Someone in the food tent protested, “Well, hell! I lost the contest already!”
Pierre sought a change of subject. He swirled the wine in his glass as he thought. “We can talk about the methyl alcohol. What we call the legs.”
“Hubba hubba,” Carlo said.
Pierre glanced agitatedly at Owen, but Owen simply offered encouraging thumbs-up, you’re-doing-great gestures.
“We will skip ahead to the bouquet,” Pierre told them, and lifted his glass to his nose to inhale the aroma.
A would-be connoisseur put his nose completely inside the glass, dunking it into the wine. Watching him, Owen got up. “We might need some hands-on teaching here, Pierre.”
Owen and Pierre stepped down to the main floor as Pierre instructed, “And then we taste.”
About half the guys at the folding tables dipped their forefingers into their wine and then slurped it off.
Owen said, “And as far as what Jerome told us last month, I done some checking and that’s totally wrong.”
Pierre demonstrated, “Hold the wine in your mouth like so.”
But Owen jumped the gun, saying, “And then spit it out.”
A host of them spewed and gushed their mouthfuls. Pierre watched in abhorrence as a burly highway worker named Orville bent with his knees wide apart and spit a jet of wine to the floor like it was tobacco juice.
Owen happily slapped Pierre on the back, “See the effect you’re having? We’re already better than last time. And we got forty minutes to go.”
21
The sole customer in the Main Street Café was a four-hundred-pound wedding photographer who, in the on-the-nose way of Nebraska, was nicknamed Biggy. Scanning the sports page for Cornhusker news, he slurped coffee and went through a half-dozen stale doughnuts as if gaining weight were his full-time job.
Iona and Natalie stood behind the pink Formica counter blowing up bright balloons for The Revels. With the worm of one deflated balloon in her mouth, Natalie was trying to tie off another. Shrinking throughout her efforts, it was finally knotted when only the size of her fist.
“This food is lousy!” Biggy shouted and got up from the booth, hardly a smidgen of doughnut left on his plate.
Natalie was mystified as she watched him storm out.
Iona just sighed. “I can’t be worrying about his little world.”
Natalie got his coffee cup, saucer, and doughnut plate and took them into the kitchen. And she was putting them in the dishwasher when Dick stood up from a crouch outside and just appeared there at a screened window beside her.
“Hello,” he said. Embarrassed, he looked down. “I’m standing in the pansies here.”
Alarmed, she leaned forward to see.
“Oh, I’m not squashing anything. I just want to talk to ya. Will ya go for a horse ride with me?”
“But the café is still open . . .”
“You won’t get anybody. Opal handles the after-lunch on Fridays.”
Natalie looked back into the café, which was, indeed, vacant. She smiled and took off her apron as Opal trundled in with her ironing board and a basket of clothes. Natalie looked for Iona to say where she was going, but Iona had spied Dick and disappeared. A lone balloon floated across the floor.
22
Frenchman’s Creek was pelting and gurgling in the background as Owen and Pierre sidestepped among Owen’s trellised grapevines in sunshine in their tuxedos. Owen said, “You see here how I’ve used the classic, double-guyot way of training the vines?”
Pierre gently touched the grape leaves and hefted the grape cluster in his palm like a lovely breast, measuring its weight. “You have very many the grapes.”
“Excuse me?”