by Doug Worgul
LaVerne and A.B. shook hands with Iggy.
“You guys from the restaurant in Kansas City?” he asked.
“We are,” said LaVerne. “My man A.B., here, said you got oak at a good price. We’ll take as much as we can put in the truck if you’ve got it.”
“I think we do,” said Iggy. “Follow me.”
“So, what kind of place is this anyway?” asked LaVerne as he and A.B. walked behind Iggy to the stack of logs labeled “OAK.”
“This is Redemption Abbey,” said Iggy. “It’s a Benedictine monastery.”
“Monastery. As in monks monastery?” asked LaVerne.
“Exactly. There are 48 of us monks here. This, here, is our dormitory. And that is our cathedral.”
He looked at LaVerne and A.B. “You seem a little surprised.”
“A bit,” said LaVerne. “I thought you guys just prayed all day and closed yourself off from the rest of the world. I guess I didn’t expect to buy wood from a monk. Plus, I thought monks wore those robes.”
“Well, we do pray a lot,” Iggy said. “But we have to eat, too, so we support ourselves in a number of ways. Including selling wood. That’s my job here. I cut it, split it, stack it, sell it, and load it. Once we get our truck running, I’ll deliver it. And when I’m not on wood duty, I do wear a robe.”
He looked over at the western horizon. A long line of flat gray clouds was gathering. “Hope we don’t get wet.”
LaVerne backed his truck up to the oak pile and he and A.B. started loading. The sound of logs landing in the truck beds reverberated in the still, cool, quiet air. After about twenty minutes of loading, A.B. needed a smoke. He walked away from the truck and stretched his back as he lit up. He noticed that the sky had turned a yellow shade of green that made him uneasy. He walked back over to LaVerne.
“This place gives me the creeps, boss,” he said. “It kind of glows. It looks like the sky is coming right down on us.”
LaVerne looked up. Brother Ignatius and the other two were also looking at the sky.
Later, each one of them, when recounting the events of the afternoon, remembered that at that moment he felt a gentle breeze blow, heard leaves rustle, and thought about something he had said earlier in the day.
The wind surged upon them like a river rushing through a burst dam. A wide column of cloud, dense and black, closed in on the hillside. The branches on the trees around the abbey whipped about frantically. Dust and gravel rose up in swirling chaos. Brother Ignatius yelled instructions.
“This way!” He waved toward a cellar door that slanted out from the base of the building. “This way!” He held the door open.
LaVerne grabbed A.B.’s arm and ran toward the cellar. The other man and the boy followed. When they were all safely inside, Brother Ignatius bolted the door. Then he crossed himself. They stood there and listened to all hell breaking loose outside.
“Here,” said Iggy. “Sit.” He motioned toward two benches facing each other along the narrow cellar walls. LaVerne and A.B. sat on one bench and the others sat on the other side.
“I’m Steve Hinman,” said the man who had been loading wood when LaVerne and A.B. arrived. “This is my son Danny. I can’t believe this. I can not believe it.”
LaVerne and A.B. introduced themselves.
Something big thudded hard against the cellar door. They all flinched and were quiet. Then there was a piercing crack and booming crash. They all flinched again and were quiet for several more minutes. Danny looked at LaVerne and whispered something to his father, who nodded and smiled.
“Are you the LaVerne Williams who played for the Kansas City Athletics in 1967?” asked Danny.
“That’s me,” said LaVerne. “You’re the first person to ask me that question in about ten years.”
“This is sweet!” said Danny. “I’ve got your rookie card. It’s mint. This is awesome.”
“Well, son, you may have the only one left,” said LaVerne. “My guess is that card is worth less than the bubble gum that came with it.”
“No,” said Danny. “I saw on eBay that a mint condition LaVerne Williams’ rookie card goes for thirty-five bucks.”
LaVerne smiled. “I’ll bet a mint condition Rick Monday goes for a lot more.”
“Not really,” said Danny. “There’s a lot more of those. They’re easy to find. They sell for about two dollars.”
A.B. jabbed LaVerne with his elbow. “You hear that, boss? You’re worth thirty-two dollars more than Rick Monday.”
“Thirty-three,” said LaVerne.
Iggy interrupted. “Listen,” he said. “It’s over.”
They listened. It was over.
Outside, they stood and breathed. The air was clean and calm.
The elm tree had split in two and one half had fallen on Steve’s truck, only one tire of which could be seen. Steve said nothing. Brother Ignatius crossed himself again.
A.B. took out his pack of cigarettes and lit one up. Iggy looked at A.B.
“Can I have one of those?” he asked.
A.B. gave him one and lit it for him. Iggy’s hands were shaking.
Iggy, Steve, and Danny went over to examine the smashed truck. LaVerne went over to his truck to check on its condition.
A.B. walked around to the back of the dorm. All the windows had been blown out but the building was intact. Bibles and prayer books were scattered around the clearing. A.B. saw a toothbrush, a pair of underwear and a framed photograph of a dog. Some of the other monks, some in their robes, others in jeans and T-shirts, had emerged from the building, dazed and concerned, embracing one another, picking up the strewn stuff of their lives. A.B. heard a low moan and turned, expecting to see an injured monk. It was a cow.
“Hey, Iggy!” A.B. called. “Your cow got loose in the storm.”
The cow was eating grass on the edge of the clearing.
Brother Ignatius came over to see. “We don’t have a cow,” he said.
A.B. wondered if maybe it was the cow that had thumped into the cellar door.
“We didn’t have any chickens either,” said Brother Ignatius. He pointed to the side of the dorm. At the base of the dorm wall were eight dead hens. It appeared as if they had been shot out of a cannon against the bricks.
LaVerne came over to report on the truck. “Our truck seems fine. I hate to leave you and your monks like this, needing so much help like this, but I’m kinda anxious to get home and see if things are alright. What do we owe you for the wood, Brother?”
Iggy shook his head. “That’s okay, Mr. Williams, we’ll be fine. We have lots of strong backs here. We’ll settle up later. I’ll call you to arrange a delivery and you can pay me when I come down.”
LaVerne and A.B. walked over to Steve and Danny. Steve was trying without success to make a call on his cell phone.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said. “I can’t get a hold of my wife. I don’t know if she’s okay. She doesn’t know if I’m okay. And we’re stuck here.”
“Where do you live?” asked LaVerne.
“Parkville,” Steve replied.
“We’ll take you home,” said LaVerne.
There was no small talk in the truck, at first. They were all thinking about what had happened. They were all wondering what it would have been like to have died. Finally, LaVerne asked Steve what he did for a living. Steve said that he was a lawyer.
“My law firm has a barbecue team,” Steve continued. “That’s why I was up here. Getting wood for a contest we were going to cook in next weekend. I’m the team captain. I do most of the cooking.”
LaVerne has ambivalent feelings about competitive barbecue cooks. He’s been to some of the contests and has had some of the barbecue and admits, if only to himself, that it’s all been real good smoked meat. But he doesn’t like the jealousy he feels at the quality of the
equipment some of the cooks use and the lavish amount of time and money they spend at the contests.
“For them it’s a hobby,” he told Angela once, after they returned from the American Royal barbecue contest. “But for me it’s my livelihood. Yet they got better stuff than I do. They don’t depend on their equipment to make their living. But I do. Some of their cookers cost more than I make in a year.”
But LaVerne felt as if his life had just been spared and he wasn’t inclined to be touchy about barbecue hobbyists, so he let Steve talk about his barbecue contests and soon they were engaged in a scholarly discussion of the relative merits of Carolina-style direct smoking versus the Kansas City-style indirect method.
When they arrived at the Hinman house, Steve’s wife rushed out to hug her husband and son. As she gushed thanks on LaVerne and A.B., wiping away tears of joy and gratitude, Danny went inside. He returned a minute later with his mint condition 1967 LaVerne Williams rookie baseball card.
“Will you autograph this for me, Mr. Williams?” he asked, beaming.
*
Back in the truck, A.B. came down with a bad case of hiccups, which impeded conversation. LaVerne turned on the radio. The tornado had cut a swath a half-mile wide and five miles long through a corner of northwest Missouri farm country. Officials did not yet know if there were any fatalities. A.B. lit a cigarette.
“I’m glad you saved that turtle, boss,” he said.
17
Corroborated
Raymond Williams and A.B. Clayton were pretty much inseparable from the day they met until the day Raymond left for college. Raymond always had lots of friends, but he liked A.B. best. A.B. was the only one who didn’t want anything from him but his company.
A.B. didn’t have any other friends.
Raymond wasn’t just popular, he was idolized. By nearly everyone. He was the kind of kid other kids wanted to be, and the kind of kid other kids’ parents wanted them to be. Raymond was in almost every way exceptional. Exceptionally good looking. Exceptionally intelligent. Exceptionally talented. And exceptionally tall.
At school, everyone wanted to walk the halls with Raymond, eat lunch with Raymond, and be seen with Raymond. Even teachers made a point of saying hello to Raymond when they saw him between classes. And though A.B. was almost always by Raymond’s side, Raymond’s popularity did not spill over onto him. If Raymond missed a day of school, it was as if A.B. ceased to exist. Nobody spoke to him or even looked at him until Raymond returned. Everyone knew, however, not to tease or criticize Raymond’s little friend lest they be forever excluded from Raymond’s company.
Mostly, everyone politely ignored A.B., which was fine with him. He feared that interactions with Raymond’s other friends would reveal the extent of his inadequacy. The comfort and security he felt in Raymond’s presence remained intact only so long as he didn’t have to actually say anything to anyone else.
Raymond was not perfect however. Perhaps because so much came so easily for him, he tended toward laziness. And not infrequently he clouded over. When the black moods came on him, he pulled deep within himself behind a false front of cheer and charm. Only Angela and A.B. knew these aspects of Raymond’s character. Everyone else, including LaVerne, saw in Raymond what they wanted to see. A.B. just saw Raymond.
*
When they were sixteen years old, Raymond and A.B. would usually go straight to the restaurant every afternoon after school to work until closing, except during basketball season when Raymond had practice. On Wednesday nights, LaVerne had the boys lock up so he could leave early to go with Angela to prayer meeting. After the boys checked to see that the front door was locked, the walk-in fridge closed tight, the timers set on the smoker, and the lights turned off, they locked the back door and Raymond gave A.B. a ride home. A.B. was always quite careful about this procedure. Raymond, less so.
One Wednesday night, Raymond was impatient to get going. He’d been griping all evening about having to stay open until 7:00 even though there hadn’t been any customers since 6:15, and about the smell of smoke and meat in his clothes and hair, and about how his dad didn’t even like prayer meeting so why couldn’t he stay on Wednesday nights.
“I just figured it out, Ray,” said A.B. “You’ve got a date tonight. That’s why you’ve been pissy all night.”
Raymond grinned. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. I won’t know until I get out of here and go see the lady in question.”
As A.B. closed up, Raymond waited out in the alley by his car. A.B. leaned against the back door, holding it open, and reached around inside to turn off the light switch.
“You set?” he called to Raymond.
“I’ve been set,” Raymond called back. “Let’s go!”
A.B. let the door close and they got in the car. Raymond patted his pockets for his keys—first casually—then with more urgency, and then in a panic. “Oh, man!” he cried. “Did you pick up my keys? I don’t have my keys! Where are my keys?”
A.B. hated it when Raymond got upset. He immediately started to problem solve.
“I didn’t pick ‘em up. So, let’s think about where you had them last,” he said quietly and evenly, hoping to calm Raymond down.
Raymond slammed his head back against the seat headrest. “Shit! They’re on top of the filing cabinet in the office!”
The reason this realization warranted a “Shit!” was that when the back door to Smoke Meat closed, it automatically locked. To deter theft, the door had no exterior knob, handle, or key lock, just one solid flat surface with nothing to pick, pry, or jimmy. When LaVerne opened up in the morning, he unlocked the front door and came in that way. He and Angela had the only keys to the front door. When A.B. went out back for a cigarette or to get wood for the smoker he propped the door open with a log from the woodpile so as not to get locked out, which sometimes happened anyway if he accidentally kicked the log. Then he had to walk around to the front to get back in. LaVerne always snorted and smirked when that happened.
Raymond and A.B. got out of the car and went over to the window that looks out onto the alley from the little hallway between the office and the kitchen. The year before, LaVerne had installed steel bars in the window to prevent break-ins. Raymond pressed his face against the glass.
“I can’t believe this!” he yelled, kicking at the gravel in the alley. A.B. went over and pressed his face against the glass as if his way of doing it might produce a better result.
Then they heard the sound of tires on gravel and the single whoop of a siren. The bright white of a floodlight covered them and voices shouted out from the light ordering them to put their hands up. Up where they could be seen. Raymond and A.B. immediately complied with these orders. Out from the light came two Kansas City police officers, guns drawn and aimed at the boys.
“Turn around and place your hands up on the wall and spread your legs,” commanded one of the officers. Compliance was again immediate. The officers frisked Raymond and A.B.
“You have any ID?” asked the one officer who seemed to be in charge. “Don’t reach for it. Just tell me where it is. I’ll get it.”
A.B. and Raymond both said that their wallets were in their back pockets. A.B.’s was. But Raymond’s was on the filing cabinet with his car keys.
“This is my father’s restaurant,” explained Raymond, facing the wall. “LaVerne Williams. I’m his son, Raymond Williams. This is A.B. Clayton. We work here and I left my keys and wallet inside when we locked up just now. We were trying to see if we could get back in to get my keys. That’s my car.”
No proof of the car’s ownership was found in the car but the officers called in the number on the plates and confirmed that it did belong to a LaVerne Williams.
“You could have stolen the car as far as I know,” said the officer in charge. “Looks to me like you two were trying to break in here. Get yourself a little drug money and maybe some ribs
while you’re at it. We’re going down to the station and sort this out.”
Raymond and A.B. were put in handcuffs, put in the back of the squad car and driven to police headquarters where Raymond and A.B. were told to call their parents. Raymond knew there would be nobody at his house so he called New Jerusalem Baptist Church hoping somebody there would pick up the phone and get a message to his parents. After twelve rings he gave up.
A.B. went ahead and called his mother, though he knew nothing good would come of it. His mother answered the phone, but her voice sounded funny and she didn’t seem to understand that it was her son on the other end of the line. She kept asking A.B. to repeat himself.
“It’s me, Mom,” said A.B., louder each time. “Ray and I could use your help. Ray, Mom. You know, from work. The restaurant, Mom, the restaurant. We need you to get us out of a jam, and talk to the police.”
After he mentioned the police, a man’s voice came on the phone. A voice he didn’t recognize.
“Who the hell is this?” the man yelled. “We haven’t done anything wrong! You want to accuse us of something, come here and say it to my face! If you call the cops on us, I’ll kill your ass. I know who you are!”
A.B. went pale and hung up. “My mom isn’t going to be able to help us.”
He began to hiccup.
The officer asked A.B. and Raymond for their home addresses and phone numbers.
“We’re going to check some things out. But you’re not going anywhere for now.”
He led the boys down a narrow hallway to a large room divided into two parts. The front of the room was open and in the middle was a large gray metal desk where another uniformed officer sat talking on a telephone. Behind him were two large jail cells. Two women occupied one of the cells. A young black woman sat on one of the cell benches crying quietly into a wad of tissue. Across from her on the other bench, a middle-aged white woman sat scowling, her back against the wall, arms crossed.
A.B. and Raymond were put in the other cell. There were two other boys there already. A black kid, a year or two younger than A.B. and Raymond, sat on the floor with his back to the door. He clutched his knees to his chest and rocked back and forth, whispering something to himself. He wore a dirty baseball shirt and his large white sneakers had no laces. The other was a white kid, maybe eighteen-years-old, lying on one of the benches sleeping. He was skinny and shirtless and his head was shaved. He smelled like puke.
