The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  April’s eyes have grown accustomed to the dark and she can see the outlines of her sister inmates sleeping in their beds. She had noticed, while she told her story, that some of the women had doubled up in their beds and soft moans had preceded their descent into sleep. Now she hears another noise, the crackling of feet just beyond the bamboo bars. Her lover has arrived. April slips quietly from her bed and as she reaches the bars she smells him, his odour hanging heavier than the other chemicals in the air.

  Peter has been studying a chapter that deals explicitly with the female anatomy. As he stands palming the knots of the bamboo he pictures her approach. A pair of tires hang from a hollow tree and inside the tree lies a woman in sunglasses under a wide sombrero. She stretches her semi-nude body across a beach towel and pats the grass beside her, beckoning. Peter straightens in the dark as the scent of her breath washes his nostrils. He clears his throat.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “I’m sorry you’re in there.”

  April laughs and quickly stifles herself with a hand to her face.

  “Let’s not talk. Touch me.”

  Peter hovers his hands through the bamboo, careful not to make contact with the bars. He feels her fingers slipping around his wrists as she lowers his hands onto her hips. The bamboo is so thick that when they wedge their faces between the bars their lips barely touch. When they do, and she flips her tongue along his teeth, he jumps back slightly and she pulls him hard against the cage. She pushes her breasts between the spaces and they brush against his chest before falling just short of his skin. They pull at each other’s bodies stretching their buttocks apart with digging hands. As they writhe their hips into bars Peter’s cock jumps across the inches that separate them, pressing below her navel and falling into the top of her pubic hair. April turns her hips sideways into the space with his cock becoming wet against her. She tries to grip the bamboo with her thighs, slickening the smooth bars with her pussy juice. Neither of them can come this way and this pushes them both suddenly apart. In the dark Peter wipes his mouth. April slides a finger between her legs to preserve the throb there. When she speaks, her words come out in short pants.

  “Listen … we have … to find … we have … to find …”

  “Listen, I want to get you out. I know I can never explain to you why … this is … why.”

  “It’s OK. Later you can tell me why the hell I’m in a cage on an island in Rice Lake. Believe me I want hear all about it, but first get me out of here.”

  “Tomorrow night, at midnight, I will set you free.”

  As Peter stumbles up the hill, pulling up his pants, he is angrily trying to recall her name. He keeps thinking Ample, is it Ample? — but no, he thinks, that’s not even a name. Peter is stopped suddenly by the jumpy beam of light that hits his eyes.

  “Hey, virgin. You want to spring your little bunny, eh? You want to hit the town with your pretty little wife? Well I got news for you, sucker, you open that cage, even a tiny bit, and she’ll knock you over when she bolts.”

  Peter feels the rough pull of hands as the light clicks off.

  ★

  Dr. Daiquiri stands with a drink in his hand, leaning against the stone column. He is a huge man with a vast belly that heaves up into his barrelled chest. His hair is long and thin and a great, thick moustache hides his chewing mouth. He wears a long white cotton robe that falls over his sandals. When he drains the glass through his moustache, its edges serrated by wetness, he stretches his arm out and back behind himself. A woman rises from the floor and pours a clear fluid into his glass from a labelless bottle. She takes a drink for herself directly from the bottle and she slinks out in front of him. She turns her head to the side as she swallows and draws a bare, white shoulder up to her chin. She lays the bottle in the dolphin’s shell and shakes her hair with hands that flutter at the ends of long black gloves. She picks up the bottle again to drink before speaking.

  “Doctor, I was thinking, before you get busted for your little pussy farm, let’s have a big fuckin’ orgy.”

  Daiquiri draws himself up with professional indignation. “For your information, you hot bitch, this isn’t a pussy farm, as you call it.”

  The woman fixes her gaze on the cage in the compound below. Her lips curl up over pointy white teeth.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Doctor. This is your pussy army; isn’t that right, honey?”

  Daiquiri steps forward, fills his glass from the bottle as he passes her, and stands, a tall and central figure in the sun that spreads down the hills. He seems to lock himself to this figure, raises his jaw imperiously, and speaks with the mock maturity of a scientist.

  “Army. An army of women. Soon, my little muffin, the strong men of Bewdley will have soaked up enough estrogen, they’re slipping in it on the streets by now for Christ’s sake, that my raw materials here in cages’ll be able to kick the wiggle right out of their cute butts. My amazons will get their revenge on my smooth-faced gender and when they do, I’ll consume such a quantity of estrogen, myself, that my tits’ll rise up and knock this moustache clear off my face. And then I, Dr. Daiquiri, shall be Ontario’s first monarch.”

  The woman twirls her thumb around the neck of the bottle. “OK honey. For the record I think you’re insane, but let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that this makes some sense. If your secret weapon, estrogen, is what makes your army so powerful, how come you think it’s gonna make your enemy so weak? Answer me that one, queen for a day.”

  Daiquiri points his forehead toward the cage and smiles under his moustache.

  “Obviously you haven’t looked closely at the effect estrogen exposure has had on the fair studs of Bewdley. Just yesterday, when I made a secret tour of the town, I saw this big, brawny son of a gun scissor kicking over a fence to rope a cow. A scissor kick for Christ’s sake. Probably worth a gold badge at the Ontario girls track and field competition. But, really, I nearly gave myself away laughing at him. My estrogen scissor kicks in a male, but it drop kicks in a woman. My little army is deadly, believe me.”

  The woman walks up behind Dr. Daiquiri and lifts the back of his robe. She spins her finger at the base of his spine, knotting the long hair at the top of his buttocks. Daiquiri downs his drink and juts his erection between the buttons of his robe. The two walk in each other’s arms across their patio and through the wide doors. On the branch of a tree that hangs between the dolphin and the facade of the house, two sitting birds drop into the air and float down onto the empty patio. They poke their beaks through the parts of Daiquiri’s speech that are lying, unaccountably solid, on the smooth marble. The birds tear at the fibres of the speech, swallowing it in shreds, and then they fly off, limping on their full bellies, into the air and over the trees toward Bewdley.

  In the light of day the women are miserable. They are forced into commando exercises and boot camp drills. Maria quickly establishes herself as the gang’s physical leader, her anger and her prowess make her a natural dominant. In this capacity her better qualities start to show, she is patient and enthusiastic; in fact, part of her is deeply fond not only of the other women, but also of their predicament. For Maria, the world has finally agreed to show itself and she welcomes this with a war face. She has now grown soft and encouraging towards Blondie, who proves in every one of her eighty tearful push-ups that her inner resource, her secret resolve, is made of such fierce iron that it’s no wonder she’s afraid. When they rest, strewn about the ground, sweat-soaked and reacquainted with the strangeness of this life, Blondie seeks out the arms of Sandra, who is, in spite of everyone’s nightly coupling, the gang’s only biological lesbian. Blondie, however, has fallen so deeply in love with Sandra that her lesbianism is a compelling fact. Maria’s only serious contest is with April. While Maria works to concentrate the women, April exposes them dangerously to distraction. To April, the world beyond the cage need on
ly be dreamt; walking into it will make it hers again. For Maria, however, it’s a world that will be destroyed by her escape, it will disintegrate under her touch. During the drills April tracks everyone who walks beyond their bars and Maria burrows into the women. She baptizes her escape in the burn of their bodies with eyes that are cinder to the core. At night April tells her stories. All of them include a man who is arrested, jailed and hung; and in each story the sexual part gets longer, until by the fourth night, the man’s arrest is merely a pretext for getting him into the shower with other men. Every night at midnight April stands alone in the moonlight waiting at the bars for her lover who does not come. Except on the fifth night, as she finishes her story …

  “Kelly wiped his brow and licked the sweat from his lips. Around him his lovers lay spent and sleeping, he counted their buttocks and divided them by two — sixteen sleeping men, sixteen wet dreams tied together like damp shoelaces. When the guard came he informed Kelly that the executioner would be ready soon and the two men fell together weeping, fumbling at the front of their pants.”

  April knows the others are sleeping, but she draws out a long version of her tale in the desperate hope that her lover will appear. When she hears the sound of a stone rolling through leaves she dashes from her bed into the moonlight and holds herself against the bars. She surprises herself by crying, and she laughs, wiping a tear from her cheek. She hops from foot to foot and throws her head back unable to contain herself, not because she wants to feel his body, which she does, but because a mad love has just struck her. She will escape with him tonight. When he appears, his bare shoulders wet with moonlight, April extends her arm through the bars, and her hand opens and closes on air; she has abandoned her entire being to this frantic hand, the first part of her that will touch him. The first touch is a terrible pull at her forearm, and like a swimmer who says calmly before she dies, “this must be a shark,” April feels in the pain of her shoulder against the bars the strangeness of this man.

  “No virgin boy, tonight baby, you got lucky, I love you, c’mere now, I know you love me too. C’mon.”

  The odour of alcohol reaches into her stomach first and before she can smell it, a chin, sharp with bits of glass, cuts down on her cheek. April blinks the now confusing tears from her eyes as she attempts to pull away. It’s impossible. She is caught on this man and as she tries to kick her knees wedge between the bars. She falls backward but is pulled painfully back against the bars. Her feet are no longer on the ground and as she bangs against the bars to free her knees, the man whispers encouragement. His whispers are suddenly cut short by an anguished belch and April feels his hands spring off her body. She falls backwards into someone’s arms. As hands carefully free her knees she can see in the moonlight what has happened. A rope stretched across his back is being held at either side of his silhouette from within the cage. In the dark Blondie and Sandra coordinate savage tugs at the rope and the man vomits into the hollow of his chest as his arms slap flabbily against the bamboo. April feels her hair being drawn from her face, and when two hands rise against her shoulders encouraging her to move, she knows that it is Maria who has saved her. The women act quickly now. A machete is found under the man’s kicking feet and it’s used to kill him. The smell of his blood and guts infuses the hot chemical air of the night with a kind of metal and it transforms the women into red-eyed killers. They take turns hacking at the base of the bamboo bars, and before they step free the women fashion spears from the hard strips of wood.

  ★

  I don’t know exactly where to say it is, except that I want it to be somewhere, the invisible place that negotiates the end of things. And in this hollow, where all the tips are scratched by the marks they make, everything durable enough to even say it may soon disappear, does so in the form of a mood. The dead child hides in the card game played by grieving survivors as they drink early in the evening of its wake. The child lines itself in the signals they make to their partners, and shines brightly from their poker faces. And it follows that nine women are now circling a hill in the dark. They crouch outside its brightly lit summit to watch. Dr. Daiquiri is opening a case of liquor and he passes the labelless bottles out to the four men lounging on the marble. A woman in a fire-red dress stands apart. She pours the contents of a bottle into the shelled base of the dolphin. When the liquor leaks from the sculpture’s snout she balances herself on its base and slips her lips over its face. As Dr. Daiquiri leads his men in applause the air is shattered with the sound of devils. Daiquiri looks up and smiles like a little boy as the machete spits his shoulder off. Maria swings the heavy blade back at the man behind her, sending the top of his head skipping like a saucer across the patio and down the hill. For a moment they all freeze; as if considering how to word a request, the doctor looks at his missing shoulder and the woman, sitting in the shell where she’s fallen, squints at the brains on the patio as if they are a cue card. Then the spears leave the dark, pausing before they sail into their targets. The four men are instantly transformed into jiggling scarecrows, and they fall as close to the ground as the spears will let them. The women follow the spears, dancing into the light kicking and tearing at bodies, turning their spears and prying them apart to hear the flesh tear. They slide into blood stockings and wigs of gore, wrapping entrails around their ankles as they forage in body cavities for their gleaming. Daiquiri, who has begun to hoot like an owl, attempts to rise, but he falls on his incomplete arm. April, who is standing near the edge of the patio, looking into her hands, horrified by the empty space her spear has left behind, hears the doctor crash to the ground. April watches the other women spin toward the doctor, spraying his white gown with the blood they wear. April steps forward holding her hand up to stop them, but the women crouch hissing and take a sly step toward her. April is suddenly terrified and she stops moving. With a final hiss at April the women turn to Daiquiri and they dive at him. April turns to run down the hill as the sound of teeth meeting between crunched skin gives way to a deep bellow of pain.

  April falls sideways through the trees at the base of the hill. She pushes at the branches, scratching at the dark with her fingertips as she chases the red glow on her eyelids. The screams of the killers are part of the forest and they seem to have passed her to lie in wait. When April tumbles into the sand that skirts the island she covers her ears and listens to the little screeches in her skin. When they become warm like wounds, April sits up. Dropping her hands to her side, she notices the air. The air smells like water. No chemicals. No blood. Just water. And fish. April breathes deeply.

  “April!”

  April turns and sees him running up the beach through rose water, splashing in the surf and waving his arms. As he gets closer she sees the bruises around his eyes and the blue of his beard. He is handsome, after all.

  “April! April! April!”

  When he reaches her he stands, out of breath, repeating her name. April, who feels that the time for practicality has arrived now that night is leaving the sky, asks the straight question.

  “What? What do you want?”

  Peter isn’t sure what to say next.

  “Your name. I remember your name. It’s April.”

  April feels a shake of tenderness for this man, and she doesn’t cry; but she could: instead she raises her hand to his face.

  “Well, I don’t know yours. You never told me.”

  “It’s Peter. My name is Peter, April.”

  April rises from the sand and puts her arms lightly around him.

  “Peter, I could like you. You’re not the worst I’ve seen. But, you’re still part of what of I’ve seen.”

  “But I told you, I told you, I told you …”

  “I know, Peter, but now I’m going. I’m glad I know your name. Goodbye, Peter.”

  When she steps back, Peter looks away and whimpers. He holds himself in his arms and smiles back to her. A tear slips along the purple of his eye and swi
ngs from his face to fall in the sand. April doesn’t look back as she climbs into the outboard, which she sets afloat and starts with a single draw on the engine.

  The springtime air over Bewdley is a secret tributary. Microscopic seeds hitch their rides on the zipper of the wind and if you wrote their names against the blue of the sky, names so long and so numerous, the sun would only prick through their edges. So the seeds leave their names behind when they fly, copying the ones they’ll find if they land. They choke the banks of Rice Lake with colour. And if you look closely at the fifty-dollar bills that burst their reds across the trees of Bewdley in late June, you’ll see what April sees, a wedding band of saints, sleeping on horses with their spears pointed like rifles in a musical ride.