Flying Crows (20 page)

XVIII

RANDY

KENWOOD

1997

The old man slept for more than twenty minutes.

“What kind of policeman are you?” he asked Randy, within seconds of opening his eyes again.

“I'm a detective, a lieutenant. I handle mostly armed robberies— holdups, shootings.”

“You're not working on the Union Station massacre, are you?”

Randy laughed. “No, sir. That's history and
only
history now. Nobody but professors and book writers are working on that anymore. I'm just curious about it.”

“I was there.”

Randy held his breath, but Carlucci said nothing else. “So you said. What did you see, Mr. Carlucci? I'd love to hear your story.”

“I was paid to be there that morning.”

“Who paid you? Who were you working for?”

“Some guys—mostly Italian, like me.”

“What were you doing for them?”

“Hawking newspapers—kind of. They hired me because they knew I knew the place; I went there a lot with my cousin, who was a real
Star
boy. They wanted somebody who knew Union Station.”

Randy stopped rocking. “You said something the other morning about Pretty Boy Floyd and Righetti. Did they hire you? Were they there? Did you see them?”

“I'm not saying any names. Never have, never will.”

“Was your not wanting to be a witness the real reason you went into hiding that day at Union Station?”

Carlucci smiled. “I guess a person could figure that would be the last place they'd look for me—at the scene of the crime.”

“Who, Mr. Carlucci? Who was looking for you?”

Birdie Carlucci stopped rocking and looked over at Randy. “The guys who hired me, the cops, J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men: I figured everybody was looking for me. I was a kid, I was scared, I didn't want to be found by anybody. That's why I was sent to Somerset in the first place.”

“I don't get it,” Randy said.

Birdie smiled and resumed rocking. “After the massacre, the guys who hired me were afraid I might talk and because I was a kid they didn't want to kill me, I guess, so they paid off some big shot at the asylum to stash me there until it all blew over. That was the plan. At Somerset, nobody but the guy they paid off knew I was a phony, so I had to fake being nuts for everyone else. I was doing pretty good at it,
too
good, so after a few whacks to the head and my fooling with Hilda, Josh got me out of there.”

The old man's voice cracked—and then fell silent. Randy couldn't tell if it was from weariness or the subject.

After another twenty or thirty up-and-back rocks, Carlucci spoke again. “Have you ever seen Somerset?” he asked Randy. And when Randy said he hadn't, Carlucci was off again. He had his voice back.

“From a distance it looks like a castle in a moving picture, but up close it was a place for making people crazy. You were supposed to be that way when you got there, but Josh said if you weren't, they'd make you that way. He was right. I wasn't there long enough to find out much except about the rocking and the sweeping. But I knew I'd really be crazy if I'd stayed there long. They hit my head a lot. They also made me run around naked and spend a lot of time in a bathtub. So, like I said, with Josh's help, I went back to Union Station and made me a life there. It was great. I had the trains and the people and the books. The most exciting times were when there were wars. I loved watching the men in their uniforms come through in troop trains. They were all so full of fight and noise and whiskey. I entertained three WACs at one time during World War Two. They had missed a train connection to Chicago and had to spend the night at Union Station. I invited them to my room, and it was cozy and wonderful. I did my part for the war effort, was the way I saw it.” Carlucci laughed. So did Randy.

“The Korean War didn't bring so many troops through the station. I saw in the papers it wasn't as big as World War Two. I saw Harry Truman forty or fifty times, I guess, coming or going from the station to Washington and other cities. He always walked through like he was going somewhere but he usually took the time to wave and smile at everybody, including me, when we were close enough for us to see each other's eyes. Even after he was no longer the real president I saw him as
my
president. He was a great man. I read about it in the newspapers when he died. That was a very sad day for me.”

There were tears in the old man's eyes now, Randy saw. But he kept talking.

“Many of the trains quit running once the war in Vietnam started. I never really understood that war, but it upset a lot of people. That was when the really bad times began for me. You ever hear of a train called The Flying Crow?”

Randy said yes. He knew about that long-gone Kansas City Southern passenger train.

“Josh and I came to Union Station from Somerset on the Crow—that's what the railroad people called it.”

“Yes, I remember you told me that the morning I found you.”

Birdie Carlucci ignored the interruption. “The Crow was a beautiful sight coming into Union Station on Track Three; that was its usual track. For a long time, I went down there to watch the Crow arrive every morning, thinking maybe Josh might be on it. I always believed that someday he would leave Somerset and come back to Union Station—even if it was just to connect with another train going somewhere else. When he did, I wanted to be there. I wanted to apologize to him.”

“For what?”

“For faking it, for lying to him. He thought I was a real lunatic, but I wasn't—never was. I saw the first day I was at Somerset how some of the loonies seemed to scream from something awful they'd seen in their lives, so I decided that's what I would do too. I'd really seen something bad— the Union Station killings—and I wanted the attendants and the doctors to think I was a real nut. Josh thought I was real, too. I never told anybody about the Union Station thing, of course, until I told Josh at Union Station later. Nobody at Somerset knew what kind of awful thing I was pretending to see when I was screaming. Josh tried to help me from the beginning. Later, I let him believe his doctor friend had snapped me out of it. That was at Union Station.”

“Was the doctor named Mitchell, Will Mitchell?” Randy interrupted.

“Sounds about right. I was only with him a short time. I came away liking him because I got him in private away from Josh for a minute, told him I was a fake lunatic, and asked him to help me convince Josh I was OK. Josh was trying to get me to memorize another man's horror story about how his sister got torn to pieces by The Flying Crow, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it. The doctor said OK because he'd already pretty much figured out I was a phony. I was trying at first to keep Josh thinking I was too crazy for him to leave me alone so he wouldn't go back to Somerset. That was an awful place but, to be honest, I also wanted to be with him.”

The old man took several quick, short breaths. Randy had a million questions but decided not to ask them.

“That doctor said he knew all I was up to was getting a free breakfast at the Harvey House. So he told Josh he had performed some kind of quick miracle on me and I closed my eyes like I was normal and, before I knew it, I went into a real, normal sleep. The only other thing that was real was my looking around for cops and mob guys when Josh and I got to Union Station that morning. Josh thought I was just nutty. But the rest was lies. I shouldn't have done that to Josh. He was trying to be my friend. He
was
my friend. I shouldn't have done that.”

Randy had no idea what most of this was about. A little girl torn to pieces by The Flying Crow? But he decided to let it be.

“Josh never did show up, but it gave me something to think about when I woke up each morning, something real and lovely to do no matter what else.
Are you coming this morning, Josh?
My plan was to tell him everything and then see if he would forgive me, and then I would try to talk him into staying there at Union Station with me. I was going to show him around, let him see all the books I had collected, and maybe he would see how great a life it could be for him. I also thought having him there would be great for me too. I got very lonely at times, particularly every Christmas Eve. There were always great red and green lights and baby Jesuses and wiseman dolls and a huge Christmas tree in the grand lobby. There was Christmas music playing and little old men in Santa suits and people carrying presents. I watched all the hugging in the grand lobby and down at the tracks when families were coming together or parting before or after Christmas. But none of it was for me. If I were a poet I'd write something about being in the middle of thousands of songs and lights and words and laughs but none of them for me. I was alone. My birthday—November twelfth—was even worse than Christmas. I'd wake up and say, Happy birthday, Birdie. But then I'd go through the whole day without anybody else saying that to me. I tried one year acting like November twelfth didn't come. I went from November eleventh to November thirteenth, not reading the papers in between. It didn't work. How can anybody wipe out his birthday? You ever been alone?”

The question was for real. “Nothing like what you're talking about, I guess,” Randy said. It was as honest a response as any he had ever given.
Alone.
He would never again think of that word in the same way.

“I sometimes talked to passengers and people hanging around, but never for long and never in a way that was really personal. Most of the bums that slept on the waiting-room benches were drunk or living in other worlds. I didn't want them in mine. Most of them got picked up regularly by the police and were thrown in jail for a while. I didn't want any part of that. It was my choice. I can't blame anybody. Alone was what my life was. I figured all I needed to make it better was one person. I didn't need a crowd or a family, just one person to be with. Josh would have been perfect. But he never came.”

Randy tried to picture this poor man meeting the same train day after day, year after year. On reflex, he said, “I'm so sorry, Mr. Carlucci. That must have been terrible for you every day.”

Carlucci raised his left hand in a movement of dismissal and said, “That's what friends do.”

At least Randy understood that part of the story very well.

“The Kansas City Southern pretty much replaced the Crow as their main train with a new streamliner called The Southern Belle. Then, in 1967, they killed the Crow off altogether. I went down to Track Three to watch its last trip in from Texas and Louisiana. It had its diesel engine and it was painted in the yellow, red, and black colors of the Kansas City Southern. There were only a dozen passengers on it and a few other people around—nobody important or special. I couldn't get over why nobody was there to make a fuss over the last trip of The Flying Crow. I really cried that day. I went into one of my rooms and cried. Things like the Crow and people like Harry Truman shouldn't be allowed to die, should they?”

Randy said he agreed about that.

“I was also probably crying too because it meant that Josh would never ride The Flying Crow out of Somerset.”

Carlucci paused, took a long breath.

“The most awful part about when the trains stopped running was that it also meant they stopped taking good care of Union Station. First, parts of it were closed off, including the whole sixth floor, which by then had been turned over to some people who collected toy trains. They had them running around on tables. Some fool took out all the wooden benches in the waiting room and replaced them with colored seats. From the newspaper, I read about the material they used: plastic—something new, I guess. They looked awful. The Harvey House closed and other restaurants came and went until one day there weren't any at all. That meant I had to go outside to get something to eat. The Salvation Army was fine, and occasionally I found things people had thrown away. The newsstand closed and so did the bookstore. Fewer passengers meant fewer books left behind in the waiting room for me to read.

“I woke up one day in the eighties—late in the eighties—and realized I was almost the only person left. They weren't keeping the place clean or painted. Water leaked through from the roof every time it rained or snowed. The big clock quit working. The passenger trains were no longer run by railroads but by the government. The passenger cars and engines were all silver with red, white, and blue trim. Everything was alike. Then, one day, they weren't here either. No trains, no stores, no girls to love, no people at all, no nothing. Just me. Only me.

“The thing I missed the most at first was the noise. There was nothing more exciting to me than the commotion of all those people traveling or working on the railroad, moving around that big old place like they were in a separate town—a different world from everything outside. I was scared for myself and how I was going to live. I thought about giving up, of surrendering, of just going to a policeman and announcing,
All right,
here I am. I'm the escaped lunatic from Somerset. Birdie. Yeah, yeah, Birdie, that's
me. And I saw the big massacre here, too.
I actually walked out of my room a couple of times on the way to do that, but I always stopped before I got to the top of those basement stairs. I wanted to be where I was; I wanted to stay at Union Station.