Burnt Ends
By Ralph Hornbeck
“You know what they say, Harry,” said Freddy, standing in front of his offset smoker, waving his grilling tongs at me. “If you don’t like smoking your meat…”
“Beat it,” yelled the rest of his pit crew in unison. They laughed, as much at their own immaturity as any actual humor.
“Y’all should put that on a T-shirt,” I said. “You might sell enough to pay for all the money you lose competing against me.”
Freddy and I were competing at the Grills Gone Wild barbecue event in the central Florida town of Davenport. The smoke of 10 different woods wafted through the crisp spring-morning air. Everywhere you went was the smell of fat slowly rendering at low heat. Life, as they say, was good.
Freddy and I were next-door neighbors, best friends, and the pitmasters of our respective teams. Freddy ran the Village Smokers, a decent bunch that just needed a little seasoning. (Sorry, puns are sort of a thing in the grilling world.) Their top finish was winning Best Sausage at the Smokin’ in the Boys Room festival in Lakeland. On the other hand, my team, Pork Incorporated, won Grand Champion at several events this year.
Freddy poked the bark on a brisket. “So, Harry, you going to the Royal this year?”
I turned to the two guys in my pit crew, Steve and Bob. “You guys ever hear of something called the Royal?” Steve shrugged, feigning ignorance. After a few moments, Bob spoke up.
“Perhaps Freddy is referring to the American Royal Barbecue event in Kansas City, the largest and most prestigious competition of its kind.”
“Oh, the Royal.” I nudged Steve. “Weren’t we the Grand Champions at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest in Memphis last year?”
“Why yes, Harry, we were.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“And doesn’t that qualify us for The Royal?”
“I’ll have to check the rules, but I believe you are correct again.”
“So, Freddy, when you ask us if we are going to The Royal, our answer would be…”
“Hell yeah,” we yelled in unison. We high-fived but tried not to overdo it. The Village Smokers hadn’t qualified to go to Kansas City yet, so we limited our celebration. Feeling guilty over our display, I threw Freddy a bone. Figuratively, not literally.
“In all seriousness, guys, I hope you qualify. I’d love to see you there.”
Freddy tipped back his Stetson and wiped his brow. Austin-born, he cooks central Texas style—post oak wood in the fire, with a thin mop sauce during cooking but nothing at the finish.
“You and me both. I’d give anything to make it Kansas City just one time in my life. But if we don’t win today, Florida doesn’t have any more qualifying events before the deadline.”
In most competitions you cook four meats—brisket, chicken, pork ribs, and pork shoulder. Freddy cooked a brisket that’ll make you holler. He also grilled a mean chicken. Where he needed help was in the other two entries. God love them, but Texans just don’t understand pigs.
We would need to fill our turn-in boxes in about 30 minutes. My chicken was getting a beautiful finish. Right before the end, we would turn up the heat a little to get bite-through skin. I didn’t want the judges to chomp on my bird and have the top layer come off and slap ’em in the chin.
“Hey Harry, don’t forget to add the liquid smoke,” said Freddy as he inserted a temperature probe into one of his Boston Butts.
“I’d borrow some of yours, but I’m sure you’ve used your whole bottle already,” I said without looking up. The ribs looked perfect. No shiners. The team huddled to sample them.
I cook exclusively Memphis style—hickory wood fire, spicy dry rub. Born and bred in southwest Tennessee, I’d been cooking this way my entire life. Unlike Texans, everyone from the Volunteer state knows their way around a pig. Since two of the meats in the competition are pork, I figure that gives us Memphis boys an edge.
Bob and Steve leaned forward and bit a chunk off their samples. We had been doing this long enough I didn’t expect moans of delight, just the honest-to-gosh truth.
A concerned look passed over Bob’s face. He glanced at Steve and then over at me. “I dunno, something seems off.”
I nibbled my portion. It didn’t take two chews to realize Bob was being kind. Sure, it had all the familiar flavors. Pepper, paprika, garlic, cayenne, and ginger. I even sensed the smoke from the few sticks of pecan wood Steve threw into the fire with the hickory to sweeten it a tad.
Lurking among these, though, was a bitterness that didn’t belong. Most people wouldn’t detect it, but I did. So would any judge who knew a money muscle from a burnt end.
The three of us looked at the bones in our hands and tried another bite. We chewed with quick bites, like gerbils with a toilet paper tube, hoping to locate the elusive element. Bob spoke first.
“Is it the rub?”
I shook my head. “It’s not on the skin, it’s deeper.”
Steve nodded his head. “I licked the sauce and it’s fine. The taste doesn’t show until you chew. Is it the smoke?” He was our fire expert and would have taken it personally if his wood was the problem.
I shook my head slower this time. “It’s stronger on the surface than down by the bone, so I thought it might be at first. We’ve been standing here all day, though. We would have smelled anything that bitter.”
Steve hesitated before speaking. “Could the meat have been…off?” I had hooked the team up with a hog farm in west Tennessee that supplied us with competition-quality pork.
“I’ve eaten meat that’s turnt, and this ain’t turnt. This ain’t bad meat or meat that’s gone bad.” I paused to consider my next words. “It’s like sumpin’s been done to it.”
Competitive barbecuing is a friendly world, and the idea of sabotage was ridiculous. Still, everyone guards their secrets, whether it’s their sauces, meat, or wood. The ribs had been brought in a cooler in the RV straight from home, and they’d been locked up or in my sight ever since. Someone messing with the meat didn’t seem possible. We had to find another explanation.
“Maybe it’s only this rack?”
We all snatched another slab off the grill and cut off an end piece. We bit. We chewed. A pause. Three sad shakes of the head. The bones drooped in our hands.
Bob and Steve worked as my pit men, but I was the pitmaster. My acute sense of smell and taste is my superpower. If I’d been born in France, I could have been a wine taster. It was up to me to figure out what was wrong and fix it. The deadline for our entries was closing fast.
The wind shifted. A new odor assaulted my nose, interfering with my ability to isolate the flavor. It reminded me of the cologne you’d find in a honky-tonk men’s room. Sure enough, Freddy was standing nearby, chatting up a young woman twirling a few blond locks between her fingers and smiling at him. Whether it’s his black Stetson, his 6-foot rail-thin frame, or the gravelly voice, old Freddy sure charmed the ladies.
Not that I’m jealous. My shape may resemble a pork butt more than a slab of ribs, but I’m still married to my high-school sweetheart, which is more than I can say for Freddy. His wife left him after he came home with a strand of someone else’s hair on his Stetson one too many times. If I had Freddy’s weakness for blondes, I would’ve switched to wearing a white hat. Just saying.
But I had my own problems to worry about. “Steve, throw a buttload of pecan wood into the fire to increase the smoky flavor and sweeten it a little. Bob, add more brown sugar to the sauce. Let’s try to mask some of the bitterness.”
I crossed my arms. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t like our chances of winning.
* * *
After parking the RV in the side yard that night, I walked into my house in the Villages, a planned community near Orlando. My wife Ellen took one look at me and made an exaggerated sad face.
“I’m sorry. You must have lost,” she said.
“I guess after 23 years of marriage you can tell what happened just by looking at my face, huh?”
“Well, that and the fact you’re not dancing around the living room with a four-foot-tall trophy like you usually do when you win.”
She didn’t say it in a loving, teasing way. More of a sarcastic, arms crossed over her chest way. Something was up. I would hear a steady drip of snide comments until I found out what was bothering her. I decided to use some of the people skills I developed running my plumbing supply business back in Memphis.
“What in the hell is wrong with you?” I asked.
“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you? When you sold your company, we made enough money to retire to Florida. I wanted to travel, meet new people, party…all the things we never did because you were too busy selling pipes and putty. Instead, you spend all your time with that stupid smoker in our backyard or at some competition in the middle of nowhere. When you’re not competing, you’re hunting with your buddies to ‘relax and clear your mind.’”
“Honey, I do apologize. I didn’t know you felt that way. I would be happy to have you come with us to our competitions. You can’t replace Bob or Steve, but I’m sure we can find some things for you to do until we get you trained up…”
“Trained up? I don’t want to watch food smoke for eight hours. I can’t think of anything more boring. I don’t want to help you, I want you to quit.”
Clearly, she had lost her mind while I was away. Competitive barbecuing is a complex, exciting world requiring a unique set of skills to be a champion. Smoking meat was boring? Right. And NASCAR was just a bunch of guys making left turns.
I should have stopped speaking until she cooled down and came to her senses. I tried to reason with her instead.
“What else am I supposed to do with my time? Spend it with you?”
In hindsight, I might have taken more care in my choice of words. It took over an hour of apologizing, and, worst of all, listening to her talk about her feelings before she calmed down. In the end, I agreed to cut back on the number of competitions I entered. Keeping my skills sharp with only ten contests per year would be difficult, but making her happy was worth it.
Around midnight we managed to patch things up. I was in no mood for more talking, but a fight always wound Ellen up.
“So, how did you feel when you didn’t win?” She was laying on her side in bed, her head propped up by her pillow.
“Well, I wasn’t surprised. The judges didn’t like our ribs, and I can’t blame ‘em. My spirits picked up, though, when they announced Freddy as the grand champion.” Ellen shoved me in the shoulder, a smile on her face.
“No way. He won? He deserves it, considering all the hard times he’s been through.”
“Yeah, not winning any contests has beaten him down. The best part is he can go to Kansas City this year. He’s wanted to since we started entering competitions together.”
She frowned. “I was talking about his wife divorcing him.”
“Oh right, that too. I can’t imagine how depressed I’d be if I lost you.” I hoped this would raise a smile, but still too soon I guess. “Freddy was pretty tore up about it. Looks like he’s moving on, though. This win might put him back in the saddle again.”
Ellen frowned again. “What do you mean, he’s moving on?”
“Well, he was chatting up this young blonde near the end of the competition. I don’t know if they hooked up later, but he was interested.”
Ellen’s face went blank. She stared at the ceiling for a few moments, and then rolled over to face away from me. I thought about sliding over and snuggling but figured she wouldn’t welcome it.
My mind kept returning to the ribs. What had been wrong with them? The taste was too complex to pin down, especially mixed in with all the other flavors. Could I break it down to its individual notes? Some of them were herbal, like caraway or coriander. Rose and chamomile were in there, too. But the main undertones had been musky.
I sniffed, trying to imagine the scent again. Amazingly, it popped into my head, without being encumbered by the presence of the meat or sauce or smoke. It’s like my brain magically subtracted them and left only the foreign substance.
I inhaled and smelled it again. But it wasn’t coming from my memory.
It was coming from my pillow.
I shoved my nose into the fabric and took a deep breath. Faint, but it was there. And I knew exactly what it was.
Cheap cologne. The kind you might pay a few dollars to splash on your face when you’re in a honky-tonk men’s room.
Like the cherries on a river boat slot machine, things started lining up one by one. My wife’s sudden coolness when she found out Freddy was hitting on someone else. My neighbor’s decision to skip our usual hunting trip before the competition. The mysterious problem with the bitter ribs.
At first, I assumed Freddy seduced my wife while I was away and then tampered with the meat in the cooler in my garage. Was that possible? He had been my best friend. He was the one who convinced me to start entering barbecue competitions. We hunted together. How could he have betrayed me this way?
But what if he didn’t initiate the affair? What if Ellen seduced him and made him sabotage my ribs so I would lose and not want to compete anymore?
Or what if no one seduced anyone? What if they both came up with this plan to ruin my chances? Freddy could have suggested it to Ellen, she helped him, and then they laughed at me and then jumped each other’s bones to celebrate.
I spent the rest of a sleepless night thinking of all the ways Freddy’s cologne could have gotten on my pillowcase and each scenario was worse than the one before. My emotions ping-ponged all over the place. One minute I wanted to confront Freddy in a rage. The next I wanted to sob into my pillow over being betrayed by the two people I loved most in this world. Sometimes I blamed Freddy for this, sometimes I blamed Ellen, and sometimes I blamed myself.
By the time the morning arrived, I managed to reign in my emotions. Oddly enough, I didn’t blame my wife. She would only have gone along with the plan because she wanted more of me. I couldn’t be angry at her for that. As for her sleeping with Freddy, I suppose I bear some responsibility. She had made it clear I had neglected her, and she had a point.
No, the person I sought revenge on was Freddy. He broke the Bro Code. Twice. You don’t sleep with your best friend’s woman, and you don’t mess with another man’s meat. Vengeance demanded payback, and not the kind you find in a courtroom or with your fists.
That morning I sat on my back patio, drinking beer and staring at the equipment that had brought me so much joy over the years. Now all I saw was pain, folly, and betrayal. Freddy needed to feel the same. Over the course of the day, I hatched a plan for the ultimate revenge. I worked out all the details in my mind and then made a call.
“Hey Freddy, how’s it going? Yeah, I bet you’re still coming down from cloud nine. Listen, you’re going to the Royal this October, right? What do you say to heading up to Kansas City together, you and me? We can stop and do some deer hunting on the way, like usual. Sure, take some time to think about it.”
* * *
Five months later, I stood in my booth in the infield of the Kansas Speedway on a cool Saturday morning. My brisket and pork shoulder rested in a haze of hickory smoke. They would be in the smoker for three more hours. The chicken and ribs wouldn’t start for another hour. My team and I had time to relax for a bit. Phase one of my plan was completed on the way up. Time for me to initiate phase two. I hollered at the pitmaster with the team next door.
“Hey buddy, what say we take a break for a while and soak up some of the local color?”
A tall, thin figure in a black Stetson checked the temperature gauge on an offset smoker and ambled over. So help me I wanted to punch him in the face. Instead, I gave him another one of the stupid grins I’d plastered on my face since April.
“I don’t know, Harry. This is my first time at the Royal. What if I leave and something goes wrong?”
Although I hadn’t let on I knew about him and Ellen, he was a little gun-shy around me. He had declined my invitation to go hunting, which I expected. Now I leaned into his guilt a little bit.
“C’mon, Freddy. What’s the point of coming to the Royal if you spend the whole time staring at your smoker? You already bailed on going hunting with me. Don’t tell me you’re going to refuse to let me show my best buddy the highlight of his barbecuing career?”
Freddy gazed at his booth and out at the grounds. He mumbled something about it being alright, so we headed out together.
The competitor’s section was in the infield of the Kansas City Speedway, a 1.5 mile oval track. We made our way to the Marketplace, where the sponsors’ tents hawked every kind of liquor or barbecue-related item. We found a food vendor offering all the popular snack items: Pig Candy, Atomic Buffalo Turds, and my favorite, MOINK balls.
“What do you want, Freddy? I’m buying.”
You’d think the last thing we’d want to do is eat, let alone something like candied bacon or a jalapeño stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in bacon. The truth is, competitors don’t taste anything we’re cooking until near the end. Surrounded by all those delicious smells, you can find yourself famished a few hours into the contest.
Freddy pushed his hat back to read the menu. “Well, I don’t want to fill up. Got to stay hungry for when I’m sampling my entries. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to have me some of them MOINK balls, though.”
“Sounds like a plan. Ma’am, grab a couple of them puppies for me, likewise.”
The woman behind the counter handed us each a small white paper plate with two meatballs wrapped in bacon. (Get it, MOO plus OINK makes MOINK?) The vendor had put a tasty mesquite rub on the beef, which was smoked and sauced. When I popped one into my mouth, it exploded with meaty goodness. For the last six months I had been miserable, thinking about Freddy and my wife. It was almost worth it to watch him swallow those little treats.
We strolled by the stage where the results would be announced and scoped out the competition. The unofficial dress code for the pitmasters hadn’t changed much since last year—the look was still suburban dad on a summer weekend. Men wore caps or bucket hats. Shorts were knee-length and either khaki or cammo. No wonder Freddy got all the stares from the ladies. With his Stetson, black long-sleeve shirt with an actual collar, and a pair of worn blue jeans over hand-tooled boots, he looked like a 60s cigarette ad.
After a while, I got nervous about being away from my booth, so we headed back.
Our teams were fixing to prep the chicken and ribs. Things got busy quickly, but I kept one eye on Freddy. At first, the only symptom was a little extra sweat. About thirty minutes later the hives must have kicked in, because he started to scratch his forearms through his shirt sleeves. I tried to keep a smile off my face and focused on putting my team through their paces. Soon after, he bent over at the waist and rubbed his belly.
“Hey Harry, your stomach bothering you?”
Without looking up from the pork rib I was massaging with Dalmatian rub (salt and pepper for the uninitiated), I shook my head. “No, why you ask?”
“I think I got a bad MOINK ball.”
He looked uglier than the south end of a north-facing mule. Sweat soaked his shirt and his tanned skin resembled bleached leather. My plan was working to perfection.
You see, after thinking about how Freddy had betrayed me, I concluded he should suffer the same way. Just sabotaging his meat wouldn’t have made up for sleeping with my wife. The most important thing in his world must be taken away from him—barbecue.
The plan started with the hunting trip on the way to Kansas City. Freddy had begged off like I figured he would. With the woods to myself I managed to bag a couple of white-tail deer. The first one didn’t have what I needed, but I hit the jackpot with the second one. Several engorged lone star ticks hid in the fur near its hindquarters. I carefully removed them and placed them in a glass test tube, stoppering it tight.
When I made it to the competition two days later, I parked my RV far away from Freddy’s. The extra distance gave me a ready excuse to go into his trailer to use the facilities when I was tossing back his longneck Lone Stars. While inside, I slipped into his bedroom and released the ticks into his pillowcase. With any luck, they would come out at night, and he wouldn’t know he had been bitten.
See, a lone star tick that’s bitten a deer can carry a protein called alpha-gal. If the tick bites you, your body’s immune system overreacts to the protein. Whenever your body is exposed to alpha-gal again, the allergic symptoms hit you a few hours later. The reaction differs from person to person, but in Freddy’s case it looked like sweating, hives, and nausea. And almost all mammals contain alpha-gal. From now on, he wouldn’t be able to have any more ribs or brisket without itching or puking his guts out. Yep, that’s right. I made Freddy allergic to meat.
Freddy reached for a chair and plunked his bony butt on it. He plucked off his hat and fanned his face but nothing helped.
I was enjoying Freddy’s discomfort so much I didn’t notice him deteriorating more than I expected. His breathing grew almost as loud as the fan in the back of the booth. His eyes darted around the booth, but his team was focused on filling their turn-in boxes for the judging. His lips moved to form words, but nothing came out. He stood up but collapsed to the ground.
“Freddy?” I dashed over and knelt next to him. He latched onto my shirt and then pointed at his throat. His airway must have closed. He couldn’t breathe.
“Steve, grab the first-aid kit from the supply box. Bob, call the paramedics. He’s having an asthma attack or something.” Freddy’s eyes had the frantic look of a drowning man.
The yellow medical box arrived. I found an EpiPen and tore open its foil pouch. Grabbing it in my right fist with my thumb on the top, I brought it to a spot just above Freddy’s left thigh. I leaned down and whispered into his ear.
“I know you slept with Ellen and sabotaged me in Davenport.” His eyes grew wide as the meaning of my words sunk in. My hand slammed the injector into his leg. The needle plunged through the cloth of his jeans and into his quads.
The effect was almost immediate. Freddy’s chest lifted as he was able to feed his starving lungs. The color soon returned to his cheeks and the panic left his eyes. He climbed back into his chair and waved off the circle of people around him.
“Go back to finishing up. I’ll be okay. Harry will take care of me.” My team turned to me, and I nodded. After everyone left, he spoke.
“Honest, Harry, it wasn’t planned or nothing. Your wife was upset, and I was comforting her when things kind of got out of hand.”
“Upset? Upset about what? You’d better start at the beginning.”
He paused. Finally, his shoulders dropped.
“Hell, I suppose I owe you that much. I’d just come back from the store with a new bottle of cologne. Your garage door was open. I’ve always been curious about where you got your meat, so I pulled a couple racks out of your freezer. As I stood holding the package and thinking just once I’d like my ribs to be better than yours, I saw the meat injector lying on the workbench. On an impulse, I loaded up the injector with some of my cologne and squirted it inside the plastic wrap.”
He searched my eyes, hoping to find understanding, if not forgiveness. Until I heard the rest of the story, though, I wouldn’t give him either one.
“I put everything back in the freezer and turned to leave. Ellen was staring at me from the door to the house. I tried to cover it up by pretending I was looking for you. She said you had left for a competition. I got closer and saw her eyes were all red. I asked her what was wrong. She started crying and unloading everything on me.”
Freddy took a deep breath, steeling himself for the final part of the story.
“She accepted being away from you while you ran your business because she knew how much you wanted to be successful. When you retired, she hoped the two of you would spend more time together. Then I sucked you into the barbecuing world. She realized she was never going to be the most important thing in your life. I tried to console her and tell her you were a decent man. Before I knew it, we were kissing. We didn’t mean to…it just happened. Harry, I’m sorry, I can’t believe I did that to my best friend. You didn’t deserve it.”
About then the paramedics showed up. They insisted on taking Freddy to the hospital, saying the drugs in the Epipen wear off and his symptoms could return. They loaded him on one of those fold-up beds they got. As they took him away, he grabbed my shirt.
“Don’t blame Ellen. She’s a good woman. Don’t lose her, or you’ll end up like me.”
As they wheeled him away, my throat had a lump so big I couldn’t have swallowed a BB.
My team managed to put our entries together without me and got them to the judges in time. The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur. I remember being in the audience when they announced we were the Grand Champions. Someone dragged me up onto the stage. It should have been the highlight of my life, but I felt dead inside. In my thirst for revenge, I had darn near killed my best friend. The cheering of the crowd only made it worse. I croaked out a thank you to my team and fled the celebration.
Somehow, I staggered through the throng to my RV. I collapsed on the sofa, grateful to be alone. My shirt was damp with sweat, my legs were rubbery, and my stomach flip-flopped more than a Senator in an election year. I rushed to the bathroom and threw up.
Afterwards, I sat on the floor with my head between my knees. My mind flashed back to Freddy sitting in his booth in the same way.
I lifted my head. It couldn’t be. I had been so careful. After I had lugged the deer back to the RV, I stripped naked and inspected every inch of my body for ticks. I had sprayed all my hunting clothes with permethrin to kill any bugs that might latch onto them.
Except my hat.
I rushed to the mirror and pushed my hair around, checking my hairline. Above my left ear was a brown tick with a white spot on its back like a lone star. Using a pair of tweezers, I plucked him from my scalp. Its belly was all swole up, no doubt with a mixture of blood from me and the deer. No way I didn’t have some alpha-gal running through my veins right now.
I sank back onto the floor of the bathroom, sobbing. No more Memphis ribs dry-rubbed with garlic and cayenne. No more Kansas City burnt ends, dripping with a ketchup and molasses sauce. No more Carolina pork shoulder basted with a tangy vinegar and a hint of mustard.
I grabbed a bottle of Jack from the cupboard and poured a couple fingers for myself and, after a moment’s reflection, two more for the tick. By midnight, I drank almost more fingers than I have fingers. Bleary-eyed, I stared at my gold championship trophy, my chin resting in my hands.
Maybe it was for the best. Ellen and I could spend more time together, get to know each other again. Jump in the RV and travel around the country. Ellen liked to go antiquing when we were first married. We could visit some small towns and check out the shops. I could help her haggle with the store owners.
On occasion, I still might be able to grill for our friends. It would have to be vegetables only, of course. Portobello mushrooms would be a good start. Hickory would be best for the fire, but the caps would have to be cooked low and slow to keep them from drying out. After that, I might try something more exotic. I’ve always wanted to smoke using rooibos leaves but never found the right meat. They would probably pair well with jackfruit covered with a thin teriyaki glaze.
I wonder if they have vegan barbecue competitions.
END
