The Music of What Happens(61)

The guy makes another mark, and I can’t tell if the marks are good or bad. “Let me see your license, please.”

I go up to the dashboard and pull out what I have — our food handling cards, the truck’s license, the truck’s registration. He shuffles through them and stares at the license.

“It says Coq au Vinny,” he says.

“That was our name. Up until yesterday. We re-painted and re-branded,” Max says.

“You have a DBA form?”

“A what?” I ask.

“Doing business as.”

“Um,” I say, and I remember Popcorn Guy. Asshole. He must have called in and told the inspector. Why would anyone do that to some kids who are just trying to make an honest buck?

He fills out a form, rips it off the pad, and slaps it down next to our cash register.

“Fifty-dollar fine,” he says. “And you’re out of business until you get one.”

I’m about to argue, but Max pulls on my sleeve and I close my mouth.

“How long will that take?” Max asks.

The guy shrugs. “Beats me. If I see you out here, or anywhere, again without a DBA, the fine will be five hundred. You hear me?”

We both nod in silence. A heaviness enters the pit of my stomach as he leaves. We turn on the fan and close both the service window and the back door.

“This isn’t good, dude,” he says.

“Thanks, Captain Obvious.”

“No. It isn’t good because we have a refrigerator full of thawed chicken breasts. Like hundreds of them. We’ve been selling easily two hundred a day, so I figured …”

“Yeah,” I say. “I get it. How long will they last?”

“A few days, tops. But the ones here have been thawed since Thursday, and you don’t want to re-freeze them. Tomorrow at the latest for about a hundred.”

“Shit,” I say, doing the math in my head.

“Bad time to have just put out five hundred on paint,” he says.

I sit on the filthy floor and put my head in my hands and think about what to do.

What would my dad do in this situation? He was always good in a crisis.

I have no idea.

“Sorry, dude,” Max says.

“You feel like being a scofflaw?” I ask.

He laughs like I’m joking. I’m not. “How many food truck inspectors do you think there are?” I ask.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, let’s look it up. If there’s like, one, how dangerous could it be?”

He shakes his head. “Dude,” he says. “I dunno.”

“Well, a week ago I had enough money to pay the back mortgage. Now I’m short. We can’t stop now. I had to pay you and for the paint, plus us being idiots and living big those couple nights.”

“So we’ll get legal,” he says. “C’mon, dude. I’m not doing illegal shit. My mom would kill me.”

“Maybe just the thawed chicken? ’Til that’s gone?”

“Where would we go?”

“Well, wherever we go, it should be where no other trucks are,” I say. “And it should be legal. And you shouldn’t put it on social media, because they’re probably tracking us now.”

Max says, “Trampoline place in Tempe?”

I smile. “I knew you were a badass.”

He rolls his eyes. “We’ll see.”



It turns out it’s not that easy to just park the truck at a location in Phoenix in the summer and expect foot traffic. We park in the trampoline parking lot, which may or may not be legal, and lots of kids go in and out but almost no one stops at our truck. We sell a couple frozen lemonades to a mom and her daughter as they leave, but as far as chicken goes, we get shut out. I guess jumping up and down while eating spicy chicken is not recommended.

We close up and Max says we should try the escape room place in south Scottsdale. We get there, though, and there’s literally no place to park, as it is right on Scottsdale Road.

“We could do Zorba’s,” I say, pointing in the direction of the infamous dirty bookstore.

He laughs. “Good plan.”

“Can you think of any place where there would definitely be people?”

He gets on his phone and surfs around for a bit. Finally, he says, “D-backs game?”

Having never been to a Diamondbacks game, I have no idea if this is a good plan or not. But I’m getting desperate. I’m afraid we’re gonna waste hundreds of dollars of chicken if we don’t find a location in the next day or two.

So we park in front of Talking Stick Resort Arena, a couple blocks west of Chase Field, as the streets closer to it are cordoned off. We face the sidewalk and soon we’re doing a brisk business with people heading to the ballpark for an afternoon game, not wanting to eat the horrible food there — their words, not mine.

“Two habanero all day,” I yell back to Max, about an hour into our stay there. A police officer walks up.

“Do you have a permit to be here?” he asks.

I freeze up. “Do we need one?”

He frowns. “Yes you need one. Get moving.”

I nod, finish the order we’re on, apologize to the other people in line, and we close up and jet.