by Susan Dunlap
Ignoring his sarcasm, Edwina nodded vigorously. Her short, serviceably cut brown hair quivered from the aftershock. She was a little, dark woman, with pale eyes that bulged as if to spot the offending speck of dirt more quickly. Her nose was narrow and hooked. The observation that in profile she resembled a steelhead trout had not originated with me. “And the folding chairs, Bert, you do have those, don’t you?”
“You had them delivered yourself. Mine weren’t good enough for you, remember?” he said. “Look, don’t you have something to do at the store? Aren’t you afraid Hooper’s smoking a peace pipe in the back and your customers are spitting on the sidewalk?”
His mention of the store reminded me of Edwina’s guest. “Edwina,” I said, coming up to the pair, “there is a man waiting for you at the store.”
She spun toward me. “A man? Who haven’t I seen?” she asked herself, as if to short-cut waiting for my reply.
“He’s not local. Drives a blue Volvo.”
“Maybe he’s Chinese, Edwina, or an Apache,” Bert said. “You better get down there.”
Cutting him off before he could deliver a deeper dig at Edwina’s well-known, unquestioning support for Indians and Asians, I said, “He’s about six feet tall, and has curly brown hair and a beard.” I was hoping Edwina would mention who he was, but my description didn’t seem to enlighten her.
Still, she thrust her clipboard under her arm and said, “I’d best get down there. Can you manage now, Bert? I could have Curr drop Hooper off to help you.”
“I’ve managed this lodge for thirty years. I think I’ll make it through another three hours.”
“Call me if anything isn’t right.” She was halfway to the door. “I can get back here.” And then she was gone.
“Goddamned woman,” he muttered as the front door banged. “Does she think nothing moves without the snap of her tongue? First she’s got to have the lodge. Gives me three months’ notice. I’ve got parties booked in here years ahead. Does that impress her? No, it doesn’t.” Still on the ladder, he leaned his arm on a rung. “ ‘Let them stay in a motel,’ she says. ‘They’ll be in no condition to care where they sleep,’ she says. What she doesn’t say is ‘Let me give you what they would have paid you, Bert.’ No ma’am, I don’t hear those words from her. You know her?” he demanded, looking directly at me for the first time.
“Not well.”
“Save yourself the pleasure. Particularly if you’re thinking of some kind of business arrangement. Once that woman’s got a dime, it never leaves her hands.”
“Why did you let her have the lodge?”
But Bert Lucci was too well launched in his monologue to be deflected. “So, once I agreed, then all of a sudden, it’s not good enough. Now I ask you, is she planning to have the Queen of England here? Is she thinking of bringing her good family china and putting on a formal dinner? No. This is the Slugfest my lodge isn’t good enough for. I had a janitorial service out here for three days. And you know who had to pay for that. They spent an entire day on the bathroom alone.”
I pressed my lips together to forestall a laugh. I knew what shape the bathroom had been in. “She went to a lot of trouble to bring the Slugfest here,” I said, trying to steer Bert Lucci back to my interest.
“Spent too much time in that cigar store. Last thing that woman needs is nicotine to speed her up. What she needs is a harness to keep her out of the way of normal people.”
I laughed. “I heard you rather liked Edwina when you two were younger,” I said.
“Like! A day with that woman is what convinced me to live here in the woods.”
“If she’s such a plague to you, why did you let her come here with the Slugfest?”
Bert Lucci stepped down from the ladder. “Curry Cunningham got me a group of logging crews from up north just for Saturday night. That’ll make up some of the fees. But I’ll tell you, if you know Edwina, you know Her Highness is not a woman you tell no.”
“But why did she insist on having the Slugfest here to begin with?”
Bert Lucci’s face softened. He eased the hammer back through the loop in his pants. “Don’t make sense, I’ll grant you that. Told her that myself, when I could get a word in between her orders. But you know she doesn’t bother to explain herself.” With a sigh, he said, “I can’t stop and gab now. I’ve still got enough work for six days left. And if everything’s not just right, you can bet I’ll hear about it. Her Highness wants it up to snuff when the television cameras get here.”
“Television?” The Slugfest was a local event, more in the line of a church supper than a newsmaker. It hardly merited network coverage.
“So she says. She had me install two-twenty wiring for them. They’d better show. And it’s already after five o’clock; I’ve got to get hammering.”
After five! I raced for the men’s room, pushing open the door without even a knock. It was empty, and spotless. It looked like it had been renovated rather than merely cleaned. I noted the read, and then ran for my truck.
When I got back to the PG&E office Mr. Bobbs would be waiting. It was just a question of what he would be more perturbed by—my late return and the Missed Meter, or his impending duty as a judge of the Slugfest.
CHAPTER 3
MR. BOBBS WAS NOT seated in his cubicle waiting for me. He was out in the middle of the office, pacing. With his light brown hair and pale horn-rimmed glasses, his tan suit and shoes, he resembled a cloud of dust blowing toward me. Pointedly, he looked at his watch.
“I know it’s after five-thirty,” I said. “A number of roads were out. There are three new mud slides, not to mention the ones left from last year.”
Before, he had looked distressed; now his eyes narrowed in suspicion. But I knew he was not worrying about the hazardous roads having endangered me; he was afraid of a Missed Meter.
I put the route book on the table before me. “There are no Changes,” I said. “Changes” were notations we made when a meter had been removed or tampered with and required a repairman or an inspector. “But I do have an M-Five.”
His pale eyes narrowed further. I was amazed he could still see. “Bad road?” he demanded. “Tell me about it.”
He meant “justify it.” “There was a mud slide across Kiev Road.”
“Your truck has four-wheel drive.”
“A tank couldn’t get through that.”
“Did you try?”
“If I had tried, the truck would still be there.”
He eyed my boots for evidence of mud. With a quick shake of the head, he said, “Clean. Didn’t you attempt to circumvent the obstacle on foot?”
“Mr. Bobbs, Kiev Road is on the hillside. If I’d tried to walk around that mud, I’d have slid all the way down into the river. And,” I added, knowing his weak spot, “I would have lost my route book.”
He winced. I had lost a route book to an angry German shepherd three months ago. He’d been going for my leg when I proffered the book. Snapping his jaws around the tasty leather cover, he shook it till every page sailed out, half onto the muddy rain-covered hillside and the rest into the river. I’d spent days on the phone to the main office in San Francisco copying over all five hundred names, addresses, meter numbers, and reads. And while I had done that, my routes had gone unread. Late routes go on the office report—Mr. Bobb’s report—as do unjustified Missed Meters. If I failed to read a meter because of a locked gate, or something blocking it, or because it was so obscurely placed that I just couldn’t find it, then the miss went on my Missed Meter Count. It was my responsibility to contact the customer and deal with the problem. I was allowed only four and a half misses per thousand. But if I failed to record a meter because of an acceptable reason, like a bad road, then I was in the clear; it was the office’s count it was noted on. And since the little offices in the rugged areas always had more Missed Meters than the city offices, where there were no felled redwoods blocking the roads or bulls huffing at outlying gates, Mr. Bobbs was always in the pos
ition of justifying his count. He fought us on every M-5. Presenting him with a Missed Meter was like telling Edwina Henderson to put up No Smoking signs.
He glared down at the offending route book. “We’ll hold that read out.” He looked back at his watch. “Too late to contact Public Works today. First thing Monday. And you can drive by to see if that slide has shifted.”
I was tempted to argue that my route for Monday was nowhere near Kiev Road, that I didn’t have time to hassle Public Works about a slide I knew they wouldn’t clear for months, and that Mr. Bobbs didn’t need to hold this read out to badger me with next week (other offices didn’t do that). But it was nearly six o’clock, and on Friday night, the night of the Slugfest, I had other things to do. “Perhaps,” I said, “your sacrifice tonight will make up for this month’s Misses.”
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.