And suddenly being removed from the rest of the world, a lone pilgrim on the land, doesn’t feel so romantic.
She finds Locust Street by accident.
A couple more blocks’ worth of walking does it.
She’s moving if only because she feels uneasy standing still there, a half dozen sheets of smoke emitting from various cracks in the earth around her.
What in God’s name is going on here, she asks.
Though she is not sure who she is asking.
The thought’s interrupted by the sight of a house up the street—up Locust—where the low-lying foliage that threatens to consume the town rises and meets the tree line beyond.
Yes, there’s a house there, maybe even another.
She nears the house, sees signs of life: a vehicle, well-rusted but with tires still full of air.
The remnants of a garbage fire on the side of the property, within which can be seen the scraps of packaging not yet yellowed with age.
And an address, painted in barely legible digits on the curb: 44.
She, of course, must knock.
But is suddenly terrified of who or what will answer.
Yes, the man listed on the internet as the resident is supposedly her cousin, however many times removed, and yet…
She subtly grips the ignition key of the rental car between her fingers, tight and ready between forefinger and thumb, so that she might put it in his eye should he prove to be the wrong sort of man.
Which is quite likely, given that she’s calling on the House of Grendel.
She knocks.
(I’m going to get ahead of this, Lil: Run.
Run, dumbshit!
Oh you dumbshit dumbshit dumbshit!)
The door opens.
And standing there in robe and sandals is a man with cheerful eyes in a decaying body.
Are you Peter Allen?
I am, he says.
He seems confused at the sight of a visitor.
Who are you, he asks.
I’m your cousin.
She’s in fact first cousin once removed.
That’s what he determines once she’s laid out the familial connections.
They’re in the front yard, if it can be called that, and he’s vaguely sketching out the family tree in the air before him.
Little flips of the fingers up, down, left, right.
Almost as if he’s dialing an invisible phone.
Yes, first cousin once removed, no doubt about it, he says.
All the while, Lily’s looking at him, with his sagging bloodhound eyes and the tufts of elven gray hair that thatch from his ears.
She is bemused.
She is in some small way blood with this man.
Just as she is blood with Tish.
Family trees: as tangled as all the overgrowth surrounding this place.
He coughs.
It is a familiar cough.
Bespeaking a perpetual net of mucus within the lungs.
It is her father’s cough.
A seventies cough; the recurrent gurgle of men who smoked and drank too much, men who watched the Dean Martin Variety Show.
That’s what you did back then: you lived hard, got red-faced as you aged, and wore your years in your voice as a badge of honor.
Peter asks her why she’s come to the end of the world.
Columbus may have discovered America, he chortles.
But he didn’t find this place.
Lily nods, looks around.
Can I ask…what happened? she says with a vague nod back to the desolate grid of what was once downtown Centralia.
Columbia County Redevelopment Authority happened to it, says Peter.
There is a sort of resigned displeasure in his voice when he says this.
Come in, he says with a nod toward his Grendelian abode, as if he’ll further elaborate inside.
We’ll get you an orange juice.
If there is nothing outside the house, there is virtually Everything inside.
A hoarder’s paradise.
Crates of spent Coke bottles and old magazines.
Shelves of VHS tapes and cassettes.
Stackable plastic patio chairs, columns of them all the way to the ceiling, in four or five different places.
He’s running hot water from the sink over a frozen can of orange juice concentrate.
He starts to say something, but a multisyllabic spasm of gurgling coughs interrupts him.
He waves a hand before him—like he’s shooing away a fly—and as he gets the rumble under control, widens his eyes slightly, apologetically.
Used to work in the coal business, he says.
I got out of the mine when they shut Centralia down.
But the mine didn’t get out of me.
That’s what you’re seeing out there, in case you’re wondering.
What, you mean the smoke?
Been burning since 1962.
Whole network of mines Centralia was built on.
He gives the floor a stamp with his slipper.
That slipper says: right below us, everywhere.
Centralia, he says, used to have a couple thousand residents.
Then in 1962, the fire department’s doing an annual burn of the landfill, and know what happens?
There’s a breach between the landfill and the mines and the fire gets through.
And whoosh.
The fire gets into the coal mines.
No putting it out at that point.
They try, but that’s sixty miles of tunnel down there, all burning.
They try to seal it, but nope, that’s not going to work either.
He frees the cylindrical brick of frozen orange juice from the container, lets it thunk into a plastic pitcher.
He coughs again, casts a glance at her, those hangdog eyes flashing a hint of mischief: Got the Fires of Hell burning beneath us, Lily Allen.
Fifty years they’ve been burning; they brought in some experts few decades back, and their best guess was it was liable to burn for two hundred fifty more years given the deposits down there.
Can you believe that?
She can’t and says so.
City got condemned by the state; they even took our zip code; that was 1992.
They can do that—take a zip code?
Don’t know if they can or can’t, but they did.
The orange juice comes in plastic tumblers.
They sit together at the Formica table, its uneven, age-rilled surface stretching between them.
She tells him about her interest in Gray Allen.
Understands that he was brothers with Peter’s father.
She does not tell him about the sixteen million dollars.
(Though, when he unleashes another cough, she’s again rocketed back to the seventies and her father’s proud version of that cough, the Man-Who’s-Lived cough—and she’s struck by the sameness of these Allens—both dying from the inside out for another man’s dime.
She thinks secretly if she gets this money, she will give him some.)
She asks him if he would have any information, however insignificant, about Gray.
She knows he was likely too young to remember anything.
But were there stories?
Bad news for you, he says, is I got the memory of an earthworm.
Good news is I don’t need one.
Because, he says proudly with a nod to the sprawl around, I save everything.
I’m like the Library of Congress, he says, rummaging through shoe boxes, file folders.
Right here at the edge of the world.
Repository of all Knowledge.
It smells faintly like sulfur.
Everything in Centralia smells like sulfur.
Forty years of coal fires will do that to you.
It smells like the must of wet paper too—paper that has been wet, dry, wet, and dry again.
I’m thinking I’ve got some services pictures, Peter’s saying.
&nb
sp; Lily looks around the chaos.
My grandfather was an MIA; was there ever any sort of sense where he might’ve died—
God, no, Lily.
I’d love to help you and I’ll do my best.
But beyond pictures I couldn’t put a single fact to him, a single piece of information.
As far as my memories go, he’s just a face in a picture.
A black-and-white ghost.
He finds a picture.
Amid numerous others, in an old envelope.
War pictures of his father—Stateside, anyhow.
In a still-pressed uniform.
Way too young.
Hopeful.
Proud.
The picture, though, that Lily has in her hands is of the brothers—Bill and Gray Allen—both in uniform, arms slung across each other’s shoulders.
Gray.
He is not an unhandsome guy.
Well put together in his prim uniform.
But the image is grainy.
He doesn’t smile.
His mouth and eyes: perfectly neutral to the camera.
Unreadable.
She’s struck by how dark the wells of his eyes are, how the sun top-lights him, casts his eyes in his brow’s shadow.
They are a dark place, those eyes.
Perhaps she’s looking too hard at it, trying too hard to find something.
Peter, meanwhile, is nostalgically communing with various odds and ends, bits of correspondence he’s completely forgotten he’s hoarded.
Pictures of his own family—his parents, his sister.
Black-and-white ghosts everywhere, he says.
She sits out on the porch.
Watches the smoke out in the street, watches its perpetual escape from the underworld below.
The earth off-gassing all its pain.
She alternates between that and the mute image of Gray.
Peter appears a short while later.
He’s got a cardboard box in his hands.
Library of Congress is worth something after all, he says.
He hands her the box.
It’s full of letters.
They’re addressed to LCPL Bill Allen, A.P.O. 46441, PACIFIC THEATER.
The return address: PFC Gray Allen, A.P.O. 71710, EUROPEAN THEATER.
She looks up at him.
By the look of it, Peter says, the brothers were writing each other.
I got into your grandfather’s first one just now, Peter says.
But…
For a split second, she senses discomfort in him.
She tilts her head: What?
Little…troubled, that’s all.
A moment later he goes back inside.
IV
18 July 1944
B—
I stood on the moon yesterday. Surrounded by death. And I was strangely happy.
My soul demands I put these thoughts down on paper, give voice to them, though it is a black thing that I carry. I apologize in advance that you must be the one to read it. But I have no one else to write to.
Does it rain there like it does here, brother? Like God is trying to wash us sinful things from the earth?
It is the wettest year in half a century in Normandy. We advance on the Germans through perpetual sheets of rain, the roads ankle deep with the mud.
In that mud are the bodies of the German soldiers our bombers and artillery have shredded in the hours and days leading up to our advance. They are half-sunk in the mud, as if the earth is trying its best to bury them, consign them to graves if their fellow man will not. The treads of our Shermans hasten the earth’s efforts.
Do the dead there have that same peculiar look they have here? Of being so perfectly alone?
It does not give me solace—that death looks so lonely. It gives me the sense that there is no way out of this life, no respite from the hells both without and within.
The Germans are in retreat, but fight like hell with their Tigers and 88s and panzerfausts. We have near air superiority, but they occasionally send single aircraft toward us in the dark of night—“Bedcheck Charlies”—to kill off those of us not safely tucked into foxholes for the night.
Yesterday we came over a ridge, looked down at a strategic crossroads—a village called St. Lo. The B-17s had pounded it on every clear day since D-Day. And yet the Germans had held it, despite the fact that there was nothing left there that a civilized man would dignify with his presence. Just broken fields of rubble, cobblestone streets and sidewalks pockmarked with bomb craters. It was clear the blasts had breached the sewage systems, for those craters were filled not only with rainwater, but pools of excrement as well. We could smell it from the ridge, through the rain.
The Germans huddled in places only rats would go: the rain-swollen cellars and culverts, or hid from sight in the mud beneath whatever overgrowth remained.
We hovered there on the ridge in our ponchos, miserable and wet to our skin, but ready to kill, ready for that sweet adrenaline rush of bloodlust to distract us, warm our otherwise tired bones.
We lose ourselves in war, don’t we? When we engage the enemy, that part of our brain that so taunts us, so tortures us, is suddenly rendered mute. The Before and After die in that moment, don’t they?
We put mortars on the Germans for an hour, but all we were really doing was redistributing the rubble down in the streets. What could be knocked down already had. We were going to have to go in and do it by hand.
So down into the village we went, lighting up everything we could with our BARs and Thompsons, our ponchos billowing behind us like avenging angels in the rain.
But stone is indifferent to bullets. The Enemy was still unseen in his ratholes.
How many were there? How desperate would they be to hold this shit-infested swamp? A sane man would throw down his weapon and give up. But there are no sane men in war. I was evidence of that.
I was ready to kill; in a high elation—as if to take someone’s life would give me meaning—would bestow mettle and honor and all that bullshit upon me, and snap me out of this self-hate.
But it is really none of that, is it, brother?
It is the Rage that burns in me. You’ve seen it and know it. If I were still Christian, I’d say it was the Devil’s work—that he’s got a hard grip on my soul—and his fires burn in every part of me, just beneath the surface.
But if there were God or the Devil, they’d have better things to do than poke around in the heart of a single, insignificant man—just one of billions worldwide, all of whom seem hell-bent on killing one other.
We went into St. Lo, that scar upon the earth, seeking to do our share of that killing.
The single biggest cellar, we knew, was beneath the church, itself a ruin now (and a testament that God oversaw nothing here). We were pretty certain that’s where the bulk of the German forces would be dug in.
We readied ourselves to breach it, and did so.
The cellar was empty.
Could it be that St. Lo in turn was empty?
But then the great cruel humor of war reasserted itself, and the blasts of a half-dozen panzerfausts slammed into us. Blowing men’s ribcages open, tearing limbs off (though you and I both know that limbs are never torn clean off; rather, they’re shredded into some crude flapping facsimile of what was once a limb).
The Fallschirmjäger—some of their most elite troops—were hitting us from the cemetery!
They’d dug into the vaults and mausoleums, waited there amidst the dead in impeccable silence, and had baited us perfectly. We were sitting ducks; machine-gun fire and potato mashers came in. All around us in that church—what was left of that church—was an orgy of death. Our ponchos became so splattered with blood that we didn’t know who had been hit and who had not, where one man ended and the other began.
It was chaos, but we were in too close quarter to retreat. There was no cover. We would either die in that cramped shooting gallery that was the ruins of the church, or we would go forw
ard, into the cemetery, and kill them before they killed us.
We charged them in their graves.
It was a wet, sloppy, horrible carnage. Men slipping, firing, bayoneting. Again, where our blood ended and theirs began was impossible to tell.
I slipped and shot and sought cover behind headstones. I was so alive in that moment, as absurd as it sounds, trying to kill in a cemetery.
I badly wanted to kill a German. My first German. As if by doing so I would experience catharsis, and this Rage would be out of me forevermore.
But my shots were wild, feckless things squeezed off into the rain while I ducked back behind headstone after headstone. I was hopeless.
You know how the sound of a playground is a universal sound? How when you pass a playground in any country in the world—the voices of those six- and seven-year-olds all combine into a single mass voice? All the words are lost to the collective din, and only the intonation remains? Surely you know that intonation: the sheer, unknowing bliss of a child that does not yet know the truth of life beyond the blinders of his innocent existence?
So too is there a universal sound of war, of men in close combat. The words, languages are lost to the larger bedlam—there is no German, no English—only a united song, ear-splitting and horrible, that rises into the air.
It is fear.
The sound of men vainly trying to fend off oblivion.
That’s all there was yesterday: that sound, the rain, and the white phosphorous that came in and ended it.
Do you use white phosphorous in the Pacific too? If not, you should’ve seen it: launched from our Shermans, the enemy has no chance against it. It explodes, splashing outward in its smoky white sheets, scorching everything in its path.
It’s through uniforms in a second, through skin in another.
How the Germans writhed! It dumbfounded me; there I was behind my stone, lowering my BAR in amazement as the Shermans came in and rained the stuff upon the Germans in their graves.
Their bodies spasmed like human bodies are not meant to; that universal cry of war became something else, an unholy shriek, as if a whole new level of hell had yawned opened beneath them.
And then it was done.
The population of dead in the cemetery had tripled that day.
I don’t care about country, brother. I don’t care if censors read this and use it against me. I am beyond lying and saying things for appearance. That has been beaten out of me.
The Far Shore Page 6
