Windwhistle Bone
Page 1
Windwhistle Bone
Richard Trainor
Austin Macauley Publishers
Windwhistle Bone
About the Author
Copyright Information ©
Book IThe Hour of Not Quite Rain
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book TwoWoe the Luck
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Book IIIRestless Farewell
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Richard Trainor began writing Windwhistle Bone at the start of his publishing career in the early 1980s. Trainor has published four non-fiction books and over 100 feature stories for national and international publications including The Sacramento Bee, The Los Angeles Times, Elle, American Film, and Sight & Sound.
Trainor is now working on the second volume of his California trilogy, the prequel of Windwhistle Bone, titled Fran’s Nocturne; a collection of short stories, Valley Fever and Other Stories; and a new non-fiction book titled Final Say.
Copyright Information ©
Richard Trainor (2019)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
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Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Trainor, Richard
Windwhistle Bone
ISBN 9781643780122 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781645754701 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645366720 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 2019942826
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1 (646) 5125767
“If ever, in days to come, you shall see ruin at hand, and, thinking you understand mankind, shall tremble for your friendships, and tremble for your pride; and partly through love for the one and fear for the other, shall resolve to be beforehand with the world and save it from a sin by prospectively taking that sin to yourself, then will you do as one I dream of once did, and like him will you suffer, but how fortunate and grateful should you be, if like him, after all that had happened, you could be a little happy again.”
– Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man
“If ever, in days to come, you shall see ruin at hand, and, thinking you understand mankind, shall tremble for your friendships, and tremble for your pride; and partly through love for the one and fear for the other, shall resolve to be beforehand with the world and save it from a sin by prospectively taking that sin to yourself, then will you do as one I dream of once did, and like him will you suffer, but how fortunate and grateful should you be, if like him, after all that had happened, you could be a little happy again.”
– Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man
Book I
The Hour of Not Quite Rain
“Authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know. When they claim to get to the painful admissions, you have to watch out, for they are about to dress the corpse.”
– Albert Camus, The Fall
Chapter One
Shapes, just shapes. Different sizes, colors, attitudes. Shapes. That’s the way things seem to me these days. Shapes. Motley shapes. I like that word; motley. I just learned it and now everything’s motley. I like the sound of it. It sounds like a parade or a carnival. I see the parade pass by every now and then on the street that runs by the park and I imagine myself out there being as motley as the rest of them. But anyway, I was talking about shapes, and I know I used to have names for all these things, but now, I have to learn them again—piano, candle, philodendron. And I learn the names of all these things that I’m finding out about, but they’re still shapes, shapes that either move or grow or change colors or speak or even just stay the same. If they mean anything, I don’t know about it, and I try and do like I’m told and not worry about the things that I can’t understand yet. I guess I forgot the names of these things not long after I got here. Maybe it was before I got here. Maybe I never knew them, I don’t have much memory.
Barry showed me an instrument the other day and even though I recognized it, I couldn’t find a name for it. I asked him what’s that silver shape, and he said it was a hemostat. I’ve seen them before but I can’t remember when. Anyway, it was interesting and at the same time, a kind of mystery seeing this silver hemostat and knowing that I knew it but couldn’t name it. And that’s the way things are for me these days: Naming shapes. But after something like that hemostat thing, I usually either get tired or depressed, and if I get depressed, I just sit there at lunch or dinner and cry as quietly as I can while I play with my applesauce or stewed prunes. I don’t understand it. Hemostat. Just a harmless little silver shape and I wound up crying on my bed almost all night long.
I’m afraid I’ll have to leave here soon, and I hope that’s not true because I’ve gotten used to the routine, and I know how to play the game pretty well without winding up in the hot seat. Katz and Bardens—they’re the head guys on this unit—came to visit me the other day, and along with the usual tests and instruments that are part of the routine, they also had this big yellow thing with a red sticker on it. My file, they told me, and they said that they’d gotten back the report from the board and things were looking promising is how they put it. Promising for whom? Promising for what? They talk to me fairly straight these days—just a little of their old style left. They used to talk to me real slow with their eyes opened up real wide. It used to make me feel like I was four years old or like I’d just landed from outer space. It was like they were creeping around me and didn’t want me to know if—that’s what I told them.
So anyway, they said—Katz and Bardens, that is—that I had made real progress and they were going to schedule me for something they were sure I’d like and that it would help me get better. I didn’t say much. I was looking down at the desk and picking at the plastic strip that was peeling on the edge, and they looked at each other and nodded, probably because I was smiling. I was thinking that they told me the same thing right before they started giving me the shocks. I like this time of year the best—Fall. Especially from up here on the sixth floor, where I can look down on everything, and it all seems to move in a nice little order. People crossing the wet streets and buses stopping and pulling up to the curb where some get on and some get off. In the dayroom, there’s this huge window, and below it is a park with thousands of trees—big green, gray, red, and yellow shapes—and they still have their leaves on, but they don’t seem as busy as they are in the summertime. They seem to be thinking or resting, and I usually spend part of the afternoon looking down on that park, and the leaves are so thick that you can barel
y see the grass and paths that I know go through there. It’s something that I’ve really come to like and look forward to—looking down into that park and the thousands of trees whose names I used to know. It’s a whole lot different than walking up to a tree and looking up through it. Sometimes, looking down into that park, I can imagine how God feels.
When I think of what it would be like to leave here, I’m both thrilled and scared. I’ve been here a long time—long enough to get over being nervous—because that’s one of the things that I can still remember. When I arrived here, I was in quite a state. That’s what Bardens says, and although I don’t remember exactly clear that time, I do recall that I was all worked up. A lot happened when I first arrived—it was a much busier time for me then—maybe because I was new, and they have to do that to everyone when they first arrive. But then again, I don’t think so. When Barry first showed up, he didn’t get nearly as much attention as I did. I look at the calendar every now and then and try to figure out how long I’ve been here—I think it was sixteen months the last time I checked, but I’m not really sure. They—the staff—are pretty quiet about these things and tell me not to trouble myself about such matters. Sometimes, I feel like they’re keeping something from me, but maybe it’s just their way to ask questions and not answer them.
I’ve been here this long—from when I was nervous and in quite a state and took lots of shots and pills and was always busy with tests and experiments until now when I can talk and write again and am pretty calm. I don’t worry anymore, and I sometimes wonder how that felt. Maybe it’s because I know that I have no control and figure that worrying about things won’t do me any good. I just leave it up to the staff and hope they know what’s good for me. They tell me to trust them and that they’re only trying to help me, so I do.
This is the way things are—just shapes—mostly, sixteen months here on Six East, last time I checked, looking promising and not worrying too much. It’s really not such a bad life, now that I think of it.
I sometimes can’t help from thinking though. Are worry and wonder the same things? The other night, I was playing bones—dominoes, that is, but we call it bones up here—with Corvo, an old guy in a chair, and I remember thinking to myself—his face is as white as the white cliffs of Dover—and I had no idea where it came from. I wondered about it or worried about it—whatever the difference is. I can make no connection to ‘white cliffs of Dover’—it came from out of nowhere and shocked me so hard that I couldn’t think about the game of bones and had to quit right in the middle. What it is, is that I don’t remember a thing that happened before I came here, and that phrase—white cliffs of Dover—was like a shock or charge that snapped something inside me. It was like a ghost walking around in my head and turning on a light switch that gave me a glimpse of something that another part of me recognized, but the light was too bright, and I felt better afterward when we were able to shut it off.
They’ve asked me to do this—writing I mean. The other day when they—Katz and Bardens—came to interview me, they said, “We’d like you to do something for us that we feel might be helpful.”
When they say that, it makes me nervous because I still remember them saying the same thing before I got the shocks—but I went along. “What’s that?” I said.
“We’d like you to do some writing for us,” said Katz.
“Oh,” I said. “What kind of writing?”
“Nothing in particular,” said Katz. “Just write about whatever comes into your mind. How you’re feeling, what you’ve been doing, how you’re getting along here, you know.”
“Just write about anything?” I said.
“That’s right,” said Bardens.
“And then what?” I said. “What’s this for?”
They looked at each other, and then Katz said, “We would like to see what you think about when you’re alone. How you see things these days. We feel it could be of value in gauging what kind of progress you’re making.”
“Alright,” I said. “Do I get to keep the stuff I write?”
“Well, we’ll give it back to you later,” said Katz.
“When?” I wanted to know.
“After we’re through with it,” said Bardens.
And so, this is a new thing for me. I haven’t done any writing since I’ve been here, other than writing in the tests they’ve given me, but they don’t test me as often as they used to.
I think I said that when I got here, it was a real busy time for me. Here is what I remember. They talked with me a lot, asking me questions about everything. Now, I don’t remember what all the questions were, but I do remember that they’d interview me for a long time—from after breakfast until lunch. Then I had a lot of electric tests—they’d take these little caps and put grease on them and tape them to my head after they’d scrubbed my head with some scratchy soap that itched. Then they would run wires from these caps to a giant machine with green screens that dots and lines ran across and they’d sit me in a chair and show me movies and play sounds through plugs over my ears—it wasn’t sounds of anything you could make any sense out of—just whirs and buzzes and beeps—Barry said it was a code—and that would go on for hours until I couldn’t see the pictures clear anymore and my ears buzzed from the sounds that were going on at the same time.
Then I had tests with blindfolds on, where they made me stand on a board and made me walk down it, and tests that checked my reactions to things, where I had to stick my head in a box and press a button when certain things happened. There was a cat in that box that I was supposed to press a button at when it jumped out, but it always scared me when it did that, and I could never do that one right. About every other day, they’d stick a needle in my wrist with a twisted tube coming out of it and, every half hour, they’d come along with a bigger tube that they’d screw on to it and fill with blood, so that by the end of the day, I’d be very dizzy and seeing spots and needed someone to help me walk. They had me writing in these tests that had hundreds of questions, where they’d ask stuff like whether or not I’d flown across the Atlantic Ocean 10 times and if I’d been on the cover of magazines and if I’d like to be an explorer and all sorts of other confusing stuff that I can’t remember. They’d show me pictures and tell me to make up stories about them. They’d show me different colored spots and ask me what was in them. They’d have other people come in and interview me. They had me taking all kinds of different pills and shots and a couple of times, they put me on special diets. I remember that happening, but it was like it was happening to a different person because I remember them asking me once, “How do you expect us to help you when you won’t cooperate?” We laugh—me, Katz, and Bardens—about those times now. I laugh with them but I really don’t know what I’m laughing at. They tell me my attitude is much brighter and more positive now. That changed about the time we started the shocks.
Life sometimes can go by pretty slowly up here on Six East, although I don’t really think that I’m bored by it. Just used to it, I guess. Still, I can tell that it’s pretty slow because whenever I look down at life in the street from the dayroom window, everybody seems to be in a big hurry and I get to wondering why that is. I guess they’ve all got to be somewhere and they’re running late. At times, I imagine I’m missing something by not having somewhere to hurry off to but I can’t see their faces from up here and can’t tell if they’re happy or angry that they’re in such a rush, and so, I’m not sure if I feel left out or not. I’ve talked about this with Katz and Bardens, and they give me their usual answer whenever I bring up stuff like this—you need not concern yourself with such matters—so okay, I leave it alone. It can get confusing sometimes, and when I get confused, I sometimes get angry.
Like I said, life is pretty slow up here now and, at one time, it wasn’t. I guess that’s because of the progress I’ve made. This is my routine lately—I wake up at 6 and after the meds are passed out, I go to breakfast with the rest of the residents—I usually sit with Barry at the t
able that’s closest to the stairs so that I can be the first one onto the roof for exercises and recreation. That’s what we do after breakfast—go up on the roof and exercise and play ball games. The roof has a big fence around it, I guess so nobody will fall or jump off. There’s an exercise routine that everybody has to do—jumping jacks, knee bends, windmills, hamstring stretchers, and pushups. After that, it’s recreation, and I get a big laugh every morning after the exercises when I yell, “—Alright, residents, let’s recreate.” It just kills them every time. It’s an old joke, but nobody minds because I think we’ve all come to count on it. We have volleyball, handball, foursquare, and basketball courts, and after a while, all you can hear are loud whumps as the games go on.
Basketball is my sport and I’m pretty good at it. I’ve played before. It’s funny, but I can remember that. I guess I quit because I lost interest. Anyway, a few of us have a game of basketball every morning and although I usually make the most baskets, my team usually winds up losing because Barry—he’s always the captain of the other team—chooses the sides. One time, he even stuck me with Corvo—the old Italian guy in the chair I talked about earlier—but that one backfired on him. Corvo just wheeled himself to a spot by the half-court line and when he wanted the ball, he’d clap, a hook shot, swish—about five in a row. Nobody would even guard him—I guess they couldn’t believe he’d do it again—but he’d clap, get the ball, take a second to look at the basket, and swish, just net. Some people are more than what they seem and those are the ones you gotta watch out for.
So, alright, morning is exercise and recreation, and at 11, we’ve got to come down off the roof. Why? I don’t know, because lunch isn’t until 12:30. I usually watch TV or play solitaire. I don’t much like the shows that are on TV at that time—mostly doctor shows or shows with a whole bunch of people that live in a small town and don’t seem to do much except talk about each other. They never seem to laugh or smile. I guess life treats some people pretty rough. After lunch, they pass out more meds. I used to have to take afternoon meds, but that stopped a while ago—another sign of the progress I’ve made.