The Last Annual Slugfest (3 page)

Mr. Bobbs stared. One of the attributes he shared with Edwina Henderson was the absence of humor. To him, the idea that anything even this loosely connected with our utility company could be laughable was close to heresy.

Silently, I extricated the offending page and handed it to him. Route book in hand, I turned toward the storeroom, where I would drop it in the tan, dufflelike San Francisco bag that would carry it to the computer in the city.

“Miss Haskell!”

“Yes?”

“Your Missed Meter Count is already at four.”

I nodded. As I put my truck key on the hook and signed out, I thought that no one but Mr. Bobbs would know by heart each reader’s Missed Meter Count. I hoped that when he got his first bite of slug tonight, it would be raw.

It was eight-thirty when I pulled up outside Steelhead Lodge. The Slugfest was scheduled to start at eight, but the first event was the award for the biggest slug. Then there were the races, which went, as the master of ceremonies said each year, “at a snail’s pace.” Coming half an hour late, I expected to arrive just in time for the final heat.

The rain was lighter now, but the unpaved parking area had the consistency of chocolate pudding. Cars and pickups were parked every which way, and as I headed toward the veranda I could see the crowd huddled three and four deep around a Ping-Pong table. I glanced at them, looking for a tall, curly-haired man. But Edwina’s visitor was nowhere in sight. In the middle of the onlookers, by the table, was Bert Lucci. “That’s Sluggo in the lead,” he was calling out, “with Escargot second, then trailing behind are Slimy, Spot, and it looks like Swifty is dead.” All eyes were aimed at the table’s three concentric circles. The slugs, I knew from last year’s event, started in the middle and made their way to the outer rim. The contestants could be rented (with no possibility of return) for ten cents. And from the look of the crowd, every grammar-school child in Henderson was there, screaming encouragements that appeared to slide off the backs of their steeds. At the outer ring of the crowd, parents leaned back, oblivious to the decrepitude of the veranda railing, drinks in hand.

The Slugfest was symbolic of what the Russian River area had become: no longer strictly a secluded back country in the winter and a down-scale family resort of mildewed motels and poison-oak-covered campsites in summer. It was in transition, with its divergent groups: the old fishing families who had lived here for generations; the hippies from the sixties influx; the gays from the latest immigration; people who had summered here as children and come back “home”; civil servants from Santa Rosa and Sebastopol; and those who were fed up with the pressures of San Francisco life and marriages that had been no more personal than a business card, who longed for a place where they would be more than a digit in the vacancy or unemployment rolls—people like me.

The Slugfest was our spoof of “country-ness,” of the county fair bake-offs and black currant jelly tastings. Its consummate tastelessness amused every segment of the river community. The more disgusting the entrees, the better; the cornier the judges’ comments, the more delicious we found them. Every year
The Paper
in Guerneville devoted weeks to pre-Slugfest hype, selling Slugfest T-shirts, soliciting judges, and quoting the excuses of those who couldn’t stomach the molluscous repasts. They captured the judges’ gastric distress in print and on film; the post-Slugfest issue of
The Paper
had a veritable bloat of coverage.

The Slugfest was part church supper, part high camp. Everyone understood that—everyone, it seemed, but Edwina Henderson. She couldn’t see the tongue-in-cheek quality of it because, of course, she had not a soupçon of humor. She must simply have found the whole thing boorish, which made her desire to run it all the more puzzling.

“Going pretty well, don’t you think?” Curry Cunningham was standing beside me. He was a smallish man in his mid-thirties, with dark wavy hair thinning across the top and cut river-chic long. With his upturned nose, thick eyebrows, and prominent jaw, he could have stepped out of a St. Patrick’s Day card, had it not been for his slightly bulging eyes. Like Edwina Henderson’s, they looked as if they had been stretched forward to see things first for so long that now they found that vantage point normal. They were the eyes of the man who, after only a year in town, was already on the city council. Curry Cunningham ran Crestwood Logging, a small venture, which, he was quick to tell you, was so ecologically sound that it had been used as a showpiece by the State Forestry Department.

“I’m surprised to see Bert Lucci running this,” I said.

“A natural choice. He’s doing a great job.” Curry smiled at me. “He’s barely stopped talking in half an hour. And look at the kids. He’s got them thinking the winner will take the race by a nose. I’m only sorry my own boy, Terry, can’t be here.”

“Is he sick?”

“No, no. Megumi, my wife, took him to Japan with her for the semester. She’s Japanese. Her field is Eastern Buddhist Art. In that tradition they believe the most perfect work is the one that most faithfully reproduces an earlier great work. The continuity is through the work rather than through the artist, you see.” He sounded as if he were repeating by rote what his artistic wife had explained to him. “So it’s vital that she be where the great works are. She’s been back to see the collections at all the museums on the East Coast. Still, it’s a shame for Terry to miss the Slugfest. It’s one thing he’ll never see in Japan.”

“There’s always next year.”

A woman with long dark hair caught at the back of her neck—Angelina Rudd—made her way in front of us, nodding curtly to Curry. I knew her by sight. She wasn’t much older than me, maybe thirty-five, but already she managed the fish ranch at the mouth of the river and had a house near the top of the hill in Jenner by the Pacific. She was rarely home when I read her meter, and at the fish ranch it was the guard who unlocked the gate and accompanied me to the meter and back. So even if my face looked familiar to her, it probably fell into that uncomfortable category of those that couldn’t be readily placed. And she was clearly too preoccupied to bother finding my niche at the moment. Looking past me, she took a long swallow from her glass.

“Don’t ruin your appetite,” Curry said to her, grinning. “We judges have to have fresh palates.”

She scowled. “I hope Crestwood Industries appreciates this. If they hadn’t insisted—if
you
hadn’t told them about this—I wouldn’t have set foot in here or have done anything to help that old witch out of a bind.”

When she had moved on, Curry Cunningham shrugged uncomfortably. Both Crestwood Logging and the Russian River Fish Ranch were parts of Crestwood Industries. There had been speculation that Angelina, who had run the fish ranch since the property had been purchased a year and a half ago, would be given charge of all Crestwood’s area industries. She’d even been called to the Crestwood headquarters in Baltimore to be interviewed. When Curry had arrived from there, six months later, with that job in the bag, Angelina hadn’t hidden her irritation. Apparently, time hadn’t diminished her bitterness.

“How come Bert is center stage here and not Edwina?” I asked, partly to fill the silence Angelina had left.

“Good sense on her part?” Curry replied.

“When she rushed out here this afternoon, she left him with enough work to keep him going till Wednesday. I’m surprised even she could get him to do anything else.”

Curry grinned again. “Don’t worry about Bert overdoing it. He called Hooper at the tobacco store. I dropped Hooper off here at five-thirty. So you can guess who’s done the hauling and lifting since then.”

I laughed. Clearly Bert had gotten to Hooper as soon as I had left, and well before Edwina had had a chance to get back to the tobacco store and intercept his call.

A scream went up by the table. “Sluggo,” Bert announced, had triumphed. After a break, he added, the gourmet judging would begin.

I headed inside. At the left, a table was set up for a bar. Most of the crowd was either making their way to or from it. A few were settling on folding chairs by the stage. On the platform five chairs were positioned behind a long table. At each place was a soup spoon, the de rigueur utensil of the Fest. Cooks of the slug-filled entrees would hold their dishes in front of each judge while he dug in with his spoon. The dishes wouldn’t be moved until he had taken his share.

I glanced to the right of the stage, at another long table where some of the entrees were already waiting. Hooper, Henderson’s self-pronounced Pomo Indian leader (and probably the town’s only full-blooded Pomo), seemed to be guarding them—not that I could imagine anything that could adulterate a slug dish. Next to the folding table was Edwina’s podium. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Edwina up there already, assembling notes, preparing for whatever she planned to present to the television cameras. But her podium was empty.

I made my way through the crowd to the bar and bought a brandy and soda. Perhaps the receipts from the bar were the inducement Edwina had used to convince Bert Lucci to turn out the weekend’s fishermen in favor of the Fest.

Inside the kitchen Leila Katz bent over a container of red sauce that smelled so enticingly spicy that I was almost sorry I wouldn’t be offered any. Next to her stood Chris Fortimiglio—not the first person I would have expected to see here tonight. Chris, like his father and grandfather, was a fisherman. Now, with salmon season only three days away, I would have expected him to be at the dock in Bodega Bay, checking his lines or drinking with the fleet, listening for a hint of where the coho might be biting.

The Fortimiglios had been good friends to me when I moved up here from San Francisco two years ago. Chris’s mother, Rosa, had fed me often, and I’d spent many an evening in their living room, listening to the Fortimiglios and their numerous relatives and friends (who comprised almost all the winter population of Henderson) passing the word of who was doing what. Gossip was as integral to the Fortimiglio household as pasta—but there was no malice in that gossip. If someone in town had a problem, they wanted to be there to help. They had pulled my pickup truck out of the mud; they had brought me a kerosene lamp the first time the lights went out, knowing that I, a new arrival from the city, wouldn’t be prepared to deal with a power outage. They had made me feel a part of the town. And when we had all been caught up in a murder and it had separated us, I felt the loss. Chris was still friendly, but awkward about it, as if he was betraying a trust he didn’t quite believe in. As for Rosa, it was as if the sight of me brought it all back.

But if Curry Cunningham had left my questions unanswered, I didn’t expect that worry with Chris Fortimiglio. I glanced down at his tray. It held five small pastry shells, each filled with a suspiciously lumpy mixture in red sauce, topped with cheese, and sprinkled heavily with black olive bits. He was adjusting their positions on the tray. “What are they?” I asked.

“Slug Pizzas. They’re good.”

“Did you make them?” I asked in disbelief.

“Well …”

“Rosa?” Rosa’s culinary renown was unequaled in Henderson.

Chris looked away. He was one of those blond Italians—tall, already tanned from working on his boat. “Well …”

“How come she’s not here then?”

“You remember my nephew Donny, Vejay. Well, he bought some tobacco at Edwina’s store last fall, and he got sick. You know how bad his asthma is. We had to take him to the emergency room. Afterward, Mama told Edwina, and well … Mama’s forgiven Edwina, but Edwina’s still on her high horse. I was kind of surprised that she didn’t find some reason to throw out my entry.”

“I’m surprised you made an entry.”

Chris hesitated, then grinned. “It was Donny’s idea. His nose drops were pretty expensive. We could really use that fifty dollars. And you know, with Mama’s cooking, we’re hard to beat.”

Behind us, Leila Katz spooned her spicy sauce into long-stemmed crystal dishes. The kitchen had a festive atmosphere, more relaxed than I would have imagined anyplace with Edwina Henderson in charge. I glanced around. “Where is Edwina, Chris?”

“Isn’t she outside?”

“I haven’t seen her. Her podium is empty.”

Chris put down the tray. “She hasn’t been in here. I don’t know where she is. Have you seen her, Leila?”

Leila Katz was another person I wouldn’t have expected to see here. She was Edwina’s niece, though no one would have guessed by looking at her. Her short black hair hung in unruly curls, and her nose and cheeks were as soft and wide as Edwina’s were sharp. Only in shortness did she resemble her aunt. She ran the Women’s Space, a bookstore and general gathering place for women, straight and gay. It was no secret that lesbian rights was not one of Edwina’s causes. As the creator of the town museum (a room connected to the tobacco store), Edwina was nothing if not traditional. The last I had heard, she and Leila weren’t even speaking. “I thought she’d be here all day,” Leila said. “Bert was afraid she’d commandeer one of his bunks at night.”

“It’s almost nine o’clock,” I said. “She should have been here an hour ago. You don’t think something’s happened to her, do you?”

“Like she had a few too many to fortify her for her meal here?” Leila suggested.

All three of us stood silent, putting off the inevitable question. Finally, it was Chris who said, “Maybe someone ought to call her house and check.”

There was another silence. Leila, the obvious candidate, was waiting for one of us to offer. Chris shifted his weight.

In the main room I could hear Bert Lucci beckoning judges to the platform. The shuffle of feet suggested a concerted effort by the audience to get one last drink before sitting down.

Bert Lucci stuck his head into the kitchen. “Almost ready?”

“Are you going to start without Edwina?” I asked.

“No. She’s in her place. Looks a little green, but that’s not unusual for a judge, or for Edwina at any time.”

As one, Chris and Leila sighed.

I hurried out, and after a quick survey of the audience to spot Edwina’s curly-haired visitor—he wasn’t here—plopped down in the one remaining seat in the first row, right in front of Edwina. Bert Lucci had been right about her looking green. Unlike the Edwina of this afternoon, who could barely stand still long enough to give orders, now she slumped in her chair, noticing neither the audience nor the procession of platters from the kitchen. Maybe Leila had been right about her aperitifs. In the sticky heat of the crowded room, a number of drinkers were beginning to look sleepy.