Flying Crows (4 page)

“Josh, Josh, good morning,” she said with a wide smile.

“Good morning to you, Sister Hilda,” said Josh.

Without having to look, Josh could feel the heat of excitement gushing out of the kid Birdie. It was certainly understandable. Mrs. Hilda Owens, the young wife of the vice president of the Somerset Bank & Trust Company, was a strikingly beautiful woman who, particularly from the side, seemed all set for a shampoo advertisement in a magazine. Her hair was bright yellow, her skin milky white, her lips large and red. The shape of her body, clearly discernible through a red-and-white flowered dress, would, as they say, turn a pope's head.

“This is Birdie,” Josh said. “He just came in yesterday.”

“Well, Birdie, welcome to Somerset,” said Sister Hilda in a voice that was light, airy, musical. “I hope you are a poetry fan like Josh.”

“I am, I am. I love poetry. Yes, ma'am. I love every word of it.” Birdie's words jumped out of his mouth like popping corn.

“That's wonderful. Be sure and come to my reading on Tuesday. I'm planning to read some of Vachel Lindsay and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

“I'll be there. I will, I will, I will.”

As she walked on, Birdie watched her every moving part, most particularly her magnificently rounded rear end and her legs, visible through straight-seamed silk stockings, which were perfectly formed.

“On with ya, bud,” Jack the bushwhacker said.

Birdie seemed unable to move. “Who is she? Why is she here?”

“She's what they call a Somerset Sister,” Josh explained. “That's the same as gray ladies in hospitals. They come here to help during Sunday visiting hour and do other things for the patients.”

“What kind of other things?” Birdie asked, with a silly grin on his face.

“Let's get a move on, buddies,” said Jack.

“I could tell just now that she liked me,” Birdie said to Josh, once they started walking again. “Didn't you see the way she smiled at me? Women all do that.”

Josh was struck by how rare it was for a Somerset patient to say anything routinely normal about a reaction to a woman.

But as they arrived at a large locked door that led to Stearman Wing, Josh thought it best to issue a warning. He said to Birdie, “There once was a patient, a handsome fast-talker from Webb City, who thought he saw the same thing in a Somerset Sister who was the wife of a lawyer in town. He tried to act on it, she told everybody, and they beat his head so hard and so often with sluggers that within a week he was dead from what they called
brain poisoning.
”

Josh didn't think Birdie heard what he said because the new boy from Kansas City still had that silly—normal—smile on his face.

The curtain opened for Josh. There he stood, dressed in short
dark-green pants and a white shirt with bloused sleeves and a
large collar. His flowing hair looked very appropriate with that
outfit. He was greeted by a loud noise of clapping and shouting.

John Paul Flynn Auditorium had the appearance and feel of a second-rate
theater or opera house. Its main floor slanted up from a three-foot-high stage.
There were several dressing rooms in the back and a curtain of heavy red
velvet across the front. There were some four hundred folding wooden
chairs arranged in a half-moon on the slanted floor and another hundred
seats in a one-tier balcony. Christmas and other holiday pageants and performances by asylum musical and dramatic groups were held here.

Josh bowed with a flourish and then stood up like a soldier snapping to attention. Looking straight ahead toward the back of the hall, making no eye
contact with anyone, he spoke in a stiff, formal manner, very different from
his usual way.

“This account I am about to give to you comes from my own experience
as a participant and eyewitness to one of the most barbaric massacres in the
history of our state of Missouri, if not our world. The story I will now tell is as
weird a tale as ever grew out of the most vivid imagination of any writer of
fiction.”

Josh paused and moved his eyes around the auditorium. It was a crucial
part of his opening ritual. Hear ye, hear ye, listen up! That was the message,
the order of the day.

Everyone obeyed. Some four hundred people, patients and staff, sitting in
chairs and standing around on the sides, were quiet.

“If anyone here is a person prone to fits of fear or screaming when confronted with tales of savagery, gore, and horror, I would advise them now either to leave the room, which they can't do without permission, or close their
eyes and ears, which they can do on their own. Because I hereby forewarn
everyone present that what you are about to experience, through the
straightforward, unembellished, true, and accurate recitation of my experience as a small boy in Centralia, is something that can only bring you to the
outer limits of your ability to tolerate savagery, gore, and horror.”

The words and sentences came out like they were part of sharp turns at
the corners of a box. If the people in the audience hadn't known for sure already who he was, they might well have thought Josh, this man onstage
dressed like a kid, was really somebody else.

“Like the radio show or a burlesque moving picture, only everybody
dies!” one of the patients yelled, as was usual at this point in the program.

Josh did not respond. He acted, as always, as if he had not heard.

Then he slowly, deliberately, turned his back on the audience, which momentarily created absolute silence. The new patients who were seeing this
for the first time were shushed silent by fellow patients and bushwhackers.

That was because Josh's about-face signaled that his Massacre Act was
about to begin. Silence, everyone!

“Let me out of here! Please! Let me out!”

That was Lawrence of Sedalia in the front row, where the bushwhackers
always made him sit. Lawrence was simultaneously trying to hold his hands
over his eyes, his mouth, and his ears while screaming and crying and sobbing. He pleaded with the bushwhackers not to make him see Josh's show
again, but they always insisted that he do so. It's good therapy for you,
Lawrence, they said. Witnessing Josh getting over his problem will give you
the strength and hope to get over
your
problem someday.

Nobody seemed to know exactly what Lawrence's problem was, but they
mostly called it civilian shell shock. Lawrence walked around the asylum almost always naked because clothes reminded him of something awful he
had witnessed in Sedalia, a town in central Missouri. Supposedly, what he
saw was his uncle, a Holiness preacher from Texas, tear the clothes off his
wife and two infant children and then drown them in a lake to protect them
from the spirit of the devil that was moving toward Sedalia from Durant, Oklahoma. To Josh, Lawrence mostly seemed shy and withdrawn and off in another world, except when he was watching Josh's Massacre Act. Would being
scared cause him to put his clothes on, rid him of his shyness, and chase out
his demons?

Josh was sure the bushwhackers permitted his regular performances because it gave them pleasure to watch him terrify Lawrence and the other lunatics, but he hated to think about that. He wasn't onstage tonight or any
other night to understand or feel guilty; he was there to be the star, to entertain, to be a swell example, to be the patient who had made the greatest
progress in overcoming his lunacy by standing up in front of a group of fellow lunatics and scaring them out of their wits.

III

RANDY

KANSAS CITY

1997

Randy was working an overnight armed robbery at an apartment near the Country Club Plaza. A uniformed patrol squad had brought in a thug to city jail this morning they thought might be good for it.

The man in custody was somebody Randy had encountered more than once. He was not only willing to talk about last night's robbery but would also implicate others in exchange for a break on a possible habitual-criminal charge. Randy said he would pass that on to the district attorney's office. And that was that.

On his way out of the small jail conference room, Randy passed by the Cage, one of the holding cells where as many as twenty or twenty-five prisoners were kept temporarily while their cases were processed. It was a crowded, noisy, awful place to be—and sometimes even dangerous for prisoners not used to this rough, violent, profane world.

Randy, his mind on the robbery suspect, hadn't even glanced in the cell on his way to the interview, but now he did. And there, huddled in one corner, his head down and his hands around his legs, was an old man with wild white hair.

It was the Union Station bum! The guy they'd found yesterday. What was his name? Birdie. Right. Birdie . . . something.

Randy was furious. He began to count to ten—maybe even thirty or forty for this one. He had a hot temper that he worked hard at controlling, in the interests of advancing his police career as well as his family life. His promotion to sergeant a few years back had been delayed three months while he underwent counseling by a psychologist who specialized in anger management. That grew out of his throwing a heavy metal chair from a window of the detectives' squad room when informed of a judge's decision to put a particularly vicious holdup man back on the street. The chair fell four floors to the street, barely missing the head of a passing pedestrian.

Counting before acting on a particular burst of rage was the cure.

He was up to thirty-five by the time he arrived at the main processing desk to confront the sergeant in charge about Birdie . . . Carlucci? Yes. Birdie Carlucci was what he had said his name was.

“I just saw a guy named Carlucci in the Cage,” Randy said. His upper lip was quivering, but otherwise he was in control. “He's a sick old man who needs help from social services. What's going on?”

The sergeant, younger but as rough and ready as Randy, looked at some papers. “The computer maybe came up with a
wanted
on him, I don't know. Maybe we're waiting for some clarification. He'll most probably be out of here to a group house somewhere.”

“He escaped from a state hospital more than sixty years ago! At least put him in a cell by himself. He'll get eaten up in the Cage.”

The sergeant agreed, and in a few minutes Randy went with a jail guard to the Cage to retrieve Carlucci and settle him into an individual cell. It was small but it was clean and had a cot, a chair, and its own commode.

“Did you find Josh . . . yet?” Carlucci asked Randy, once the guard was gone. Without being invited, Randy sat down in the chair and motioned for Carlucci to sit on the cot. The old man's speaking, while still deliberate, was not as halting as it had been. But he did seem sick—and more frail even than when they found him two days ago.

“No, I haven't had a chance to get on that yet,” Randy said. “To tell you the truth, without his last name I don't even know where to begin.”

“Centralia. I said he was . . . from Centralia. They would . . . know where he is. He was from Centralia.”

Randy said he would try Centralia. “I'm sorry you got tossed in that holding cell, Mr. Carlucci. We call it the Cage and that's about all it is. Are you feeling all right?”

“I'm fine, thank you. I . . . didn't mind that many people. It has . . . been a long time.”

“I assume they've given you plenty to eat? You still look pretty weak.”

“I am not really . . . hungry.”

“How did you eat while you lived at Union Station?”

“At first, mostly with help from a wonderful Harvey Girl . . . Janice. She gave me leftovers. I ate like a king. When the Harvey House closed, it was . . . much harder. And it was really hard after the last restaurant closed, the one that came in after the Harvey House.”

In Randy's mind, the Union Station had begun its real decline when the Harvey House closed in the 1960s. Randy was fourteen or fifteen at the time. He had read a story in the
Star
that said Kansas City hadn't been the same since, and he was inclined to agree. Even though he had had little more than sweets and sandwiches there, he considered every bite or sip of what he consumed at the Harvey House to have been memorable.

“Janice?” Randy asked, almost by reflex. “Did she have a last name?”

“I am sure she did . . . but she never told me what it was. We had some great times together . . . and not just eating.”

“Where, exactly?”

“At Union Station.”

Randy was as confused as he was curious. But he had to get on to the district attorney's office.

He left Birdie Carlucci with the assurance that it wouldn't be long before a social worker helped find him someplace to go besides a jail cell. Most likely, in a community-based group housing facility run by the city-county health services people.

“We don't put folks like you in jail anymore, Mr. Carlucci,” he said at the cell door, “and, like I told you before, all the state hospitals—you know, for people with your kind of problems—are closed.”

“I'm not a lunatic. I mean . . . not anymore.”

Randy thought of Carlucci's desire for Randy to contact Josh.

“When was the last time you saw your friend Josh?”

“Oh, that was the day I came . . . to Union Station: in 1933.”

“How old was he at the time, do you remember?”

“He was pretty old, sixty or seventy . . . something like that.”

“How old are you, by the way?” Randy asked. This would definitely be his last question.

“About the same as Josh . . . was.”

Randy promised to stay in touch.

And suddenly his curiosity about this man had returned—big time.

Janice the Harvey Girl. As a kid, Randy had had many a wet dream while imagining what treasures and pleasures lay in wanton waiting under all those layers of Harvey Girl skirts and aprons and stockings.