Flying Crows (2 page)

Within a few minutes, back inside Union Station to continue his search, his curiosity about the old man began to subside. Randy told himself that Birdie Carlucci was probably just another mentally disturbed homeless guy who had gone off his medicine. Whatever, the case would soon no longer be the business of the police anyhow.

Too bad, thought Randy. There was something intriguing about the old man.

And very likable.

II

JOSH AND
BIRDIE

SOMERSET

1933

Josh had been rocking in the common room for nearly ninety minutes when they hustled somebody in who smelled like bad meat and sat him down in the chair on his left.

“Hey, Josh, here's a new one named Birdie,” said Alonzo, a bushwhacker who smelled like Ivory, the soap that floats. “Teach him how to rock the loonies away.”

Bushwhacker
was what everyone here at the Missouri State Asylum for the Insane at Somerset called the attendants. Somebody had used the name several years ago as a kind of pejorative joke, but it caught on and was now part of the accepted language. Josh knew about the original bushwhackers, barbaric bands of Confederate guerrillas who preyed on Union soldiers and sympathizers during the Civil War. Their worst crime, of course, was committed in Centralia on a group of Union soldiers. He was an expert on that.

Josh said nothing but continued to move his rocker forward and back, as he did most every afternoon around this time. He didn't even think much of anything except how stupid it was to have everybody rocking like this every day. Nothing ever got rocked away.

“See you later, Birdie,” said Alonzo. “Watch Josh and see how he rocks. Rock, rock, rock, Birdie. Rock, rock, rock.”

Josh kept rocking, his eyes focused on the buzz haircut of Streamliner, the man in the chair directly in front of him.

Without looking, Josh knew Alonzo was gone but this new guy, Birdie, wasn't rocking. The chair on his left—it was only ten inches away—was not moving. Most of the others in the room were rocking. He could hear the low sounds
—bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta—
on the wooden floor. Forward,
bump . . .
and back,
ta.
How many people in how many rocking chairs were lined up in this big room of gray walls, doors, and ceilings? One day he counted as far as seventy-seven. Another day he stopped counting at eighty-two. The chairs, all dark pine exactly like his, and the people, all lunatics, were lined up in straight rows eight across like soldiers. Or schoolchildren. Or sticks.

Lawrence of Sedalia, four rows down and to the left, was one of a few who never rocked. Josh had never seen Lawrence's chair actually move. Lawrence always just sat there during rocking time, still as one of those statues of Civil War soldiers on a courthouse square. The only time Lawrence moved was when he took off his clothes, which, he said, drove him crazy. The bushwhackers used to make him put his clothes back on, but lately they'd begun to leave him mostly naked. Sometimes they got him to sweep the floors with one of their big brooms. Sweeping was the other routine thing to do around here. Josh never noticed that anything was swept away either.

Josh looked to his left, at the new loony. He's just a kid, he thought. Not even twenty. Sitting there rigid as a tree. Black hair. Bright white skin. Moist, greasy. Needs a shave. But good features in the face. Dressed in blue work clothes—the patients' uniform—but stinking like moldy green hamburger meat. They should have bathed him—hosed him down or thrown him in a hydrotherapy tub or something—before putting him in those clean clothes.

His eyes were wide open.

That's the way Josh's own eyes used to be before Dr. Will Mitchell helped him start his Centralia performances. Maybe this kid Birdie would perform something that could help him too. It was kind of working for Streamliner. Not Lawrence, not yet. Who knew if it ever would for him? Maybe he'd end up with the incurables, mostly old soldiers who saw something in the war that made them crazy.

“Ever sat in a rocking chair before?” Josh whispered to the new kid, Birdie.

Only whispered talk was allowed during rocking time. Josh waited several minutes for an answer that didn't come.

Then he said, “All you have to do is put your feet down on the floor in front of you and push back. Do it gently. Let the chair rock you forward, and then push your feet against the floor again. Do it over and over. Nothing to it. That's mostly what we do is rock—in the morning for two hours, in the afternoon for two hours, and after supper for an hour before we go to bed—so you'd better start doing it. Look over here and watch me. See how I put my feet on the floor and push back and then the chair rocks forward and I do it again? Try it. You can do it. If you don't rock you won't have much to do here, just sweep the floor or go to the library. They've got big heavy push brooms for sweeping and polishing the floors, and you can do that all day, but it's not as good as rocking. So rock; try it. You can only go to the library in the morning. Did Alonzo say your name was Birdie? Birdie from where? Where in Missouri you from? Birdie as in
tweet-tweet
?”

The kid turned his head toward Josh.

“
Tweet-tweet,
” he said, in a voice that was the opposite of a bird's—or at least any bird Josh had ever seen or heard. (Had the world created new kinds of birds since he came here?) The boy talked like a grown man speaking in a sewer. Maybe he had been in a sewer and that's what his smell was instead of rotten red meat turned green. The kid's face certainly didn't match a sewer. The wet white skin was all slick, free of the sickening big pimples that were on the faces of so many of the kids who came here. Josh asked a doctor once if pimples were a sign of lunacy, and the doctor only laughed. Except for Will Mitchell, who was now long gone, that's the way doctors here handled most of the questions they were asked.

“Kansas City,” said Birdie. “I'm from Kansas City. You?”

“Mostly from Centralia. I'm from Centralia.”

“Never heard of it.”

That made Josh want to yell something really bad at this tweet-tweet Birdie. Like, How stupid can you be to live in Missouri and not know about Centralia? Haven't you read any history? The Civil War in Missouri? But he caught himself in time and just said, “OK, then, fine with me. But start rocking, Birdie of Kansas City. You'll go even crazier if you don't rock. It's the only medicine they've got around here to calm you down besides a baseball bat and a lot of hot and cold water. They're working on some things with electricity and insulin and pills, but it's going to be a while before they know if they really work. So, for your own good, rock, Birdie of Kansas City.”

For your own good, rock.
Josh had an odd thought about this kid's own good. Josh had seen nothing in the guy's black eyes or in the way he moved the muscles of his face or anything else to mark him as a lunatic. Most of the others had some mannerism, even if it was only a peculiar stare or a hesitant way of speaking, or they constantly sniffed their noses or stuck fingers or dirty socks in their ears. . . .

The kid turned his head back straight and rocked.
Bump . . . ta,
bump . . . ta.
He did it again and again. “That's great,” Josh said, adjusting his own his rocking to be in sync with Birdie's. Forward they went together; back they went together.
Bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta,
bump . . . ta.
They rocked together like two soldiers in a close-order drill parade.

“You're a rocking natural,” Josh said after a while.

“It's making me sleepy,” said Birdie. His voice was too loud for rocking time.

“It's OK to sleep,” Josh said, as pleasantly and soothingly as he could, looking back over at the new kid from Kansas City. “I know about sleep because I couldn't do much of it for a long time when I came here.”

“Why not?” the kid asked. He stopped rocking.

“Every time I closed my eyes, I'd see something awful that I'd seen before, and I'd scream and rant. That's why I'm here.”

“That's it? That's what you do to show you're crazy?”

“Not everybody's the same kind of crazy, of course.”

Josh saw a smile come across the face of Birdie of Kansas City. Only a slight one and only for a second. “Me too,” Birdie said finally, as he turned back and resumed rocking. “That's my problem too. You bet. That's it. I close my eyes and scream. That's me too.”

Josh wondered about that, but he also hoped Alonzo or one of the other bushwhackers didn't hear Birdie. Talking wasn't allowed during rocking time. One of them might come over and club the kid with one of those padded bats called Louisville Sluggers—Somerset Sluggers around here. Josh had always loved baseball, particularly the semipro ball they played in the small towns of Missouri.

Josh watched as Birdie's eyelids began to close.

Then, in a flash, the kid from Kansas City threw his hands up toward the gray lead ceiling and screamed loud enough to be heard all the way there.

“No! Nooooo! Stop! Don't shoot no more! No! No! The blood! Look at the blood!”

So the kid really did have a problem. Certainly he did. Why else would he be here? They don't send sane people to places like this.

Josh considered trying to help the kid, but he knew it was no use—not right now.

In a count of less than ten, Slim, a skinny bushwhacker, was standing there in front of Birdie and his rocking chair. In his two hands he was holding his Somerset Slugger, a baseball bat with a piece of old quilt wrapped around the fat part and held in place by large rubber bands.

Slim was a bushwhacker with a mouth of brown and yellow teeth. He swung the bat hard, the padded part smacking against the left side of Birdie's head. The sound was simply the sound of a padded baseball bat hitting a man's head. Josh knew it well. There was nothing to compare it with because it was not like any other sound he had ever heard.

Birdie was quiet, knocked cold, his head drooping down on his chest.

Josh had never stopped rocking:
bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta,
bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta.

He wondered what kind of awful bloody horrors Birdie saw when he closed
his
eyes? He wondered when the last time was that Birdie went to sleep naturally, without the help of something like a Somerset Slugger.

Bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta.

“About the word
somerset.
It means somersault. Isn't that peculiar, Birdie? Isn't that hard to figure? Why would anybody name a town in Missouri after what clowns, tumblers, and acrobats do at the circus?”

Birdie, now into only his second day at the lunatic asylum, stared at Josh as if he were seeing somebody who really was a lunatic.

They were sitting next to each other for lunch in the dining hall at a table with several other patients. The food, which they had gotten on their own from a cafeteria line, was a cheese sandwich on plain white bread, a glass of milk, a green apple, and a cup of black coffee. There were thirty long tables with bench seats—fifteen for men on one side, fifteen for women on the other. The dining hall was painted lime green and was the size of a small high school gymnasium.

Josh was following the orders from a bushwhacker named Jack to give Birdie, the new kid from Kansas City, the lay of the land here at Somerset. It was an assignment they had begun to give Josh more and more, and he relished doing it.

“The people in the town of Somerset, the sane people, call our asylum the Sunset because there's no way to look west from anyplace in town without seeing mostly Old Main up here on Confederate Hill. You know, don't you, that that's where we are now, in Old Main, the biggest building on the grounds, if not in the whole state of Missouri?”

Birdie shook his head, as if Josh were speaking a foreign language.

The guy's clearly had a bad night, thought Josh. There's no telling what they did to him to get him to go to sleep.

But Josh had figured Birdie must have paid some attention to where he was being brought yesterday. This four-story structure of red brick, turrets, and tiny windows was so huge, so dominating, that it was not only impossible to look past it to the setting sun from Somerset; it could most likely be seen from across the state line in Kansas.