Stiffs and Swine (8 page)

Once Barbie reached the end of the carpet, R. C. removed an envelope from his coat, handed it to Barbie’s owner, and then spoke into the microphone, thanking the judges once again for their time. As the spectators began to disperse, R. C. returned to the judges’ table and indicated that gift bags for all five of them were being held behind the reception desk in the recreation center.

“I didn’t want them to sit out here during the contest,” he explained. “There’s a box of truffles in each one, and I didn’t want to chance them going soft.” He gazed up at the star-pocked sky. “Mind you, it’s been quite pleasant tonight, but it’s going to be a scorcher tomorrow, so make sure you have your water bottles filled to the brim.”

R. C. wished them all a pleasant evening and reminded James, Lindy, Bennett, and Lucy to appear for the mandatory food-judging meeting at ten a.m. sharp.

“How long’s that gonna take?” Bennett asked. “Don’t we just say whether we like the food or not?”

“Mr. Marshall.” R. C.’s pleasant demeanor turned firm. “This contest is quite serious. There are a multitude of facets to being a fair and just barbecue judge.”

Abashed, Bennett nodded. “Sure, sure. Don’t worry, I’ll follow every rule to the letter. I’m really lookin’ forward to gettin’ the inside view on this whole thing.”

R. C. seemed satisfied by Bennett’s answer. He was about to turn away, undoubtedly to tend to another festival duty when he seemed to suddenly remember something. “You’ll also find a red raffle ticket in your gift bags. Most folks pay ten dollars apiece for these, but if you’re lucky enough, you could be returning to Quincy’s Gap towing a brand new RV trailer behind your vehicle, courtesy of Richter’s RV Sales & Rentals.”

“That would get me half a bookmobile,” James muttered to his friends as R. C. melted into the crowd.

“What are you using for one in the meantime?” Lucy asked.

“Oh, Wendell rigged up one of the retired school buses in his yard. He’s basically toting books around in big, plastic bins strapped to the decrepit seats with bungee cords, but it’s better than nothing.”

Lindy pulled one of the festival schedules out of her purse. “Okay, fellow celebrities, what do y’all want to do now? I’d like to check out the rockabilly concert. It just started a few minutes ago. And we’ve got free entry to all of the events everyone
else
has to pay for!”

Gillian glanced at her watch. “I’d normally be meditating in order to clear my head before sleep about now, but I’ll go with you. I do like the
unique
tones of rockabilly music.”

Lucy shrugged. “I’m in, too. Besides, you need me to come, seeing as I’m your chauffeur.” She turned to James, her eyes hopeful. “What about you guys?”

“I’ve gotta hit the trivia books,” Bennett answered immediately. “But if you wanna stay, James, I can hike back to the inn from here. It’s only a few miles.”

James shook his head. “No need. This heat’s made me kind of sluggish. We’ll pick up the gift bags and take them back to Fox Hall,” James told the ladies, trying not to let the disappointment in Lucy’s face affect him. He wondered if Lucy planned to cozy up to him over the next few days, as Murphy was over a hundred miles away. He watched her and his other two female friends walk away, stopping to chat with the owners of the pig beauty contestants. Again, he couldn’t prevent himself from staring at Lucy’s streamlined body or notice how her caramel-colored hair glimmered beneath the strings of white lights forming a canopy over the animal pen. He had always thought she was beautiful, and nothing about their roller-coaster relationship would ever change that fact.

“Hey, man!” Bennett waved his hand in front of James’s eyes. “You comin’ or what?”

“Yeah, sure.” James looked away from Lucy just as she turned back to see if he was still standing there.

James and Bennett collected five Hog Fest tote bags stuffed with goodies from the recreation center and then headed toward the parking lot. The car lot was adjacent to the camper area, and James noticed that more and more people were gathered around their barbecue cookers. Crescents of smoke drifted into the night and the glow of lit cigarettes made the cooking area seem as though it had been overrun by a swarm of fireflies. Raucous laughter filled the air, and James guessed that bottles of beer and whiskey were being passed around among the cooking teams.

“They’ve got to stay up all night tonight, right?” he asked Bennett.

“At least one of them will. They wanna cook those briskets just as slow as they can to make the meat as tender as filet mignon.” He smacked his lips together. “Always been a favorite of mine, brisket. I can hardly wait to sample all the entries tomorrow. That’s what I call a first-class Southern-style lunch. A big pile of meat and not much else. Yessir.”

As James gazed down the aisles between campers, he noticed the familiar bulk of Jimmy Lang behind one of the larger RVs. He was speaking to a taller man wearing a white T-shirt and cargo shorts. James was too far away to hear their conversation, but both men appeared agitated. The taller man’s profile was hidden from James behind a baseball cap worn at an angle. The cap was black and had some kind of silver symbol on the front, which was unfamiliar to James. The brim of the hat dipped up and down as the man nodded his head, trying to drive his point home.

As James watched, the taller man suddenly took a threatening step toward Jimmy, raising his voice to an angry shout. Jimmy wore what James assumed was his typical expression of amusement, but when the man finished yelling and stomped off, Jimmy’s smile immediately faded away.

Unaware that James’s attention was elsewhere, Bennett chatted about the festival events that he planned to attend the next day.

“You’d better read that barbecue book of yours tonight,” Bennett suggested, but James didn’t reply. He was too fixated on Jimmy’s posture, for the large man had slumped back against the rear of the trailer and had bowed his head so that he could hide his face in his hands. This Jimmy bore little resemblance to the boisterous and cocksure man James had seen earlier in the day, the man who claimed he would be the festival’s champion and be well on his way to a life of fame and fortune. Instead, he seemed tired. In fact, though the barbecue contest had yet to begin, Jimmy Lang already looked defeated.

James had never
slept in the same room with Bennett before, and he was unsure whether he could survive a second night as his roommate. Bennett studied his trivia books until after midnight and then fell asleep with the table lamp on. Lying flat on his back with his arms stretched out to the side, Bennett’s mouth hung open and the sounds that erupted from his throat sounded like the contented growls of a hibernating grizzly bear.

By quarter after six in the morning, James gave up any further attempt at sleep. Removing the pillows he had piled over his head, he pulled on a pair of jeans and his favorite William & Mary sweatshirt, slid his bare feet into a pair of worn loafers, grabbed his book on the history of barbecue, and crept downstairs.

The stairs creaked as though protesting his early arrival. No one else seemed to be awake. The entire first floor of the inn was silent, but James remembered that the note to guests placed in their rooms indicated that there was a self-service coffee urn located in the main hall and that coffee would be ready each morning by six thirty.

Ten minutes
, James thought. He hoped Eleanor would be punctual in setting out the coffee urn. In the meantime, he decided to settle himself in a rocker on the front porch. The morning was gray and a low mist hovered over the tired-looking summer grass. Robins poked around for worms in the lawn as jays pecked through the sprinkler-moistened soil of the garden beds. There was a refreshing coolness to the early air that carried a faint hint of autumn.

James inhaled deeply and caught a whiff of rain. His mother always claimed that she could tell when rain was imminent by stepping outside her back door first thing in the morning and taking a deep breath. In the days before the Weather Channel, she had been the family meteorologist and had never once been wrong. James had often grumbled about taking a golf umbrella to school when none of the other children carried one, but he also remembered sharing its shelter with a few of the other kids as they waited at the bus stop.

“Rain can’t be good for the festival,” James said into the stillness and then opened his book to a section entitled “Presidential Barbecues.” As he read about Lyndon Johnson’s diplomatic dinners, which were conducted as family-style barbecues, James heard noises coming from the room behind him. Swiveling in his chair, he noticed that it was positioned in front of the kitchen window and that the window had been left open a crack.

“Coffee time,” James murmured contentedly, glancing at his watch. He decided to finish the section on Johnson before claiming the first cup when he heard Eleanor’s voice from inside the kitchen.

“Francesca Fiennes! Where on God’s green earth have you been?” she asked angrily.

There was no response from Eleanor’s daughter.

“I told you to be home by midnight, which I thought was a mighty generous curfew for a person of your tender years, and how do you thank me? By keeping me up all night, worrying that you’d been abducted or … something worse!” Eleanor paused and then cried, “I even called the sheriff, Francesca! I was
that
worried!”

“I was
going
to call you.” Francesca finally spoke, though there was no remorse in her voice. “But my cell battery died and then it got later and later at night and I … just fell asleep. I was hanging out at the festival with a bunch of my friends and we crashed in someone’s tent.”

“Someone’s
tent
?” Eleanor sounded horrified. “
Whose
tent?”

Francesca didn’t answer. Instead, James heard the rattle of silverware.

“I asked you a question, young lady.” Eleanor’s tone was strained. “In case you’ve forgotten, you are still living under
my
roof. I work my fingers to the bone each and every day, and the money from
this
inn pays for your clothes, your cell phone with the
dead battery
, and your contest entry fees. So when I tell you to be home by midnight, you’d better be home by eleven fifty-nine!”

“I don’t want you to pay for those stupid contests! I’ve never
once
asked you to spend money on them!” Francesca snapped. “I
told
you. I want to spend my free time tutoring disadvantaged kids. I want to be a teacher—not win a stupid makeup or modeling contract.”

“We’ve been over this a
thousand
times.” Eleanor was exasperated. “You can
be
a teacher
after
you’ve entered the Miss America contest. The judges will love your passion to help those little needy—” She broke off and then whispered fearfully, “Sweet Jesus! Are those love bites on your neck, Francesca?”

“They’re called hickies, Ma. Get with the program, will you?”

James heard the crash of dishes. “That’s just great, Francesca! Are you trying to drive me to an early grave? So you were out all night with some boy, doing God knows what, and now your neck is full of blemishes, your eyes are red, and you’ve got purple bags beneath them. You’re
supposed
to be a princess today! Not some roll-me-in-the-hay teenage tramp!” Eleanor drew in a ragged breath. “Oh, that’s right. You weren’t in
hay
with a boy, you were in some filthy, mildewed
tent
.”

There was a moment of silence and then Francesca calmly replied, “Who said I was with a boy? It could have been a
man
. An
older
man.”

“Good Lord.” James could almost visualize Eleanor grabbing onto the counter for support. “Please tell me that it wasn’t that disgusting barbecue man, Jimmy Lang.”

“I can’t kiss and tell.” Francesca goaded her mother.

“I’ll
kill
him!” Eleanor raged. “So help me, I will! I’ve got plenty of pesticides and poisons to rid this world of
that
fat, nasty pest! Oh, the thought of him touching my beautiful girl! Franny, how could you?” Eleanor wailed, and then the sound was cut off as she covered her mouth.

“Don’t worry, Ma. I’ll still be ready for my enviable car ride with a
pig
, but I’m not going to follow
your
life plan for me much longer. I mean it!”

Seconds later, the front door slammed and Francesca appeared on the porch. She looked at James, keenly aware that he had listened in on the entire exchange with her mother.

“Coffee’s ready,” she told him nonchalantly and then headed off toward one of the nature trails.

From inside the kitchen, James could hear the muffled yet pained sounds of Eleanor weeping.

Over a breakfast of sausage rolls, strawberries, and hunks of aged cheddar cheese, James told his friends about the altercation he had overheard.

“Francesca and Jimmy Lang?” Lindy asked and then gave an involuntary shiver. Glancing around to make sure that none of the other guests were listening, she lowered her voice. “That’s too gross to picture.”

Gillian examined the dregs of tea at the bottom of her china cup and frowned. “Do you think Eleanor was serious about having poison around the inn? I’d have thought she’d use harmless,
natural
pesticides. Maybe I shouldn’t accept any more of her herbal tea blend
recommendations.”

“Just ’cause the woman has a nature trail doesn’t mean she’s down with all that goin’ green mumbo jumbo,” Bennett informed Gillian.

“Mumbo jumbo?” Scowling, Gillian regarded Bennett with disdain. “We only have
one
planet to call home, and if
we
don’t take care of it—”

“If there’s such a thing as global warming,” Bennett cut her off, “then why is there a wintry chill in the air on an August morning in Virginia? Tell me that!”

“Because a cool front has come in from the mountains. It’s supposed to rain all afternoon and into the evening,” Lucy informed her friends. “I watched the local news while Lindy was curling her hair.”

“Poor R. C.,” Lindy sympathized while checking to make sure that her thick, black hair was still held captive in its invisible coating of hairspray. “And all of the vendors counting on nice weather. Rain must really cut into their profits.”

James swallowed the last of his coffee and set the mug back onto the table with a firm thud. “I hope it
does
rain. I can come back here and take a nap. My
roommate
makes sounds that a freighter crashing into a cliff couldn’t match.”

“Must’ve been lyin’ on my back,” Bennett said with a smirk. “Just gimme a push so I roll to the side. Won’t make a peep then.”

“You could’ve advised me about that little detail
before
last night,” James replied sulkily as his friends laughed.

“Come on, sunshine.” Bennett nudged James in the side. “We don’t want to keep R. C. waitin’.”

Lucy checked her watch. “Gillian, are you going to hang out here for a bit or do you want a ride to the festival grounds now?” Then, before Gillian could answer, she said, “Or I could just leave you my car, and Lindy and I can ride over with James.” She quickly added, “And Bennett.”

Gillian folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes. “I’ve already been on a most
restorative
walk through the woods this morning. My soul has been so
refreshed
by the wise spirits of those old pines. Can you imagine all they must have witnessed?” Spreading her arms out as though embracing the air, she opened her eyes and cast a serene glance at Lucy. “I think I’ll join you at Hog Fest. I’m going to watch the dog show. Mr. Richter agreed to allow me to hand out Pet Palace brochures to the audience members. What a
gracious
spirit he has.”

“Well, since we’ll all be eating barbecue for lunch, you can meet us after we’re done judging.” Lindy held out a map to Gillian upon which she had drawn a circle. “I checked out the vendor list and there’s a Greek food booth near our judging area. You could get a salad and a few falafels and then join us for the announcement of the winner.”

Gillian clapped with delight. “Oh, thank you, Lindy! I’ve never met a chickpea I didn’t like!”

Bennett grimaced. “Let’s get out of here, James. All this talk of vegetables is gonna put me off my meat!”