Cock au vim with a light vinaigrette and a bottle of Monty Crisco. Dejesus swore up and down that he hadn’t eaten in dare say a month, give or take a day or two, so I offered him my leftover vim and a monk’s worth of Grappa san Riau, which he ate like a house on a flier with little regard for proper manners or hubris. He had recently filed a complaint against a widow with glaucoma, claiming that she had hit him over the head with her wig-stand, leaving him with a Cockney and Ives’ bruise on his forehead. When she said that she owned neither a wig nor a wig-stand, Dejesus accused her of bending the truth, something she said she hadn’t the faintest notion about. I, on the other hand, knew for a fact that the truth was unsubstantiated, confusing, I know, but that’s how it is, and something best left to knockabouts and cleavers. Dejesus bought a brown paper sac and filled it with custard; a trick he’d learned from a Witness named Bibs, and threw it in the path of the widow next time he saw her approaching in the street. She got some custard in her glaucoma eye and had to be rushed to the infirmary, her wig poaching globs of air, the ambulance man saying, ‘shut the almighty window, will you, the smell is atrocious’.
