by J. M. Snyder
His head tipped back mid-guzzle, Spencer slid his eyes to meet Ethan’s. “Really?” he said after he gulped half the bottle’s chilly contents. “‘What’s going on?’ Threw you out of your acting class, did they? That’s a shame. ‘What’s going on’ is I can’t find my sauce. As in, the sauce you took from my refrigerator when you conveniently snuck out in the middle of the damn night, talking about, ‘You should go back to sleep.’ Why, Ethan? You were awake. Half the town was on fire, according to you, but I should keep sleeping? Why, so I didn’t foil your plan?”
Ethan laughed. “‘Foil my plan?’ Who teaches your acting class, Nick and Norah Charles? Spencer, do you need more water? You wanna come and sit in the shade for a minute? You’re talking crazy. Do you want me to help you look for your sauce? It has to be around here somewhere.”
“Oh yeah, thanks. Gee, good idea, offering to help like that—you’ve thrown me completely off the scent. I guess everything’s alright. A burglar must have stolen my sauce. Phew, I feel better.”
Ethan laughed again, this time suspiciously. “Spencer, nobody took your sauce,” he said, the lightness in his tone dissipating. “It’s hot, maybe you’re nervous; maybe you left it at home and that’s where your little drag queen friend ran off to, I don’t know. I told you I don’t give two shits about this ridiculous cook-off, other than I was kind of hoping you might get your hands on some of that restaurant money you want and we’d get to sing a verse or two of Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better with my pop; do him some good to be put in his place by someone queer. As for the fire you’re—what, accusing me of making up?” He waved his arms incredulously at the smoke haze that permeated the sky. “It’s crackling through Mountain Shadows like the houses are made out of Popsicle sticks, and the only reason I’m even here instead of standing on top of the rec center with a hose is because the cops turned me back at Boulder Road. So yeah, no offense, but I got more on my mind than this stupid show and its stupid sauce situation.” He took a second, seemed to seek, then find, a more even tone. “You don’t really think I’d do something like that? To you? After last night?”
Spencer felt chided. Which had never been the easiest thing for him to take. He knew the smart course of action was to apologize. At least express concern about the fire and the fate of his rec center. At the very least to shut up and take his medicine like a man. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said instead. “I think I’m the only guy in town who puts candied ginger in his barbecue sauce, and when your dad’s ribs taste just like mine are supposed to, you’re gonna look like an asshole.”
Ethan shook his head. “God, I thought I was really gonna like you.” This laugh was utterly mirthless. “Talk about looking like an asshole.” He walked away.
Spencer felt like he’d just been kicked in the gut, but how had he managed to kick himself? There wasn’t any sauce; where else could it have gone? He had the sense to call after him—”Ethan, wait. Come back!”—but Ethan did neither.
“Did you get all that, Carmine?” Francesca and her unerring eye for conflict had naturally materialized.
“Yup.”
“Great. Look, that was rough stuff,” she said to Spencer in a reasonable facsimile of a consoling tone. “But you just knocked my promo reel out of the park. Something about you, I just knew you were gonna be good television. Oh, by the way, I know this isn’t the best possible time, but your little friend Carter is back. I guess that sauce just fell out of the van? I guess while he and Tyler were…you know, ‘helping’ each other? Well, anyway, he said one jar broke but the other’s good to go. I can’t wait to taste it!”
“You mean…”
“I know,” Francesca said, arranging her face as if to indicate where concern might appear, had she felt any. “Talk about looking like an asshole, right?”
After he recovered a modicum of control over his faculties—and it took a second—Spencer spun back into the kitchen. He could tell by the smell of the smoke that Carter had found the sauce and splashed it onto the food on the grill. He supposed he should feel triumphant. Disaster averted, right?
“Carter!”
“Yeah, Boss?” He stayed at the grill, madly flipping meat with Claudia, but he turned his angel face to show he was listening.
“Carter!” Spencer hollered again, for want of something less frustrating to say.
“What?” Carter whined.
“You found the sauce?”
Carter beamed proudly. “Sure did, Boss. It was there all along, my bad. One broke, but there’s gonna be plenty, huh Claude?”
Claudia grunted her agreement, brushing it across the slabs of meat in great broad strokes to illustrate Carter’s point.
“So relax, Boss,” Carter chirped. “Practice your winning smile. Everything’s cool.”
“Everything is not cool,” Spencer growled.
“Well, not if that’s your ‘winning smile’ it’s not,” Carter agreed.
“Carter!”
“You wanna stop saying my name like it’s a cuss word?” Carter asked.
“I’m sorry,” Spencer had the presence of mind to say. “It’s just—you said there wasn’t any sauce.”
“No I didn’t. You were freaking out about there not being any sauce, I said I would go find it. And I did. See? It’ll all come back to you when we have the viewing party.”
“I just accused Ethan of stealing the sauce out of my fridge this morning to sabotage the show,” it pained Spencer to admit.
Carter made a yikes! face. “What’d you do that for?”
“There wasn’t any sauce…” There hadn’t been any sauce, right? Was he going crazy?
Carter set his tongs down, prompting an eye roll from Claudia. He walked over and put an arm around Spencer’s shoulders. “Honey, I told you there was sauce. We forgot it in the van. I went and got it. Everything’s fine, baby. Go sit in the shade for a minute, me and Claudia got this. Maybe see if Ethan’ll sneak off and bring you a beer.”
“It’s unlikely.”
“Why? I mean, it’s not like you made a big show of calling him a cad and a scoundrel in front of all the cameras.”
Spencer met Carter’s eyes with a grimace.
“I mean, right?” Carter pursued. “It’s not like you did that. Not on camera. Right?”
“Did I use the word ‘scoundrel’…?”
“So you did do that.”
“Oh, he did it,” Claudia muttered.
This time Carter said, “Yikes!” when he made his yikes! face. “Talk about looking like an asshole.”
“See, I know you meant that to sound comforting…”
“Sorry, Boss.”
Unflustered, Claudia went about her business at the grill. Ethan’s pop had gotten under her skin at Pride, and she was just happy to have the opportunity to turn out a quality rib and shut his smack-talking mouth in front of an audience. Mind you, he’d kept his anti-gay slur-slinging to a minimum since the teams had hit their grills, but she’d been cooling her heels at the park all morning and had heard his ridiculous, riled-up pre-game interview. “It’s against the natural order!” he’d frothed at the camera. “A man who lies with another man as with a woman shall not be able to barbecue better than a God-fearing Republican!”
“Is that a direct quote from the Bible?” Francesca had asked.
“If it isn’t, it should be. I mean, if this was a cupcake contest, maybe. Can he make a better Apple Brown Betty than me? Heck, I hope so. I’m here to tell you I’m gonna lose a Be a Woman contest, even if he does think that beard makes him look like a man. But barbecue? Of course mine’s better. It’s God’s law, Felicia!”
“Francesca.”
“Don’t correct me.”
“I think we’re done here.”
But Claudia had every intention of seeing him corrected. She neither knew nor cared what the Bible said about barbecue, or about anything else, but she knew for a fact that Spencer’s were the tastiest ribs this side of…you know, this side of so
me famous town in the Bible. The two people she knew named Jesus were from Mexico, but that didn’t sound right…Anyway, these ribs were the shit—put that on TV.
Francesca refrained from using the exact phrase “these ribs are the shit” in front of the cameras, which disappointed Claudia somewhat, but she did indeed say they were better than Ethan’s angry dad’s, to the delight of everyone on the Bone Lickers team.
“Ha!” Spencer cried when Francesca raised his hand in victory. Carter rushed the winner’s circle squealing with glee, and Spencer scooped him up in a spinning hug of triumph. “In your face!” Spencer howled euphorically without setting Carter down.
“Whatever.” Ethan’s pop glowered. “It’s a liberal media fix.”
“The only thing that was fixed today was ‘the heck out of these ribs,’” Francesca declared, presenting Spencer with a pig-shaped cardboard check for ten thousand dollars.
“In your face!” Spencer whooped again.
A benefit to cooking on TV, the Bone Lickers quickly learned, was the team of people whose job it was to clean up and break down your temporary kitchen. Spencer, Carter, and Claudia gathered up their pans and the empty unbroken sauce jar, a couple aprons and Claudia’s tongs, and gamboled to the van aglow with victory. Tyler hurried to offer his help, carrying maybe a fork, and declared impure intentions to Carter, who begged Spencer to forestall the celebratory cocktails. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“You do what you want,” Spencer said with a chuckle. “But me and Claudia are gonna go drink all the beer in my house. You wanna celebrate tomorrow, I’m down, but it’s B.Y.O.B.”
“Does that stand for Bring Your Ornery Boss to the bank so he can cash his big fat check and buy you all the beer you want?”
Spencer laughed. “Sure, buddy. That’s what it stands for. Seriously Carter, you know I couldn’t do this without you. Thanks, huh? You’re the best.”
“That’s what he said!” Carter squealed, taking Tyler by the hand as they scampered off.
“You, too, Claudia,” Spencer said. “This whole thing—you know I don’t mean this stupid contest, I mean my whole life. You employ me at your business, help me out with mine…thank you.”
“You can thank me with beer,” she assured her pal. “I’m gonna go home, take a shower, get Gwen and Persephone,”—her dog and her wife of seventeen years, in that order—”and we’ll be over in an hour or so.” She started for her pickup truck, then turned and added, “You can probably also thank me with pizza.”
“You got it.”
A very dejected Ethan was slouching towards them across the park, and Claudia departed with these words of wisdom: “Now go say you’re sorry.”
Spencer didn’t exactly jump at this chance, but it soon become obvious that Ethan was going to walk right past him on his way to his car, and Spencer knew the ball—if it hadn’t been irretrievably lost in the weeds—was in his court.
“Hey,” he said as Ethan made to walk by.
Ethan looked at him expectantly.
“So…”
Ethan raised an eyebrow. So?
“I found the sauce,” Spencer acknowledged.
“Oh no,” Ethan said. “So my plan was foiled. Where’d you find it? In the pocket of my trench coat? Did I leave my spy briefcase laying around? How careless.”
“Actually we found it in the van.”
“Whoops. Guess this means they’ll probably fire me from my saboteur job.”
“Hey, but at least we showed your pop, right?”
“Don’t.”
“Look, Ethan. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well…” He was on the verge of tears, which Spencer found most alarming.
“Look, I know I was a jerk…”
Ethan scoffed, wiping a tear from a chubby pink cheek. “Oh God, of course you think this is about you,” he said.
Spencer bristled. “I wasn’t a jerk?”
Ethan let loose another of his mirthless laughs. “You were a huge jerk. Spencer, the church is on fire. I just saw a picture on Facebook: the rec center? The art room? My Sunday school classroom? It’s all gone, and if the church hasn’t burned to the ground by now it’s about to.”
“Oh my God, Ethan, I’m so sorry.”
“You know what? I accept your apology, okay? But I’m gonna need to ask you to step aside, I have some rubble to go sift through.”
“Yeah. Oh my God, yeah,” Spencer said, clearing Ethan’s path. “Look, if there’s anything I can do…”
Ethan trudged to his car without answering, wedged himself behind the wheel. Spencer watched him go, and his celebratory mood along with him. His pyromanic paranoia had paid off, he realized: not only had he managed not to start the first forest fire of the summer, but any flames of passion that had started crackling in Ethan he’d managed to stomp right out.
* * * *
The First Freedom Church of the Rockies did not in fact burn to the ground. But with its roof caved in and its stained glass windows blown out and every tree, shrub, and outbuilding on the hill leveled to cinders, the shot of its mournful bell tower that made the front page of the Gazette the morning after the fire was finally conquered looked like something a lazy photo editor may have re-run from a retrospective on the Dresden fire-bombing.
That’s the trouble with working with a church that’s actually motivated by Christian principles, Ethan had ruefully joked at the hastily convened board meeting at the Village Inn over by I-25: while Free Rock had blown all their cash assets on literacy programs and after-school kid care and the most comprehensive food bank in the Mountain time zone, any of the megachurches in town would have had easy access to pastors’ vacation funds and pastors’ wives’ plastic surgery stockpiles and could rebuild bigger and better in the blink of a freshly lifted eye. Not that Free Rock’s members wouldn’t rush to pitch in, he understood, but it was gonna take an awful lot of bake sales to get this community back on its feet. When he suggested the board name a Recovery Coordinator, the inferred self-nomination was unintentional, but he didn’t buck the unanimous Ayes. He’d rather dive into the day-to-day of reconstruction than sit at home watching the clock as the hapless victim, even if most days he had no idea what he was doing.
It was ten days before the Forest Service deemed the site safe for any kind of use, and another week before Ethan was able to convince the Feds they could spare one trailer, in which he installed a card table-and-phone charger office for himself and Walburga, the church’s bird-like bookkeeper. The air was still heavy with the smell of wet campfire, and the teetering bell tower made him both heartsick and slightly fearful for his safety—he certainly wasn’t about to walk under it, and he marveled at the foolhardy workmen who spent the days salvaging in its shadow with complete trust in the power of the hard hat—but a Recovery Coordinator who couldn’t turn in his chair and ascertain with his own two eyes the current state of the recovery might as well devote his time to repairing the screen door on a submarine, for all the good he was going to do anybody.
Walburga had already set sail for an extended lunch in the land yacht that was her 1968 Buick Wildcat when the Mysterious Benefactress, as Ethan fancied she would have liked to be referred, rap-rap-rapped at his office door.
“Coo coo!” she called, hoisting herself up the fold-out step and into the government trailer. Ethan was up to his elbows in the detritus of a takeaway sandwich, on hold with an insurance adjustor, but he rose to greet her.
“Coo coo,” he replied with a small laugh. “Can I help you?”
“Well, you’re Ethan, aren’t you?” she asked, placing a gloved hand at the nape of her neck. Ethan knew he was meant not to notice the quick tug she gave her orange wig, although it did settle at a more natural angle around her shoulders.
“I am,” he said. “And you are…?”
“Oh right, my name,” she said. “I am…um…well, let’s just say my names is Anonyma. Anonyma S. Donor, perhaps you’ve heard of me?”
“It rings a bell,” Ethan all
owed with a chuckle. After a vigorous once-over with a paper napkin, he offered her his hand. She shook it gingerly. Suspicious of this heavily made-up woman in spike heels and a coat made out of carpet samples, at her mention of the “surname” Donor, he nevertheless terminated his call with the insurance adjustor. He could call her back in two weeks and probably still be on hold; she’d keep. Ethan offered Walburga’s chair to his visitor with a sweep of his arm, then re-seated himself, asking, “How may I help you today, Miz Donor?”
“Please, call me Anonyma.”
Ethan laughed. When she winked, her false eyelashes stuck together, and this, too, Ethan courteously ignored.
Once she had picked them apart and finished fretting over the mascara on her gloves—She knows it’s August, right? Ethan wondered; she was wearing opera gloves and a heavy coat, and he could tell by the way his T-shirt was sticking to him that underneath it he was sweat-slippery as a seal—she got down to brass tacks. “I understand your church has burned down.”
Did she “understand” this because she was sitting in a slouching federal trailer amidst its smoldering ruins? Ethan wondered this, but did not ask. Rather he said, “Alas, it has.”
“Yes, well…it’s rather obvious, at that, isn’t it?”
“Traces of the incident do remain.”
“Yes, well…and you’re planning to rebuild, I take it?”
“Work has already begun,” Ethan affirmed. “It’s slow going, as may also be obvious, but we’ll get there.”
“Yes, well…that’s the spirit, and all that. I suppose every little bit helps,” she observed, clicking open a glittery vinyl clutch purse shaped like a hot dog and withdrawing from it a folded piece of paper the approximate size of a cashier’s check, which she handed across the sandwich-strewn table to Ethan
“We are in a position to put even the very small donations to good use.” He unfolded the check, then sat up straighter in his folding chair. “And also the very large ones,” he said appreciatively.
“Yes, well…good,” Anonyma S. Donor said, rising to take her leave.