When Crickets Cry (12 page)

In the months that followed, Emma made sure that we read aloud from my copy of Shakespeare. Eventually, we began speak ing to each other in the lines we remembered. Emma was much better at it than I. We did it so much that even Charlie-who was sick of hearing us speak the King's sixteenth-century Englishlearned to play.

One Saturday afternoon the three of us were going to a movie. When Emma saw me coming, she threw up her hands and said, "0 Hamlet! Thou hast cleft my heart in twain."

Charlie looked over his shoulder and said, "Oh, brother!"

Without skipping a beat, I hopped up on the front steps and knelt, taking her hand in mine, and said, "0! Throw away the worser part of it, and live the purer with the other half."

And to this day, I wish the same.

our neon beer signs hung in the window of The Well in full Friday night glow. Atop the apex of the roof, a neon strip of lights outlined a well-endowed woman wearing nothing but high heels and a cowboy hat.

The Well is an anomaly in Clayton. As out of place as a baseball in a football game, or a poker chip in church. The structure itself was built from huge stones pulled from the shoreline around Lake Burton. Some of the stones are as big as beach balls. They've been squared, mounded together, and piled atop one another to form walls that at a minimum are two feet thick. The roof is built from huge rough-cut cedar timbers and draped with cedar shakes that are nearly covered in moss. The moss hangs down, accenting the huge front door that was once the loading door on a steamer in the North Sea. The door is six inches thick, nearly eight feet square, made from planks that are almost a foot in width and held together with three thick iron straps. It hangs on runners and must be slid open and closed by a very strong person.

The place was built in the fifties by a hermit who must have been afraid of nuclear war with Cuba, because the cellar was just as stout as the building above it. Dug down into the rock, it became the county's fallout shelter after the hermit hopped on the Appalachian Trail one afternoon and walked to Maine with his dog, never to be seen or heard from again. Due to its stone construction, The Well stays cool all summer, and thanks to its sixfoot-wide fireplace, warm all winter.

It sat vacant for years until Davis Stipes got hold of it. And Davis, or Monk, as we call him, is as much a mystery as the former owner's disappearance. Davis is forty-something and likes Hawaiian shirts, cut-off jeans, flip-flops, and the fact that very few people suspect him of holding a doctorate in theology. In truth, he holds two. A military brat, he was born in England where his dad was stationed with the SAS. He's traveled more than most anyone I know, attended universities and seminaries all over Europe, dropped off the radar screen for most of his twenties, spent five years in a Spanish monastery where rumor has it he took a vow of silence-and kept it-and has never married. Although he says he's open to the possibility.

The details of his lost decade are a little fuzzy, but people with secrets in and around Clayton are nothing new. There are a lot of secrets both above and below the surface of Lake Burton. Davis's mother and father died while he was studying in the Spanish monastery. He buried them in London, along the river Thames, and when he read his father's will, he discovered his folks owned a little ten-acre tract on Lake Burton. Obviously, they'd had hopes of building a retirement home. Davis flew back to the States to put it on the market, but when he drove around the lake and pulled onto the gravel drive next to the Burton Campground, he changed his mind.

When The Well came up for sale, Davis was on his way to the Clayton hardware store to pick up some more bolts for the extended dock he was building. He drove through Harley's Curve, saw the sign, inquired about the price at the real estate office in town, and was told to make an offer. The city wanted to be rid of the headache, so Davis canvassed a few friends, sketched out a business plan on a napkin, and told them what he wanted to do.

"One of my favorite stories is when Jesus meets the woman at the well. Imagine that moment. She was a `loose woman,' known around town, and in the flash of a second, He knew everything about her: her five husbands, current boyfriend, everything she'd ever done wrong-He knew it all. Yet He spoke to her and loved her despite all the baggage she brought with her. Something about how He treated her was magnetic, because she wanted to be there. Like all of us, she was thirsty, and when He pulled that bucket up just spilling over with clear, cool water, she shoved her whole face in it and sucked it dry.

"The people who are really thirsty aren't going to church on Sunday. They're driving around this lake, running from their secrets, looking for a good, quiet, fill-your-stomach place to eat. Trying to fill that God-shaped hole with a bigger house, another boat, a second mistress, whatever. So let's take the bucket to them. Speak to the heart, and the head will follow. And the fastest way to the heart is through the stomach. I want to get in the business of making God-shaped cheeseburgers."

The silent four nodded, pitched in, and the five of them bought it off the courthouse steps for $100,000. After about six months' renovation, Davis opened the doors. The first day, the wait at the door was an hour, and it's been overcrowded ever since. For the last three years, seven days a week, Davis has pounded out the burgers and tended bar. On his days off, which are few, he disappears into the mountains.

The Well is not your local biker hangout. Above the door is a small, barely noticeable sign that reads: As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And that's just the beginning. The entire place is one well-disguised billboard for God. The cocktail napkins are printed with Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, there's a Bible on every table, the mixed drinks are labeled after the twelve apostles, and chalkboards around the bar are covered with everything from the Ten Commandments to the Sermon on the Mount.

And while the jukebox is filled with rock-and-roll titles, all the records have been replaced with gospel music. G5 may read "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC, but when the quarter's dropped in and the unsuspecting bar hopper sits back with his beer to combat the writing on the walls with some good old hard rock, he's greeted by the Atlanta Gospel Choir singing, "Ain't No Rock Gonna Cry in My Place."

Most of the servers are kids from church, and on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday mornings, Davis fills the room with recovering junkies, admitted adulterers, and struggling soccer moms in his morning Bible study. Right now they're working their way through the Gospels, and focusing on the words in red.

Davis lets his bar speak for itself. It's neither his podium nor his pulpit, but he's always listening, and he'll speak up if you ask him the right question or look like you need a friend. And while he may serve both beer and mixed drinks, I've never seen him touch either one, although he is partial to his own cooking. Between the environment and the food, people can't stay away. This includes Charlie and me.

And talk about successful restaurants. An armored truck makes two pickups a week. With that much money flowing through here, you're probably asking yourself, Yeah, what about the money? Sounds like a scam . . . like maybe he's using all that religion and Scripture quoting to pad his own pocket. Problem is, we all know better. Davis got his investors to oversee the finances so he could concentrate on what he did best-hoisting up the bucket. As a result, Davis never touches a penny; he's paid a reasonable salary with a quarterly bonus based on net income and couldn't steal from himself if he tried.

The parking lot was half-f, and Davis's enormous Harley, chromed from stem to stern, sat to one side of the front door when Charlie and I arrived. I parked next to Sal Cohen's decadeold Cadillac, and we walked in. Four guys stood in the back propped between pool cues and baseball caps, talking above squinty eyes and the cigarettes dangling from their lips. The cloud of smoke hanging just above their heads swirled slightly from the single ceiling fan that sucked the air around the inside of the bar. The stacks of quarters lined up along the green velvet rail told me they'd be there all night.

Upside down on the wall above the bar hangs the world's largest armadillo. At almost three feet long with a pre-roadkill weight of twenty-five pounds, he was three times bigger than any armadillo I'd ever seen. All the locals called him Leppy, because armadillos are known to carry leprosy, but I just called him Gross, because he was.

An out-of-town couple sat at a table against the wall, clutching hands and wearing slick biker leathers, unscuffed Dingo boots, bandanna do-rags, and black T-shirts they had bought at Bike Week the year before. They were what the locals call "weekend warriors from Atlanta."

Davis stood sweating in a white, grease-stained apron, flipping a griddle full of burgers with one hand and pounding out patties with the other. As we walked through the door, he waved his spatula at us. Charlie tapped the floor with his walking stick, checking the location of the chairs between him and the bar.

"Hungry?" Davis asked over his shoulder.

"I could eat the butt end of a horse," Charlie replied.

"Ahh." Davis smiled and shook his head to avoid the smoke. "A man after my own heart."

I spotted Sal, patted him on the back, and we took a seat at the bar next to him. Davis poured me a Sprite from the fountain while he made Charlie a St. Peter Johnny Walker Black Label with soda.

Davis had no problem with you drinking if he detected it wasn't an issue for you. If it was, and he did, then he'd serve you, but you might not enjoy it very much. Drinking had never been an option for me. Occupational hazard, you might say. And after I left my occupation, I just never picked it up.

On our left sat Sal, making his way through a cheeseburgerwhich, as slowly as he ate and as much as he chewed, would take the better part of an hour. And on my right slouched a greasy, skinny stranger staring at three empty glasses of beer and trying to make sense out of the Scripture verses printed on his cocktail napkins. Davis had loaded him up with popcorn, peanuts, and napkins, apparently working him over pretty good.

As for the empty glasses-he hadn't really drunk three whole beers. He thought he had, but the alcohol content had been altered somewhat. Actually, it'd been altered a lot. To strangers that are "of legal age," Davis gives what they ask for. Real beer. At least until they demonstrate a need for it. After that, he waters it down a bit, mixing regular with an unleaded version like O'Doul's. It's mixed beneath the bar and comes out the tap looking like real beer, so the guy drinking it has no idea. It's a little frothy but settles quickly. For the folks that are "notyet of legal age," which Davis can spot a mile away, he serves them the nonalcoholic stuff straight up.

The stranger next to me was a perfect example. Davis had spotted him the moment he walked through the door, and the look on the kid's face told me he was starting to get worried. Normally, three beers should have had some buzzing effect, but tonight something was different.

"How's the boat?" Davis asked, slicing tomatoes.

Sal perked up, bent an ear our way, and forked his food around his plate while his jaw moved in rhythm with the slow-tempo gospel spilling out of the jukebox, like a cow chewing its cud. Sal had one speed-his-but at his age, nobody seemed to mind. It might have been slow, but it was effective. And one other thing, you could count on it. Everybody did.

"Coming along," Charlie said. "We're just a few days away. That is"-he threw his thumb at me-"if I can get Captain America to keep his eye on the ball."

Davis flipped a burger and looked at me. "I heard you were the center of excitement in town the other day. Heard you were wearing your cape too."

BETWEEN THE NAKED-WOMAN WEATHER VANE ATOP THE ROOF, the "We Bare All" and "Adult Toys" signs in the windows, and Davis's unadvertised beer-pouring practices, you might think he's misleading people, showing them one thing and giving them another. Lying, to call it what it is. Because there are, in fact, no naked people in Davis's bar; no one bares any skin other than Charlie, who sometimes does a belly-button routine on openmike night. The only adult toys are a pool table and a few dartboards. And chances are pretty good that when you buy a Budweiser, you're not getting 100-percent Budweiser.

Davis will admit all this if you ask him, but he's zeroed in on his target audience and knows what appeals to them. I'm not saying he's right or wrong, and I'm not suggesting the end justifies the means, but he's passionate about getting people to heaven. And judging by his Bible study attendance during the week, it's difficult to argue with his results. If it means titillating people's sin senses and hoodwinking them on their beer, he's comfortable standing before God and telling Him he did it that way. That's just Davis.

If he'd lived in Germany during World War II, he'd have been one of the people who answered the knock at the door and told the SS soldier there were no Jews in his house, while his basement was bursting at the seams with eight or ten families whose fathers' names were Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael.