The smut we must stop
The trash we must bash
The Laughter and fun
Must all be undone
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming us!!!!
- "Blame Canada" (Parker/Stone/Bacharach; 1999)

The bar was on a main drag, halfway down a long sloping hill running through the center of the town next door. It was pouring rain by the time we got there, forcing Charles and me to race through streams of water slicing down the sides of the road.

"So you're sitting there and she's questioning you - while she's drinking it..." I grabbed two Chesterfield Ales from the bartender. "What's Emile doing while this is all going on?"

"That again?"

"You never finished the story."

"I thought you wanted to talk to some locals about the fire."

"You see many locals floating around?" The place was empty save a college aged bartender talking to a short man in a baseball hat smoking at the end of the bar.

"Okay. Here's how it goes. Emile's sitting across the table from me, across the pile of food. Bacon, eggs, pancakes... all kinds of shit. My uncle Bill's at the bottom of the table and Betty's at the top, standing up."

"Betty's the aunt?"

"The great aunt."

"But Bill's a regular uncle?"

"You mean 'Not a great uncle?'"

"I mean Bill and Betty aren't a couple."

"If Bill was banging Betty--"

"Were they on the same side of the family?"

"You mean, was Bill Betty's nephew?"

"Uh..." Nephew... Nephew... Jesus Christ. Did I just forget what a 'nephew' was? The word seemed to escape me, for reasons I couldn't surmise. It was one those moments - those creepy little instants where the hard drive in your head just stops, or freezes. Where you're doing something rote, mechanical - the sort of task you don't even consciously consider - and all of the sudden, with no hint of warning, mental gridlock. The gears grind dry, you totally blank. Forget what you were saying, what you were thinking - how something's done, or what you were even doing. You might be sitting at a stop sign a stone's throw from your home and suddenly struggle to remember, left or right? Leaning over your shoes, staring at the laces in your hands and spacing the steps in a knot you've tied a thousand mornings before. Damnit, I know the word 'nephew'! How the fuck can I forget what it means? You wonder if it's just a lapse, part of the aging process. But then there's paranoia, when you notice it happening a lot. Fuck? Did I have a mini-stroke somewhere? Fry a stack of circuits in the heat of bloated bender? I hope I don't have brain damage.

Nephew (n.) - A son of one's brother or sister or of the brother or sister of one's spouse.

I figured I was burned, suffering some low grade form of what Hollywood types call "exhaustion." The last eighteen months had been a brutal, ruthless blur. I'd moved, quit a job and written, then rewrote and edited a book twice. I'd learned a business I knew nothing about, stretched my dwindling cash like rubber and somehow - mainly luck - ducked the hooks of this doomed economy. And through it all, through the madness and convulsions and confusion, producing a website that demanded ten to twelve pages of high-grade content every week or two. Burned could be accurate, but fried might be better. Thinking that much, in so many disparate directions, slamming all that work into an abbreviated timetable... This can break the mind. Leave you wondering whether maybe, just maybe, you'd damaged the wiring enough that standard English was lost. That an idiot simple descriptive like "nephew" no longer registered. I didn't bother to think - remind myself of the meaning of the word, or do the verbal algebra to grasp what Charles was asking. It was easier just to speak. Take that fifty percent chance of sounding coherent. "Uhh...yeah. 'Nephew.' That's what I meant."

"No. They were on different sides of the family."

"So Bill could bang Betty."

"You could bang your mother."

"Banging a parent is not your uncle banging your aunt."

"Betty's fucking dead."

"Back then."

"She was 75, at least. She had a fucking moustache."

"Still, you never hear of that, you know?"

"Geriatric incest? I'm shocked. None of your family's taken you aside and said, 'Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I fucked Grandma?'"

"That's not what I mean--"

"'It was Columbus Day, 1977. We'd gotten into a bottle of Reunite and--"

"I'm serious... Say you have an uncle and he's single, and an aunt and she's single, and they're on opposite sides of the family. Everybody gets drunk together on Christmas and those two wind up fucking. You know that has to happen--"

"Except Bill was a regular uncle. Betty was a great aunt."

"Bill's dead, too?"

"You going let me finish this shit?"

"That's not incest. I'm almost posit--"

"ANYWAY... So I get up in the morning, go to the table and I sit down and the first thing I see is Emile. He's holding his head in his hands and his face is beet fucking red. I could see he was barely holding his shit together and while I'm watching him, the only thing I can hear is Betty, standing there, holding that pitcher--"

"Ahhh... So it was a pitcher."

"So what?"

"It's easier with a pitcher. I was trying to visualize doing it with a carton and it seems pretty hard. I mean, you could pull it off, but... Well, that'd be fucked up."

"Actually, it was a carton. Betty poured the juice into the pitcher the next morning. I think she got all formal because Emile was Canadian."

"Royalty."

"He did speak French."

"So do the French."

"The woman never left Pennsylvania. She was like a seamstress, or nurse or something."

"Tell me you washed the carton before you put it back in the refrigerator."

"I'm not a barbarian."

"Is that a 'yes'?"

"It's an 'I don't rememb--' Fuck!"

"What?"

"Order me another beer, will you? I forgot my dip in the car."

"Bum a smoke from the dude at the end of the bar."

"I only smoke when I drink."

"We're in a bar."

"This doesn't count." He started for the door.

"Excuse me..." The bartender frowned in my direction. "Can I get a couple more Chesterfields?"

"Chesterfield?" The smoker at the end of the bar laughed. "Man, that stuff's awful."

"We're awful people." I moved a couple seats in his direction - close enough to talk, far enough away to mind my own business. "You from this area?"

"Let me guess... Here to see Centralia?"

"I'm going to write something about it. Came looking for the mayor, to ask him who's the best candidate for Centralia in the upcoming election."

"Her. The Mayor's a she."

"So there's still a government?"

"Not much of one. Most of the residents got settlements and moved to New Centralia back in the 80s."

"How original."

"Beats living on a plate of hot coals. Good deal, too. Government built them all new homes."

"When did the fire start?"

"Sixties. Sixty-two, maybe sixty three."

"It took twenty years to get everyone out?"

"It didn't get huge all at once. The fire spread underneath the town for years. But it was slow, smoldering. I don't know if anybody understood how it big it was getting. They tried to put it out a couple times and that didn't work. Then it got too expensive to try. The lawyers came next, but that fell through--"

"Lawyers?"

"A bunch of lawyers came through in the early 80s. They sued to get a settlement out of the government, or the state or somebody."

"That's how they got New Centralia?"

"No, New Centralia happened after the kid almost fell into the fire. He was playing in his yard and a hole opened up under him, a hundred feet deep. Barely survived by hanging on to branch as he slid down. The national media jumped on the story and after that, the government cut a deal in a hurry. Moved everybody who wanted to go."

"You know who the lawyers were on that?"

"The lawyers were gone by that point. They were supposed to get money in the original deal, but that got screwed up with the atomic clock bullshit. When the chances of getting money faded there, well... You know how lawyers work."

"I'm a lawyer."

"Really? What kind--"

"Recovering." I had to kill that discussion quick, before it even started. Everyone in Pennsylvania has a cousin who's suing for government benefits, a stepmother with an "airtight" slip and fall case or a sister jammed up in a child custody battle. Everybody knows about his "rights" in these places. Or thinks he does. The smoker seemed a decent, normal sort, but I wasn't taking any chances. "What about this atomic clock?"

"You know who Robert Byrd is?"

"The old, senile senator?"

"At the last second, just as the lawyers and government had the original deal ready to be signed into law, Byrd stuck some rider on the bill giving West Virginia an atomic clock. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Totally killed the deal."

"A what?" Charles had returned from the car.

"An atomic clock."

"That's a concept, not a thing."

"You're thinking of a nuclear clock." The smoker laughed.

"An atomic clock's an actual clock." I figured I'd drop some knowledge on the conversation. "It's what they use to calibrate Greenwich Mean Time." (Of course, this is entirely incorrect.)

"Why don't they just use the one in Greenwich?"

"Maybe it's fast."

"It's a hundred million dollar clock."

"How you going to know unless you have another?"

"What if both are fast, or slow? Or one's slow and the other's fast?"

That's why I don't buy into 'time,' man. It's all just an illusion. Like measuring slices of wind...

I could see the smoker wondering what drugs we'd been taking. Why else would an attorney be here, writing about this shit? Lawyers lived in court - arguing worker's comp cases, settling car accident claims or glad-handing judges at political benefits. They were players in these parts, important mother-fuckers. The only people in town with Range Rovers, Rolexes... wives who wore fur and girlfriends with stripper tits. The people with their faces on the phone book. You didn't find them sitting in dingy bars, quizzing natives on a ghost town dead before the days of Hair Metal. That was journalist toil, shit-work for the just-out-of-college crowd - the kids with no direction, no Serious career.

"Budweiser?" I bought the smoker a beer, to clear up any concerns.

"You mean Greenwich, England?" Charles grabbed his other beer.

"Connecticut. Steve Cohen has it. He was tired of being late for shit."

"All I know," the smoker cut us off, "is Bob Byrd fucked Centralia so West Virginia could have a really expensive clock. West Fucking Virginia... You can look it up in the Congressional records."

"I can do that, very easily." Or I could just print the exchange and leave some egghead to look up the story and prove it right or wrong.¹

"Why would that place need an atomic clock? It's like hanging a plasma screen in an outhouse."

Who cares why? We're talking about pork here... Free shit's an oxymoron.

I wanted to sound appalled, or at least surprised, at the smoking man's story, but I couldn't. Truth is, there's a sad aptness in a state like West Virginia fucking over a town like Centralia. Both are Appalachian, parts of a festering national scar running from Western New York through Northern Mississippi. A stretch of blue-ridge forests dotted with abandoned strip mines, skeletons of coal towns and tin roofed hamlets better accessed with all terrain vehicles than cars. All of it flooded with the issue of Scots-Irish immigrants - the spawn of mad, angry bastards who hopped off the boats and ran for the hills, to live on their own. Separate, Sovereign, Totally Disconnected.² These parts of the world are fifty years in the past. Sitting there, listening to the story, I couldn't help thinking how perfectly ridiculous it was to give the finest time measuring device on the planet to a place that didn't observe its passing.

"Looks like the rain's slowing." I threw back the last of my beer, waved goodbye to the smoking man and headed for the door with Charles.

"Did you get any good stuff from that guy?"

"A little," I scribbled notes from the conversation on some loose papers in the car.

Kid grabbed branch to avoid falling in hole... Mayor's a chick...

"Where were we in the 'Breakfast Story'?"

"Fuck... 'Pitcher' ring a bell? Something about Betty putting the juice in a pitcher?"

"Right. So you guys did that while it was still in the carton?"

"I think we were looking for a chaser for the Southern Comfort. Emile pulled the o.j. carton out of the refrigerator, took a swig and-- I don't know... He just started going to work on it."

"No warning? Nothing, like, 'Hey, you mind if I jam my dick in orange juice box?'"

Most residents moved to New Centralia... Old town still has working fire department...

"Nothing. My first reaction was, like, 'What the fuck are you doing?'"

"Did you try to stop him?"

"How?"

"But then you did the same thing?"

"Peer pressure."

"Peer pressure? Really?"

"He threw down the gauntlet. I didn't want to look like a pussy."

Smoke near the dump smells sugary... Charles and Emile sodomizing juice carton...

"You never thought, 'Shit, I have to throw that stuff away?' when you got up?"

"Too late. Betty already had breakfast made. The first thing I saw was her holding a glass in the air and talking to Bill. 'Bill? Bill, does this juice taste funny to you?' I look over and Bill takes a huge gulp. 'Yes, Betty, it is kind of strange.' It was fucking surreal. All I could do was sit there and watch. Do you know what that's like?"

"No. No, I can't say I do."

Daniel Boone and Grizzly statues in front yard of home... Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill drinking urine...

"My first impulse was to stop them. But then I realized, Fuck, I can't do anything rash here. Any wrong move could lead to dire, horrible consequences. I had to sit there and watch, guessing all their possible responses and reactions in my head, gaming how to reply.

The whole time I'm thinking, 'How in the fuck do I play this? Should I say anything at all? If I act nervous I'll look too concerned. If I look too concerned, they'll sense the gravity of the situation. That'll put them in a spot where they'll have to acknowledge something they might already suspect, but would never say out loud. I mean, how could they? You can't come back from this... There's no 'explaining' yourself. Betty'd have a heart attack. Bill would go home for his rifle. Just sit, wait. Leave them to craft the explanation. Go along with whatever they say.'

Finally, Bill turns to Betty and-- Shit, I'll never forget this... He licks his lips, super-fucking-slowly, swishing the stuff on his tongue like he's at a wine tasting. I'm losing my mind now, barely keeping it together. I can't even look at Emile. Then Bill winces, 'The juice tastes a little funny, like someone put salt in it.' Betty downs the last of her glass - holding it in her mouth for what felt like a decade, all but gargling with the shit. 'Yes. It is salty." Then she turns to me. "Did you kids put salt in this juice?'"

"What did you say?"

"What do you think I said? I straightened my face, looked her in the eye and said the only thing I could - the only thing any living human in could say in that moment:

'Yes, Aunt Betty. We put salt in the juice.'"

"You think she knew?"

"Couldn't tell. But I knew that even if she did, she wasn't going to accuse me of that. What was she going to do? Challenge me in front of Bill? 'Bill, I think we just drank juice mixed with the boys' urine!' She couldn't go there."

Town filled with home-made street signs... Possible Betty knew she'd been drinking piss?

"You're lucky you didn't have asparagus for dinner the night before."

"Huh?"

"Forget it. What was Emile doing through this?"

"The minute I told her the excuse, he lost it completely, started laughing uncontrollably. I had to sit there, stone-faced, listening to Bill bitching, wagging his finger in my face. 'You kids think this is funny? O.J. isn't cheap. This stuff doesn't just grow on trees.'"

"You might be one of the only people on Earth who's 'dick buddies' with someone through a Minute Maid container."

"'Dick buddies' with a dude who bangs trannies."

"Say that again?"

Robert Byrd killed original settlement... Uncle Bill not a horticulturalist...

"Emile moved to Europe after college, but he stayed in touch with my family. A couple of years back he calls and says he in New York, so my brother and I take a trip into the city to see him. We're downing drinks, rehashing old shit and out of the blue, he asks, 'What's the protocol when you bring a girl home and find out she's half man?'"

"Half man?"

"Chick with a dick."

"The 'protocol'?"

"The 'protocol.' He tells us, matter of fact, like it's nothing, how he was at this bar a few weeks before, brought home a chick and found out half way through screwing around that it was a dude with tits."

"What did he do?"

"He fucked it."

"Fuck you."

"No shit. My brother almost spit out his drink. He was like, 'You what?' Emile just sits back and laughs, 'What else are you going to do? Waste all the effort? It's all the same in the back side, no?'"

Atomic clock in West Virginia... Canadians = ultimate pragmatists...

"How many years has this dude done in prison?"

"Prison? He's an investment banker."

"Bullshit." I folded the paper into my pocket and put the car in gear.

"In France. I shit you not."

"Well, you know why he gets the big bucks." We hooked a u-turn in the street and pointed the car down the road out of town. "Doesn't let emotion get in the way."

"Where now?"

"Home."

"No more photos?"

"No more photos."

"That's all you need to write something?"

"I think I have enough."

----------
¹ One of the beauties of the internet - a free research staff hundreds of times the size of anything the Newhouses or Sulzbergers employ.

² Here's an up-close picture of the scar.

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 5:19 PM

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