The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  His living testimony was written by his real parents who were the faceless angels, and the shifting grammar of clouds, the night sky.

  In the bay four small aluminum boats are closely arranged in a spot about 100 metres off the far western shore. The sun will soon reach its highest point in the summer sky. Jesus assumes they’ve found a nice school of smallmouth bass. He wishes he could join them. He underlines: These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Jesus watched how the sun was writing on the lake in figures that flashed on crowns of amber and grey. Gold talons, the veined bellies of horses and huge rolling eyes met and dissolved in the vast lake of numberless flesh. He held his pen tightly, unable to record the vision; instead he said “amanuensis.” It was on the same page of his dictionary as ‘Ambrosia.’

  He said Ambrosia aloud, too. He looked back into the Bible, with his Bic poised ready to underline the word ‘ambrosia’ if it appeared. He couldn’t find it, so he wrote at the bottom of a page: “The third part of the sea became blood, and the rest became ambrosia.” He always initialled his scriptural amendments — ‘R.P.’ And then he said Amen aloud.

  He added:

  “The fallen sea is written with Ambergris.” — R.P. Amen.

  ★

  I rented a small boat with a 7.5 Evinrude outboard and I left the marina and headed to the far side of Rice Lake. I had only paid for an hour’s rental, and I intended on keeping the boat forever. That makes me a thief. Ha. Ha. A thief.

  After three hours I was a great distance from the marina, in fact, I was in a place I had never been before. I was in the middle of acres and acres of tough brown reeds, and their tall dry stalks scraped the boat making the loudest, most infinite sound on earth. I had no more gasoline so all I could do was listen to the roaring drag of these stiff whips as they rasped along the hull of my boat. They drowned out the sound of the wind and the gulping water beneath my bare feet, and the boat moved so slowly I couldn’t tell if the vast field was opening up for me or closing in around me.

  I fell asleep and had a dream.

  I dreamt that I was a gun. My neck was a long blue barrel, hollow and cold. My eyes were pulled into a metal fin that sloped out from behind my face, which was the black hole at the end of the barrel. When I swallowed I felt my saliva as it spiralled down a perfect groove inside my body. I could make no sense of the trigger or the handle and it seemed that these were just gun parts and nothing to do with me at all. I woke up when I felt my own finger slipping around the trigger. I think I know what the dream means. It’s not really open to interpretation.

  The sun was high in the sky when I awoke and there were no shadows. I had drifted out of the reeds and the propeller was now making a conking noise as it bumped against the rocks. The water was very shallow. The shore was only a metre away from the side of the boat, so I climbed out and pulled it against the bramble that hung, dry as tinder, over the water’s edge. I crushed and smashed into the dense tangle of dead white branches, making my way up on to a large hot rock that rose out of the brush just two metres from the shore. I could only hear the water now, so close, making sucking music with my boat, its prop still scraping at submerged stone. That sound, that water-held banging, was probably echoing deep under the lake, like a lonely, inane drum.

  I lay on my rock, my rock padded with areas of moss, and I guessed by the sun’s position that it was only just past noon. The sun was fiercely bright and the sky was cloudless. In the distance I could hear the high whine of a powerful outboard and by this sound I could track it crossing the lake, fading as it went around an island further out. I noticed a large toad shared my rock. Its wide, brown body, arched and lumpy, sat perfectly still, beyond comfort, beyond patience. I took off my shirt and instantly felt the sun spread across my shoulders. Then I took off my pants. My knees poked up around me, hairless and sharp. My legs looked dead white and my penis looked like the toad’s dead baby brother and I laughed at it. My pubic hair, so dense and black under the pale swell of my stomach, was obscene. I decided to take a swim.

  The coarse brush tore into the translucent skin of my legs but soon I was free of it and standing up to my shins in the cold water. A large globe of blood on my thigh broke and ran fast down my right leg. Other smaller red beads emerged and made spidery deltas around my naked body. A brownish crosshatching surfaced on the back of my left hand. Christ, I was a mess. My genitals slipped up, unharmed, into a tiny model of themselves. It was too cold to leap right in so I just stood there, letting the breeze dry the blood, except for one cut on my right hip which still bled freshly. I noticed my stolen boat had drifted out into a current now, leaving an iridescent wake, a bending trail of purple eyes.

  On the far shore I could make out a man sitting with something on his lap. When he saw me he leapt to his feet, dropping what I could now see was a large book. I laughed quietly, wondering what he must be thinking, then I worried about the stolen boat. In the western end of the lake were a number of small aluminum boats, fishing I suppose, but they didn’t seem to notice me. I waited for this other man to signal to them, to call their attention to the naked boat thief on the north shore. Instead he held his hands up to me, in a gesture I didn’t understand, waving a pen. I wanted to yell to him, to get him to say something, but I just turned my palms upward and shrugged.

  The next thing he did was very strange. He walked straight into the water toward me, steadily and slowly his body moving forward and down into the lake. I heard engines starting up from the boats at the other end of the lake. They had seen him, but by the time they were moving, still far off, the man’s head had slipped under the water. I turned back and tore into the tough white nettles behind me, feeling them pierce into my naked body. I climbed up over my great rock, its surface hot against my hands and feet, and I pushed my way out of the sunlight into the soft cool mud under the rock’s raised edges. I listened to the boat engines cut out offshore. They must be over where the man had gone under. They were arguing loudly, but the wide lake and its dozen coves baffled and echoed their voices into incoherent blaring sounds.

  I noticed that there were three parallel slices deep in my inner thigh. I grabbed handfuls of muck and pushed them against the wounds, but the pressure of the blood pulsing out streamed the black mud from my fingers and washed between them with a thick clean flow. Instead of panicking I looked around for something I could use as tourniquet. When I turned my head I felt a click deep in my throat. I pulled a short stick out. I gasped. I heard a whistle under my chin. I was trying to breathe through another hole. Oh God.

  ★

  Bobby’s whole body was shaking now. His father and his uncle were really pissed. Bobby stared into the metal blue water where he had seen the man go under. The man had walked in over his head and hadn’t come up. He is down there, Bobby thought, right now, right under this spot. He had seen it with his own eyes. The man would be dead by now. Bobby felt a hard blow to the back of his head.

  “You were lyin’ weren’t ya boy? Weren’t ya?” His father eyeballed Bobby’s uncle, and nodded. The uncle nodded back, then turned away, seeming to shrink a bit.

  “Nobody walked into the fucking water, did they, boy?” Bobby’s father drew the back of his hand under his chin. “You’re a born fuckin’ liar, aren’t ya boy? Answer me!”

  The uncle was now bent over the side of the boat pretending to retie the anchor.

  “I ain’t a liar dad, I saw what I told you, I saw it.”

  Bobby lowered his head and braced himself for another blow.

  “You little shit. You lyin’ little shit.”

  Earlier that week Bobby had told his mother about what his uncle had done to him the last time he had taken him fishing. He had made him take his pants off and then, in the bottom of the boat, he had hurt him. Bobby told his mother and she told his father and nobody had said anything about it since. Except that now Bobby’s father came fishing with him an
d his uncle.

  “I think you make a lot of shit up.”

  Bobby couldn’t speak, his throat was closed up tight. His uncle stood up and faced his dad now.

  “See Keith, I told you the kid was lyin’. Just lookin’ for attention. You should beat the shit out of him for those lies he told my sister. Dirty, filthy fuckin’ lies. You can see now the kid’s a fuckin’ liar.”

  Bobby’s uncle was almost spitting now, his eyes wild and his mouth pushed out in an ugly way. Bobby’s father stood stiff with his back to the uncle and punched his son in the face. Bobby fell into the bottom of the boat and held his arms up over his head and drew his knees up under his chin.

  “That’s it Keith. Teach the little bastard a lesson. Now we gotta make sure the lyin’ cocksucker tells Laura the truth, that he made all that sick shit up, right? Let’s straighten this out once and for all, Keith.”

  Keith stared at his son, curled up at his feet, then he heard his brother-in-law’s whiny voice and he felt a slow sick rage fill his chest.

  “That boy needs to be straightened out, Keith. He shouldn’t have never lied like that and he’s just gonna keep doin’ it too, like just now. Ain’t nobody walked into this lake and drowned for crissake, Keith, that’s just more pure bullshit.”

  Keith turned slowly towards the other man and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He struck him fast and hard in the face, sending him bouncing off the motor and down on to his face cracking the middle wooden seat. He lay there motionless, panting, while blood spread out from his nose and mouth. Keith dragged him up by the hair and flung him so that he was sitting in the bottom of the boat with his back against the engine.

  Bobby crawled to the front of the boat and stared off into the thick bush that lined the near shore. He saw a naked man rise up, standing waist high in the bushes near the water’s edge. Blood pumped like paint out from a black hole in his throat and splashed across his chest. The man was now silently floating backwards, his bloodied hands pushing forward slowly as he was falling, and then suddenly he was gone. Bobby blinked at the quiet shoreline for about ten seconds then he looked over at his father’s broad back. His fists were now clenched at the ends of his thick round arms. His body seemed to be challenging the man, slumped over in the bottom of the boat, to say something. Anything.

  Bobby turned away, feeling cold, and stared down into his own wiggling face reflected in the water. First he counted the drops of blood that plunked in the water from his nose, and then he watched as the top of a man’s head rose to about a foot below the surface of the water, its blond hair waving in the current like soft weeds, and then it sank back down, deep under the boat.

  WRIST

  This is the story I tell to leave myself cold again, crouched down behind the dryer, remote and white, choking on winter garbage. And I remember that I broke into this house and that there is a family upstairs and that I had crawled into their mouths to get here. Sliding over their teeth, and under their moist webs I fought with an erection, steering myself up to the left so that I was just inside something. And she said to him:

  “Don’t swallow the bones.”

  And he said:

  ★

  That night I sat in a bathtub and carefully removed the tiny blades from disposable razors. The faucet tumbled water into the bath, greying it, warming it. Can you end your life by opening your wrists in a bathtub? I believed if you were serious it was very possible. The veins and arteries are sneaky and will slide between and behind those two pliant bones in your forearm, so the job is to outwit them. There are two ways: mount an exacto-blade tight in a sturdy vice, find the right swing so that your forearm lands on the blade, an inch along the wrist. Rehearse a few swings: it’s worth it. Then slam-bang the fucker down hard. All going well the vital cables snap like bands, slip up into the arm and pump it all out. This is pretty fast. Warm bang, cold shivers, then life slips away.

  Unfortunately, I did not have all that hardware at my disposal — besides, I didn’t want to risk the possibility that I might change my mind with elaborate preparations. So plan B.

  If the veins were going to play hide and seek, I was going to have to hunt them down. Brand new, these little blades will cut through whale skin. It was surprisingly easy to flash in the first slice — pretty, superficial, and it slipped right under the skin, giving me the opportunity to hunt for those tricky little tubes. The body has a mind of its own, and I am tired of it doing all the thinking for me. This is my revenge.

  I felt nothing as I carved back large flaps and began to dig in earnest for big bleeders. I hit one, up against a bone; Christ, I was almost through to the back of my arm. After a couple more serious severings, my heart danced up and down like a pulsating sprinkler, my arm was starting to look like a lava lamp.

  I stopped for a moment and drew my arms like oars under the foamy pink water, feeling my skin unfurl down my wrist and all the pleasant numb openings. I was rowing out from the living.

  Then I looked up at the pink tile and watched the light dripping there, like glue.

  I looked back down into the rouge bathwater and lifted my arms to examine the spaces. I was open alright. Blood filled up each of the nine carefully deepened gashes, and a thick dark wetness draped around my arm. I picked up the blade again and dove blindly, plumbing the inside of the widest opening. I felt bone, then suddenly I went blind. Blood had sprayed into my eyes. I thought to myself, “Oh, dear, I’m going to die. Everyone will hate me.”

  I knew that they would. They would see it for what it was: impulsive, selfish and mad. I, however, was here. I saw a thing, my thing, so brightly lit with darkening colours, the vivid, sensual violence of my sanity and the thinking clots that rallied around the drain. I think I detest people who do this sort of thing. All the more reason to die.

  My hands are cold now, and it occurs to me that a few longitudinal slices might be in order. I’d heard that that’s the best way to flush out those cunning veins. Slash, slash, slash. Gouge, gouge, gouge. Maybe it worked, maybe not, there’s so much fuckin’ blood leaving me I figure it’s only a matter of time. I am bored now though. I believe in God.

  If you don’t, you are stupid.

  Maybe I should try to cut off my head? Do you think so? Now that would be a challenge. Unfortunately, I’d need an assistant with an axe, cause my beribboned arms couldn’t even hold a toothpick. Dead, dead, dead.

  Soon to be. I have no fear of dying. I’m sure it all means something less frivolous than I believe it to be. I sometimes imagine it is the bravest, most generous act left for me. I will not talk to you about it. Oh, shit, I think I’m becoming delirious. Hee hee, I don’t wanna die. I am very tired of watching myself; I’m a crash test dummy, taking safety courses. And I’m tired of watching the good things jump out of their skins. I’m going to leap into my own dead body and dream.

  Suddenly Hobbes saunters into the bathroom, and stands staring with a poker face at the bathtub. What he must have seen and thought. Oh, sweet Jesus. I stared silently down at my penis, bobbing sickly in the pink froth and I waited for him to lace into me. Lace me up, Hobbes.

  Instead, he did this. He silently removed his clothes and slipped into the bloody water with me, then he reached for the blade I had stuck in the soap.

  “You can’t just slap away at your arm like that and expect to hit anything good. Watch.”

  Hobbes observed closely the surface of his wrist, right near the palm. And then popped into it fast and hard. Sure enough, a single dark jet arced across the room. I didn’t ask.

  I tried to picture Roger leaning against the door frame. He had named us Calvin and Hobbes. I always forget his Cree name.

  As our blood covered the soap and fell against strangers, I rose unsteadily from the water, to save us, I think.

  Hobbes said something and pointed out my blood racing to the floor.

  Anywhere but here.

 
; THE ONLY GAY MAN IN BEWDLEY

  I was the only gay man in all of Bewdley. At least I think I was. Well, I might as well have been. I’ve known that I was gay ever since I was very young. It’s not something you suspect, you just know it. At least I did. I also knew, growing up in Bewdley, that even if you are gay, you just best not be. I was thirty years old and I’d never had sex. That alone was reason enough for some of these guys to drag you off to one of the islands; that’s where most of the beatings take place.

  It’s not that I didn’t want to have sex, it’s just that there were no other gay men in Bewdley. If there were and I knew about it and I liked the fellow, Christ I’d probably have married him. Except in good old Bewdley, if you’re even suspected to be gay, you know, if you talk funny, or you have pretty eyes or some bullshit, you’ll likely as not get your head kicked in at least once in your life. The stupid thing about that is that these poor guys with long lashes or nice legs or somesuch aren’t even gay, so it seems to me. And there are lots of men in Bewdley with some pretty odd ways of walking. I would not be surprised if half the population of Bewdley has taken that unpleasant island trip; and if you did the math, that would make Bewdley the gayest capital of the world. Which it ain’t, because there is only one man in town who is truly gay and that man is me.

  Nobody in Bewdley thought I was gay, however, and I suppose that’s because I’m very masculine. You know, big build, nasty grin, messy workclothes and all that. I would have to say that nobody in Bewdley knew the first goddamn thing about gay men. In fact I don’t think I knew a hell of a lot about gay men either, besides knowing that I was one. I must admit that deep down I liked it. It made the population of Bewdley look pretty damn stupid, and maybe it was my loneliness, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit superior to all those ignorant jackasses. You probably think I’m outta my mind, living so secretly with myself, but I had reasons that I don’t think anybody, maybe not even another gay man, would understand. I don’t feel compelled to over-explain myself on that score either.