Flying Crows (3 page)

Josh remembered being brought here, straitjacket style, in the back of a marshal's open wagon, in 1905. He was wrapped in a gray woolen blanket with a rope tied around his chest, stomach, and legs because they were afraid he might throw a fit or try to escape. It seemed to him that he had seen a massive red building on the horizon, getting larger and larger, for miles and miles, hours and hours.

Would they ever get there? Would it be awful when they did?

“So, here we are at the Sunset in Somerset,” Josh said now to Birdie, as if he were announcing the arrival of a train—or a wagon.

The Sunset in Somerset. Josh sometimes wondered if there could be a second meaning to
sunset.
Up here on the hill at the asylum, things always seemed to be getting darker, with the inmates' suns never doing anything but setting.

Josh repeated none of this wondering to Birdie. The new kid's mouth was full of sandwich. To Josh's disgust, Birdie had covered the cheese between the bread with a coating of salt and pepper. Birdie nodded but clearly did not care about this building or what the people in town called it or anything else. He was just hungry—and tired.

“What did they do to you last night?” Lawrence of Sedalia, half-dressed as usual, asked Birdie, who no longer smelled like spoiled hamburger. His black hair was mussed, his eyes were bloodshot, but other than that he seemed almost normal to Josh. There was no trembling in his hands. His glances seemed engaged.

“They put me in a big tub of hot water for most of the night and then knocked me out with something. I only came to a little while ago,” said Birdie, pausing in his eating. “I woke up screaming in a little locked room all by myself. There was no window, only a slit through the door.”

“Why do you scream?” Josh asked.

“I told you. It's because I have the same craziness thing you do. I see awful things—blood and stuff—when I close my eyes.”

“Whose blood and stuff?”

“Cops and a crook.”

“Where?”

“At the . . . well, someplace like a train station.”

That didn't make sense to Josh. They had trains and passengers at train stations, not the blood and stuff Birdie was talking about. This kid may be a lunatic like the rest of us but maybe not, Josh thought. Maybe all he does is lie himself crazy. Could that be possible? It was times like this when he really missed Dr. Will Mitchell.

“They told me not to try to sleep or even close my eyes again unless there was an attendant with me,” Birdie said.

Josh knew what that meant.

“Meantime, they brought me here for lunch and told me to do whatever you do and what you tell me to do,” Birdie said to Josh. “They talk like you're almost one of them.”

“That's because he does an act in the John Paul Flynn Auditorium every Christmas and Fourth of July and Halloween,” Lawrence of Sedalia said. He was about forty, fat, friendly, bald, hazel-eyed. “I hate Josh's act. It makes me sick.” Lawrence closed his eyes, dropped his knife and fork, and covered his ears with his hands.

Streamliner said to Lawrence, “Tickets, please. Everyone must have a ticket.” Nobody paid any attention to Streamliner.

Richard of Harrisonville, a patient sitting next to Lawrence, whispered to Birdie, “We figure Lawrence is the craziest one of us. Wait till you see him at the auditorium when Josh does his act, new boy. You'll see.”

Richard was a squat fellow in his late thirties with smooth olive skin and a head of full dark-brown hair that he parted down the middle. His eyes seemed crossed; at least Josh had never seen both of them focused on the same thing at the same time. There were a lot of people at Somerset whose eyes were crossed or otherwise screwed up. Josh figured it was a sure sign of some kind of lunacy.

Still whispering, Richard leaned even more across the table to talk to Birdie, one eye focusing off to the right and the other to the left. Josh knew what he was going to do. Richard loved to tell new patients—all of whom he called “new boy,” regardless of their age—the story of how the John Paul Flynn Auditorium got its name.

“Today is Sunday, visitors' day,” Richard said to Birdie. “Did they tell you that, new boy?”

Birdie, still trying to eat his lunch, shook his head.

“Before long—from one o'clock sharp until two o'clock sharp—people from town and anywhere else in the world can come in to visit or just walk the grounds and stare.”

“Maybe some of my people will come see me,” Birdie said with a smile, the first Josh had seen on the kid's face. But it seemed a bit phony, like he really didn't expect anybody to come. “So will all the girls who love me.”

Richard went on with his story.

“It was a visitors' Sunday in March 1921, not that long ago, right, Josh? You were already here, right, Josh? You know what happened, right, Josh?”

Josh told Richard he was correct on all three counts, and Richard went on.

“John Paul Flynn was one of the four Flynn Brothers of Excelsior Springs. They operated the Flynn Circus that toured around Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. You ever go to a Flynn Circus, new boy?”

Birdie, the new boy, said he hadn't.

“Maybe they didn't come to big cities like Kansas City. That's where you're from, right, new boy? You a crook like Pendergast and those Italians? You a whiskey runner or a gambler, like most everybody I ever heard of from Kansas City on the Missouri side?”

Josh watched Birdie for some reaction, but the kid's face showed nothing beyond the fact that he was listening and not caring much about what he was hearing.

Richard didn't wait for an answer anyhow. He just went on, still in a whisper.

“John Paul came here to Somerset that Sunday afternoon to visit one of his brothers, Ronald James Flynn. He was thirty-two years old; John Paul was thirty-seven. Ronald had been committed here because every private hospital and doctor his rich family found couldn't cure him of his particular kind of lunacy. And, oh, boy, did he have a particular kind. Ronald, poor soul, had worked with the family circus's lions and tigers and, after a while, began to take on the sounds and movements of a ferocious lion. Right, Josh? You were here, Josh. Tell him I'm right.”

“Being a lion,” Josh said, “was, in fact, Ronald's sickness.”

Richard picked up his story. “On that Sunday, an ordinary one just like today, Ronald was allowed to walk around the grounds and Old Main with his brother without a bushwhacker or a Somerset Sister or anyone else watching over him. That was a mistake, wasn't it, Josh?”

Josh nodded. Birdie had quit eating altogether. He was listening intently.

“Because while strolling about, seemingly peaceful and all,” Richard said, “Ronald coaxed his brother John Paul into the empty auditorium— at that time named for no one—to watch a new act he said he had created for their circus. You can guess what happened, can't you, new boy?”

Birdie just sat there calmly looking at Richard, ready to hear the end of the story.

“Well?” said Richard. “What's your guess, new boy? What do you think happened?”

“Don't make him guess,” Lawrence whined. “Just tell him.”

“All aboard for The Flying Crow to Hummer and Kansas City,” Streamliner said. “Have your tickets ready. The sleeping car is the last one right before the club observation car. . . .”

Richard was determined to tell the story his way, which was always to drag it out as long as possible. There were rituals to most everything in life here at the Sunset in Somerset, just like there were at church and at lodge meetings and most everywhere else in the outside world. Josh knew there was no way Richard would change the speed of his storytelling—the ritual—for anybody, most particularly a new boy.

Richard bit into his apple, chewed the mouthful five, six, seven times. Then he took another bite and did it all again. He had two sips of coffee, after first blowing on it to make it cooler, an act that was strictly for show. That coffee had come out of the big stainless-steel pitcher already lukewarm.

Then he started whispering again.

“A bushwhacker, alerted by the sound of frantic screams for help, ran in too late to save John Paul from being mangled to death, lion style, by Ronald. Ronald killed his brother like a lion would kill a sheep or a deer or a big-game hunter. It happened right in the center of the stage where Josh does his Centralia act.”

Birdie continued not to eat, only to look at Richard as if he was—well, crazy.

“The asylum superintendent quickly decided to name the auditorium in memory of the dead brother and to lock up the other brother in Beech. He hasn't been seen since, has he, Josh?”

Josh agreed; to his knowledge, Ronald Flynn had never been seen outside the asylum's Beechcraft Wing.

There were three wings of patient rooms and dormitories that went out like appendages from Old Main. They had been named for airplane manufacturing companies by an asylum superintendent who, the story went, had grown up in Wichita, Kansas, where inventing, making, and flying small airplanes was a common enterprise. So there was the Stearman Wing, where Josh and the rest of the men lived, and the Cessna Wing for women on the other side. There was almost complete segregation between the men and women, the only time they ever saw one another being across their separate eating sections in the dining hall and out on the grounds doing their respective organized activities.

The third wing, which ran out the back of Old Main, was the Beechcraft Wing, called simply Beech, which was where the hopeless were housed: the incurable, the demented, the very old, and those physically ill with TB or something else besides insanity who were kept away from the rest of the asylum society to die out of sight. There was a large locked double door leading off to Beech. Josh had never been on the other side of it, and he had never talked to anyone who had.

Richard, his story finished, stood up and left the dining hall without a word or smile. That was what he always did, Josh explained to Birdie.

“Is that true, what he said?” Birdie asked.

“I'm afraid so,” Josh said.

“How could a man become a lion?”

“Wait till you hear Josh's Centralia story,” Lawrence said. “It's much, much worse.”

Lawrence also rose and departed. So did Streamliner and most of the others around them.

It was almost one o'clock, according to the large clock on the far wall over the door that led out to the hallway toward Stearman. Time for visiting hour to begin.

The bushwhacker named Jack came for Birdie. “Josh and I will take you to your space in the dormitory—your new home away from home, bud,” he said, in his foreign accent. When Josh first heard him he thought it was British, but, as it turned out, Jack was from New Zealand. He had come to Missouri with a nurse from Somerset he had met and married some other place far away—someplace like Malaysia, Singapore, China, Korea, or Australia. Now they both worked at the Sunset.

“Don't worry about any visitors who might come for you, bud,” said Jack. “I'll get you if they do.”

Jack was a tall well-built bushwhacker who never used a cussword or a Somerset Slugger on patients. He had been known to use his fists, which were large and soft, on a chin or a head, but usually gently and mostly only to put somebody to sleep—or out of his misery. He also used a soft rope instead of the regular hard leather straps as restraints.

Birdie dismissed Jack's comments about visitors with no sign of concern. That told Josh the kid from Kansas City was definitely only blowing smoke when he talked about his people and girls coming.

Josh and Birdie fell in together, Jack following them as they left the dining hall.

“How did you get the name Birdie?” Josh asked.

“My Aunt Grace, who was beautiful, gave it to me when I didn't eat all my food one day,” said Birdie. “She said I'd get as skinny as a bird on a skinny tree limb if I didn't eat more. ‘
Tweet, tweet, tweet,
little birdie.' And I was Birdie.”

“What was your name before it was Birdie?”

“What are you doing, taking the census for the government? My Aunt Grace's husband—her second or third, I think—worked for the post office at Christmastime. The rest of the year he didn't do much of anything the best I could tell, but nobody else was doing much either until Roosevelt came in because of Tom Pendergast.”

Because of Tom Pendergast? They didn't let patients read the daily newspapers, but Josh had heard some of the bushwhackers talk about the Pendergast machine in Kansas City. What he knew was that the machine was crooked and rough and tough but he didn't know they were responsible for Roosevelt—the one who was president now. Josh had heard about Teddy Roosevelt, who was a Rough Rider in glasses with no rims, but he knew little or nothing about this second one they called by his initials, FDR. He had the impression from God knows where that Roosevelt Two was the fault of a president named Herbert Hoover, who didn't think there was anything wrong with people standing in breadlines. That's what a bushwhacker named Jefferson said one time while he was running water in the tub for a hydrotherapy treatment. Josh couldn't remember exactly how long ago that was or how it had come up in the conversation. Jefferson normally didn't talk much about anything.
Je ferson.
Now there was a good name to have.

Birdie didn't respond to Josh's census question. It didn't really matter. Josh was only asking questions out of simple old-fashioned curiosity. He himself was Joshua Alan Lancaster, but the name no longer had meaning. He hadn't been called anything but Josh since he came to Somerset. Nobody except doctors and the superintendent, not even the bushwhackers, used last names. Birdie was Birdie, and as long as he was at Somerset that was all he would be.

The no-last-name thing was even true of the volunteers from town, including the Somerset Sisters. That came to Josh's mind right now because here came his favorite, Sister Hilda, down the hallway.