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

by Doug Worgul

  “I don’t know much about baseball, child. But I know you’re good at it,” she told LaVerne as they sat together on a bench at the bus station. “Everyone in this town knows it. You’ll do just fine. Stay out of trouble with the white folks, LaVerne. Be a gentleman at all times. Find a good church and you’ll do fine.”

  Rose was lonely that summer. She cherished her years with LaVerne and didn’t know what to do with herself after he left. She kept track of the team in the newspaper and sometimes she would go next door to her brother Delbert’s house and if they could find one of the games on the radio they’d listen out on the front porch and drink iced tea.

  Once a week, usually on Monday nights, LaVerne called her and made her laugh with stories about his teammates. Twice a month, Rose wrote LaVerne a letter, folded a five dollar bill inside the letter and sent it to him in a box of puffed rice candy she had made herself.

  And twice a month LaVerne Williams was the most popular guy in the Birmingham A’s clubhouse. His teammates crowded around him as he dispensed homemade puffed rice candy until it was gone. Which was fine with him. LaVerne hated puffed rice candy.

  6

  Silent Partner

  It was an unlikely friendship. Delbert Douglass Merisier III was a black man whose father had moved his family from Louisiana to Texas to find work milling rice when Delbert was four years old; and Frederick Wilhelm Hartholz, a white man whose father moved his family to Texas from Germany to join his older brother’s butchering and sausage making business. Both were widowed at a young age. Hartholz’s wife died giving birth to a boy who would have been their first child, had he not died a few hours after his mother. Delbert’s wife left one morning for her job at Raylon Rice and never came home. She was found three days later floating face up in the Trinity River with a broken neck. The police said it was an accident.

  When Hartholz’s family came over from Germany they settled in New Braunfels. But after his wife died, Hartholz had a falling out with his father that ended with him taking the butcher shop truck and driving east. In Plum Grove he ran out of gas and slept the night in the truck. The next morning he answered a notice in the paper and was hired on as the second janitor at the school. Delbert was the other janitor. It was the job he went to after his shift at Raylon. Even though he’d been the main janitor for four years when Hartholz started work the school board made him Delbert’s boss.

  Hartholz was moody most of the time. Not a mean-spirited moody, just not happy. For that reason, and because most small town native Texans had little patience for his heavily accented English, Hartholz made no friends in Plum Grove.

  Delbert Merisier was as merry as Hartholz was morose. When Hartholz grumbled about having to mop up the pee in the boy’s room Delbert smiled. “Well sir, their little peckers ain’t big enough for them to get a hold of ‘em and aim ‘em right. And little boys is always in a hurry. They don’t care much if some goes on the floor. Half the time they wouldn’t even go if someone didn’t remind ‘em to. They ain’t like you and me, having to piss every five minutes.”

  When Hartholz complained about rain, Delbert laughed. “Mr. Hartholz, maybe in Germany you had plenty of rain, but this is Texas and we don’t ever have enough of it. Maybe if you was a farmer you’d feel different about it. It’s all in how you see things.”

  Hartholz marveled at Delbert’s positive outlook. He had observed that black people were mostly invisible to the whites in Plum Grove and elsewhere in Texas. Except when they were ordered about, cursed at, or mocked. He saw, that though they worked as hard, or harder, than white people, the black residents of Plum Grove all lived in a cluster of small, poorly built houses at the edge of town, without the benefit of paved streets. Delbert’s good-humor was an antidote to Hartholz’s gloom and over time Hartholz developed an unspoken respect and affection for Delbert.

  Delbert had learned to be wary of friendly white folks. More than once, previously gregarious white men had bluntly reminded Delbert of his proper place upon taking offense at a remark or smile deemed uppity. But gradually he let down his guard with Hartholz and a genial familiarity formed between them.

  Since there was no public place in Plum Grove, or anywhere else in Texas, where a black man and white man were allowed to drink together after work they would sometimes drive out to the dump and drink whiskey in the back of Hartholz’s truck where they talked about their wives, their fathers, Germany and Louisiana. Delbert made Hartholz laugh with gossip about other black people in Plum Grove, though he thought it remarkable that Hartholz could laugh without actually smiling. Hartholz never smiled.

  Sometimes when the whiskey had done its work, Delbert would take a harmonica from his back pocket and play the blues. The first time Hartholz heard Delbert play, a liberating loneliness welled up inside him and escaped in a big sob that stopped Delbert cold. “You okay?” Delbert asked.

  Hartholz jumped down from the truck bed and walked off into the night where he stayed until Delbert became concerned. “I’m leaving without you,” he called. “And I’m taking your truck and your whiskey too.”

  This produced the desired result. But Delbert was reluctant to use his harmonica again. However, the next time they shared a bottle in the back of the truck, Hartholz asked him to play.

  On Sunday afternoons they fished for bluegill on the pond behind the Raylon property or sometimes for catfish up on the San Jacinto. Delbert wouldn’t fish in the Trinity River.

  Delbert called Hartholz “Fritz” once. But Hartholz put an end to that. “‘Hartholz’ is good,” said Hartholz. “‘Fred’ is good. But never ‘Fritz’.” Delbert wondered if maybe Hartholz’s father was called Fritz.

  One Sunday morning on the drive up to the San Jacinto, Hartholz confided in Delbert that he was saving money to open his own butcher shop.

  “How much you think you need?” asked Delbert.

  “Maybe $1,000 for a building and $1,000 for equipment,” said Hartholz. “And then the meat.”

  “How much you got saved?”

  “$1,237.”

  “Well, I got $946 saved up, myself. Maybe you could use an investor.”

  *

  The residents of Plum Grove naturally assumed that Delbert was Hartholz’s employee when the butcher shop opened up in the old filling station next to the post office, and neither man ever said different. But they were in fact business partners. And after a time they both quit their janitor jobs and Delbert gave notice at Raylon.

  Hartholz butchered sides of beef, whole hogs and chickens, which were delivered each week from Houston. Delbert arranged the cuts neatly in a meat case they bought used from a grocery store over in Beaumont. In a shack Delbert built out behind the store, Hartholz cold smoked hams and sausages he made himself. Beside the shack Delbert erected a brick pit four feet high and four feet square. About halfway up, between two courses of bricks, he crisscrossed two rows of steel rods, forming a grate. On Friday afternoons Delbert covered this grate with briskets Hartholz had set aside for this purpose. In a bisected oil drum next to the pit Delbert burned oak logs down to coals which he shoveled into the bottom of the pit. He then covered the structure with a piece of corrugated steel and let the briskets cook slowly over the coals for the next seventeen or nineteen hours.

  Saturdays soon became the busiest day of the week at the butcher shop. Delbert sliced the smoked briskets in the back of the store while in front Hartholz wrapped and sold the meat by the pound.

  *

  After Delbert’s sister Rose took her grandson LaVerne into her care she sometimes left the boy at the shop while she worked an extra shift at Raylon, or if she had a meeting at church.

  LaVerne liked the butcher shop more than any other place in Plum Grove, and the men enjoyed his company. He was eager to help and did what he was told. When his uncle sliced the briskets he stood at the end of the table and snatched crispy pieces of the black smoky crust and
shoved them quickly into his mouth.

  Hartholz looked forward to LaVerne’s visits. On the days when the boy didn’t come by, Hartholz asked about him. “The boy, LaVerne, he is okay?”

  One evening Delbert and Hartholz sat on chairs behind the store sipping whiskey and watching smoke rise from the pit while LaVerne played with a yellowed baseball coming apart at the seams. Over and over he threw it high into the air and caught it barehanded.

  “The boy is a good boy, Delbert,” said Hartholz. “You and your sister should be proud. He is happy. You are doing good for him.”

  Delbert looked over at his friend. Hartholz was smiling.

  7

  Double-wide

  It was the big kid at the trailer park who gave A.B. his first cigarette. A.B. was twelve-years-old. So was the big kid.

  When A.B. was little, his grade school teachers had the kids make construction paper posters saying that smoking was bad. When he got to middle school, his gym teacher showed a film with pictures of diseased lungs and people who had to talk through holes in their throats because they got cancer from smoking. But A.B. didn’t know any grownups who didn’t smoke, including his gym teacher, who he’d seen smoking out in the school parking lot. Sooner or later someone would have given him his first cigarette. It just happened to be the big kid.

  A.B.’s mother took him with her to a trailer park up on Sterling Road in Sugar Creek a few times, to visit a boyfriend. She was between husbands at the time—a condition she disliked and was always in a hurry to remedy—and the man in the yellow double-wide showed promise. He had a good job at the landfill, was separated from his wife, was a good pool player, and generous, too. At the bars, he was always buying pitchers of beer for his friends.

  The boyfriend’s kids lived with their mother so there wasn’t anyone for A.B. to do anything with when he was there and the boyfriend didn’t want him watching TV.

  “When I get home from work the only sound I want to hear is my finger popping open a can of beer,” he said. “We didn’t have a TV when we was kids and we did okay so why don’t you just find yourself something else to do and let me and your mom be.”

  A.B. understood this wasn’t a request.

  A deep concrete drainage ditch ran along the back of the trailer park. Sometimes A.B. threw sticks in the water and watched them float away. Other times he wandered over to the park playground and knocked the tetherball around the pole.

  One time when A.B. went down to the ditch a big kid was there adding trash paper and scrap wood to a fire he’d built. A.B. stood at a distance and watched.

  After a few minutes the kid turned to A.B. and grinned. “Wanna see something?” A.B. shrugged and walked forward a few steps.

  “That’s as close as you wanna get,” said the kid. He threw something into the fire and scampered over to where A.B. stood. An instant later a puncturing blast from inside the fire sent sparks and cinders flying in all directions, causing A.B. and the kid to cower and shield themselves with their arms.

  “What was that?” A.B. squealed, as something metallic fell from the sky landing with a clank on a rusted tire rim approximately a yard from A.B.’s feet.

  “That’s what that was,” laughed the kid, pointing to an exploded aerosol can of Faultless starch. “That was excellent!”

  A.B. tried to laugh in a cool nonchalant kind of way, but what emerged from his throat was a big hiccup. Followed by a fit of smaller hiccups. The kid took a pack of Camels from the back pocket of his jeans and pulled one out. “You want one?”

  What A.B. wanted was to not look like such a scaredy-cat. So he said yes. He put the cigarette between his lips and let the big kid light it.

  He’d seen his mother and her friends take long hard drags on their cigarettes so that’s what he did, resulting in an instantaneous spasm of coughing which propelled his Camel out of his mouth in a high arc, into the ditch where it was carried downstream alongside an empty Pabst can.

  The kid looked at A.B. with disgust. “What a wuss.”

  The next time A.B.’s mom took him with her to the trailer park, A.B. went down to the drainage ditch again but the big kid wasn’t there. A.B. threw rocks into the ditch for a while. But it hadn’t rained for several days so there was hardly any water.

  When he got there he saw that someone had cut open the tether ball. It hung there on the rope like a gutted fish on a stringer. He went over to the basketball court and lay down on one of the benches where players sit. He thought about his social studies teacher Mrs. Norris and how pretty and young she was and how he had seen her at the grocery store holding hands with her husband and how she smiled up at him when he surprised her by kissing her neck. He fell asleep wondering if they had any children.

  He woke up when the big kid kicked his feet off the bench.

  “Hey, wuss,” he said. “Taking your nappy? Where’s your blankey?”

  A.B. had learned that when big kids ask questions like this the answers never seem to satisfy them. He sat up.

  “Hey,” he said, anticipating further provocation, perhaps with a painful conclusion. To A.B.’s surprise the big kid sat down next to him.

  “So, do you live here or what? How come I only see you around once in a while?”

  “My mom likes a guy who lives over there.” A.B. pointed in the direction of the yellow double-wide.

  The big kid nodded. “Do you have a basketball?”

  A.B. shook his head.

  They sat there on the bench without saying anything. A.B. wondered what would happen next. The big kid sighed and took a pack of Camels out of his T-shirt pocket. A.B. noticed that the kid was missing his index finger on his left hand. He didn’t ask about it.

  “Are you going to hack out your lungs again,” the kid asked, “or do you want one of these?”

  A.B. reached for one. This time he took in the smoke slowly and breathed it back out evenly. It made him dizzy at first but then it went away.

  “It’s just the opposite with me,” said the kid. “My old lady’s here and it’s the guys who come to see her.”

  He stood up. “Next time you come here, bring a basketball,” he said.

  He flicked his cigarette butt into the grass and walked away.

  *

  When the big kid got back to his trailer, his mother’s car was gone and the trailer door was locked. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. He yelled and pounded the door, but still nobody came. He went down to the ditch and sat on a broken cinderblock and smoked another cigarette. Tall weeds grew in the soggy dirt along both sides of the ditch, and sometimes a stray dog or a rat would run out of the weeds and startle him. So when he saw the weeds moving he picked up a rock and stood, ready for whatever it might be. It was a turtle. About the size and shape of an overturned cereal bowl. The kid watched the turtle make its way down toward the ditch. He wondered where his mother had gone. He felt the weight and rough edges of the rock in his hand and without thinking much about it heaved it at the turtle. He heard a thick smack and he could see that the rock had hit and cracked the turtle’s shell. He could see bright red where the shell had split. He picked up the broken cinderblock and went and stood over the turtle. It had pulled its head and legs and tail inside its broken shell. The kid wondered if it was dead. He held the cinderblock up over his head and let it drop. A piece of shell with something white attached to it stuck out from under the block. Maybe his mom just went up to the store to get cigarettes and beer.

  8

  Feed My Sheep

  Like robins returning in the spring, around the end of March the screamers return to the sidewalks and alleys around Smoke Meat. They don’t come around much in the winter. They live on the streets, and when it’s cold they stay at the City Mission or other such places.

  The black screamer is a young man. He strides the streets purposefully, driven by righteous wrath metastasize
d into madness. He wears an oversized Army surplus jacket. His hair is matted and littered with crud. Customers on their way to Smoke Meat sometimes hear him coming from a distance, at which point they tend to pick up the pace, hoping to make it inside before he sees them.

  A.B.’s first encounter with the black screamer came one morning when he was in front of the restaurant sweeping up. The black screamer saw A.B. from across the street, pointed an accusing finger at him and starting yelling.

  “You! You are going to die and burn in the fires of Hell for eternity! You are a wretched and vile sinner and you and the rest of your cursed race must get right with God! Damn you! Damn you for the excesses of your life and your smugness and your promiscuity! Damn you for looking away! Damn you! Only Jesus can save you now!”

  A.B. was so shaken by this he was immediately seized by a violent case of the hiccups that lasted through the lunch hour. When customers began asking A.B. if he was alright, LaVerne got disgusted, and relieved A.B. of his counter duties.

  Later A.B. sought reassurance from LaVerne. In 1987, a year after Raymond died, A.B. was baptized at the New Jerusalem Baptist Church and he wanted to know for sure that it took.

  “You don’t think that guy is like some kind of prophet or something, do you, boss? Like they talk about at church. I mean he looked right at me, right in my eyes, and damned me and said I needed to get right with God. But I am right with God, aren’t I? I’m saved, aren’t I? That’s what me being baptized was all about, wasn’t it? Being saved? Besides, I don’t even know what promiscuity is.”