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

by Doug Worgul

  Del looked at Bob. “What’d he say?” he brayed.

  “He thanked us for coming,” Bob barked back.

  “That was nice of him,” Del said, only slightly less loudly.

  Rudy glanced around the dining room, then looked at A.B.

  “This is a real nice place you got here, A.B. Your mom said you like makin’ barbecue. I bet you’re real proud.”

  A.B. looked anxiously at LaVerne. LaVerne smiled. Angela spoke again.

  “A.B., Lurleen, Rudy, if there are memories of Mona you’d like to share you’re welcome to do that.”

  Rudy’s eyes widened and filled. He shook his head.

  Lurleen stared at a handkerchief she twisted in her hands.

  “Well, Mona, her and me worked next to one another on the line up at the Fairfax plant for about ten years. And we was real good friends. We ate lunch together and we was always laughin’. We always teased her and called her Mona Lisa, even though her middle name wasn’t Lisa. We teased her that way anyways. Even after she hurt her back and went on her disability we stayed friends. Lately me and my husband Vince, and her and Rudy here, we went up to the boats and played the quarter slots or blackjack, and we’d have us a real good time. She was a kick, Mona was. We always laughed a lot. We called her Mona Lisa. That’s about all.”

  She paused and took a breath. “I’ll miss her.”

  A.B. had looked up from the floor and was watching Lurleen talk as if he were trying to understand someone speaking in a foreign language. He didn’t say anything. Nobody else said anything.

  LaVerne stood. “I think we’ve had enough prayin’ for one day, so let’s just assume that God has blessed this food and go ahead and eat.”

  They ate barbecue and pie and drank coffee. Soon they began chatting about the weather, and then about the Chiefs, and then about the differences between West Kentucky, Memphis, Texas, and Kansas City barbecue. After the pie, LaVerne went back into the office and returned with an unopened bottle of Wild Turkey. Vicki went to the kitchen and got glasses. LaVerne poured, and everybody had a drink, except Bob, who had another cup of coffee.

  It was quiet while they sipped their whiskey, then Jen starting singing.

  Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you

  You’re so like the lady with the mystic smile.

  Mother and Angela joined in, and then Lurleen.

  Is it only ‘cause you’re lonely they have blamed you?

  For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?

  The rest then joined the song, except Del, Leon, and A.B.

  Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?

  Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?

  Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep

  They just lie there and they die there

  Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?

  Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?

  A.B. put his face in his hands and cried. Rudy looked as if he might crumble. LaVerne put his hand on A.B.’s head.

  After the singing, Del bolted up and blared, “Well, I gotta go.”

  Bob stood up, too. And then the others. They each thanked LaVerne and Angela for the food and shook hands with A.B. or hugged him. When Rudy came up to A.B. he paused and then spoke in a shaky voice.

  “I know you and me have never met, but me and your mom, we was pretty serious. Like Lurleen there, we worked together. Down at GM. The Fairfax plant. I been there almost thirty years.

  “Anyways, this is a real shock. We was even talkin’ about getting’ married. I ain’t never been married an’ I don’t have kids. So I’d been kinda thinkin’ it woulda been nice to have a stepson an’ all. We could maybe have done things together. Not that I would be like a real father or anything. Anyways. Your mom always said you was a good kid. Maybe we could stay in touch. You and me. If you wanted to.”

  A.B. shook Rudy’s hand and tried to smile. “It was nice to meet you, too, Rudy.”

  Then Ferguson approached, his eyes wet.

  A.B. wouldn’t look at him. “Thank you, Rev. Glen. For those things you said about my mom being in heaven and about her name.”

  Ferguson embraced A.B. “Maybe from now on you should call me ‘Ferguson’.”

  LaVerne told Leon and Vicki they could go, and he and Angela started cleaning up. A.B. picked up some glasses to take them into the kitchen, but LaVerne told him to put them down. He stood lost in the middle of the restaurant.

  Jen Richards, who had stayed behind to help when the others had left, took him by the elbow. “How about I give you a ride home?”

  *

  “That was real nice,” he said, looking out the window of her car. “Singing that song and all.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I was glad I could be a part of this today.”

  He fished around in the pocket of his suit jacket for a cigarette. He found one, put it between his lips and began looking for matches or a lighter. Finding neither, he sat back in the seat and breathed out a long breath and rubbed his eyes.

  “You know, for a long time I only wished that my mother knew more about my life. Now I wish that I knew more about hers.”

  They watched the road ahead, thinking about the day. Jen took a lighter out of the console and reached over and lit his cigarette.

  27

  Chumming

  Behind the butcher shop, back where Delbert and Hartholz played checkers and sipped whiskey in the evening while the sausage and briskets smoked in the pit, there was an old wooden barrel that smelled like moonshine and pickles. It was a 30-gallon oak-stave barrel Hartholz used for making sauerkraut, until customer demand for the sauerkraut necessitated a move up to a 50-gallon barrel, at which point Delbert appropriated the smaller barrel for the purpose of fermenting grain for use in chumming for catfish.

  Delbert learned chumming from his father, Delbert Douglass Merisier II, and when Delbert and Hartholz became friends and started going fishing together, Delbert taught chumming to Hartholz, though Hartholz left the actual making of the chum to Delbert, which was fine with Delbert inasmuch as he had strong opinions regarding chum-making technique.

  The recipe for the chum itself could not have been simpler. First Delbert dumped three pails of seed corn, two packages of dry yeast, and three bottles of beer into the barrel. This was then covered in water and stirred with a wooden paddle that Hartholz also once used in making sauerkraut. Delbert then tamped the lid down on top of the barrel and left it alone in the Texas heat for a few days, after which two more bottles of beer were added and the corn covered again with water. When the soured grain had been allowed to ferment for about another week, it was ready.

  The other half of the chumming equation was the stink bait. Because Delbert’s stink bait stunk so omnipresently, it could not be made nor kept on the butcher shop’s premises, lest customers conclude that Hartholz was selling spoiled meat.

  Spoiled meat was, in fact, the primary ingredient in Delbert’s stink bait recipe, which he concocted in a fifty-gallon drum that Rose brought home from Raylon Rice and Milling. Delbert buried the drum in his backyard, in a hole only as deep as the drum was tall, so that its top was roughly level with the ground. Into the drum Delbert deposited scraps of meat he brought home from the butcher shop, to which he added a quart or two of milk, a pint or so of vinegar, and a handful of apple peels. Delbert then put the lid on the drum, weighted it down with rocks, and let the meat mix rot until needed.

  After LaVerne came to live with Rose, she insisted Delbert erect a chicken wire fence around his stink bait pit, to prevent the boy from investigating and falling into the fetid hole.

  Early on Saturday mornings when it was still dark, Delbert would shovel some of the rancid meat out of the pit and into a big pail, then cover it all with a shovelful of clean dirt to mitigate the stench. This and several buckets of the fermented corn
mash were then loaded in the back of Hartholz’s 1937 Ford pickup, along with Delbert’s old skiff, oars, cane poles, a tackle box, and a gunnysack in which Delbert put a block of cheese, some brisket sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, a butcher knife wrapped in newspaper, a thermos of coffee, and a bottle of whiskey. The truck bed was then covered with an oiled-canvas tarp.

  *

  On the east bank of the San Jacinto, at a sharp bend just below the Cordy Branch, there was a still deep pool shaded by a venerable black willow, where Delbert and Hartholz liked to fish for channel cats. As was their practice, they arrived at their place in time to drink a cup of coffee while they watched the sun rise. Then, using an empty molasses can, Delbert scooped out some of the sour corn and flung it out onto the surface of the water. As the kernels sank slowly down, Delbert and Hartholz had another cup of coffee.

  Delbert then threw another can full of corn out onto the water, and minutes later, small bubbles percolated up from the bottom. The scent of the chum had attracted the attention of catfish in the region. Down in the black, beyond sight, their sleek gray bodies slid slowly through the cool quiet depths, around sunken stumps and through mossy hollow logs, their wide flat mouths gaping open to take in the soured grain, their whiskers brushing up against the roots of the willow tree growing out of the riverbank into the water.

  Hartholz took the cheese from the gunnysack and cut two chunks from the block and handed one to Delbert. Delbert pushed the dirt off the top of the stink bait, then he and Hartholz held their breath, reached into the pail, and took some of the rancid meat with their bare hands. Working quickly, they kneaded their handfuls of meat and cheese together into putrid, baseball-sized lumps. Carefully, they pushed their fishhooks into the bait and lowered them into the river, then rinsed their hands in the water.

  Though he was eager to wash off the stench, Hartholz didn’t like putting his hands in the river. “Those catfishes might bite my hand off,” he said. “They got lots of little teeths.”

  It didn’t take long for the catfish to begin nibbling on the bait.

  “I must have gotten the stink exactly right on this batch,” Delbert laughed. “These poor cats is actin’ like they ain’t eaten in a month. Maybe this time we’ll catch us one of them blues.”

  Delbert held out hope that someday he’d land one of the channel cats’ bigger cousins—a blue catfish—some which were known to reach one hundred pounds.

  Within moments, Hartholz’s cane pole was bent over, its tip pulled down hard, whipping back and forth. After several minutes of thrashing, the fish tired and Hartholz pulled it into the boat. After removing the hook, he carefully threaded a long rope stringer through the fish’s bottom lip. Hartholz lifted the shiny gray fish up by the stringer.

  “Feels like eleven pounds,” he said. “Maybe eleven-and-a-half.”

  Delbert knew that if Hartholz said it weighed eleven pounds, it weighed no more than eleven pounds, two ounces, and no less than ten pounds, fourteen ounces. At the shop, he had seen his friend cut meat exactly to the weight specified by customers without using the scale until the cutting was completed and the meat wrapped.

  “How do you do that, Mr. Hartholz?” customers would ask, shaking their heads in wonder. To which Hartholz would shrug and smile. Though only Delbert would recognize it as a smile. Customers most likely thought he was suffering a bit of indigestion.

  By ten o’clock, the men had caught nine fish—Delbert three, and Hartholz six. To deflect any potential gloating by Hartholz, Delbert reminded him every 10 minutes or so that, while he may have only caught three fish, his biggest—at about 20 pounds—was almost twice as big as Hartholz’ biggest. Delbert also accused Hartholz of underestimating the weight of his big fish so as to diminish the magnitude of his achievement.

  Hungry and satisfied with their morning’s work, they rowed to the near bank and tied the boat to the stump of a toppled old sycamore, their fish wallowing on the river bottom, strung together with ten feet of rope.

  They stretched out on the grass and ate their sandwiches. Delbert took his harmonica from his shirt pocket and played Robert Johnson’s “Travelin’ Riverside Blues,” and then “Ramblin’ on My Mind.” Delbert always played these two songs while they ate lunch on their fishing outings. While Hartholz watched a great white egret hunting frogs on the far bank, Delbert fell asleep. Then Hartholz leaned back on the trunk of the black willow and he, too, fell asleep.

  After napping, they got back in the skiff, pushed off, and let the boat drift back into the shade under the willow. There was never any urgency to their fishing, but the afternoon halves of their excursions were lackadaisical to the point of somnolence. This was aided and abetted by the whiskey, the bottle of which Delbert retrieved from the gunnysack and took a slug from before passing it to Hartholz.

  Most of the stink bait was gone at this point, and the catfish had either wised up or retreated to deeper cooler pools. Delbert and Hartholz let their baited hooks sit on the river bottom, hoping maybe they’d get lucky. They shared the whiskey and talked idly about baseball, the price of beef, the new janitor down at the school, and Mrs. Jenkins, the fair-skinned black woman who came in on Wednesdays to buy a roasting chicken and a pound of smoked brisket. Most folks guessed Mrs. Jenkins was a widow. Nobody had ever heard anything about any Mr. Jenkins, and Mrs. Jenkins had never clarified the situation. She worked as a secretary at a lumber yard over in Cleveland, and gave piano lessons at her house. She was judged by both Delbert and Hartholz to be the prettiest woman in Plum Grove.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Hartholz began to complain about the deer flies that had begun to torment them. “It’s your sweet disposition they’re attracted to,” said Delbert. “If you were just more of a sourpuss we wouldn’t have this problem.” They pulled their lines in and began packing their gear in the gunnysack and the tackle box. That’s when something jerked down on the right side of the boat causing the men to grasp the sides to keep their balance.

  “That was some big deer fly that just landed,” laughed Delbert.

  Hartholz didn’t laugh. “What do you think that was?” he asked, looking over into the water.

  “Maybe my twenty-pounder is trying to get free,” shrugged Delbert, grinning.

  The boat tipped suddenly hard to the right again, this time so far that water slipped in over the side. The boat began to move slowly out into the current as if it were being towed.

  Hartholz went pale. He shouted, “Delbert!”

  Delbert saw that the rope stringer was pulled taut and whatever it was that was dragging them had a hold of the rope.

  “Something’s on the stringer,” he said. “You row us back to shore and I’ll pull on the stringer.”

  Hartholz thrust the oars into the water and pulled on them as hard as he could in the direction of the riverbank behind them. Delbert took the stringer rope in his hands and yanked it toward him.

  “I think a big blue came by and tried to eat our little channel kitties,” grunted Delbert, straining to maintain his grip on the rope. “He’s a big ‘un.”

  Hartholz’s face was flame red. He groaned against the oars, sweating heavily. The men struggled in silence for fifteen minutes to reach the shore, a distance that would normally have been achieved in seconds. When he finally guided the boat to within a few yards of the shore, Hartholz jumped into the water and tried to drag the boat up onto the bank. Delbert leapt out of the boat to help. Hartholz slumped to the grass when they successfully grounded the skiff, but Delbert wasn’t done. He went to the front of the boat and continued to pull on the stringer.

  “If this is a blue on the end of this rope, I’m not lettin’ it go without a fight,” he insisted.

  Hartholz cursed and got to his feet. He came up behind Delbert and seized him around the waist. Together they heaved themselves backward, and fell over on top of each other. Hartholz managed to get back on his feet quickly,
but Delbert slipped as he tried to stand and he slid back down the bank toward the water. Something moved in the water and Hartholz yelled “Watch out!”, grabbing Delbert’s hand and yanking him to one side. Delbert turned around in time to see the massive, monstrous, green-gray face of a giant turtle lunging at him. The stringer rope extended out of its gaping mouth like a tongue. The glistening, pink, bony remains of a catfish draped over its bottom jaw. Three other fish flopped around on the grass, their bottom lips still threaded through with the stringer. The turtle made a low, huffing noise in the back of its throat, shot its head forward and snapped the head off the nearest fish. Delbert yelped, and jumped into the grounded boat. Hartholz followed.

  The turtle was covered in dark green algae. Its shell was as big around as a truck tire, and along its back were three ridges of sharp peaks, each six-to-eight inches high. Its head was as thick as a telephone pole and around the thing’s bullish neck were rows of stubby spikes. Its face was fierce and rhinoceroian.

  “Stegosaurus!” Hartholz shouted. “It is a dinosaur!”

  “That, my friend, is not far from the truth,” said Delbert, keeping a wary eye on the beast, which was retching and hacking, trying to disgorge the rope. “What we’re lookin’ at is the biggest damn Texas alligator snapping turtle I have ever seen.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Hartholz anxiously.

  Delbert picked up one of the oars. “This is what we’re going to do,” he said.

  He stepped out of the boat and walked quietly and gingerly up behind the turtle which was not at all fooled by Delbert’s attempt at stealth. It turned and pushed itself up as high as it could on its four squat legs. Its tail was at least eighteen inches long, maybe ten inches wide at its base, and pointed at the tip. Without hesitation, Delbert raised the oar above his head and swung it down hard on the turtle’s head. And then he did it again. And then again, breaking the oar clean in two. The turtle’s head lay still and bleeding on the grass.