Chapter 36

Due to the 'altercation' Bill got two reputations:

1. Don't mess with Bill. (Sing it with me.)

2. Don't mess with Bill's ladies.

But, number one was the important one.

Oh, there were repercussions. There was a drive by at the house in the country ... that pissed Mina off beyond belief. Pyewacket wasn't happy about it either. Her kittens were sunning on the 'veranda' (a porch that big isn't a porch. It's a veranda.) and one of the multitude of bullets just missed. Pyewacket, being the only witness to the make, model and license plate number of the car, took action.

Two nights later, the car ... with traceable stolen weapons ... and the shooters ... was found mashed and mangled at the foot of the abandoned railroad bridge in the middle of the abandoned rail line, struck by an abandoned diesel switcher that had run into the car ... and occupants ... at midnight. The crossing where they were struck was nearly two miles from the bridge.

There wasn't even a whiff of fumes in the fuel tank and this is the superstitious deep south.

Where did all this come from? During the war, and after the war, America wasn't all that fussy about the 'ecosystem.' During the war, the Germans were sinking oil tankers right, left and center. The heavy smoke from burning ships and the heavy clinker left over weren't considered pollution ... it was part of the price of freedom.

Wetlands were appropriated from hell to breakfast and turned into Navy airfields, Army Airfields and assorted other bases. Got a lot of pretty good iron ore? ... great ... we mined the shit out of it and nobody said 'you can't do that'.

"You can't do that," was skirting treason ... mighty close.

Asphalt was poured aplenty and some of it never went anywhere ... the planned plant, airfield, training base or shipyard didn't get built where the road went. It's a road to no where.

Rails were laid but the planned shipment point ended up someplace else.

Today, those kind of places are called superfund sites. The old rail line and bridge were from one of those "Superfund" sites. Except it wasn't a superfund ... yet.

In this case ... nuclear waste hauled from the process of manufacturing nuclear weapons grade metal and stored in rusting metal drums that leaked and spread radioactive emissions that cause cancer and bone disease and who knows what all in the poor south.

Places the government denied were dangerous for half a century because the cost of cleanup was immense and there were better pockets for that cash were suddenly on the radar.

Did it matter? Of course not ... those kinds of things don't matter as long as it's not my back yard. Everybody knows poor white trash comes from the south.

That old diesel switcher was so radioactive they had to build a fence around it to keep the neighborhood kids from playing on it.

The mystery of it all was who picked up a twenty ton double ender from where it was sitting and put it on the abandoned and rotten rail line and ran it into the car crossing the tracks, striking the car loaded with gangbangers dead center and rolling the car like a basketball along the tracks for two miles, shoving it off the bridge and then landing on top of the mangled mass of bleeding steel. Nobody asked that question until someone recognized the switch engine for what it was and hollered, "STOP!

"That engine is dangerously radioactive."

(The total number of sites contaminated with radionuclides in the United States is in the thousands. Contaminated sites range in size from corners of laboratories to sprawling nuclear weapons facilities covering many square miles of land. The contamination extends to all environmental media, as well as to on site buildings and equipment.

EPA's Radiation Protection program provides assistance to the Superfund Program for both remedial and removal actions at radiologically contaminated sites. Removal sites are those sites that require quicker action, based on threats to public health and welfare or the environment, than remedial sites, which typically allow for more planning time.

Superfund maintains the National Priority List of chemically and radiologically contaminated sites. Its primary purpose is to identify, for states and the public, which facilities, sites, or releases warrant remedial actions. The NPL also serves to notify the public of sites that EPA believes warrant further investigation. (Removal sites are not listed by name, because they are typically shorter in duration than remedial sites.)

EPA maintains a database (called CERCLIS) of all reported potentially hazardous releases to the environment. Of over 37,000 entries in CERCLIS, 1231 are listed as NPL sites. Seventy-six are radioactively contaminated (although many were actually listed because of their chemically-hazardous contamination rather than their radioactivity) (WIKIPEDIA)

You have to understand ... the Government shot itself in the foot by making such a huge deal of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl raised the citizens level of conscious. If that can happen there, it can happen here. People began to wonder where the mess of concrete behind the school came from ... and why the kids ... normally pretty healthy ... were suddenly sick a lot.

Well ... most of that concrete came from Oak Ridge, Tennessee when several of the war and cold war facilities were too dangerously radioactive to continue to be used. Unscrupulous men bid on contracts to tear down the facilities and dispose of the material.

That little switcher was used to haul the radioactive waste for years ... there was a lot of waste ... and the underpaid men who were supposed to be observing the disposal were easily bribed. The waste accumulated in swamps, wornout cotton fields and even shoved in old mines.

It's only recently that the expansion of suburban sprawl and wealthy men wanting an isolated bit of land to retire on that the places those unscrupulous men used as 'safe' disposal have been uncovered.

The word was quickly passed. 'Voudun.' Stay away. In later years, the story grew to monstrous proportions. The little double ender switcher became a fire breathing steam locomotive and the by then missing bridge and crossing where the car was struck and dragged became embedded in folk lore. It was said ... by more than one passing preteen that the very ground screamed.

Of course it did ... Pyewacket.

Andie went back to school ... which gave Bill a chance to know Millie better ... as in the Biblical Know ... she liked it ... Bill liked it. They both liked it.

See Dick. See Jane. See Jane run. See Dick run. See Dick chase Jane. See Jane catch Dick. See Dick dick Jane. Ain't reading wonderful!

You know the old saying? "New money seldom lasts." You don't? ... never heard it before? Probably because I just made it up.

Bill went through eleven million dollars like it was eleven cents in a penny candy store.

'I need more, ' his brain growled. 'I have a watch ... I know history ... I know the most important part of history ... Those who deny History are doomed to repeat it ... I can't win the lottery again and I can't go gold mining in the south. Wonder if I can find treasure?' "Mina! What's Wendy's phone number?"

"It's on your phone!"

"I know that ... I can't make my phone tell me!"

"Bill! I'm busy..." and now Mina spoke the words that would change history " ... look it up on the internet!"