The Proper Words for Sin

Somebody Somewhere Else

196 SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE ELSE The tourists who come year round expecting flames and giant cracks in the earth are always disappointed. The ones who come in summer see how the trees are still green not so far away as in any another town. The ones who come in winter see how grass grows where the soil is warmed from below by the fire. All of them take their photographs where things look worst to show to relatives and friends. My name is Harold Plezik, retired two years from Penn Modular Homebuilders, and the rest of us who live here, my wife Melinda and fifteen others, they seldom walk out to where the fire has crept. They say there’s no curiosity for what’s been seen for most of their lives. They act as if they’re long past wanting to scold those camera bugs aloud. The last to leave is what the seventeen of us are called, but that’s just out and out wrong, since we’re not leaving Centralia, not any of us scattered along Troutwine Street and beyond. Not that the press has shown up for these past five years or so, as if our story has ended or is inching along as slowly as the underground fire that ruined Centralia so long ago that my children, full-grown for years now, were still under my roof. SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE ELSE 197 Everybody knows the story, or they should. Centralia is the town that was burned out from underneath, the seams of coal below us and places nearby smoldering now for going on fifty years. Those newspapers, they’ll be back, for sure, when there’s half a century of fire, but that’s four years off, forever for a reporter. And to tell the truth, we look to be diminishing, trickling away to senior centers or death, nobody here as young as me and Melinda, past sixty now. And the houses, too. We’re on our own inside the last eight of them, the rest long gone. Just the bare spots to be made out where they stood, and the shrubbery and such left to go wild in rows as strange as the telephone poles going nowhere on streets entirely deserted. A ghost town, some would say, though I think it will never get to be that, what with the government taking down the houses as soon as the owners get committed by their children or die. Somebody would have to rebuild Centralia to make it a ghost town, put up a thousand houses with nothing inside but memories. Here’s one, for instance. There was a time when the National Enquirer came to town expecting to see hell right up on the surface. They were disappointed to find just steam and warm earth, but they got the story they wanted by setting a pile of trash on fire to get flames in their pictures and claiming you could fry an egg on the sidewalk as if all of us who used that sidewalk wore some sort of magical insulated boots to retrieve our mail. That’s all you need to hear about that, and frankly, I’ve had enough of telling people about the history of Centralia. Once upon a time, that sort of talk was for those who’d been taught to unravel things and investigate and pick around papers in libraries and courthouses . These days I want only to talk about the here and now of flesh and blood still standing on the earth that’s been left unbroken. 198 SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE ELSE The underground fire has moved on, following coal seams, the experts declare, that will last for a century or more. For example, the man and the girl I came across yesterday. I’d crossed Route 61 where it’s been blocked by a levee of earth for going on twenty years. There’s plenty of dead forest out beyond the highway, the trees a dozen shades of near-white from the fire passing beneath them, but there’s still green a short hike away, and that’s where I was headed, because I have a doctor who’s told me to get out of my house or they’ll carry me out. There was a car parked with its tail end right up to that roadblock, facing out as if the driver expected to be boxed in by...