Flying Crows (19 page)

Birdie Carlucci didn't answer. He just picked up where he was. “So I decided to stick around a while. I didn't have any money, except some change from a dollar the doctor gave me. A week came and went. During the day I scouted out other corners and rooms in the station. There were hundreds of little places to lie down, to sit and read, to stay out of sight, to be away, to be safe. There was a little cubicle down in the basement, below the trains and the tracks, just off the pump room for all of the elevators. Somebody had put a comfortable chair in there. That worked well for me. The top floors were the best. There were tiny offices and special places. I spent many nights in a dormitory room with cots that was there for conductors and engineers and other trainmen who got stranded between trains. Nobody used it much, so I did. That's where Janice and I met a lot. It was right above—way above—the Harvey House. There were narrow stairs up against the east wall that you had to climb to get up there. When anybody did see me I always acted like I was a crewman on a train, on his way to someplace that mattered. I knew all the trains pretty soon, so it was easy to make up one for me that sounded right to the person I ran into. I went for walks outside the station. I even went down Main all the way to downtown, strolled like a banker by the hotels and the department stores, and saw streetcars and fancy women on the streets.”

Carlucci took a breath and sighed. Randy seized the pause to ask, “You said earlier there wasn't anything wrong with you; you weren't a lunatic. What were you doing at Somerset?”

If the old man heard the question he gave no sign. He went on with his story.

“My real life at the station began when I found a book that was at least three inches thick. Somebody left it behind on a waiting-room bench. It was called an almanac. In a few days I knew the capitals of all the states and all the countries of the world. I knew their average annual rainfall and average family income and the names of all of the presidents and vice presidents of the United States. Then I learned all the members of the House of Representatives and the ninety-six senators and the governors and lieutenant governors of the states. I knew how many votes every candidate for president got from the beginning of elections. I memorized the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution. I knew the crest records of the Mississippi and Missouri and Kaw rivers. Before long, there wasn't much I didn't know. By the time I finished reading that almanac and memorizing everything I wanted to, more than six months had gone by: eight or nine months, probably—maybe a year, now that I think about it. I got lucky, because before I finished the almanac, I found a Bible on a bench. Josh had told me that the guy who had my bed at Somerset before me was named Jesus. Not
the
Jesus, the one from Nazareth; this one was from Chillicothe. Josh said he had memorized the entire Bible, so I thought I'd see what
I
could do. I read it from cover to cover several times. Most of it didn't make sense the first time, so I kept reading it until it did and then until I knew it by heart. Now I know the Bible as well as Jesus of Chillicothe.”

Carlucci stopped rocking. He turned to Randy and said, “Name a verse from the Bible. Any verse.”

Randy was not a Bible person. His relationship with the Bible had been only in passing from his having attended Sunday school in Winston and, now, going with Melissa and the kids to a Methodist church in the neighborhood.

“Anything . . . maybe something from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John,” Randy said. For the first time in his life, his ignorance of the Bible was an embarrassment. “Whatever, Mr. Carlucci.”

Carlucci shook his head. “Those four are too easy.” He closed his eyes for a second, opened them, and said, “I'm thinking about something from the Old Testament, from Samuel. Do you know the Books of Samuel?”

Randy's silence was his answer.

“He spoke a lot about friendship,” Carlucci continued. “In One Samuel, chapter twenty-two, verse twenty-three, he said, “ ‘Abide thou with me, fear not: for he that seeketh my life seeketh thy life: but with me thou shalt be in safeguard.' Did I quote the passage correctly?”

“Yes, sir,” Randy said. He, of course, had no idea if it was from First Samuel or First John, or anyone else. It could have been from a fairy tale or a Hallmark greeting card, for all he knew. And clearly Birdie Carlucci realized that. He was playing with the unversed cop from Kansas City.

The rocking and the talking out into the backyard resumed.

“An awful thing happened only a couple of weeks after I'd been there. In November, a policeman—his name was Fanning, according to what I read in the newspapers—came into the Union Station. He was drunk and out of uniform, but he had his gun and he started threatening people. He went down to one of the tracks, where he shot and killed another officer who was trying to stop him. It turned out that Fanning was on duty the morning of the massacre and never got over believing his fellow officers blamed him for what happened. I heard all the commotion that night and saw them take out the dead officer on a stretcher and Fanning in handcuffs. Do you know the story?”

Randy said he had read about it recently in a book—Jules Perkins's book. “You witnessed the massacre itself, isn't that what you told me the other morning?”

All Randy heard from Carlucci was the sound of his chair rocking:
bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta.

Carlucci, again ignoring Randy's question, picked up where he had left off:

“I went to the man who ran one of the restroom cleanup crews at Union Station and asked him for some part-time work. Occasionally he gave me a job mopping floors. He never asked me where I came from in the morning, and I never told him. Nobody ever asked me where I came from. There were always so many people in the station, coming and going. I also was careful to keep up my looks, unlike the others who hung out around the station. They were bums. I was not a bum and I didn't look or act like one. I made a little money from the mopping, enough to get an occasional haircut in the station barbershop, and I picked up some clothes— free of charge—from a Salvation Army place not too far away. Once they knew I could recite the Bible from memory, they gave me anything I wanted, including the use of their washing machine and an iron and ironing board. I also found an easy way to get into the station's lost-and-found room down next to the big baggage room in the basement. I never took anything important or valuable, only a few clothes. I made me a good life. Josh loved to read in the library, and now I was just like him. Before Somerset, I had never read much of anything, even in school. But now that was my main thing to do. I found other books lying around the station after the almanac and the Bible, some about war and crime and love. The Salvation Army also had some books.

“I stayed up on what time it was with the big clock between the lobby and the waiting room, I stayed up on what day it was by reading the dates at the tops of the newspapers. But even I was surprised one day to realize two years had gone by since I left Somerset with Josh. You can go up on the sixth floor and see the record I kept.”

“Record of what?”

“My life at the station. It's in the big hallway leading into the dormitory room. I'm going to nap a few moments.”

Carlucci kept rocking and looking straight ahead. But soon his eyes were closed, the chair was still, and he was asleep.

Randy decided to stick around until the old man woke up.

XVI

WILL

SOMERSET

1920

It was a new bushwhacker named Pete who finally prompted Will Mitchell to leave Somerset. Pete claimed to have been a professional baseball player—a right fielder—for the Philadelphia Athletics before turning to what he called
loony labor.
He was one of what Will discovered were hundreds of itinerant men who traveled the country with the weather and their whims, working as attendants at state insane asylums.

“This is the tool of my trade, doc, a Ty Cobb special,” said Pete, the day he arrived at Somerset. He was holding a baseball bat—a Louisville Slugger—in his hands out in front of him. Will knew about these magnificent instruments of white ash. Every boy did. “It worked great hitting the ball out of the park, and it works great hitting loonies out like lights.”

Will, who had played baseball in high school, was appalled. “I don't want you using that on any of our patients,” he said to Pete, a bald gorilla of fifty or so who stood at least six feet four inches tall and some two hundred fifty pounds deep.

“I already have the play-ball sign from the big shots here to use it. But don't you worry, doc, 'cause I always wrap a little piece of something soft around the butt of this bat. That's so as not to draw blood or make scars. That way all it'll do is draw some attention and put out some lights in loony heads.”

Before the first day was over, Will saw Pete hit three patients in the head with his bat. That night, Pete and his bat went through two or three wards, helping sleepless patients fall asleep. Josh did not escape his whack because this was before he and Will had had their Centralia revelation in the library. Now Josh was past needing such violent assistance to go to sleep and had, with Will's encouragement, already begun his regular Centralia performances in the auditorium.

But the other patients were regularly hit and hammered. Will raised steady and increasingly hot protests about Pete's batting to Dr. Mayfield, the superintendent, and anyone else who would listen. Not only did they not stop Pete, but it wasn't long before most of the other attendants bought baseball bats of their own to use on the patients. Replica autographs of famous major league baseball players like Ty Cobb were burned into the heavy part of the bats. One of the bushwhackers got a Rogers Hornsby, another a Honus Wagner. Soon the term
Somerset Sluggers
was born and became part of the asylum vocabulary.

The sound of those padded bats slamming against the heads and bodies of human beings, lunatics though they may have been, provided the last push for Will Mitchell. He still had ten months to go on his two-year commitment to the state health department, but that was too bad. One morning after watching a poor soul have his head nearly torn off by the swing of a bat, he decided he had to get out right away.

“I'm leaving this place in the morning and never coming back,” he said to Josh—as a secret—the afternoon of his decision. “You are my one and only proud accomplishment, Josh.”

They shook hands.

“Thanks for making it possible for me to have a life in this place,” Josh said.

“I wish it meant you could leave here and have a normal life somewhere else, far, far away from here . . . but that, of course, is not possible.”

Josh said nothing. He didn't have to.

The next morning, just before six, Will threw his few belongings into a small tan leather suitcase his father had given him as a college graduation present. He hid the case in some bushes near the front gate and then, as usual, went to make his wake-up rounds.

His first stop was in a second-floor ward office station where he knew there was an attendant with a newly bought and outfitted Somerset Slugger at the ready. His name was Amos.

“Can I borrow that Honus Wagner bat of yours for a few minutes?” Will asked. “I've got a guy downstairs who needs some help concentrating.”

“I thought you disapproved of these things,” said Amos, surprising Will with his use of a word as long as
disapproved.

“If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, is what I always say,” Will replied in as buddy-buddy a way as he could manage.

Amos handed Will the Honus Wagner slugger.

Will walked down one flight of stairs to where he knew Pete was on duty.

Holding Amos's bat down by his side, he approached Pete, who was seated at a desk reading something. Probably a dirty comic book, Will thought.

“Good morning, doc,” Pete said, looking up. “You got a slugger there with you? I can't believe it.”

“If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, is what I always say,” Will said.

With Amos's Honus Wagner in both hands, he raised the bat and, in two swift back-and-forth swings, whacked Pete's head from both sides, knocking him out cold and sending him sprawling on the floor.

He laid the bat down across Pete's stomach, walked quickly to the front door of Old Main and out onto the gravel pathway, retrieved his suitcase, and then continued down Confederate Hill to the Somerset train station.

A few minutes later, he was seated comfortably in a chair car on the Kansas City Southern's morning train, flying north toward Kansas City as straight as the crow flies.

XVII

JOSH AND
BIRDIE

UNION STATION

1933

Josh motioned for Birdie and Will to take a seat on the cot, while he grabbed the chair and pulled it up close, facing them.

“I'm now going to tell you Streamliner's awful story,” Josh said to Birdie. “I will do it as if I was him—as if it happened to me. And I want you to repeat it after me, sentence by sentence, like you're telling it— like you are Streamliner too.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Birdie said.

“Maybe so, but just do it,” Will said impatiently. “It's either that or somebody's going zap your brain or slice a little piece out of it someday— whether you need it or not.”

Birdie reflexively threw his hands to his forehead. Then he looked at Josh and said, “Let me have a few minutes with the doctor here—you know, in private.”

“I can't do anything for you, young man,” said Will Mitchell. “I really am not that kind of doctor.”

“OK with you, Josh?” Birdie asked, ignoring Will. “Just for a minute?”

Josh figured there was no way he could say no to that. He knew from his own experience how helpful and good a man Will Mitchell was. If Birdie wanted to talk to him alone, so be it.

Will Mitchell was shaking his head, but Josh said, “I'll be right outside,” opened the door, pushed the mirror forward, and stepped out into the large storeroom.

Josh decided to take a closer look at an open bay of what looked like canned foods—soups, beans, juices. Next to it were shelves ten feet high of bread and rolls. . . .

He heard a noise behind him and turned to see Will Mitchell coming out of the inner room.

“He's going to be fine,” Will announced, his voice as loud as if calling a train over the PA and his hands raised high over his head.

“That can't be,” Josh stammered. “You were only in there together a minute or two.”

Will motioned for Josh to come back into the little room with him.

Inside, Birdie was lying on the cot, his legs stretched forward, his arms down along his sides. There was no cover or mattress on the cot, which was made of dark green canvas.

“This thing smells like mustard,” Birdie said.

Will said, “Close your eyes now, Birdie.”

Birdie's eyelids flicked up and down several times before staying shut.

“Are you all right, Birdie?” Josh said. “Will said you were going to be fine. Is that right?”

“I'll bet you he'll be asleep—like normal asleep—in a few minutes, if not seconds,” said Will.

Birdie didn't react with either a word or a movement. But his eyes remained closed. They had been that way now for at least thirty seconds.

Will put a finger up to his mouth. Stay quiet, please, Josh—that was the message.

Josh and Will did not move or make a sound for a full minute. Two minutes, three minutes.

Then, after Will again took out his watch, they left Birdie sleeping, carefully opening the door, moving the mirror aside, and then gently closing the door and letting the mirror swing back in position behind them.

Will offered Josh his right hand. “Great to see you again, Josh,” he said. “Now I really do have to go.”

“What did you do to Birdie?” said Josh. “You said you weren't a lunacy doctor—”

“Birdie and I worked out a little treatment that was special only to him, and it worked.”

“What treatment?”

“It doesn't matter. People can snap into lunacy and they can snap out of it. The important thing is that it worked and you can leave him with your mind at ease.”

“How do you know the snap will take—will last forever?”

“I know it as well as I know I have to leave right this second and take that little girl's tonsils out.”

Will removed a well-worn brown leather billfold from his right hip pocket. “I'm going to give you some money to give to Birdie once he wakes up. He'll need to catch a trolley or a bus to somewhere, maybe his home—wherever it is. Don't worry about him anymore.”

Josh thanked Will for his generosity.

Will gave Josh a one-dollar bill for Birdie. “Now, what about you, Josh? You're definitely going back to Somerset?”

“Of course I am,” Josh said. “I just didn't want to go until the kid was all right. I can't imagine what you did in there in just a couple of minutes.”

“Even in the world of lunacy medicine there are occasional miracles, Josh. Trust this one, and trust me. I know you have to go back. Now go in peace of mind.” Will extended two dollar bills toward Josh. “Buy yourself a ticket on this evening's southbound Flying Crow.”

Josh didn't take the money. “I'm sure I can steal a ride—”

“Take the money, Josh, for God's sake. Go back as a real person with your head high, not as a cowering thief. Are they likely to punish you for escaping—hurt you badly with a ball bat or something—when you get there?”

Josh said he didn't think so but he couldn't be sure. He took the two dollars.

“Thanks for whatever you did for Birdie,” Josh said. “I don't know what it was but . . . well, I really couldn't have left him the way he was.”

Will made a move to go.

“They said at Somerset that he was an insincere lunatic, not a maximum one,” Josh said. “But I didn't believe it, do you? You should have seen the way he was acting when we first got off the train. And don't forget Birdie wouldn't have been sent by some judge or doctor to Somerset in the first place if he hadn't been some kind of real lunatic. I never saw a sane person there.”

“I did, I think. I saw a few that seemed to be there because somebody paid some administrator to take them. Who knows?”

They shook hands again and embraced, and Will disappeared at a half trot in the direction of the employees' stairs, the way Janice had said for them to leave.

Josh pushed the mirror aside and returned to the little room to watch Birdie sleep.

Whatever else might be going on, Josh knew Birdie wasn't faking
that.
The kid was snoring.