We made our way past signs for the impressive-sounding Grave Creek Mound Archeological Complex. One of us suggested drinking right there. We turned in unison and looked up at the mound, knowing full well that the only place worth drinking on this property was at the heights. Greg and I hoisted our sacramental offerings over the green chain-link fence to Chet, who waited on the other side. We carried the beer up the spiraling stone stairwell to the statue at the mound’s peak. The sun was setting behind the ComEd coal-fired power plant across the river, rendering the horizontally blown white smoke in hues of red and orange. Horizontal exhaust meant clear days ahead, the smokestack serving as a sort of primitive Weather Channel. Two blinking jets on the way to somewhere very different from Moundsville left puffy contrails in the sky. The red sunset bounced off the muddy water below, giving the image of a river on fire.
We plopped down on a stone wall and just stared at each other silently before Chet popped open the first beer. Greg and I followed suit and all three of us grimaced at the taste. The cold Iron City Light stung with an unfamiliar bitterness, something like a blend of tonic water and gasoline.
From the peak of the mound we had a clear view over the penitentiary walls. What I had thought was one gargantuan building in my youth was actually a massive four-story wall, as thick as a car is wide. Inside was a complex of buildings, an open-air hell. It was a mysterious place occupied by murderers and child rapists, eerie long before it was closed down and turned into a place for freak tours and Halloween haunts. Criminal silhouettes danced on frosted windowpanes.
Stories abounded about the pen. Like the guy who was burned alive by gasoline in his cell during a riot, or the warden with a German name and knee-high leather boots who would challenge prisoners to fights after removing his badge.
Chet turned around and commented on the glow of the sunset. We turned around with him, and then we saw it. A truck jacked up to a ridiculous height bounced down the street, pitching and yawing with each seam in the road surface. Oversize exhaust pipes jutted vertically out of the truck’s bed. The driver slouched in the seat, with his right hand low on the steering wheel near his dick and his left arm leaning on the door. His female passenger sat at his side, snuggled close on the bench seat, à la mode at that time. As the truck rounded a corner, the driver leaned his head out of the window and released a dark stream of chewing-tobacco juice in a manner only made possible by dental peculiarities.
“High-altitude hillbilly,” Greg blurted out. The spitting driver was no doubt one of the ridge-running locals who found his identity in southern West Virginia, while Chet was the type who looked northward along the industrial riverfront for his. On this mound we straddled the fault line of two cultures.
“A good case for forced sterilization,” said Greg ruefully. He was back on his forced-sterilization soapbox again, a theme he had beaten to death that summer. Greg had thoroughly absorbed—to its dangerous conclusion—the elitist mind-set of the gifted program’s lead teacher, who flaunted a doctorate in education from the state university that Moundsville had passed up.
“Actually, if you want to sterilize people, you could start here,” insisted Greg, pointing epiphanically toward the penitentiary, which by now was lit up brighter than a Steelers game on Monday Night Football. A guard was visible in a Gothic-style turret, looking around with binoculars during what must have been a shift change. He turned in our direction. I thought about my grandfather, who died decades before my birth, climbing that same guard tower and perusing the grounds with his binoculars. The houses on the hills surrounding the town stared darkly like pillboxes.
“You can’t just sterilize people,” said Chet. “They are still people.”
Chet and Greg’s friendship had been strained since the Betrayal, when Greg chose to play on the laughingstock football team rather than play trumpet in the state-champion marching band. It was an unexpected move, given Greg’s complete lack of sports experience and his three years in the junior high band. He wasn’t athletic, he was just big. He would play defense.
The acrimony between the band and the football team was the most talked about conflict in the town, after the inevitable union-management conflicts. The band made the team seem like an appendage of a music show. It was safe to say that most spectators turned out to watch the band, and not the football games already given up for lost. The coach and band director were no longer on speaking terms. The band entered the field at the same time as the team, which more than once led to a smashed tuba or broken bass drum. It seemed vaguely revolutionary at the time to see the football team as the side act surrounding the halftime music show. Later in life, when I had a greater appreciation for sports and a suspicion of military-influenced music, I came to see this was an omen that there was something wrong in our universe. Greg took a loud slurp from his beer and sat silently.
“What about Fred?” I asked. Fred was the elderly wash boy at the local Ford dealership. He had done some hard time for chopping up his wife and her lover with an ax. He had caught them in the act while returning home early one day. Fred, one of the few black men in town, became a sensation after his release, treated as a hero and given a $50
