The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  BOY ON FIRE

  Why would a cottage suddenly catch fire? A small black and red box of punky wood and cupped shingles, smelling like lilacs, wet tails and dry fish, darkens in the sun, beneath a million leaves, while trees sneak their heavy living skirts across the cool roof. Why should this cottage burst into flame? Fire is an animal, covered in black wind, that lives only as long as it is hungry. When it dies in its own fiery guts it eats the cottage. And why should my eight-year-old brother stand in the middle of the cottage screaming? Why doesn’t he leave?

  I was standing by my father, near our neighbour’s cottage, listening to the grown-ups talking about concrete. I was trying to make sense of it, but I couldn’t. I had always thought it was like clay and that it became hard when it dried, like mud does or scabs do. My dad and Mr. Dunston were talking about pouring concrete underwater, which seemed to me really very stupid. The lake would just carry it away in clouds, sending it into ever thinning banks of grey, until it disappeared. I resisted an urge to explain to my father one of the basic, sad rules of building with sand on a beach.

  “Well Jim, how are we gonna keep this stuff from getting washed out of the forms?”

  Mr. Dunston was coming closer to my way of thinking. “We just catch a calm day. We’re bound to lose some, but if we line the forms with poly we’ll hold on to most, trust me.” OK, Dad. But how do you expect cement to dry under water? Mr. Dunston tugged thoughtfully on the skin of his neck and stared out at the white lines that flashed and vanished in the bay. He didn’t look sceptical, but he was avoiding the obvious question.

  “OK, Dad. But will cement dry underwater?”

  Both men smiled at me with that dreaded “this is sort of complicated, son” look.

  Fear starts in the root system of a single flower, blanching the extremities, which pull in spasms held tight by wet, blind mud. A sweet juice explodes into the soil, meeting with the roots of other flowers. Soon an airless voice is carried along a thousand clawed tongues that tell each other “there is horror.” Above ground in the sunlight the purple bell and the white anther flash in the eyes of a boy on his bike. He falls, and on his hands and knees he suddenly smells candy. Candy on a country road. He has no time to realize he is screaming.

  “Well, Tony, cement is only one of the ingredients of concrete. Concrete doesn’t dry out really. It’s a chemical reaction caused by a mixture of ingredients, that cause it to change its molecular makeup. You notice how concrete becomes hot when it’s setting, well, that’s because its molecules are speeding up as it changes its composition …”

  He was becoming increasingly more technical in his explanation, and he seemed to doubt my comprehension. The explanation was soon directed at Mr. Dunston’s eager nods, which seem to imply both his previous knowledge and his current interest regarding the underwater project. I was not learning as much about the magic properties of concrete from my father’s explanation as I was learning about the magical properties of comprehension from Mr. Dunston. I imitated them, losing my discomfort, and as my father finally noticed that my head was lowered, not in shame, but in private consideration of this discussion, he seemed satisfied that he had successfully deepened my knowledge of chemical compounds. Under the cover of mimicking Mr. Dunston’s grasp of the subject, I was thinking that I would simply have to find a book that explained concrete if I was ever to get it straight. I was also wondering if Mr. Dunston fully knew what my father was talking about.

  I liked to picture things in Mr. Dunston’s mind. I always suspected that these pictures had their own life, playfully making up the world behind his serious expression. Had he ever pictured helium shooting miles above a water table in tiny black arrows? Had he ever imagined motes of lithium dancing in an artificial light before a window in blood? Was he now sketching a particle of sand so overheated with rage that it is tricked into becoming something else, something manic, then something reticent? Did he feel against the cool of his feet the violence that hides in fixity? Smooth walkways winding under oceans, their moment shaken into silent shape by the drone of great revolving drums? If Mr. Dunston didn’t see it this way I doubted that it happened this way. I remember my father’s knees scorched and leaking white skin down his shins, after working in cement, or rather concrete. He had me press my palm and write my name in it before it dried, or rather, set.

  The boy had smelled that candy once before, maybe twice. It seemed to him that it was connected with those rare and horrible sentences you hear only once in your life. The sentence you always wait for, knowing exactly how it sounds and who will say it. A sentence like “A farmer shot your cat today.” You are nauseous from the smell of candy, long before the words are spoken. The last time the boy had smelled candy they said to him, “Your grandmother died today.” For days her room was full of flowers leaning in vases, without roots and stuffed with loud, awful colours. The hyacinth by the roadside that had knocked him off his bike was gathering a terror from under the earth.

  Mr. Dunston asked my father how far out could they pour the concrete that would burn underwater and then set hard as rock.

  “Theoretically, we can take this thing as far out as we want, but I figure thirty feet or so should do it. Just so the kids can walk up to their waists without getting their feet all smashed up in that rock.”

  Mr. Dunston plunged his hand down into the back of his bright blue bathing trunks, and looked ready to move away from theory.

  “We’re gonna have to pour all of it in one day, for sure. So that means building all the forms ahead of time, maybe in rough water and having a load of concrete to call on the first calm day we get.”

  “We’ll also need a lot of hands.”

  I didn’t even offer my services, assuming with no small pride that being in on the project at the engineering level my assistance at other levels was a given.

  “Do you smell something, Jim?”

  “Smoke. Smells like smoke. Somebody burning brush.”

  “I don’t think so. Besides, that smells like paint.”

  “Oh damn, Jim look there’s smoke rising over your place.”

  Both men bolted down the road and turned up our driveway before I could get on my bike. That’s when the flower struck me down. That’s when I heard my brother screaming.

  Fire takes little boys and hurls their little hearts up into skies that drip with tar. Fire concentrates all the unfair wrath of the body into a brother of mine. His hot corpse, still standing in an animal’s bowel, still screaming, “Tony, help me! Help! Anthony! I’m on fire!” I felt the candy in my brain and heard its sentence crystallize and I knew the world encouraged brothers to catch fire and that the roots of plants were pencilling the screams into my lungs. I was pushing a small stone into my mouth just as I slipped out of consciousness.

  When I awoke I lay still, hoping I was dead. I was shivering into a blanket and I heard my mother and Mrs. Dunston talking.

  “For Christ’s sake, the Clements know you need a fire permit; and burning tires, honestly, I hate when people treat this wonderful country air like a dump. Just like little boys playing with fire. The ironic thing is they probably wouldn’t think of polluting the air in the city, you know what I mean?”

  Mrs. Dunston was trying desperately to stick to these topics — Mr. Clements’s reckless poisoning of a perfect, cloudless sky, the horrible stench, and the damage he may have inflicted on the ecology. She didn’t want to talk about her friend’s son Tony. She wanted to protect her friend from the embarrassment she surely must feel. Her friend was so intensely proud of all her seven children, and no one was more astonished at this number than the mother herself. At this moment, however, Mrs. Dunston couldn’t rid herself of the image of that boy leaping off his bike and screaming his own name: “Anthony, help me! Anthony is on fire!” The sight of him fainting in the middle of the road, with those horrible words still whispering from his mouth, would not let her go, and she sh
uddered. Mrs. Dunston pretended that she was shuddering at the consequences of that toxic cloud the Clements had unleashed in their clear blue sky. She quickly said so.

  A huge blistered barrel held the foaming roots in place. These roots raced around in jet-black circles, anchoring the tree. The tree shot up into the sky like a giant’s leg, twisting and flexing up into a vanishing body. Half a mile away, my brother, who was bow-legged and stood short for his age, was throwing horseshoes with his friends. When his friends all suddenly pointed in unison to the west, my brother stopped and stared with them at the smoke billowing up over the trees. He threw his horseshoe wildly across the sand and ran excitedly towards his bike.

  THE FORCING HOUSE

  Outside this little pink washroom was the farmhouse where Jim’s parents, Lloyd and Bev, paced across the linoleum, and beyond that was hundreds of acres of bone-white farm spreading up like paint into the night. And beyond that, drawing in over the rim, was the car that carried Petroff, Chris and Andrew, closer to this pink room, to me. I now have to ask, are these people going to kill me? Do speed addicts just blast apart and kill? I have a mirror in this room, but I’m too ashamed to look. I know so little about speed. I know so little about desperate people. I’ve lied about all these things and now I have to tell the truth.

  There were two things that everyone I knew in Bewdley had — things I wanted so terribly that I was willing to burn everything to acquire. One thing was their age. It was not so much that they were older, though they all were; it was that they had never been as young as me. The thick rope of farming had chafed at their skins, revealing hard purple beards and deeper colour in their eyes. I always felt small and clean and soft when I was with them, but I was determined to change all that. I wanted to put old maps on my face. The other thing they had and I wanted was real lawlessness. Tourists and vacationers went to great lengths to avoid stepping on rattlesnakes or poison ivy, and they would study these things until they had nightmares. After a while they would start to walk all crooked over because they figured they had to watch their feet constantly if they were going to survive the summer. If you were born here you avoided bumping into Officer Patterson. If you lived here you struggled with a bad reputation. You either struggled to live it down, or you struggled to live up to it. Motorcycle crashes, brakestands, strip searches and lawn fires pointed up and over the heads of all the dull and sleeping. I had been doing some work in this direction, except my efforts didn’t roll naturally out of my life and I tended to go too far.

  That summer I had stolen six cases of beer from a station wagon, bravely dragging one at a time along the grass in full view of a party that would soon be very dry. The problem was I attracted far too much attention. Officer Patterson spent the entire summer tracking me down in a sweeping manhunt that caused a great panic among his flock of local monsters — my friends. It was at about the middle of the summer, when I was still only a dreadful rumour, that I met Jerry. Jerry was a wide-bellied, thick-bearded, homegrown messiah. He was all things to all people. He was a probation officer who smoked dope, he showed stag films and ran a speakeasy on Friday nights, and for vacationing families, like mine, he showed cartoons at the marina on Saturday nights. Out of his house he employed young parolees in his wholesome, little cottage industry, screening his own drawings of stoned-out hippies onto T-shirts. Everyone who got along with Jerry was cool, because it meant that you knew things. About being busted. About overdosing. And, most important, you knew something about Jerry’s new way.

  I did not get along with Jerry. This was his decision, but it was no mystery to me. He didn’t like me because I was from the city; but mostly I think he avoided me because I seemed far too young to have lost control. He had certainly heard about the beer case theft from both my friends and the police, who were elaborately hunting for me everywhere. This was devastating to me since I saw in Jerry a place and a person I would go to when I had finally become used up by my own trouble. I’d see him sitting on his stool at the marina doling out intentionally ludicrous advice to everyone who came near. “You don’t want to fill your truck with just gas, Emerson. Hell no, you gotta put money in there.” Whenever I’d see him I wanted to say, “Jerry, I expect to be a parolee myself soon. I suppose you’ve heard about the big manhunt. Well, why don’t I come by your place soon and you can show me how this silk-screen rehabilitation thing works.”

  A young criminal with a wry look to his own reform, except I was really just a barely audible, dangerous little boy.

  One Friday night I did manage to gain entry into the secret northern bad boy’s club, through the magic door-opening powers of my friend Jim. Jim had extraordinary status throughout the entire peninsula, not only because he had lived through so much more than everyone else — PCP benders, biker riots, heroin and hard boredom — but simply because he was still alive. Jim was not supposed to have lived past the age of eighteen. He was now twenty-three. He had muscular dystrophy and in the past couple of years his immobility was starting to isolate him from his increasingly mobile friends. It was largely our mutual sense of being alien that made us close, even though I was eight years younger. Anywhere we went together we opened doors, Jim being an important footnote to everybody’s reputation. He was a comfortable, swollen man in this last year of his life, with his puffed lap full of detective novels and his pincer tough fingers pulling his chair along, spoke by spoke. I was the grimy minion; nervous, delinquent energy. Jerry let us in that night because he adored Jim. I didn’t care. That night I met everybody: Steve, Peter, John, Andy, Bruce. The next morning I awoke in an entirely new setting. I don’t recall how I got there but suddenly I was living at Peter and John’s. Peter and John were the minister’s sons and the minister was away.

  I drank with them for weeks, watching the place become a major centre for drug traffic, until this one afternoon the whole house was suddenly full of men in uniform. One of the speeders, a lanky ape named Petroff, was suspiciously busted with a small bag of weed. For some reason Patterson gave him twenty-four hours to revise the charge. It very quickly became my bag of weed. Petroff convinced me of this by placing a telephone book over my head and repeatedly pounding on it until I relented. After the beating he said I would have to sleep with him that night. He would escort me personally to the police station to make a statement. Blows through a phone book do not leave marks. He had done this before.

  Steve, Peter, John, Andy and Bruce helped me explain to Petroff that my mother would phone the police if I didn’t return home that night. Petroff agreed to let me go, but vowed to kill me if I didn’t meet him the next morning. He tore off my watch and ground it under his foot.

  “Now our watches are synchronized, mine, yours and mommy’s.”

  He also removed my shoes and stood on them while I fled the house. On the way out I heard my new friends talking.

  “He’s the youngest. He’s the shortest. He’s from out of town. Petroff knew what he was doing when he picked Tony. Christ, Bewdley cops just love busting city boys. Christ, Patterson and my dad drink together.”

  “Think he planted that dope on Petroff? I mean, Petroff shoots speed, he doesn’t smoke weed.”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “Probably he did.”

  “He’ll only be charged as a juvenile anyway, what’s the big deal?”

  “What an asshole.”

  “Poor Petroff, with his record he’d probably do time.”

  “Fuck man, I like Tony, but this is very uncool.”

  The first thing I did after fleeing the house was to seek out Jerry. He consoled me, explaining that Petroff couldn’t prove the dope was mine.

  “And anyway,” he said, “all that business is the least of his concerns. He’s facing a big old assault charge now.”

  I felt relief and gratitude wash over me as I listened to his deep, hippie voice. Jerry solved these problems every day. Jerry never doubted my innocence for a second. He knew
instinctually how these evil bastards prey on people like me. He told me I could spend the night at his place, and that in the morning we’d beat Petroff to the OPP station. My mother wasn’t actually expecting me that night; in fact she had given up on expecting me at all.

  When I climbed into bed so did Jerry. He put his hand inside my underwear. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even move. I knew that Jerry had saved me from a nightmare and I was very grateful.

  I knew he was the only person who could protect me now: from Petroff, from my friends, from the cops, from my parents. I rolled over face down on the bed so he couldn’t touch my penis, and before I drifted off I pictured Petroff’s fingertips blackened with ink.

  KINDNESS

  I live mostly on the sidewalk these days with my friend Tommy. Tommy’s a Native Canadian who has a very confusing, deformed face. It’s divided up into cylinders displacing his eyes, nose and mouth, which seem to have just moved out of the way. Sometimes, when the heat hangs in my eyes, I look at him and wonder if I would like him if his face was normal. I am never sure whether his eyes are full of understanding because he feels it, or because strange folding skin makes it look that way. It doesn’t really matter, their effect on me is the same. I like Tommy.

  I know two people in this town, Tommy and Jimmy. Jimmy lives pretty high off the savings bonds he’s cashing in all the time. He’s got a two-bedroom apartment to himself. It has a television, VCR, and a piece of a dock for a bed. He drinks methodically, laying on the dock, rolling full bottles of whisky up onto his chest and then rolling the empty ones down the other side. About once a week he gathers all the empty bottles, carefully removes their labels, and fills them with coloured water. He lines these bright blue, orange and purple bottles up in his kitchen cupboards. When he shows them to me, he insists that I stand in the hallway craning my head in the bare kitchen, while he opens the cupboard and gestures to them softly with an upturned hand. This is really frightening. I can never seem to respond to this the way he expects me to. If I try to appear impressed he becomes angry and says menacingly, “It’s just stale bottled water.” But if I seem unimpressed he’ll punish me by meting out only enough drinks to stave off the D.T.’s, no more. This is torture because I have to pretend to like him just to get those few drinks. I can never leave until they’re gone. He knows this. I just hang off the dock some days, with my knees snapping against my chest, hoping he’ll say something. When he does I know another drink will be poured and so I always listen closely. I shape a minor complimentary opinion to make things go smoothly. These moments sometimes feel like friendship, except they ulcerate inside our laughing. I always want him to die.