Thin Blue Smoke: A Novel About Music, Food, and Love

by Doug Worgul

  “I picked this up at an estate sale up on Ward Parkway, if you can believe it,” said Bob, as he handed the bat to LaVerne. “It’s the real deal. There’s a note that came with it that says that this was really Colavito’s bat. It’s cracked on the handle which is probably why he gave it away. It’s even got cleat marks. Can’t you just see The Rock pulling this thing back behind his shoulders before he steps up to the plate?”

  LaVerne held the bat in his hands and grinned. “Damn, Bob. I can’t accept this. You need to give it to your grandson or something.”

  Bob shook his head. “LaVerne, my grandson doesn’t know who Rocky Colavito is and he doesn’t even like baseball. I want you to have it. As soon as I saw it, I wanted you to have it.”

  LaVerne just grinned some more.

  Later that afternoon he put the bat under the counter by the cash register with the intent of showing it to Pug next time he came in with Mother Mary. If LaVerne had known that a genuine autographed Rocky Colavito model K55 35-inch Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville Slugger from 1964 would sell for about $1,000 on eBay, he would probably have chosen a more secure place to store Bob Dunleavy’s gift. As it turns out this lapse in judgment thwarted the theft of the $100 in the cash drawer.

  A week or so later, A.B. was at the counter, when a burly black man in an oversized hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled up, baggy carpenters’ jeans, and expensive sneakers swaggered up to the counter and shoved a gun at A.B.

  “I want all your money and cigarettes,” he said. “Don’t mess with me, ‘cuz I’ll kill you. Just give me your money and your cigarettes.”

  The request for cigarettes concerned A.B., because Smoke Meat doesn’t sell cigarettes. And since he had left his own pack of cigarettes in the office he wasn’t sure how he would comply with this demand.

  He tried to explain. “Well, I can give you the money but not the cigarettes because we don’t sell cigarettes here. I used to try to get the boss to sell ‘em because there are plenty of people who ask for them, including me, but the boss’s wife won’t do it. And she’s probably right about that. It’s not really healthy. We don’t allow people to smoke in here anyways. I’ve tried to quit myself but I always start up again.”

  About then LaVerne came out from the kitchen and saw the man and his gun. Without hesitating or breaking stride LaVerne snatched the Rocky Colavito model K55 from under the counter and with a quick single-handed swing swatted the gun from the man’s grip, almost detaching the man’s hand from his wrist in the process.

  The man fell on the floor writhing in pain. “Damn, dawg! You broke my hand!” he cried. “You didn’t have to do that!”

  LaVerne stood over him ready to use the K55 again if necessary. “You didn’t have to come in here and try to steal from us,” he said. “Call 9-1-1, A.B.”

  Twenty minutes later the whole thing was over. The police had come and hauled the perpetrator away and had taken statements from A.B., LaVerne, and a few of the customers. The place was empty except for Ferguson Glen and Del James.

  LaVerne was pissed. “We should have just given him the $100 because he chased away at least $300 worth of business.”

  He went into the kitchen, got himself a beer and went out back by the dumpster to drink it. A.B. sat down in a chair across from Del and took a deep breath. He wanted to go out back and smoke but decided it was best to leave LaVerne alone.

  “You alright?” Del asked.

  “Yeah,” said A.B. “Whenever this happens it reminds of when I saw the angel.”

  Del pointed to his ear. “You’ll have to speak up. I thought you said you saw an angel.”

  “I did, Del. I did see an angel. That’s how I got saved. That’s when I accepted Jesus.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, boy,” said Del. “But I’m not really religious. That may be why.”

  “It was September 6th, 1987. I’ll never forget it.” said A.B. “I was cooking briskets and butts for the next day, so it was late, like ten or eleven o’clock, and I went out back to get some wood for the smoker. I propped the back door open with a piece of wood like I always do so it doesn’t close all the way, and I loaded up with logs.

  “Anyways, I had my arms full and was trying to get the door open with my foot, when I hear something back behind the wood stack. So I’m trying to get inside quick because I think maybe it’s a rat in the woodpile. Rats give me the willies.

  “I get inside and put the wood down and turn around and there’s this guy with a knife. A big knife. And I know the guy! He’s the guy we got our wood from. He and his uncle had this big woodlot down in the Ozarks, and every two weeks he would drive his truck up here and sell wood to us and some of the other joints.

  “So I say ‘Billy, what’s goin’ on?’ And he says ‘Sorry man, I wouldn’t do this if I had a choice. But I don’t. And just because we know each other doesn’t mean I won’t cut you up if you don’t do what I say.’

  “So, Billy makes me go in the office and tells me to open the safe. I tell him I don’t know the combination and he gets real mad. He puts the knife right up under my eye and tells me I’d better think of it real fast. I thought I was going to die. That he was going to kill me right there. Especially since I really didn’t know the combination. That or he was going to cut my eye out.

  “Anyways. Next thing I know, I see this flash of light. It blinds me. And everything is dark all around me, but I see this light in front of me and I hear a voice. A strong, but kind of quiet voice. And it says ‘You’re alright. You’re safe. Keep your eyes on me.’

  “And I do feel safe. I don’t feel afraid of Billy and his knife. The voice is telling me ‘Stay with me, A.B. Stay with me. You’re mine. And I need you.’

  “And then I see a man in white clothes. He’s standing there in the light smiling at me with his hand out to me. He says ‘Don’t be afraid.’ And he calls me by my real name. Al Buddy. Nobody even knows my real name. Everybody just knows me by A.B. That’s when I knew it was an angel.

  “Then, I’m waking up in the hospital emergency room. And I’m okay, except I got a big ol’ shiner.

  “That’s when I started going to church. Mrs. Williams had been asking me to anyway. I figured if Jesus wanted me, then he was going to have me. If he sent an angel to save my life, then I was sure going to accept him as my personal Lord and Savior. That’s when I got baptized. That’s when I got saved.”

  Del thought about all this for a moment. “So, what happened to the kid with the knife?”

  “Don’t know,” said A.B. “But he didn’t get any money. A couple of weeks later his uncle came around to deliver wood and the boss told him to go screw himself, that we didn’t want his wood anymore.”

  Del shook his head. “I’m not sure you saw an angel, A.B. That sounds to me more like a medical experience than a religious experience. Sounds like you had a brush with death, not an angel.”

  Del patted A.B. on the back and got up to leave. “I’m glad you’re still among the living.”

  After Del left, A.B. sighed and looked over at Ferguson. “Nobody ever believes me.”

  Ferguson, who doesn’t smile much, smiled at A.B. “I envy you, young man.”

  “Why would you envy me?”

  “Because I do believe you.”

  The two men sat in silence. A.B. felt like he might cry.

  Ferguson spoke. “So? Is your name really Al Buddy?”

  16

  Direct and Indirect

  LaVerne gets annoyed when people ask him for his “secret recipe” for barbecue.

  “There is no recipe for barbecue,” he snarls. “There’s a technique for barbecue. And it’s no secret. Anybody who knows anything about barbecue knows the technique.”

  Usually LaVerne’s response stifles further discussion; however, if he’s feeling charitable, he may offer that barbecue is a
technique where certain cuts of meat are cooked slowly by the heat of coals made from a hardwood fire.

  “Wood, meat, and time. That’s what you need to make barbecue. It’s no secret. There are lots of ways cooks add their own personal flavor to the barbecue, such as seasonings and sauces, but seasonings and sauces don’t make it barbecue. They make it your barbecue.”

  LaVerne Williams’ barbecue is pretty straightforward. He prefers oak and cherry wood for his fire, though he’ll use pecan and apple. And for seasonings, he uses salt, pepper, cayenne, and garlic powder. That’s it.

  “I’m not heavy on the seasonings,” he says. “I let the wood and the smoke do most of the work.”

  Maintaining a steady, reliable, supply of wood is one of the problematic aspects of the barbecue business. A few years ago, Smoke Meat struck a deal with a young farmer with a big woodlot down near Sedalia, who got into the wood business as a way of supplementing his cash flow during the winter months. He was punctual and honest and LaVerne liked him, but in the spring when the farmer realized he was actually going to need to use his grain truck to haul grain instead of wood, he called LaVerne and told him he was getting out of the wood business. For a couple weeks, LaVerne bought wood from local suppliers. But most of the local woodyards sell primarily to competitive barbecue cooks and backyard enthusiasts and they charge more than LaVerne is used to paying.

  The regulars at Smoke Meat knew that LaVerne was unhappy about his wood situation. So when Del James saw a sign advertising firewood up in northwest Missouri, he wrote down the phone number.

  “It’s about two hours from here, up near Worth, Missouri, on 169 Highway,” said Del. “I saw the sign on my way back from my mother’s place, up in Mount Ayr, Iowa. It may be too far. But you said were pretty desperate.”

  LaVerne had A.B. call the number and ask what kind of wood they had and how much they charged for it.

  “Looks good, boss,” said A.B., reporting back with the information. “They got oak, apple, hickory, and maple. And the price is right. Only problem is, his truck is broke down so he can’t deliver until it’s fixed. If we want wood this week, we’ll have to go pick it up. But he says if we do, he’ll knock some off the price.”

  LaVerne swore and slammed shut the walk-in door, but told A.B. to call back and make arrangements for them to pick up a load that Saturday.

  *

  Late Saturday morning, LaVerne and A.B. left on their errand, leaving Angela in charge of the lunch shift.

  “I got a map from the Internet,” said A.B. proudly, climbing into the passenger seat of LaVerne’s old, white, crew-cab Ford F-150. “We’re going to some place called Redemption Abbey, outside the town of Worth. We take Interstate 71 north to St. Joe and then cut over on 169 Highway.”

  “Why don’t we just take 169 all the way?” asked LaVerne, skeptical of a computer’s ability to provide accurate driving directions.

  “Because it says here that the fastest way is 71,” said A.B.

  “Well, I’m saying that’s bullshit,” snapped LaVerne. “We’re taking 169.”

  A.B. sulked for the first few miles. At about Gladstone, the silence finally got to him, and he reached for the radio, only to be jolted abruptly forward against his seatbelt as LaVerne pulled the truck over onto the shoulder and braked to a sudden stop, skidding a bit in the gravel.

  “Jeez! Boss!” yelped A.B., unsure of what had just happened. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” said LaVerne. He opened his door and hopped out of the truck.

  A.B. watched LaVerne look both ways for traffic and then walk out onto the road where he bent to pick something up. He crossed in front of the truck and A.B. got out to see what it was LaVerne had.

  It was a turtle.

  LaVerne held the turtle in his right hand, his arm extended all the way. Turtle pee dribbled out the back of its shell. Its legs moved like it was swimming in the air. LaVerne put the turtle down in the grass, which sloped into a ditch. It pulled its head and feet into its shell.

  “Dang, boss,” said A.B. “How’d you even know that was a turtle there in the road?”

  “When I was a kid in Texas, we’d see ‘em all the time,” said LaVerne. “Sometimes you’d see ‘em crushed on the road and I just hated that. They’re so damn slow they’re helpless. I can’t stand to see them crawling across a road, because you just know they’re going to get smashed. So, when I see one, I always stop to pick it up and put it on the side of the road.”

  LaVerne and A.B. watched the turtle tentatively poke its head out to assess the situation.

  “I haven’t seen one in a long time,” said LaVerne. “But I don’t get out of the city that much.”

  The turtle decided the coast was clear and started down the slope toward the ditch.

  *

  Approaching Smithville, LaVerne and A.B. conferred with one another and decided they were hungry and drove into town for something to eat. The first place they came to was Humphrey’s “Fill ‘er Up” BBQ, which was housed in an old gas station.

  “Let’s see what the competition is up to,” said LaVerne pulling the truck into the parking lot.

  Inside, LaVerne inspected the menu and immediately began heaping scorn. “Same old, same old. Fries, potato salad, slaw, and beans. None of these joints has any imagination.”

  He ordered a brisket sandwich and beans. A.B. ordered the half-chicken, with fries and beans.

  “Where do you think that turtle was going, boss?” asked A.B. while they waited for their food.

  “I asked my uncle Delbert that same thing once when I was a kid, after he and I rescued a turtle from the road. He said ‘Well, boy, he was goin’ to the other side of the road.’ So I guess that’s the answer. I mean, who knows what’s in a turtle’s mind? Their brains can’t be any bigger than a pea. Then he said ‘LaVerne, you never know what the result will be from something you do. You see a turtle in the road, and you worry it’ll get killed, so you pick it up and you move it off to the side of the road and you think you done something good. And you probably did. But maybe that turtle was on its way home, and when you put it down on the other side of the road it got mixed up in its direction and got lost and never did find its way back home. Or maybe the turtle actually makes it across the road, but then a fox sees it and eats it. So, if you get the turtle out of the road, you’re not saving it from the car running over it, but from the fox. But then maybe the fox goes hungry. Or maybe if you don’t rescue that turtle, somebody driving down the road sees it up ahead and slams on their brakes and slides off the road and gets killed. You just never know when you do something what will come from it. So you just always have to do the best you can. You have to do what you think is right.’”

  The food arrived, and LaVerne and A.B. ate in silence, until A.B. said, with his mouth full, “This is pretty good chicken.”

  LaVerne frowned.

  “How’s your brisket?” A.B. asked.

  “It’s okay.”

  “How about the beans?”

  “These aren’t beans,” groused LaVerne. “They’re candy. Sticky, sweet candy. You can have mine if you want. I can’t eat ‘em.”

  A.B. took the beans.

  Back in the truck, LaVerne shook his head in disgust. “I can’t believe you liked those beans. Sometimes I wonder about you, A.B.”

  “Well, I may as well tell you that I liked the fries, too,” said A.B., still smarting from the dispute over which highway to take. “They were real good, in fact. They put some kind of seasoning on them. We should start serving fries like that. Our customers would like ‘em.”

  LaVerne glared at A.B. “Unbelievable.”

  They proceeded in tense silence and A.B. wished that the farmer from Sedalia hadn’t reneged on his wood contract. Finally, LaVerne spoke. “What’s the place we’re going, again?”

  “The guy called it Redem
ption Abbey,” said A.B. “I have no idea what that is. Maybe it’s a town. It sounds religious.”

  “I don’t know,” said LaVerne. “I never heard of it.”

  He looked up at the sky through the windshield. “It’s getting dark over to the west. Just our luck it’ll start raining when we’re loading up the wood.”

  Just as Del had said, near the town of Worth, on the side of the highway was a sign painted on a half-sheet of plywood indicating that firewood was for sale six miles west, down a gravel side road. The first two miles of road cut through soybean fields. Then the cropland gave way to brush and scrub and LaVerne and A.B. could see in the distance a large red brick church high atop a broad hill. Beside the church was another red brick building, rectangular and not as tall.

  The top of hill looked as if it had pushed itself up by force of will out of a stand of trees that surrounded it on all sides for at least a half-mile in every direction.

  “Dang,” whispered A.B.

  “This doesn’t look like a place that sells wood,” said LaVerne.

  At the base of the hill was a driveway that split in two. One way went up to the front of the church. The other went up and around to the back of the other building. A small sign said that was the way to the wood. LaVerne drove up and around slowly, unsure exactly where he was going and what he was getting himself into. He stopped in a clearing near where another truck was parked under a massive elm tree. Two men and a boy were loading the truck up with wood. The boy looked like he was about 12 years old.

  LaVerne and A.B. got out of the truck and looked around. There were neat stacks of split logs all around the clearing. Each stack was labeled with a hand-lettered sign designating the pile as oak, apple, hickory, or maple.

  The younger of the two men walked over to LaVerne and extended his hand.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Brother Ignatius. Call me Iggy.”