sanitation

Sanitation by Barry Rachin SMASHWORDS EDITION ***** Published by: Barry Rachin on Smashwords Sanitation Copyright © 2012 by Barry Rachin Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. ***** When Hal McCarthy arrived at agility training, a coal-black Scottish terrier with stubby legs and a huge tuft of chin hair resembling a Fu Manchu was negotiating the course. The squat dog hurried effortlessly through the six-weave training chute, cleared the bar jump before heading off in the direction of the teeter totter. The dog’s owner, a woman in her early thirties, waved a treat in front of the pooch’s nose. Leading the dog to the center, she pressed gently on the plank. The raised portion settled to the floor and the dog promptly rushed off toward the thirty-foot tunnel.

“Nice run,” Hal noted when the woman exited the course. The Scottish terrier was wellbehaved if somewhat skittish. Maria Santos warned him a week earlier not to pet the dog, who was food-aggressive and tended to snap at outstretched hands.

“He lost focus on the final turn.” Like her shaggy companion, the Hispanic woman was short and squat with a broad forehead. On the final turn, the dog was supposed to leap through a vinyl tire suspended several inched off the ground, but the high-strung dog took a detour, waddling back in the thirty-foot, orange tunnel. “What do you do for a living?” Maria asked.

A toy poodle, extremely fast and skittish, was racing about the course. “Up until retiring last August,” Hal explained, “I worked for the health department inspecting food facilities.”

The woman eyed him curiously. “I’m opening a diner on Howard Avenue.”

“The old Breakfast Nook?” The woman nodded. “We used to inspect the place. They had a problem with their dishwasher.” Fifty feet away, the poodle was snaking through the training chute effortlessly en route to the bar jump. From previous experience Hal knew that the tiny dog would be in rare form for another twenty minutes or so until he tired and his attention span melted away to nothing.

“Water wasn’t hot enough,” Hal picked up on the thread of his previous remark. “The previous owner had to install a booster to get the dishwasher temperature up to code.”

“Yes, he mentioned something to that effect.” Maria noted. “Who does the inspections now?”

The toy poodle scampered around the final turn. Hal’s Lhasa Apso, Teddy, would be going next. Reaching down he checked the dog’s collar. “Donna Hadley took over when I retired.”

“And what’s Ms Hadley like?”

Hal rose to his feet and began leading the Lhasa toward the gate. “Finds fault with everything... a restaurant owner’s worst nightmare!”

Later that night at home Hal took Teddy outside one last time to pee. The dog was sure to sleep like the dead after the hour-long workout. The Hispanic woman knew next to nothing about sanitation or the Minotaur’s maze of health regulations governing food service. She had never worked in the field or taken a single course at the community college. Inside the first minute, Donna Hadley would tease the truth out Ms Santos then set to work dismembering the Breakfast Nook with one petty code violation after another. Too bad! She seemed nice enough, even if her Scottish terrier was a bit high-strung. ***** The following Tuesday, Hal ate a leisurely breakfast then drove downtown, parking the Toyota near the public library. The Breakfast Nook was closed up tight, tables and chairs pushed against the far wall. Behind the counter a stout elderly woman was bent over the grill. Hal rapped on the plate glass door. “Not open.” Hunched over the food, the woman never bothered to look.

“A week from Monday… come back then.” In response to the noise, Maria Santos emerged from a storage area, came and unlocked the door.

“Just wanted to see how you were getting along.” Hal surveyed the room. The floor was spotless, the Formica counters and tables equally clean. “I brought you this.” He handed her a thick, blue book. On the glossy cover a chef decked out in culinary white was chopping celery on a cutting board. “It’s the National Restaurant Association Servsafe manual.”

Maria held the book lightly with her fingertips and her face assumed a look of reverence as she surveyed the table of contents. “I’ll need to know all this?”

“Pretty much.” Hal gestured with his eyes. “What’s she preparing over there?”

“Home fries… my mother will be helping out in the kitchen. She wanted to familiarize herself with the grill.”

Hal edged closer. The older woman, whose grayish hair was tied back in a bun, smiled over her thick shoulder. “Well, there’s a problem right off the bat.”

“Excuse me?”

“What happened to her finger?” He gestured toward the grill, where the elder Mrs. Santos was flipping a pile of pearlescent home fires with a metal spatula.

“Nicked it dicing vegetables the other day... a tiny scratch. The cut’s almost completely healed over.”

“Yes but, a health inspector could shut your place down for something as minor as that.”

Maria’s face dropped. She said something to her mother in Spanish; the woman’s affable manner quickly dissipated. Laying the spatula aside, she disappeared into a back room only to emerge a moment later with a band-aid covering the cut. Returning to the grill she retrieved the spatula and lifted a pile of potatoes that, in her absence, had darkened about the edges.

“Stoppppp!” Hal shouted. The older woman promptly dropped the spatula scattering its contents on the clean floor. “Your mother just made a minor problem ten times worse,” Hal explained in a phlegmatic tone. “According to state law, all food handlers must cover cuts with both a band aide and single-use disposable glove or finger cot.”

Maria stooped down and helped her mother clean the mess. All the while the older woman was speaking furiously, non-stop in her native tongue. Ignoring her daughter’s placating gestures, Mrs. Santos no longer bothered to acknowledge Hal’s presence in the restaurant.

“Show me the refrigerator.”

“Why?” Maria replied in a beleaguered tone.

“It’s one of the first places health inspector’s look.” Maria led him into the supply room and cracked the refrigerator wide open. “Who lined the shelves with aluminum foil?”

“I did.”

“Get rid of it and everything else that block the flow of refrigerated air through the unit.”

Hal lifted the lid on a plastic container. “Chicken and all meat products are routinely stored on the lowest shelf so juices don’t accidentally drip onto fresh produce or prepared foods.” “An outbreak of Salmonella or E. coli could put you out of business over night.”

“You should invest in a set of professional, temperature gauges – immersion for soups, infrared and thermocouple for cooking surfaces and general culinary.” Judging by her panicky expression, Hal doubted she understood what he was saying. He pointed at the three-bay sink.

“And I didn’t notice any commercial-grade sanitizing solution.” When there was no reply, he added, “You’ll need a formal system for monitoring employee training, hand washing procedures, cross-contamination controls...”

Back out in the main dining door, Mrs. Santos was glaring at the retired food inspector as though he was an emissary from hell. She handed him a plate of home fries and a fork. Hal teased a couple of potato wedges onto the tangs of the fork. “What did you use for seasoning?”

“Dried parsley, paprika, thyme, nutmeg, salt and pepper,” the woman replied then burst into an extended harangue, the bulk of which was in Spanish and directed at her daughter.

“What did she say?”

“She said,” Maria translated, “that the herbs must be dry not fresh. Heat from the grill releases the subtle flavors. By using only a tiny pinch of each, the various, seasonings intertwine, marry so to speak, without overpowering the dish.”

“My wife used to cook home fries,” Hal mused, “but they never tasted like this.”

“She doesn’t cook anymore?”

“Died… a year ago,” Hal clarified. “Thirty years we were married.” ***** To insure a smooth transition, the Brandenburg Department of Health brought Donna Hadley on board a full month before Hal left his position. The only child of a neurosurgeon who owned a three-story brownstone in the posh Chestnut Hill section of Newton, Massachusetts, Donna’s family maintained a vacation home on Block Island.

“We had a thirty-foot sloop...stabled horses. It was a bucolic existence, like something out of a Victorian novel,” Hal’s replacement gushed. The twosome had just returned from inspecting a Chinese restaurant. A dead roof rat lay near the dumpster; a strong oily smell – usually a sign of cockroaches – laced the air in the dry storage area, but otherwise the business was in compliance. Pest control had visited the facility a month earlier.

“Pride and Prejudice,” Hal offered.

“Yes, exactly that sort of rustic bliss.” Donna Hadley was a tall woman with a wide, mannish jaw. Boasting a masters degree in public health from Stanford, she struck Hal as rather unimaginative, the sort of brittle-minded hack who, despite a 3.5 grade average, seldom puts her cleverness to proper use. They had arrived back at the department of health where Hal was writing up his report. “All summer long, I rode bareback through meadows of tiger lilies, salt spray roses and wildflowers. From June when school got out straight through to Labor Day, I never wore shoes.”

Hal thought the last remark a bit of a stretch, but obviously the youthful Donna Hadley lived a blessed existence far removed from the humdrum monotony that most middle-class working stiffs endured. “Our summer home was a mile and a half from the Southeast Lighthouse. A favorite tourist spot, it draws thousands of visitors to Block Island each year.”

Hal had toured the structure during a trip to the island a few years back when his wife was alive. The lighthouse featured a six-sided, red brick base leading up to a formidable steel enclosure which housed the light element. An attached, three-story building with scalloped windows was only slightly shorter than the massive light itself. “There is so much history in the region. The area around Block Island has been the site of numerous shipwrecks, including the Steamer Larchmont in 1907.” “And, of course,” Donna Hadley was tripping over her words, “the wreck of the Princess Augusta, also known as the Palatine ship, which was later immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem, The Wreck of the Palatine”. Raising an arm in a theatrical gesture, she recited from memory in a stilted, breathy monotone.

“Circled by waters that never freeze, Beaten by billow and swept by breeze, Lieth the island of Manisees,…”

“Very pithy!” Hal responded when the woman finished the poem. He felt like throwing up. This narcissistic clod who spent her childhood summers galloping frenetically around an

historic island off the Atlantic coast, clearly considered herself royalty, an aristocratic breed apart.

“What about the Norwegian rat?”

“Roof rat,” Hal corrected. Roof rats were physically smaller and darker. “The dumpster was properly covered with no refuse lying about.”

“And the cockroaches?” Donna pressed.

“We didn’t actually see any bugs, and according to the pest control log, the place was fumigated recently.”

“I see.”

Hall didn’t think the woman saw much of anything. On the contrary, she was spoiling for a fight – wanted to make her mark as a no-nonsense, upwardly mobile professional. But the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Lee, who enjoyed a respectable track record, had always been cooperative and forthcoming. More to the point, no history of food poisoning or complaints associated with the facility existed.

“A while back,” Hal noted in a flat monotone, “slaughterhouses in Kentucky were forced to make expensive renovations or go out of business.”

“Where did you learn this?”

“An essay… Wendell Berry.” He rose and went to the window. The last of the winter snows had melted away, crocuses tentatively thrusting delicate purple shoots up through the frozen earth. “These slaughterhouses were small, mom-and-pop operations. They didn’t process meat for the wholesale, commercial market but did custom work for local farmers… exclusively for their own, private use.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Donna Hadley asked in a decidedly pinched tone.

“Local authorities,” he ignored the question, “passed even stricter legislation regulating creameries and poultry. Grocers couldn’t accept farmers’ eggs or chickens. Small-scale dairy operations closed down over night.”

“The public has to be protected.” The woman, who made no effort to mask her disdain, glowered.

“Protected from what? No one ever got sick. The meat they brought home from the local slaughterhouses fed immediate families. It wasn’t a money-making proposition.” “Maybe a farmer kept a cow or two… partitioned off a milking stall in the barn with wooden partitions. So bacteria didn’t grow, milk was cooled in containers suspended in tubs of frigid well water. No one got sick. The locals knew what the hell they were doing. It’s what their parents did and their parent’s parents going back generations.”

“The greater good,” Ms. Hadley insisted by way of rebuttal, “trumps personal consideration.”

Hal’s mind wandered back to the Hong Kong Restaurant and its owner, Mr., Lee. Donna Hadley was untroubled by life’s ambiguities, nuanced shades of gray. A brittle-minded bureaucrat with a chip on her shoulder, the damage perpetrated over the course of a professional lifetime would be exponential.

“Circled by waters that never freeze, Beaten by billow and swept by breeze, Lieth the island of Manisees,…”

The woman, with the gilded spoon between her middle-aged lips was a governmentsanctioned ignoramus. ***** Tuesday Hal clipped Teddy’s nails and trimmed the thicket of bristly hairs around his bulbous eyes. The previous spring the crazed dog ran headlong into a thicket of bramble and came away with a thorn on his eye. The vet cleansed the wound and applied a topical antibiotic.

Now a faint scar was visible on the cornea.

Tuesday evening Maria Santos was waiting outside when he arrived for agility training.

“The aluminum foil… I didn’t realize it was the wrong thing to do.” The Scottish terrier by her side lifted his leg and a stream of steamy, fluid gushed from his hind quarters. Without waiting for the dog to finish relieving himself, Teddy promptly sniffed the dog’s privates.

“An innocent mistake,” Hal observed. “Not the end of the world.”

“The Servsafe book… we open in a week and a half. I can’t possibly read through four hundred pages and makes sense of it in such a short period of time.” She looked utterly miserable.

The manicky terrier inspected Teddy’s anus and the Lhasa returned the favor. “Forget about the book. I’ll mentor you… make sure that the Breakfast Nook is up to code.” Hal rubbed his chin with a liver-spotted hand then scratched a hairy ear. “I’ll teach you to clean, rinse, sanitize and air dry all the prep surfaces, hot-hold foods at the proper temperature, inspect deliveries for damaged foods.”

Maria looked the balding man full in the face. “I’m strapped for cash… can’t afford to -” “If you offered me a penny,” Hal brought her up short, “I’d be insulted.”

“I don’t understand.”

The grizzled man grinned opaquely. “Circled by waters that never freeze, beaten by billow and swept by breeze, lieth the island of Manisees,…” In response to her baffled expression, Hal added, “It’s a private joke.”

They entered the building where the charcoal-gray, toy poodle was sprinting about the course. Several obstacles had been reconfigured. The teeter totter, which originally stood in the center of the room, was near the far wall. Without warning, the poodle suddenly veered wildly off course heading in the direction of the tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel he skittered through a crack in the fence. The owner finally retrieved his pet, who pulled up short alongside a frizzy Pekinese, but the frazzled pooch was unable to pick up where he left off.