Deep Dish (21 page)

T
ate gazed up at the pig hanging from the lowest limb of a hickory tree deep in the interior of the island. Thank God, it was untouched since he’d had to return this morning to the lodge.

Moonpie was untouched too—unconscious was more like it. He slept now, curled up at the foot of the tree. “Some guard dog you are,” Tate said. The dog, hearing Tate’s voice, raised his muzzle sleepily, wagged his tail twice, then went instantly back to sleep. Tate patted his head approvingly. Moonpie had done his job, driving off any marauding animals that would have liked to have dined on that fine wild pig hanging from the tree.

The two of them had spent the previous night beneath that same tree, bunked down on a hastily assembled bed of pine needles and Spanish moss, with only a sheet and blanket swiped from Tate’s room back at the lodge as bedding. It had been one extremely long night. The island’s nighttime creatures—foxes and raccoons—had crept close to where they slept, drawn by the scent of the fluids draining from the pig’s body. Moonpie had barked and growled and driven off the would-be diners who’d come and gone all night long—meaning they’d had next to no sleep.

There was no time to think about that now. He had work to do—lots of work.

Luckily, the pig was a young one—maybe two years old—so its meat shouldn’t be as tough or gamey as that from one of the gigantic feral hogs that roamed the wilder parts of the island, uprooting everything in their paths. From what Inez had told him,
wild hogs had roamed Eutaw for as long as anybody could remember.

“My granddaddy hunted hogs here, his granddaddy too,” Inez had said. “The old folks say they’s livestock escaped from the days when Rebeccaville was still farmed. My mama and daddy always had a cow, and some chickens and two-three pigs they raised up for meat, but Daddy still hunted the hogs ’cause they bad to dig up folkses gardens. What he’d do is, our neighbor-man Jimmy, he had a fine coondog. That coondog would get up on the smell of a hog and chase him down, then Daddy, he’d get his dog, BooBoo, you know, BooBoo was one of them pitbulls, and BooBoo would wait till the other dogs flat wore out that hog, then he would run in, catch the hog by the ear, then Daddy and one of the boys would run up, get the hog, tie it up, and carry it home. They’d pen it up, fatten it up with peanuts and such, and come spring, we’d have us a fine pig-pickin’.”

No time for a pig-pickin’ now, Tate thought. He cut the hog down from the tree and, staggering a little from the weight of it, loaded it onto the back of the golf cart. One whistle, and Moonpie was jumping in alongside him in the front of the cart.

Inez was waiting for him at her cottage, dark eyes shining with anticipation.

“Whoo-eee, that’s a fine fat pig,” she exclaimed as he rode up into her yard. “Bring him on around back. I got everything all ready.”

“This here was my daddy’s fish-cleaning table,” Inez said proudly, gesturing toward the scrubbed board-top table that extended out over a porch railing.

Unrolling the chef’s knives he’d brought with him, Tate made quick work of the pig, handing each sectioned piece off to Inez, who was ready with dishpan and a roll of freezer paper.

“Mmm-mmm,” she said, deftly wrapping the various cuts. “Pork chops, ribs, hams. I’ll make me a fire from hickory wood and smoke us a butt. And I got mama’s meat grinder right inside, I’ll make up some sausage. We gonna have a freezer full from this here pig.”

He kept only the tenderloin for himself.

“That all you gon’ take?” Inez asked incredulously.

“It’s all I’ve got time for,” Tate said, laughing. “I’ve still got the
rest of my dinner to take care of.” He leaned over and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Thanks, Miss Inez. I don’t know what I would have done without your help.”

“Get on out of here then,” she said, giving him a playful push off the porch. “That little gal will be back up there at the lodge, firing her oven up while you stand around here messin’ with an old lady like me.”

He paused at the edge of the yard, tentatively reaching up to touch the branch of a towering bush that shaded one whole corner of the property.

“Figs?” he asked as a fat greenish brown fruit fell into the palm of his hand.

“Best on the island,” Inez told him. “Mama took a slip from a tree over there at Darien. Iris, she babies that tree somethin’ awful. Every day, she puts a dishpan full of soapy water on that tree. Last year, she canned up near a hundred jars of preserves.”

Tate bit into the fig and savored the grainy, honeyed taste of the ripe fruit. “Think she’ll miss a few?” he asked.

Inez put both hands over her eyes. “I ain’t seen nobody stealin’ no figs.”

As he plucked figs, he planned his meal out loud. “I’ll simmer these with some sugar, and make a glaze with some cracked peppercorns for the tenderloin. But I don’t have a clue about what I’ll serve as side dishes.”

“Sweet potatoes would be good,” Inez remarked.

“You know a potato patch I could raid?” Tate said playfully.

“Nosirree,” Inez said. “Iris, she picks those sweet potatoes in August, and she don’t overlook a single one. After they’re cured, she banks ’em up out in the garden. Later on, she wraps ’em up in croker sacks and puts ’em in the smokehouse out yonder.” With a jerk of her head she gestured toward a crude structure of weathered silver boards at the edge of the sisters’ back property. “They ain’t but a few left now from last year.

“Well,” she said after an exaggerated pause. “I’m goin’ on in the house now. And if I hear them guinea hens settin’ up a ruckus, I’ll just figure it’s a stray cat crossing the yard.”

She wiped her hands on her apron, gave him a wink, and walked slowly inside.

G
ina looked down at the blue crabs scuttling around inside her plastic bucket. She had maybe two dozen crabs. Big and fat, they were what her daddy called jimmies—males. On another day, she would have been more than happy about her catch. But this wasn’t just any day. She’d spent the day on and around the marsh, desperately trying to catch a supper worthy of winning the Food Fight. And these crabs were all she had to show for it.

She walked dejectedly down the length of the dock and placed the bucket on the floor of the golf cart. She had only two hours left, but that should be plenty to boil the crabs, pick out their meat, and fix her own version of deviled crabs. She had no idea what else she could serve. The sun had fried her brain.

She was headed back to the lodge when she had an idea. Iris’s garden. Maybe, Gina thought, she could scavenge a tomato or a cucumber—anything to supplement her pathetic offering of deviled crabs.

The cool air rushing past felt good on her sunburned face and shoulders, and her spirits lifted a little when she caught sight of the little cottage and the stoop-shouldered woman standing at the edge of the yard, picking figs from a huge tree.

“Lookee here,” Iris said, setting her plastic dishpan down on the dirt of the yard. “You got you a mess of fish, I hope.”

“Not quite,” Gina said ruefully. “They just weren’t biting. But I did get some blue crabs.” She held out the bucket for Iris to inspect.

“That’s fine!” Iris said. “You done good.” She looked around at the house. “Course, that boy Tate, he ain’t done too bad hisself.”

“You’ve seen him?” Gina asked eagerly. “When was that?”

“Little bit ago,” Iris said. “He was headed to the lodge, fixin’ to start cooking up that pig meat of his.”

“A pig?” Gina was dumbfounded. “Where did he get a pig? How did he get a pig? They didn’t give us any guns.”

Iris shrugged. “He didn’t say. Inez let him do the butchering out on the back porch here. She’s sweet on that white boy! Course, I’m
kinda sweet on him now my ownself, since we got us most of a pig now, packed away nice in the freezer. Onliest thing he kept was a tenderloin.”

“A pork tenderloin,” Gina wailed. “And all I’ve got are these stinkin’ crabs. I don’t have a chance against him now.”

Iris stared down at the bucket. “What you fixin’ with these here crabs, girl?”

“I thought I’d do deviled crab,” Gina said halfheartedly. “I don’t have the ingredients for anything else.”

“Hmm,” Iris said, pulling at her bottom lip. “You ever fix crab and corn chowder?”

“Sure,” Gina said. “But I don’t have any corn.”

“Look back yonder in the garden there,” Iris said. “I got me some Silver Queen ready to be picked.”

“Really? You wouldn’t mind giving me some of your corn?”

“Don’t see why not,” Iris said. “Inez done give that boy the last of my sweet potatoes out of the smokehouse. And I know he picked some of my figs. You see anything else you want out there, you pick that too. There’s some pretty ’maters out there. Got some cukes, and some sweet red peppers and some of them little bitty hot finger peppers. Get you some of them. But be quick about it, ’cause Inez is taking her a nap, and I don’t want her knowing what I’m up to out here.”

“Oh, Iris, thank you,” Gina said, throwing her arms around the old woman’s neck. “You have saved my bacon.”

“Bacon! If you had some bacon for real, you’d be all set,” Iris said, smacking her lips. “I like to fry me up some green tomatoes in bacon grease. Fry corn in it too….”

“Well, Tate may have bacon, but I don’t. But it’s just about all I lack, except for some herbs to put in the chowder and the deviled crabs,” Gina said.

“Don’t grow no herbs,” Iris said. “But, tell you what. You go on down this same road here, and you come to a burned-out old house. Burned clear down to the concrete block pilings. That was Miz Chessie’s house. She was from away, and she was all the time growing stuff nobody else around here messed with. When that place burned down last year, she took herself back to where she came from. Ride
on down there and walk around back where she kept a garden, maybe there’s something left the hogs and deer didn’t get a hold of.

“Here,” Iris said, reaching in the pocket of her apron and handing her a worn plastic grocery sack. “Use this for your pickin’s. And be quick now!”

In ten minutes, Gina had filled her sack. She had six ears of Silver Queen corn, three huge ripe tomatoes, a cucumber, three or four hot peppers, and a red bell pepper, and just as she was leaving the garden, she spied the bright yellow blossoms of a squash vine clambering over the picket fence surrounding the plot. She added them to her stash and ran for her golf cart.

When she climbed in, she found another plastic grocery sack on the floor, beside her crab bucket. Opening it, she found two jars. One held what she decided were fig preserves. The other, which appeared to be an old wine bottle, held a dark liquid and was stopped with a wine cork. She uncorked and sniffed, then tasted. Scuppernong wine!

She glanced toward the cottage and saw a curtain move slightly.

Half a mile down the road, she came to what she decided had to be Miz Chessie’s house. Scorched earth surrounded equally scorched concrete pilings, and a pile of mostly burned furniture. A rusting bedspring marked the entrance to the yard.

She pulled the golf cart up to the remains of the house, got out, and walked quickly to the back of the property.

Although Inez had said the fire had been only a year ago, the former garden was already returning to a wild place. Mimosa trees had sprung up in the middle of the plot, and a network of vines clambered across still-standing corn stalks and whittled sticks that had probably held Miz Chessie’s tomatoes and pole beans.

Nothing edible grew here now, Gina decided. But as she was walking back to the cart, she spied some bright green shoots near the burned-out foundation. She bent down to look closer. Chives! She snatched up a handful and looked around again. More shoots, these broader. She pulled up the whole clump and found herself holding wild onions, the sandy soil still clinging to the white onion bulb.

She inhaled deeply and smiled. Suddenly she found that success smelled sweet—and oniony.

T
he camera crew and her own entourage were waiting on the porch of the lodge when Gina drove up in her golf cart. One of the cameramen ran toward the cart, followed by the sound man, who was wielding an ominous-looking boom mike aimed right at her.

“And, rolling,” Barry called.

“Noooo!” Gina cried, shielding her face with both arms. “Not like this! I’m a mess. I look like who-shot-Sally.”

“Exactly,” Barry said, walking over to the cart, trailed by all the others. “Reality is the new reality, sweetheart. We want the viewers to see that you’ve really had to battle in this food fight. And believe me, that’s obvious right now.”

“Ohmigod, Geen,” Lisa said, lifting up a lock of Gina’s salt-stiffened hair and dropping it just as quickly. “What happened? I mean, no offense, but you look like Swamp Thang.”

“I got wet,” Gina said, climbing wearily out of her cart. “And before that I got sunburned, and bit by bugs, and pinched by crab claws, and then slapped in the face with every branch and blade of saw grass on this island.”

“We were starting to get worried about you,” Scott said, taking the bucket of crabs from the cart. “Moody got back here thirty minutes ago. The man is unbelievable. He killed a pig. An honest-to-God pig. Hey, what happened to your shoes?” he asked, looking down at her bare feet, which were scratched and filthy.

“Okay, people,” Barry said, clapping his hands for attention. “We
can play twenty questions later. Right now, I need everybody out of camera range, because we have got a show to shoot.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” D’John said, elbowing the others aside as he wielded a spray bottle and a comb. “You are not letting the world see this tragedy until I do something with this hair and makeup. Not D’John’s client. Oh, no. I’m not having people associate my name with a woman who looks like she got beat up with a homely stick.”

“Flatterer,” Gina muttered under her breath.

“You can do something about her hair and wipe some of the crud off her face, but other than that, I want her left as is,” Barry said, relenting a little. “And you’ve got five minutes. I want her in the kitchen, cooking, in five minutes. So hurry.”

“Hurry,” Scott said tersely. “The clock’s running.” He grabbed Lisa’s arm. “And could you please get your sister some shoes?”

“Hurry,” Gina said, as D’John combed watered-down conditioner through her tangled hair. “I’m so far behind, I’ll never catch up. What did Tate look like when he got here?”

D’John shuddered. “He looked ghastly! Blood all over his clothes, and those cuts and bruises. If I were the type for rough trade, honey, I would have been all over him. But I’m not, and I wasn’t.”

Lisa hurried over with a bowl of hot water and a soapy cloth, and began gently dabbing at her sister’s face. She stepped out of her sandals and slid them onto her sister’s feet. “It was awesome, Geen. He looked kinda like Mel Gibson in one of those battle scenes from
Braveheart
. Only Tate’s taller than Mel. And hotter. Much hotter. You know, his shirt was kinda ripped open and his hair was all wild and windblown. I swear to God—”

“Enough!” Gina said.

“Enough,” Barry decreed. “Stand back, everybody.”

T
he smell of roast pork greeted her when she finally made her way to the ballroom and the kitchen set.

Tate looked calm and collected—and clean—as he nonchalantly chopped onions and added them to a sauté pan.

“Hey, Reggie,” he said, taking in her disheveled appearance. “Long day, huh?”

“The longest,” she agreed. “Heard you’re serving pork for dinner. Not bad.”

He shrugged. “I got lucky. What about you?”

She had already resolved not to ask him how he’d managed to kill a pig. No, she would not give him that satisfaction.

“Not that lucky,” she admitted. “I managed to catch some blue crabs and scrounge up some vegetables. So don’t count me out yet.”

“Never.”

She bustled around the kitchen, putting a stockpot full of water and seasonings on to boil for the blue crabs, shucking the corn and putting it on to boil, and lining up all the ingredients she’d need for the menu she’d assembled in her head on the ride back to the lodge.

“Nice-looking tomatoes,” Tate murmured from his side of the kitchen.

“Quiet,” Barry thundered. Turning to the cameramen, he looked annoyed. “Cut here. And Tate, buddy, no more chitchat. You guys are supposed to be mortal enemies, right? I don’t want our viewers suspecting collusion.”

“I don’t know about her viewers, but mine wouldn’t know collusion if it bit ’em on the ass,” Tate said.

Gina shot him a surprised but grateful look, and then the cameras were rolling again, and the big digital clock was ticking off the minutes.

The rest of the hour was a blur. She whisked together a quick topping of crumbled sugar, butter, flour, and cinnamon to top the dewberries she’d spotted only a few hundred yards down the path from the lodge. She sprinkled sugar on the berries, added the topping, and thrust the cobbler into the oven.

When the crabs had finished boiling, she dumped them on the counter and began furiously picking the meat from the shell, setting the heat-reddened backs aside.

Gina’s hands shook slightly as she diced celery and onions and dropped them into a skillet to sauté. In the pantry, she found a box of saltines, grabbed a sleeve of them, and pounded them into crumbs
with the bottom of a can of tomatoes. She folded the cracker crumbs into the softened vegetables and added half the crabmeat, an egg, and some of the crab boil seasonings.

She carefully spooned the crab mixture into the crab backs, and placed them on a baking sheet. Just before placing them in the oven, she sprinkled the chopped chives over each deviled crab, and dribbled melted butter over each one.

When the corn had cooled, she scraped the kernels from the corncobs and dumped them into a pan of simmering cream and butter, then added in a cup of the crabmeat, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Her stomach growled at the tantalizing smell of cooked pork wafting from Tate’s kitchen. If only, she thought, she had a bit of pork fat to throw into her chowder. And maybe a hit of sherry to give some depth to the chowder’s flavor.

She shot Tate a surreptitious look. He was peering into his oven. “You got any sherry over there?”

“Nope,” he said, not looking up. “But I saw a bottle in the bar in the library.”

“No time,” she said with a sigh, cutting up the tomatoes, cukes, and peppers for a southern version of chopped salad.

“I’ve got five minutes till my tenderloin comes out,” he said, and then he was running off the set, headed for the library.

“Hey!” Barry called. “Where the Christ do you think you’re going? We’re shooting a show here, dude.”

“Library. Be right back,” Tate called over his shoulder.

Less than a minute later, he was back, a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a bottle of sherry in the other.

“Thanks, Tate,” Gina said softly, hoping the boom mike wouldn’t pick up her words. “Really. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. But I’d been thinking about grabbing that bourbon anyway, to use in the glaze for my pork tenderloin,” he said.

“Five minutes,” Barry intoned. He was on camera now, standing in front of the kitchens, supplying commentary to the furious action going on right behind him.

“Our chefs are at the make-or-break point right now,” he said in a golf whisper. “Tate Moody appears to have his dishes out of the oven
and ready to plate. Right now he’s whisking some bourbon into the pan his pork tenderloin cooked in, deglazing the pan drippings. With the remnants of the fig and cracked pepper glaze, that should make a unique sweet-and-savory pan gravy for the pork.”

Gina heard Adelman’s commentary, but she didn’t dare look up from her own kitchen to see her rival’s progress. She yanked open the oven door and took out the dewberry cobbler, setting it on the counter to cool. But when she grabbed the baking sheet with the deviled crabs, one went skidding off the pan and onto the floor.

“Oh, too baaad!” Barry crowed. “Party foul for
Fresh Start
chef Gina Foxton.” And now the cameras and mikes were aimed at her. “She’s got three judges to feed, and only five deviled crabs now,” Barry observed. “Can she turn this tragedy into a triumph?”

Gina forced a smile. She placed three of the remaining crabs on three dinner plates, then scooped the crab out of the two extra shells and divided the extra crabmeat between the three plates, mounding the crab higher now on each. She spooned the chopped salad onto the plates alongside the deviled crabs, and quickly showered each dish with a confetti of chopped chives.

“One minute left,” Barry said breathlessly. “Can she do it? Can she get everything plated and on the judge’s table with so little time left?”

“Bite me!” she wanted to scream. But instead, she ladled the corn and crab chowder into shallow soup bowls and splashed a little sherry into each bowl. Grabbing a tray, she ferried the plates and bowls to the judge’s table, then ran back to retrieve the cobbler.

The buzzer went off just as she placed the steaming hot cobbler onto the table.

“And…time!” Barry yelled.