Category: default || By jt3y

I was looking for an address on Saturday afternoon, took a wrong turn, as usual, and wound up in one of the worst traffic jams I've ever seen. Couldn't go forward --- there were fire trucks and cop cars everywhere --- and couldn't go backward --- there were two tri-axle coal trucks behind me.

So I did the next best thing. I went sideways into the parking lot of the Tastee-Freez, got a cone, and walked down to see what all the fuss was about. According to the sign on the little brick post office, I was in a place called Saltpeter Borough.

Behind the barricades on the main street through town, I could see smoke, flashing lights, and water everywhere. A gaggle of people --- senior citizens, young women pushing strollers, a couple of kids on bikes --- was watching. A Dodge truck with blue flashing lights and a sign saying "FIRE POLICE" was blocking the road; on the running board sat a guy wearing a baseball cap that said "SALTPETER VFD" and a blue T-shirt with a maltese cross on it. He was sticking a pinch of Skoal in between his cheek and his gum.

"Big fire, huh?" I said.

"Mm-memprph-terrorithmm," he said, taking his fingers out of his mouth.

"Terrorism?" I cried.

"Sorry," he said. "We're simulating terrorism. It's a drill." Behind him, I could see about a dozen two and three-story brick buildings, with a Pennzoil station on one end and a Family Dollar at the other. The town appeared to have one traffic light, and that was flashing yellow.

"No offense," I said, "but that seems kind of dumb."

He squinted up at me, a little tobacco juice running down his lip. "You some kinda weirdo?" he asked. "Don't you remember 9-11? You like terrorism?"

"Hell, no!" I said. "I'm a charter member of the NRA." (I didn't tell him that I meant the Nelson Riddle Admiration society.)

He picked up a cardboard iced tea carton and spat into it. I instantly lost my appetite for soft-serve ice cream.

"Terrorism is everybody's problem," he said. "Fella came down from Harrisburg a few months ago and said we all should be drillin'."

A group of Boy Scouts carrying jugs of water crossed the street behind us. "Besides," he said, "we saw on the news where Pittsburgh was gonna hold a drill, and it was gonna cost 750 grand, and we figured we gotta get some of that money, some how. Borough council said the budget was light by about 40 grand this year."

"So how much is all this costing?" I said.

"About four thou. But we're billin' the feds for forty-four."

"How does that work?"

He spat into the tea carton again, then pointed down the street to where a group of women were standing behind a card table and an electric roasting pan. "The VFW ladies are feedin' us lunch today. Sloppy joes, ham barbecues, potato salad and orange drink. Know how much they're billin' the borough?"

"How much?"

"Fifteen bucks for a sloppy joe and 20 for a ham barbecue."

"Pretty expensive," I said, wiping some of the melting ice cream off of my hand and onto my pants.

"If the freakin' Pentagon can pay 600 bucks for a toilet seat, we can pay 15 for a Manwich," he said. "Then the kick the extra money back to the borough, and we can use it to buy WMDs."

"You mean Weapons of Mass Destruction?"

"No, 'What's More Deserving,'" he said. "The borough building needs a new boiler, the cop car needs a transmission, and there's a sewer collapse over on Elm Street. The federal government don't have no money for that stuff, but they do give out lots of money for homeland security."

"How's the drill going so far?" I asked, flipping what was left of the ice cream to a dog that was eyeing it, hungrily.

"Pretty good, I guess," he said, spitting again. "Chief of police come up a while ago, said they've secured the area and are now working to decontaminate people. We got lucky, 'cause the high school musical was last week, and they had a bunch of makeup and props left over. They're our victims. Some of them people is a little bit too eager to play dress-up, if you ask me."

"Any problems?"

"A couple of junior firefighters turned hoses on each other at lunchtime. Lieutenant went over, chewed their asses out. To punish them, he told them they hadda be dead bodies for the rest of the afternoon."

"That's too bad."

"You kiddin' me?" he said, sticking some more Skoal into his lip. "That's freakin' great. Any time you can get two 15-year-old boys to lie still and keep their fat yaps shut for a coupla hours, I got no complaints."

"So what's the scenario you're playing out?"

"Well, Stosh Zerpanski was a suicide bomber, and he was supposed to crash his truck into the high-test pump at Mittler's Pennzoil. I guess he got a bit too excited, 'cause he come flyin' up over the sidewalk and wiped out a big stack of them gallon jugs of windshield washer fluid. Old Man Mittler was screamin' and hollerin', but we promised to pay for it.

"Then we had a poison-gas attack down at Sue Ann's coffee shop, but if you ever been there when she runs the corned beef and cabbage special, you know that ain't far-fetched.

"Over at the beauty shop there, Johnny D'Amata got his deer rifle and took hostages in the back of the hair dryers, and the police auxiliaries are surrounding the building. But if one more of them jagoffs gets on the radio and says the situation is 'hairy,' I'm gonna go over and shoot 'em myself.

"At Judy's Hallmark, they got a suspicious UPS package, and there's three people in Dr. Harish's office with flesh-eatin' bacteria. We wanted to get O'Shannon's Printing to pretend a dirty bomb went off, but Bill O'Shannon and our chief had a fight, and Bill said we should go screw off, 'cause he was going fishing today.

"So other than O'Shannon's, we wiped out every business on Elm Street here except for the hardware store," he said.

"Why didn't you wipe out the hardware store?" I said.

He spat into the tea carton again. "We kinda figured that the way things were goin', we'd just let Wal-Mart do that."