I have been taught by experts that there are many attributes to good beer, that smoothly complex fluid. The temperature must be the constant 8C of a mountain stream. The beer must not see the light of day or be exposed to the oxidating effects of smoke in a tavern, until the very moment of its journey up from the cellar. And the tap must be pulled like the skipper of a ship leaving a good harbor pulls the lever of the engine-telegraph from "Dead Slow Ahead" to "Full Sea Speed" with one uninterrupted move.
"It's the smoothness of the pull and the slight tilt and vibration at the top of the spigot at the very end of the move," my friend Joseph from Minnesota explained. "Cello players know that technique, too." We were in the Silver Tiger, the beer hall where the best beer in Prague is said to flow. Mr. Hulanek, the unquestioned admiral of the bar, gently put another half-liter in front of me. Gently! The bubbles in the beer, those perfectly spherical spaces filled with carbon dioxide, must be treated with respect.
"You see, this beer, as everything else, has its own essence. And if you want the best--the essence must be brought out, cleaned of all the bullshit." We were swaying a little, like reeds in a breeze, not stormy gusts, yet. Joseph peered closely into my eyes, judging whether I was still capable of comprehension.
"Take rum drinks. Rum cocktails must," he raised his index finger, "must, always, taste like rum. So--the rum is the essence of rum drinks. Or take goat cheese," he went on. "Out of the 800 kinds of cheese, the French claim that there might be more than 50 they make from goat's milk. Fifty refined creations of different textures, strengths and scents. But, my friend, you have to sail to the edge of Asia, to the open market in Turkish Cannakale on the Hellespont (Byron breast-stroked across there, you know) to find the true essence of goat cheese." Joseph licked his lips, and with the back of his hand he removed a bit of beer foam from the tip of his nose. "There, like a carcass, mi amigo, like a carcass in full sun, lies a goat skin with the hair still on it and remnants of fat, I think. This raw skin bag is filled with a half-melted substance, white cheese it is, and you can get a scoop of it for next to nothing, and when you spread it on a piece of bread you know the essence of goat cheese. You feel like growing horns, too, and you'll never forget it."
Joseph half-closed his eyes, possibly shaken by his memory of `the substance'. He seemed to be in a good rhetorical frame of mind. When we went to take a leak together, the floor seemed to tilt and sway like the deck of a ship, from starboard to port and back. What wonderful sailing, through this Prague, I thought.
Back in our chairs, my friend continued: "Take apple pie, compadre." He sucked in some air. "The flag, motherhood, and apple pie--the American way, right? But what's the essence, the true essence of apple pie?"
My blank stare forced him to take another sip. "Apples?" I said.
"Of course not! Cinnamon, amigo. Cin-na-mon! True, there should be some nutmeg and mace in the pie; cloves are a must, too. But cinnamon makes or breaks it. The question is, which kind, since there are so many different varieties."
"Different cinnamons? Never heard that before."
"Sure. Chinese cassia is the sharpest, Korintje of Sumatra the smoothest--and Ceylon's old-fashioned cinnamon is the most complex, an almost citrus-flavored kind."
Joseph seemed satisfied with my enlightenment. Then he paused and uttered, "Not thallium, mind you." He grinned, looking sideways at my chin, which I dropped, uncomprehending. "Ever heard about thallium apple pie?"
"Thallium?" And that is how I came to hear the story, as American as apple pie, motherhood, or greed for money.
Before she married Steve Sandine, she was known as (Merry in the Crotch) Betty Lou Stone. After Steve's premature demise, of some weird disease without a diagnosis, she became Stone again. "So, Miss Stone. Congratulations." Limply the lawyer shook her hand, sweaty from expectation, and handed her the final verdict with its attached documents.
By Maysville standards she was loaded, rich, now. From her platinum beehive hairdo, to her D-cups in a pushup bra, to those long legs in ostrich-hide boots--all of her, Betty Lou. Stinking rich, as she had always dreamed of since her descent from those dreamy blue, nightmarish hills of southern Kentucky.
"Yup," she said, "Prudential ain't no pebble; that's the real rock, as they say. Yes sir." She lowered her artificial eyelashes and raised her real eyebrows. "Rock with veins of real gold through it, if you get my drift, ma friend." The lawyer nodded with a smirk and left.
Betty Lou made herself a stiff one, on the rocks (moonshine from her brother), pulled off her boots, unhooked the bra (thus changing her silhouette), put on a tape with a selection of Nashville greats and, embraced by the sounds of "Harper Valley PTA", contemplated her future. First, she would push Sandine out of her mind. It was a miserable death but hey, who says life and death are a walk on the beach? One thing was certain: she would cut down her job in the hospital to part-time, and not throw money around too much to be conspicuous.
Second sure thing: she would not change her looks, no sir. She wanted another body in the house, and yessir, men go for weird platinum hairdos, for D-cups and ostrich boots, too. She might look and sound like a ding-a-ling--so be it. She wanted a man in the house.
She knew what to do. She was smart, was Betty Lou. On the Gaussian curve for intelligence, she rated well to the right from the mean. On the scale of conservatism, she stood far to the right, too. So it was obvious she needed a man, and soon.
Betty Lou's monetary situation was good, but she wanted more. She established a business: a 900 telephone number. When dialed, callers would hear a message recorded by Leonard Burton himself, a professional preacher-man with a child-molester's character, but the voice of an excited and trusted grandfather. He would explain the route to Heaven with many a shortcut, and green lights all the way.
Then Betty Lou placed an over-sized billboard announcing "CALL 1-900-901-2243 FOR SALVATION" by Interstate 75 between Beirut and Smyrna. It was situated strategically, following the sequence of billboards that advertised a strip joint down the road: "We have 24-karat girls," then "We dare to bare," followed by "We bare it all," then "Couples welcome." She made good money without moving a finger, which reveals a thing or two about the bad consciences of Bible Belt sinners. A Southern Bell employee, Dorian Bolkenstein, had helped her with the paperwork for the 900 number, and told her how he liked her hairdo, while looking at her mighty chest.
After a few months of copulation, she ordered him to the altar of Saint Barnabas in Maysville and took his name. Only then, a few days later, did she learn about his two secret passions. While her first spouse, Sandine, had made a killing by drying and curing tobacco leaves, Bolkenstein smoked them in cigarettes, incessantly. His second passion was his beetles. She was the last one to learn about it. Everybody in Maysville had known and was puzzled by his hobby of collecting jewel-beetles of the Buprestidae family. Locals felt sorry for him, and wondered why their god, in his unbelievable kindness, had let it happen to somebody still quite young.
For starters, our heroine let the beetles be, but took decisive action against the smoking, with an oration worthy of Demosthenes. Because Dorian Bolkenstein's snoring (a side-effect of his smoking) closely resembled a lion's call, she forced him to sleep with a pot tied to his body by a complex tangle of straps, to prevent him from turning on his back. Once, when caught smoking in bed while inspecting his metallic Buprestidae, his nightly joy, she slapped him across the lip, hard, then moved him to the basement. There he had to sleep covered by an asbestos fireproof tarp.
Dorian started to live the life of a secret agent, traveling in his pickup in a zipped-up rain-poncho that prevented the tobacco smoke from infiltrating his clothes. His cigarettes were hidden in a series of secret drops and hideaways. He had to cover his smoky tracks at all times. His wife was not fooled. "You sonovabitch, you think you can smoke anytime, anywhere, like some goddamned European anarchist?" Betty Lou had never lost a battle in her adult life, and decided not to make an exception this time.
Soon, Dorian started to feel a strange restlessness. His muscles twitched uncontrollably at unexpected moments. His belly ached, and he vomited for no reason. Then he decided that they were after him, the CIA and contra-espionage agents that were hiding everywhere, watching and waiting...all in clever disguises. Things were getting worse and worse, and Maysville's own Doc Killian just shook his silvery mane and talked in Latin. Then Dorian Bolkenstein died.
"That's life, ma boy." Joseph lifted his mug and almost finished it, leaving an inch. I counted the pencil-slashes on the piece of paper that recorded our recent drinking history. The row of them looked like marks made by a rake. I was one beer behind.
The time had advanced, approaching closing-hour, and all the guests were gesticulating with wider expressions, talking louder. The original uniform hum became a volcanic roar that filled the entire space between the heavy oak tables and vaulted ceiling. I had to raise my voice a few decibels to achieve audibility.
"But Joseph, what about the titanium?"
"Oh, not titanium: thallium. Thallium! It is an element, atomic number 81 I think, a white metallic stuff, very poisonous."
Joseph had heard the story from a fellow he met in Captain Tony's in Key West (which was Hemingway's original watering-hole, by not Sloppy Joe's, as they advertise). The guy was a pathologist from near Maysville, who worked at the County Morgue. He became curious when reviewing the autopsy report for Dorian Bolkenstein, which described degenerative changes of the brain, dead brain cells, dead ganglian cells, and other damage that clearly did not fit the age of the deceased. But it was the description of the nails that rang a bell, loudly. They were pigmented brown with pure white stripes across. The pathologist jogged to the library, and there it was, in the reference volume on toxicology: Thallium! A chronic, slow poisoning that is deadly after causing long and specific suffering that leaves tracks readable by an expert, such as striped brown nails and signs of brain-deterioration resembling schizophrenia.
The police were on the case without delay, interrogating people in Maysville. Acquaintances of Bolkenstein described behavior that confirmed the various signs of thallium poisoning, of the twitching muscles, the impotence, and Bolkenstein's slow descent into mental purgatory, his raving paranoia. "Somebody...THEY...have planted a motor inside me, a motor called `riot'! You see, they switch it on at noon by radio-radar rays from Washington, D.C. They do it every day at the same time, on the minute. It hurts too." This is what the deceased confided to a Mr. Angelopoulos around the time he was asked to take a leave of absence from Southern Bell.
Then Angelopoulos told investigators that he had known Betty Lou's first husband, too. "Yeah, Steve. Steve Sandine. He was her first hubby. He had the same problems before he died. It was so strange. We used to go coon huntin' and deer huntin' in the fall. But it became impossible, with his jerkin' and twitchin'. Just like Dorian, think of it. Just like Bolkenstein."
So the police brought in Betty Lou. They charged her with two counts of first-degree murder after they exhumed the cadavers of both her darlings, and in the few hairs, teeth, and nails found so much thallium sulfate you could kill rats just by letting the nails lie around. She laughed at the interrogators, so they became physical, in the good old Southern police tradition. She broke down fast and told them about her thallium apple pies.
Her ma in the hills taught her to bake them. She made a good crust with brown sugar, some cloves, and plenty of cinnamon--and a sprinkling of thallium powder too. Betty Lou made pie a Sunday breakfast ritual, and sometimes in the middle of the week. Her spouses smacked their lips, smiled gratefully, and slapped her ass amorously--first Sandine, and later the other one, Bolkenstein.
"So that's the story of the thallium apple pies, my friend," Joseph sighed. "Teaches you that one should not add much to the essence of things."
"Yup, she got life for them pies."
"You're right. Badness was the essence of Betty Lou. So--cheers," he said, and we banged our mugs together, empty now.
Joseph got up. Shaking his head from side to side, he pointed to the framed instructions on the wall above our table: "DO NOT SPIT UNDER THE TABLE. FRIENDS ARE THERE!"
We left the carbonated atmosphere of the Silver Tiger behind, meandering awhile with the occasional help of lamp posts, until we flagged down a taxi between the Rudolphinum and the Old Jewish Cemetery.
© 2005 by Jarda Cervenka.