Flying Crows (6 page)

Birdie, not looking at Josh, made no response. But Josh didn't mind. He kept talking.

“Well, you can sure tell that name doesn't have anything to do with his appearance, right? He's lumpy and plumpy and cuts his hair short. He's twenty-two years old. Would you have guessed that? I didn't. He seems much older, doesn't he? He sure does. That's because of what happened to him. It not only touched him in his mind, like your and my experiences did—”

“That's right.” Birdie interrupted Josh. “We had experiences that made us nuts. We can't sleep. That's what's wrong with you, and that's what's wrong with me. That's my disease. That's why . . . yeah, that's why they sent me here. Yeah, that's it. That's why I'm here. If anybody asks you, you tell 'em I'm really nuts. You tell 'em, OK? Why else would I put up with getting whacked and drowned? You tell 'em, Josh.”

Josh nodded, as if understanding and sympathizing, agreeing to tell everybody Birdie was a lunatic.

Then he went back to talking about Streamliner. “I was just saying that, as you could see, he looks nothing like a streamliner train, not that I have seen one of those except in magazines myself.”

Birdie smiled. “I've seen 'em many times, up close. I love the streamliners. They're magic. The Santa Fe has the best, going to California and Chicago. You can see the fancy people inside, eating off tablecloths, reading the newspaper. Someday they're going to make the streamliners all silver and run them on something besides steam. That's what they're talking about, at least.”

Josh was delighted by Birdie's excitement. “You should talk to Streamliner about trains.”

Birdie shook his head at that suggestion.

“Well, have you heard of a train called The Flying Crow?” Josh asked.

“Yeah, yeah. It's the Kansas City Southern's streamliner from Kansas City to Texas; it comes right by here, I think. ‘Straight as the Crow Flies.' That's the company's motto.”

Josh said, “Right, the tracks are at the bottom of the hill between here and town. The point is, Streamliner's nickname came from his believing he's a conductor on The Flying Crow. You heard him.”

“Yeah, but I didn't know exactly what he was doing. I just figured he was crazy.”

“That's right, he is. But he's doing better.”

Birdie turned away and settled deeper into the water, which was now just under his chin. He seemed to have lost interest in Streamliner's story.

But Josh went on anyhow.

“Streamliner's problem was caused by having witnessed something awful. He and his sister were walking to their one-room school on the other side of the track near a town called Hummer, not far up the line from here. She challenged him to a race and suddenly took off running. The Flying Crow, forty-five minutes behind schedule, came roaring through at that moment and struck her. Streamliner usually stops the story there but you don't have to be a genius or an artist to imagine what the engine of that speeding train did to that little girl right before her brother's eyes. All he ever said was that they barely found enough of her to bury in the cemetery.”

Birdie put his hands up on his ears. “Please, please, no details—no more.”

“We've all got to talk about what happened to us, what we saw, what we did.”

“That's even worse than what I saw, what happened to me.”

“It made Streamliner sick. He couldn't get over it or talk about it—or anything else. I mean, he didn't say a word to anybody about anything from that day until he spoke to me one day here at Somerset, ten years later. Imagine not saying a word for ten years. There are several around here who've gone even longer, but they're mostly back in the incurables wing now. Anyhow, I was the one who finally got Streamliner to tell the story of what happened to him. Do you want to tell me what happened to you?”

Birdie shook his head. “No, thanks. Not now.”

“All I'm saying, Birdie, is that you should talk to me—or to somebody else, if you want to—about what happened that causes you not to be able to close your eyes. That's all. Maybe it can help you the way it helped Streamliner to at least be able to say something—even if it's mostly only about trains.”

Birdie started laughing.
Laughing.
“That's a really great idea,” he said. “I can be an imaginary conductor on The Flying Crow? No thanks.”

“At least he's functioning . . . more than he was before. Watch him. He walks around here all day calling out the names of towns, urging people to get on board, watch their step, have their tickets ready. He's always joyful, smiling, talking or shouting, always moving, always clicking an imaginary ticket punch or busy with the business of getting his train on down the track.”

Birdie was still ignoring Josh. But that didn't stop Josh from talking.

“The bushwhackers mostly leave Streamliner alone. They and the doctors have figured that they have no better therapy to offer. They have no other way to help this tortured human being than to let him play conductor on the same train that ran over his sister. He mumbles himself to sleep every night, and that sure beats having a ball bat slammed against his head.”

“I don't want to pretend I'm a conductor on The Flying Crow, for God's sake,” Birdie said.

Josh would not quit. “They allow Streamliner a special privilege. Every Thursday morning he gets to go down the hill right next to the Kansas City Southern track and watch the northbound Flying Crow go by. The train always slows down when it gets to him, and he waves and shouts and the engineer blows his whistle—”

“You want to help
me,
get me a woman. I need women and they need me. All I need is to put my hands on a beautiful woman's tits for a few seconds and I'll be better. What about the women patients? Get me one of them.”

Now Josh laughed. “Can't do that. No fraternization of any kind allowed. There are no women available here at Somerset for men patients to do what you want to do, Mr. Birdie of Kansas City. The only form of sex available is through—you know, doing it to yourself.”

“That makes your hair fall out.”

“If that were true, there wouldn't be anything but bald men around here.”

They both laughed. It was the first time they had done that together.

“What happened to you, Birdie?” Josh asked quietly. “What did you see?”

“I'm not talking about it to anyone.”

Amos and the other two bushwhackers returned. They helped Birdie out of the tub and gave him a large white towel to dry himself off, but they wouldn't let him wrap it around himself when he was finished. Naked, Birdie went with them and Josh down the hallway and into the ward.

Birdie did not cover his genitals. Adjustment to life at the Sunset at Somerset sometimes came remarkably fast.

Once in the ward, the bushwhackers made Birdie, still naked, climb into bed and lie on his back, and they tied him down again.

“Close your eyes,” said Amos. “Let's see if the hot water calmed you down.”

Birdie closed his eyes. His arms and legs immediately stiffened and he screamed, “Nooooo! Don't shoot no more! The blood! No, no!”

Amos raised his slugger to whack Birdie in the head from the right and another bushwhacker got ready to do so from the left, but before either took a swing, Birdie opened his eyes and went absolutely and peacefully silent and still.

Lawrence of Sedalia's pleas and protests had become as much of
the show as Josh and, as always, his noise and screams for mercy
and deliverance were followed by other patients asking for the
same. Streamliner, as always, was going about his business as a conductor,
standing in an aisle and going through the silent motions of taking tickets and
helping passengers board his train.

The bushwhackers let the racket from Lawrence and the others go on a
few minutes, until it built to a small roar, and then stopped it short.

Amos the ass from St. Joseph came down to the front row and, with
everybody watching expectantly, bashed a padded Somerset Slugger down
across the top of Lawrence's head. That shut up Lawrence and the other
noisemakers.

The sound of the baseball bat landing on Lawrence's head was Josh's cue.
Now the show was really on.

Josh turned around to face his audience. Like magic, the look in his eyes
and around his mouth was that of a little boy, a boy of about eleven or
twelve. It was uncanny. How was he able to change his face that way? Who
knows? From the face of a grown man to that of a little boy—just like that.
Maybe it was the hair. His long dark-brown hair had disappeared under a
large flannel white-and-black-striped baseball cap. Or maybe it was magic.
Or maybe just acting.

In the high-pitched, squeaky unchanged voice of a boy, Josh said,

“I had gone to my grandmama's house that morning of September 27,
1864, to help her clean her cistern. Our little town of Centralia was in a wide
prairie with barely a tree high enough to climb, which meant you could see
from the roof of any building for miles around. We only had two hotels, a saloon, and two stores that sold dry goods plus our little train station. There
were about twenty-five houses, only two of them two stories high. One of
those was my grandmama's, and I liked to go up to the second floor and look
out to see what there was to see, which usually wasn't much. But this morning I hadn't been up yet because I had a chore to do. Some cottonwood
leaves and limbs had gotten down in the tank during a rainstorm a few nights
before.

“I was outside on the north side of Grandmama's house when, out of the
air like a bad breeze, came the voice of somebody yelling, ‘Bushwhackers!
Bushwhackers! They robbed the Columbia stage! They're all over town!' ”

Josh smiled, cleared his throat, and began talking in his normal adult
voice. He couldn't keep up that squeaking for the entire presentation, but he
did stay in the first person, telling the story through the eyes of a boy in Centralia in 1864.

“I knew about the stagecoach from Columbia, a bigger town and our
county seat, thirty miles south of Centralia. It came every day about this time,
and I often watched it approach from the south from Grandmama's second
floor.

“I raced around to the front of the house and saw little Willie Hooper running down our street raising dust. He was the one doing the hollering, so I
immediately put any worries to rest on grounds that Willie, two years
younger than me, was known for being afraid of his own shadow.

“But in a few seconds, coming up behind him in a huge cloud of flying
dirt, was a man on a big black horse who was dressed all in black, too. He
rode right on by Willie to me—to Grandmama's house.

“ ‘Breakfast, boy. I want some breakfast. You got some woman around in
that big house here who'll fix me breakfast?'

“It was a little late in the morning for breakfast, was what I thought first.
But then I looked closer at the man. I could tell he was evil. His look struck
me as being a cross between a black crow and a gray rat. He had a thin mustache and dark brown hair that was long and thick and everywhere, falling
like a prissy girl's over his ears, where it kept going into a wide beard that circled and covered the bottom part of his face before ending right in the center in a point. His hat, his shirt that looked velvet, his pants, and his boots
were all black. That hat was wide-brimmed and made of felt and it had a
star-shaped pin that held the brim against the crown in front. I had heard that
the bushwhackers wore a star as a sign they were organized like soldiers. The
star was silver, about the size of a lawman's badge.”

Josh closed his eyes, lowered his head. There wasn't a sound in the auditorium. Even Lawrence of Sedalia was quiet.

Then Josh raised his head. His eyes were open, but now they were slightly
squinted. “His eyes were cold like the ice across a frozen lake on a dirty gray
day. I shivered from fear.”

Josh saw Lawrence shiver and put his hands over his own eyes—as he always did at this part.

“Then I saw the pistols. There was one in a holster on each hip and
two more stuck down in his belt in front. They were enormous, the size of axes.

“ ‘You ought to try the El Dorado Hotel, back the other way by the station,
right in the center of town,' I said, pointing south. Like I said, what we had in
our small downtown wasn't much, but there
were
places to eat.