“Sahara Chili,” Chili Con (Fake) Carne

A century earlier, everyone in the vicinity would have ducked and run for cover the moment Pierce Jouel’s horse clip-clopped its way into town; as it was, they all just hushed as the thirty-foot RV with Ontario plates came to rest in its designated parking spot, and a low murmur went up through the crowd that someone ought to tell Benjy Murchoe who’d just pulled in.

There wasn’t much to do in that part of West Texas, even when an international chili championship was in town, and so watching Pierce and Benjy go at it had become something of a spectator sport among Terlingua regulars, predictable enough that some had even started to joke years back — well out of Benjy’s earshot, of course — that the organizing committee put it on the event’s official program: Mouth-Off, Tuesday, 2PM (Or Whenever Pierce Gets Here). A few of the jokers had even gone so far as to tell Elmyra, Benjy’s wife, who had laughed herself nearly sick over it and then made them all swear up and down not to point it out to him, lest her husband become self-conscious and deprive them all of the annual event’s main entertainment.

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