doesn’t question him or the massive size of the bones. She simply sets to work hacking through the centers of each, using a small steel mallet from her knife case to strike the back of the hatchet after each initial cut. She separates the bones vertically into three-foot halves.
As Lena prepares the femurs, Bronko is shoving wood into the hundred-year-old wood-burning stove and starting a fire in its iron belly. While he waits for the flames to catch and consume the wood, Bronko busies himself prepping the ram’s meat. He coats every inch of each steak with a spice rub of his own creation.
“Straight salt for the marrow, Chef?” Lena asks him.
Bronko nods, and she sets to sprinkling aggressive amounts of salt over the fatty marrow inside each exposed half of femur bone.
When the fire’s stoked to a temperature that suits Bronko, they begin feeding their prepared product into the furnace to cook.
“I hope we’re feeding a platoon,” Lena remarks.
Bronko snorts. “Something like that.”
They come shambling in forty-five minutes later, as if drawn by the smells filling the subterranean lair. Lena hears the first one before she sees it, as the creature is forced to violently stuff its own frame through that tiny iron doorway.
Trolls look a lot like nightclub bouncers from New York City in the 1970s. Their eyebrows are competing with their scalp in a never-ending volume contest while the hair on their chests and arms battles for third place. They’re all over eight feet tall, with gargantuan torsos, short bowed legs, and thick, knotted arms that literally drag their knuckles against the ground as they walk.
“Smells like Saturday,” the first one through the door says in a voice so deep and garbled, it might be coming from under water.
Bronko laughs as he begins pulling smoking meat from the smoldering iron confines of the furnace stove.
“Tarr, this is Hongo. Hongo, this is Lena Tarr. She’s helping me with my rounds this week.”
“Hope you cook better than this puhtruhumph,” Hongo says, and whether the last word is a pejorative in his own language or just chomped-up English, Lena isn’t sure.
Four more follow him. Each troll is clad in ragged overalls. Their feet are bare and crusted as hard as granite. Hongo is pulling two large burlap sacks behind him, one of which is beginning to soak through and leave a viscous trail on the floor. One of his compatriots is carrying what looks like a makeshift battleaxe, a chewed wooden club with the end of a roadwork sign driven horizontally through one end. The metal sign, which reads BUMP, has had its octagonal edges filed and serrated menacingly.
The trolls crowd around the table in the middle of the space, and Lena can’t deny there’s a comic joy in watching them all balance their gargantuan selves atop those tiny wooden stools.
“How go the wars, boys and girls?” Bronko asks the room at large.
A chorus of weary grunts and groans and a brief, fearsome growl answers him.
“Wars?” Lena says, low enough to keep between the two of them.
Almost as if in answer to her question, Hongo slams one the bags he’s carrying onto the tabletop. Its contents spill out, a mixture of MetroCards and small coins Lena realizes are discontinued subway tokens. The other bag he flings expertly and almost without thinking into one corner, where it hits the wall with a wet splat before half-sliding, half-falling into a large plastic trash receptacle.
“A lot of folks,” Bronko explains, quietly, “just plain regular human folks, live down here in these tunnels, y’know. There’s practically a whole other city underneath our city. Nobody up there cares. Nobody’s lookin’ out for ’em. They’re forgotten. Think about everything you’ve seen, Tarr. What d’you imagine most nonhuman races would call a dark, enclosed, underground city filled with people nobody topside cares about or will miss?”
“A buffet,” Lena says immediately.
Bronko nods, stacking medium-rare ram steaks and bone vessels containing beautifully caramelized roasted marrow several feet high atop an ancient cast-iron skillet with the circumference of a car windshield.
“Think of trolls like the World Wildlife Fund, only humans who live under bridges and in tunnels are the wildlife.”
With that, Bronko hefts the skillet and carries it across the room to the communal table, dropping it like a bomb on the center of the tabletop.
The five trolls set upon the feast as if it’s still held inside the body of living prey trying to evade them.
Bronko just manages to step clear of the feeding frenzy, returning to the furnace, where he begins tamping down the fire.
Lena folds her arms, leaning toward Bronko as she watches the quintet devour the meal she’s helped prepare.
“I thought . . . in the story . . . the troll under the bridge was the bad guy and the rams were the good guys.”
“Rams are dumb animals, Tarr,” Bronko assures her. “And they’re assholes.”
“And the MTA . . .” she trails off.
“They pay the toll. Besides Allensworth, transportation authorities are probably the most well-versed governmental-type body when it comes to the netherworld. And trolls are big-time hoarders. Doesn’t much matter what, gold or worthless tokens. But they still gotta eat. And it’s not exactly like they can head up to Union Square and hit Taco Bell.”
“Does the MTA pick up your tab?”
Bronko shrugs. “I invoice Allensworth. The fuck does he care?”
“So that means we’re on your time right now, Chef?”
He nods. “And yours. Is it worth it?”
As Lena looks on, Hongo shoves half the length of a roasted ram’s femur in his mouth and snaps the bone in half with no effort, crunching it between his massive, snaggletooth jaws.
“There was a time I could’ve ended up living down here, with those people you were talking about.”
“So, that’s a ‘yes?’”
Lena nods.
“Good!” Bronk pronounces. “Glad ya feel that way. You’re on cleanup. I’m tired.”
He laughs at the look she shoots up at him then, deep and genuine, and it’s the first real bout of laughter she’s seen possess her executive chef in months.
To Lena, it’s a sound more than worth scrubbing down a few dirty pans.