The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  Jack tries to blink the blood from his eye, but it persists and the sunlight that fills spaces around him starts to roar in red. He cannot stop the alarm. Through the dense colour he can still see the man sitting in the light. Small globes burst in the air around him. When he sees the man stand up, lifting the branches as he makes his way out of the light, Jack feels himself darken inside and a numbness turns off the alarm. While Jack sleeps the man moves away, down towards a stream that wends along a gentle dip in the earth. He holds onto the branch of a tree and leans slightly towards the jewelled surface of the stream. It is moving quickly, bending up under the cold, black roots of the large tree as it courses along an exposed length of sand. At its centre red and brown stones bubble in and out of focus. At a point where it deepens and slows, just beyond the sand where the man leans, a cluster of grey water beetles scribble in silver on the shaded surface. The man suddenly sneezes and grabs the front of his face. After some moments he noisily rubs his nose with both hands and lets out a sharp cry. He crouches, careful not to let his coat touch the surface as he dips his hands into the water, turning them mechanically in the current. He draws his coat sleeves under the water above the rust-coloured stains and bunches them in his hands as he scrubs. His hands are sore with the cold when he lifts them into the light breeze. He fishes his red, plastic cup from his pocket. Inside it yellow fibres are gathered to a penny that clings to the sticky purple ring running around the bottom. He plunges the cup in the water, holding it with one hand against the current. With his free hand he selects three small stones from the stream bed and plunks them into the cup. As he turns the stones with his fingers the penny flips from the cup, its twin maple leaves brightly visible for a second as it swings in the water’s pull before disappearing. He raises the full cup to his mouth and vigorously swishes water through his teeth and then sprays the stream with a thicker fluid. He rises and turns, shaking the cup dry before returning it to his pocket, before climbing against the bush towards the bower where he had been sitting. When he reaches the spot he flips his coat open and lowers himself against the tree.

  The man resumes his silent meditation for some minutes. In the light around his head several large flies are venting two-second rages that cause clouds of smaller insects to swing in and out of formation. The man is unaware of this. He appears to be waiting out the natural span of his mood. He slowly emerges by drawing his shoulders forward. He puts his hand to his face and pushes his palms against the stubble of his beard. The scraping sound seems to bring him around and he refocuses his eyes out to the shadows beneath the trees. A look of recognition sweeps his features as he slides a date-book out from the inside of his coat. A packet of Kool-Aid falls into his lap and he picks it up, shaking the contents before returning it to his pocket. He flips through the date-book and slaps a page with the back of his hand. He bleats out an expletive. Abruptly he rises and adjusts his clothes. Again the Kool-Aid packet falls and he bends to sweep it up, putting it, this time, in the outside pocket of the trench coat. He marches angrily in between two bushes that pull at his clothes and he hikes up to the spot where Jack sleeps beside his dead friend.

  He doesn’t seem to notice them. He stands at their feet and pulls at his chin while he stares at a tear in the bark above their heads. Then he squats and firmly grabs the toes of the men’s boots. From a distance he appears to be conferring with them, though one is clearly dead and the other is motionless. Before rising he gives each boot an encouraging push. He has probably spoken to them. He is attracted to a yellow profusion of flowers, strung up in the air by the light that has newly caught them. He stares intently at the soft wood and black earth that surrounds the base of the bush as he withdraws his penis from his pants. He fastidiously frees it of any interfering clothing and tilts his head back as he waits to begin urinating. The urine flags up across the leaves, turning them in its heavy spray, before it settles into a loud, solid stream. He waves his penis rhythmically back and forth, cleaning stones and saturating moss. The colours in this small area richen and steam sighs up off the liquid as it sinks beneath the textures it has swollen. He concludes by wagging his penis between the knuckles of his right hand. Three drops stain the inside of his left pant leg. After carefully returning his penis he pulls on the front of his pants and stamps his feet. The light is now fully exposing the flowered bush and he snaps one of the flowers away, tentatively tasting its stalk before tossing it to hang loose where it once grew. He gives the area a cursory survey before leaving it, pausing briefly, as if for memory’s sake, over its more dramatic features: the diamonds playing on the surface of the stream, the heavy canopy of pine needles, the two bloodied bodies torn open at the base of a tree, the purple and white flowers creating a little room.

  The dense forest stops abruptly along a farmer’s field. A car-wide path runs around the perimeter of its twenty-five hilly acres. Large white boulders and black cows are suspended among the easily lifting and falling yellow grass. A low purple cloud is making its way quickly toward the field. It begins to darken a listing barn adrift on a distant hill. Soon the boulders and the cows are swallowed by a heavy, rapid shadow. The man’s car is parked several metres off the field, in a natural opening inside the forest. By the time he reaches it a number of large raindrops have fallen and dashed across the dry grass. From within the car he pauses and lights a cigarette with the car lighter, pooling grey smoke against the windshield. It begins to rain steadily as he starts the car. The road is quickly turned to mud and he avoids it, driving slowly through the field. The cows inevitably turn their heads towards the vehicle as it makes its way among the boulders and hills. As the car rejoins the road near the barn, a man — the farmer — looks up from the cedar rails that he has laid out end to end along the front-most part of his property.

  The flies are less active in the rain and some of the blood has loosened from the skin around the body’s head and neck. Its colours are beginning to change. The streaks of black and yellow are now more weblike, geometrical patterns of purple and orange, and any of the skin’s transparency is now altogether lost. There is a hardness to the flesh as the rain drums it clean. The shoulders and back are bare and bright with these transformations. Jack has been awake for some time, sitting in the rain and staring out through the droplets that hang from his lashes. There are changes in him as well. His legs are feeling strong again, though cramped painfully, and the binding around his wrists is tightening, pinching the veins and cutting off circulation. His hands are becoming crablike and fat. The paper plate, abandoned now by the flies, has flattened limply into the soil and the rain has begun to bury it in black splashes. The yellow flowers are hanging forward under the weight of water and the detached stem has been washed to the ground. The stream has risen slightly and browned, loosening debris from its banks and moving it quickly across its less articulate body. The rain gradually lightens towards evening, but it maintains its drizzle through to morning.

  In the morning the farmer is standing beside the paper plate, its fibres collapsing into the soil. He is crouched slightly in front of the two men lashed to the tree. He drops his hands and clasps them, resting his elbows on his knees. The two men are dead. One hangs forward away from the tree, pulled that way by the blows that killed him. The other sits more peacefully; a spiderweb, bending with beads of water, is slung from one open hand to the other. The farmer pulls a rag out from the top pocket in his overalls and holds it to his face. He lurches forward and drops his hand to the ground for support. A sharp pine needle pricks his palm, causing him to fall to his knees, and he holds the rag against his face with both hands. An orange bird suddenly floats down from around the tree and lands on the paper plate, puncturing the softness with its tiny claws. The bird steps around jerkily for footing then lifts off flying low towards the stream. The farmer is crying into the rag. A few metres to his right the purple flowers have overtaken the white ones with a new burst of growth. Several thumb-size bees hover among them, dropping and climb
ing noisily from flower to flower. The glistening bulge of a slug is attached to a spoon that lays crooked between two stones that are still wet in the shade of a softened log.

  The farmer returns using the exact same route as the man who had driven his car through the field the day before. There are no tire tracks to follow, he merely follows the course suggested by the combined valleys. By the time he reaches his small home built against the hill where the barn stands, he is walking very slowly, swinging a pole at his side that he had seen leaning against a rock in the field. A dog runs to him from the entrance, shaking its long, sandy coat. It takes a snap at the pole and when it does bite down he releases his grip. The dog drops the pole, mimicking the farmer’s disinterest, and follows him closely. Its hind quarters are wagging so vigorously that it has to pull itself through the door. In a corner of the kitchen a chair sits beside a brown telephone that waits on a tall narrow table. The farmer sits in this chair and clucks his teeth, bringing the dog to him. The dog rests its head on his crotch, and it whines as the farmer drags a closed hand across the smooth hair between its ears. The farmer lifts his hand from the dog’s head and it barks sharply. He grabs its head, vigorously shaking the loose skin and saying, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” He rises from the chair and goes to the open kitchen door. Resting his knee against a small wooden stool, he scoops a yellow plastic cup into an open sack of dog food. When he puts the food into a dish by the refrigerator the dog stares at the empty cup in the farmer’s hand. It doesn’t eat from the dish until he has returned the cup to its hook in the entrance. The farmer returns to the chair beside the telephone.

  The farmer lifts the receiver out of its cradle and returns it. He repeats the action several times before getting up and poking through a closet by the stove. After pouring himself a glass of whisky from a bottle he finds there, he again resumes his place by the phone: this time facing the centre of the kitchen. He draws in a deep breath to brace himself and expels it as he straightens his back, then downs the whisky in a single gulp. With a type of frown on his face he lifts the receiver again, this time dialling almost immediately. After completing the phone call, he makes his way down the hall to his small bedroom. He unbuttons his overalls and sits on the edge of the bed to remove his boots. When he is undressed down to an undershirt and red-and-white striped boxer shorts he pulls back the damp heavy blankets from under the pillows. He stretches under the coolness, drawing the blankets over his spotty shoulders. He folds his hand against his eyes and kicks the covers out from their tuck at the end of the bed. He is soon snoring loudly, which brings the dog walking softly into the room.

  It does not rain again for two days, and this allows the stream to return to its edges, to work its way back up under the huge black tangle of roots and resume its trembling against the sand. The nearly fully purple bush and the yellow flowers are joined by a yellow tape that drops to the ground behind the tree. The bodies have been removed. The paper plate has disappeared; it has either disintegrated or been removed as well. A spoon is beneath the stones where it was trapped, and the rain is washing away a muddy tread that unifies these surfaces.

  WINTER

  In the waiting room of Dr. Mendez, a family doctor, there are eight people with only five and a half sets of eyebrows between them. Every one of those lost eyebrows has been claimed by the sidewalk. Many of his patients are prone to falling in a fashion so free of inhibition that they often neglect to protect themselves on the way down. And the way down is always fast and the stay there very long.

  The clipped bottoms of chins and the tips of noses and patches of hair spottily represent the faces of these patients, who crowd the waiting room from dawn until well past nightfall. There are holes punched into the plaster walls. The receptionist sits behind a wire mesh window, with her hand resting beside a button which, when pressed, rattles the locked door open with electricity. Inside Dr. Mendez rocks in his chair feeling a drowsy comfort that the day will last one thousand hours.

  Today he will cry, while treating his patients, as he has cried every day speaking with them, telling different versions of his flight from the hard Jamaican police. His patients, who are all drop-ins, will sit silently through visits, which sometimes take one or two hours. They all come for the same reasons, rarely medical in nature, and they all have a lot of time to kill. They mark this time watching the soft bubbles harden in the corners of the doctor’s mouth while he speaks. Then he will slide his hand across a pad writing slowly and sadly, remembering things and looking up to ask, “Are you a Tuesday Boy or a Friday Boy?” Above his desk a sheet of paper is held with orange tape. In capital letters it says:

  WE NO LONGER LEND MONEY IN THIS OFFICE

  and

  TRANQUILLIZERS ARE NOT THE ONLY ANSWER.

  “Tuesday, Dr. Mendez.”

  “Grief.” The doctor buries his chin in the thick folds of his neck. “Grief, my Tuesday Boy, makes us seem strange to ourselves. Do you see?”

  It is always easy to imagine what is on Dr. Mendez’s mind, because he always seems to speak it.

  “The emotions we are patching together this moment have nothing to do with the new one that is emerging. We will never realize the work that new emotions are doing, because they are made in amnesia and when they light up, we will have always possessed them. Like my patients — all out of work, some really out of their minds, you see — casualties, wanting me to conscript new emotions. Unemployed emotions, always there.”

  He stares into cupped hands and then tenderly turns them over, smiling sadly, watching as nothing falls from them. I imagine the magazines in the waiting room changing into baseball bats and chains. There are signs prohibiting these things popping up all over town this winter.

  “Grief, Tuesday Boy. You lose a parent, or maybe you lose an entire family. In a single day. The police rebuild your world for you in a single day, but this mighty wind, like a great broom, sweeps the legs of your father and the arms of your mother back into the yard. And you beat the dogs that chew on their limbs. Beating and beating yourself to exhaustion.”

  Mendez presses the eraser of his pencil into the cleft in his chin, and blinks back tears.

  “The dogs always come back, Tuesday Boy, even when the bodies are gone. Even when they know that you will beat them.”

  Mendez smiles and brings his pen down to his prescription pad.

  “Only this one day you will feed them.”

  He writes quickly, ignoring himself, then rolls the pen with his palm, back and forth across the pad.

  “Grief, Tuesday Boy. You think the Ontario policeman is a hard man? Some are. Hardness is everywhere.”

  Mendez lifts the pad up close to his face and squints at it; his tears now spill as he concentrates. His pupils are tiny and black in the sad milk that washes over them. Suddenly, he blinks his eyes clear.

  “Look at this bloody pad, Tuesday Boy!”

  He turns it briefly to me, but I see nothing extraordinary.

  “This bunny here. Look. Don’t you see it?”

  He flashes the pad at me again and I see the stylized depiction of a rabbit rendered in a single blue line.

  “This little bunny, chewing away at the lawn, hopping around in someone’s garden, is a logo. What an astounding thing! Why, in God’s name, has this pharmacy chosen a little bunny for a logo?”

  Dr. Mendez lifts his phone from the desk, weaves its cable around trays and jars, and places it in his lap. He reaches for the pad and tips it up against the phone, as if it were a lectern. He seems to be looking down at it from miles above.

  “Are we supposed to be happy little bunnies, nibbling calmly in our peaceful little patch? No, no, Tuesday Boy, I think this damned business doesn’t mean a thing. Just bloody cute. Bunny, bunny nibbling on heart pills. Bunny, bunny nibbling on Clinoril. No, Tuesday Boy, this bunny is merely chewing in the grass. What a silly thing.”

  Mendez dials the phone number under t
he swirled blue line denoting the rabbit, and then rocking backward, he tosses the pad across his desk.

  “Listen to me, I’m Dr. Mendez, here in Bewdley. I would like to call in a prescription for …”

  He cups his hand over the phone and prompts me for my name and then he repeats it very phonetically, as if it were an obscure disease.

  “But I would also like to inquire about your astonishing logo.”

  As he listens he pushes his hand down onto his head.

  “Logo. Logo. Here on your prescription pad. I am curious about this remarkable bunny here in the top right-hand corner.”

  His hand falls across his desk, knocking over a pencil holder, and he picks up a second pad. He runs a cyclone of ovals around the bunny with his pencil.

  “Yes, bunny. A bunny, a little bunny there. In light blue, just above your address.”

  Mendez drops the pad in front of him and lays his hand softly upon it.

  “You see what I mean, don’t you? Well, it’s so strange, you see, it’s a bloody bunny.”

  Mendez looks away from the pad and stares at a piece of yellowed tape that is curling at the edges, revealing a bright rectangle of white in the centre of the brownish wall. Mendez reaches over and presses the edges of the tape down.