Me love you long time, Me love you long time... Me love you long time... an Asian chick on the radio sang the rap song built from sampling that kept repeating itself on the Goat's radio as Mark was pulled into the Improper's gravel parking lot.
He noticed immediately that the roadhouse would do a good patio business: the view of the Hawk Mountain Valley was beautiful--the entire valley was gonna be positively mystical at sunrise and sunset. It was time again to open the Improper in order for it to sell its particular brands of down home country. A couple beers watching the sun rise at five and six a.m was going to be pleasant; a real alcoholic fantasy, he thought to himself as he parked the car.
As he walked from his car toward the old inn, he looked up at the top floor corner window that provided a view of Hawk Mountain.
Binder's Astrovan was parked in the bar's lot, there was an angry looking pit bull pacing back and forth in the rear caged portion of the van-- the dog's mouth foamed with rabies. Mark figured Binder must've been inside doing something. He admiringly glanced out over the view of the Lehigh Valley just before he poked his head inside, calling "Binder, Ernie Binder are you here?"
"Yeah, yeah I'm upstairs and I'm on my way down," called out a voice that started out disembodied but by the time he finished the sentence, Binder was walking down the steps that led one from the hotel portion of the Improper to the tavern part of the building.
"I saw you at your uncle's funeral a couple months ago.... I meant to introduce myself to you but just like that, you were gone."
"Yeah, it was reminding me too much of my fiancee's funeral. I left and took off on the road for a three week bender. When I got back, the captain wanted to put me in rehab or fire me. I asked him to suspend me for a week which he did and I finished off that drunk."
"Good, good, you made a good choice. This place was an excellent location for this sort of business and with most of the surrounding towns turning into those yuppie latte towns that are so fashionable these days, it looks like this is good ground for a bar or roadhouse to open again. I can give you the quick tour but I'm afraid it will have to be a short one, I have a lot of work to take care of today. We can take care of the paperwork at the county office anytime; let me show you around your inheritance."
"If it's the dog you're worrying about, I can shoot the dog for you," he said, pulling his pistol from his pants."
"Can't chance it getting away, big parts of Beck County's woods are filled with crazy animals."
"Maureen's told me about the rabies (pause) and the fishing and I heard some guys in the bar the other night talking about crop rot, but only in Beck County. Is that why uncle left me the place... because he couldn't sell it?"
"Quite contrary, he thought a man with your leadership qualities is the kind of guy that could bring life back to this area.... Yep, out here one guy can still make a bit of a difference."
"You ready for a beer?"
Mark reached into the cooler (which we know is always stocked full of beer) and pulled out half a six pack.
"No thanks, I haven't had a drink in six years. Stuff began driving me crazy, you know beatin' the wife and all but that was before your uncle and his church came into my life. Eugene could handle his liquor boy. Did you know he was a real bigshot bootlegger back in the day?"
"I know a little bit of the story."
"He liked brewing it, he liked selling it and boy did he like drinking it. I'm sure you'll find all kinds of old bootlegging equipment up on the mountain-- I bet some of those stills would still work fine if a man put his mind to it. Back in the 50s, when the church was still active, a bunch of academics got some newspaper space criticizing your uncle's philosophies-- saying the only thing his religion had in common with Christianity was its thirst for drink. C' mon, let's go inside."
The pit bull watched them go inside. They entered through the basement. She closed her eyes, a long sleep was near. She wanted to move on; she needed to get away from this diseased portion of the earth. As her mind hovered in a fog, it sensed the demons who were lurking about Kurtzville. The demons were watching her, they were masquerading as the huge flies that were flying around her, waiting to devour her soon to be bacterial soul.
MANSON LIVES was spraypainted on the first wall Mark saw as he walked into the Improper's basement. The place was bright. He immediately noticed another passageway toward the back of the cellar; it was covered by cement. But it could be little else, he figured, but a doorway-- about the size of a garage door. It was probably bricked behind the cement.
"What's behind there?"
"That used to be a bootlegging tunnel," Binder answered as a matter of factly. "Your uncle used it back in his bad old prohibition days, he based the tunnels on the Cat'lics catacombs; they run for hundreds of yards back in the hills in a bunch of different directions. He used to brew the stuff up in the hills and either transport it using the tunnels or float them down the creek. Even after prohibition was repealed he avoided taxes by sneaking the stuff around the same way. He had them cemented in the early 70s after the same hippy clowns who painted the Manson stuff were here. They were doing all sorts of unclean stuff back in the tunnels."
"I wasn't around for the disappearances of those hippy kids, what do you think happened to them?"
"I wasn't here for that either; that case was handled by my father. I was drinking beers in a frat house when all that went down What I can tell you is that some hippy kids from Topton U. were hanging out, camping, right around here for the summer, getting back to nature and such-- a couple of them saying real loud that they had a right to do so and such. One night they disappeared, the four of them. It was a classic case of no witnesses, nobody had seen anyone last; they'd been in these hills for a month before they disappeared-- no one knows if it was day or night..."
"Except for the people who did it," Binder parroted back. "Anyway,they were a little loud but Eugene and Grenden didn't really care; they said it reminded them of the Jazz Age and all the fucking and sucking that was going on then. Just a lot more different drugs around to find your way-- they had a lot of stuff to play with in the 20s but to my knowledge they did not have that LSD that the hippies had. A little ergot maybe but no LSD. Folks say Kurtzville was the last place the kids were known to have been. A couple of feds poked around here for a few weeks but nothing came of it-- not a trace of those kids was found 'round here. I think Eugene felt real bad bout what happened to those kids; a lot of the talk round here was that the kids took off for the west or Alaska or something like that.... guess no one'll ever know... "
"Except the people who did it."
"Whoever did it knows. Not that I really care one way or the other about what happened to some hippies almost 30 years ago."
They walked up the rotting stairs.
*******************
They went upstairs to what formerly doubled as an eight room hotel. Some of the old beds with iron box springs were still there.
"Well, that's it," Binder said.
"I accept, thanks."
A few moments later Binder and the dog were on their way to the death chamber and Mark was on his way to see Maureen.
