The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  Roger often spoke a lot of nonsense. Rhyming, musical craziness. He seemed indifferent to whoever was listening, but then he’d surprise you with a wink that said, ‘It’s not possible to go crazy.’ And people listened to him, ’cause his were the most articulate knots of incoherence you could imagine. I, however, knew exactly what Roger’s speeches were: phantom tongues, disembodied spirits and lots of booze. I mean, who cares? I just felt too white and too drunk to even listen. I had enough of my own risky thinking to do.

  One night, apparently, he dragged me up the hall by the cuffs of my jeans and I crawled into an occupied bed. It was his mother’s. She rolled up a grey Snoopy T-shirt over the taut protrusion that was pulled huge like a silk peel holding the moon. It was the most beautiful colour and shape of human flesh I had ever seen — a perfect abdomen painted over distended organs and their frail paper membranes. I slurred:

  “Are you pregnant?”

  She laughed, her limbs jumping involuntarily with age, abuse and disease. Her lips curled back, revealing muddied teeth, and she looked down, with insanely precise eyes, at her belly’s rock-hard hill.

  “No, that’s my Labatt’s air balloon, sailing over the trees. You wanna be a tree and poke it, Calvin?”

  They called me Calvin and my buddy Hobbes. Making fun of us, we knew it, but white boys like us appreciate any attention from real Native Canadians.

  Roger was still sitting Indian-style the next morning, while I fought my blackout as I walked down the hall from the room behind me which smelled so embarrassingly of my own body. I could hear Roger’s mother snoring loudly and I think it occurred to me that I was a rapist. Roger had another fresh bottle open and was laughing purple across his Doonesbury T-shirt. He passed the bottle, staring clearly and kindly into my eyes. I upended it and felt its contents find my empty stomach and curl up inside me like I’d swallowed the big bang. It spoke in my toes and head like a riot. A barbershop quartet warming the closed parts of my mind.

  “I guess you fucked my mother.”

  Before I could answer, Hobbes darted out of the bathroom going nowhere. He silently jabbed his finger in the crook of his arm, where ragged black points popped out from circular blue welts. I was soaked with the Darvon and Librium I’d stolen from Roger’s mother the previous afternoon. I dispensed with the concerned questions about his jeopardized limb, and yelled: “Where did you get works in fucking Bewdley? Or did you just borrow a gaff hook? Christ, I’ve swallowed so many dirty pills that when I jerk off I sound like a tambourine.”

  Roger laughed at this for about two minutes. He thought we were the most desperate, ugliest junkies he had ever seen. His mother laughed for a full four minutes, from somewhere in the house. It was infectious happiness, and ugly and stupid or not, we hadn’t entertained anybody for months, and it fully felt good.

  “I was banging Talwin and Ritalin and given the shape the fits were in, I’m surprised Captain Ahab isn’t hanging off my arm.”

  Roger’s mother laughed like crazy from down the hall again. Her limbs were probably jumping, but her belly was certainly stone-still. Roger was more than ever convinced that we were Calvin and Hobbes.

  Roger attended Hobbes’s ravaged arm, while his mother had great fun calling me “Mother Fucker,” and then laughing her head off. Hobbes seemed to catch on then, and looked at me in disbelief. The woman was our friend’s mother, in very ill health and well over fifty. To my surprise, Hobbes’s disbelief seemed part of some intense reverence for us both. Not respect, not acceptance, but something else. On his face I saw him revealed, almost beatified — none of his sexual brutality, but the faint glimmer of a spiritual awe. Roger saw this too, and being familiar, I suppose, with similar garish epiphanies, he looked beyond, and announced, “Let’s go the bar and see if we can’t sell some of Mom’s Darvons for draft. Maybe score some T’s and R’s.”

  As Roger steered himself out of his Boy Scout squat, his mother made for the door as she rummaged for her purse.

  “Where the fuck are my Darvon, you cocksuckin’ white rapists?”

  Hobbes leaned against his feeble arms and tossing his long blond hair, in a faint voice he said, “Listen, you squaw, just be happy you got a long white cock up your canoe.”

  I may be a thief, and not the most decent man alive, but this froze my blood. What is it? Race? Mothers? Rape? I’m not one for drawing the line anymore, but it seemed it had been drawn for me. Was someone being impolite? Is that why I’m freezing? But before I could move, Roger had coldcocked Hobbes on the nose, and his mother was tearing at his pants, giggling, until his little white cock shot piss. Roger’s body filled the room like a mountain and he smiled his thousand teeth at Hobbes, who lay curled up, crying bloody snot, and Roger said, “I’d kill you now, Hobbes, but you’re already dead.”

  Hobbes looked frightened because I think he believed this was merely the truth. He was dead.

  I felt myself falling over wordless edges. I thought of rocket ships. I thought of what I’d do if someone called my mother something like that. Roger was different than me, sure, and probably a good man. Hell, a better man than me, after all, I’d fucked his mother, or she fucked me. Maybe we just slept in each other’s arms, my face resting on that fabulous belly. Who knows? But I seemed to be the only one who really cared. Maybe, just for myself. I don’t think I understand what it meant to them. We’re all falling apart today.

  FALL

  This evening the autumn sky over Rice Lake is barely visible in its falling; dry and cold, it doesn’t so much blow as bounce against the water, careening off trees, pulling at them in groups of five or six. No stars or moon in the sky. No way of really knowing what is happening. Tonight the fish of Rice Lake, strong bass and darting perch, shake free of the rocks inside them, gliding up the reeds like children down banisters. The water doesn’t warm as they rise, in fact it chills and the husks of summer insects hang in cold inedible clumps. The bass sense each other near and they wonder, now that the crazy green public room which had begun to smell so terribly with life is a lake again, who is really serious about this? Who wants to live here? They don’t speak, rather they look with pity on the perch who spring nervously through their death water. Close to the surface a sucker minnow hooks its belly to the invisible surface. Its mouth flutes and collapses, causing the water to bump out from its face. Its saliva holds the bumps in tiny cups that shimmer against a web of white stars. The cups and stars drop into a fixed pattern beneath the fish, projecting a milky shroud along the minnow’s tiny silver body, now still, now dead. A thousand trillion guppies are burying themselves this way tonight, dressing themselves, kissing themselves goodbye, abandoning their eyes to the ice, their souls slipping through pinpricks in the air. The bass, a tightly muscled, arrogant fish, opens its mouth like a vault and pulls in the corpses, then it dives to join the other frightened fish that hang on the wall of the dark waiting to die. As they hold themselves still, not even moving a fin, they think, “Oh dear God, I am a heavy thing.”

  The snapping turtle has watched the woods turn into a graveyard, the trees into headstones, thirty-eight times. Thirty-eight times the leaves have fallen through orange-streaked amnesia, collecting in little trays of death to freeze. The turtle holds the bank in concentration, emitting a rank perfume, spoiling the moss with poison and smearing pungent oil into the mud. The turtle is concentrating on a single tree. This tree is so tall that the sky has to curl over its top. Its brown bark has darkened into a deep wet shadow anchored where the water meets the bank, driven between the two, as immense and terrible as an angel. The turtle uses the tree as a memory machine, every year choosing the fork of a branch or the anomalous roll of a limb to store its summer. Every night, at dusk, the turtle climbs onto the bank, hovers its head out and recounts its day to a part of the tree. Every frog snapped in half, every gust of wind or strange panic is laid in its selected place.

  And on this day every year for thirty-e
ight years the turtle plants itself in front of the tree. Rather than lay its day into the branch, it stares at it, studying the surface it has selected, inventorying its face — there are forty-six ridges, eight interruptions, four green burrs and so on. And when the turtle has meticulously examined the area, it tells it to itself; stacking the excised wood carefully in the back of its mind and then clawing its way into the underside of the bank, the turtle hibernates through another winter. Throughout this hibernation the turtle points its mind, like a flashlight under the covers, onto the perfect little wooden facsimile. A ridge is selected, say, the third one along with two of the four dents, cross-referenced with a type of grain, and suddenly, under the frozen lake in the mind of a turtle, a heron leaps into flight from the reeds, its wings pounding the air like arms, as it wheels around between the turtle and the sun. There are always, however, long days when the bark can only manage to pull within itself. Sad, strange days when bizarre animated scenes emboss in the bark and the sun’s rays run into dark creases radiating from a sunken dome in wood. Through these days the turtle’s heart slows to within beats of a cold death and its anxious being is interrupted. Its breath held between two sighs, two signals, two distant poles. These days always come to an end, and beneath the March ice and deep snow, buried in the frozen ground, lily pads spread once again across a still cove under an August sky. Tonight, however, the turtle is breaking with tradition because it knows that it will not live to see a thirty-ninth piece of tree. The turtle staring, unblinking, is trying to see the entire tree, not to lay its summer there, but to open all the summers that are there now. To kill itself and be taken by the tree, all of it, and to be scattered into the wood as it rends itself, as it ignites, to see the start, the first summer still caught somewhere on the edges of all the others, to catch fire with this summer in the tree and to glow in those hollow parts that grew in winter.

  The turtle is having some difficulty finding the right vantage point and it pulls itself backwards up the bank, craning its neck upward, spitting out the leaves it grabs in its mouth. A weight drops onto the turtle’s back and two orange paws hinge over its shell. The turtle spins around on the coil of its mighty neck, sending a large dog up into the air. The turtle clacks the halves of its face together, cutting the wind around the dog’s jumping legs. When the dog retreats beyond the turtle’s dangerous reach, it lowers its head to the ground — its hind end in the air and its front paws stretched out front. The turtle feels its collar slip back over its eyes as it sinks its head to rest beside the violent beats of its heart. The turtle cannot hear the dog barking. The dog’s name is Shelley. Not like the poet, despite some of his difficulties. Shelley speaks with the voice of Sylvester Stallone. Dead on.

  “Yo, tuhtle, wass yo’ naim?” Shelley tries to blink the smugness off his face. “Woah, the woods are very eclectic tonight, an arboreal melange et trois goin’ on here. I never seen you before.”

  The turtle is absolutely motionless. A blackbird trills down at the barking dog.

  “Yo, Mr. Blackbird.” Shelley rolls onto his back. “You don’t have to stridulate like dat. I ain’t gonna hurt no one. I’m just out for a walk spreadin’ a bit of bonhomie.”

  The blackbird will probably fly away soon. It will certainly not talk to Shelley. And like most days, Shelley will sink into a bit of a depression. Shelley has been attempting to make friends in these woods for years. Cultivating a friendly personality, expanding his vocabulary — even dropping in the odd bit of French, but no one, no animal — not the birds, the rabbits, the squirrels, the reptiles, nobody — seems the least bit interested in conversation.

  “Wildlife is very cold society.” Shelley creeps cautiously toward the turtle. “I think your silence is a very wilful thing, Mr. Turtle. What do you want from me? I’m tryin’ here.”

  The turtle remains as free from motion as a photograph. “Do you like abstract expressionists? I also like Roy Lichtenstein. Hey Turtle! Turtle!” Shelley’s nose is now under the shadow of the turtle’s shell.

  “You wanna see my little collection of objets d’art? I got these beautiful stones micturated on by frogs and weasels. Did you know that every time you guys mark your territory I add another objet trouvé to my little exhibition. I can see all kinds of things in those urine stains. I got one, a porcupine, I think, that’s a perfect likeness of Paul Sorvino.”

  The turtle explodes like a grenade, throwing Shelley off his feet and through a bush onto his back. It drives its hissing head toward Shelley, its jaws open like deadly hooks and its pointy black tongue jiggling in a rage. Shelley feels the warm blood filling his nostrils and with a slurp of his tongue assesses the slash to his snout. The wound is nothing, however, compared to the deep unhappiness he confirms in himself now, laying on his side, listening to the turtle’s hostile voice. Near the dog’s limply tossed paws a large, pink spider swings from its damaged web. Shelley apologizes automatically and tries to smile. It occurs to him that a spider might have an interest in Euclid, or Cartier watches, or maybe aerobics, but while Shelley prepares himself to engage in a discussion with the spider the turtle stops hissing and in the silence Shelley’s heart sinks. He cocks an eyebrow high and looks away from the spider, trying to suppress the light cry that rises in his throat. On the bank the turtle drops into the lake and the musical clap of the water causes Shelley to whimper inconsolably. The spider has made its way to a fly, shrouded there earlier in case of just such an emergency. The spider parts the hair on the fly’s face with a cantilevered toe and lances a long white fang through the surface of a pulsating eye, into the centre of the fly’s twitching brain.

  The turtle waves its feet in a quick easy rhythm and its body is buoyed to the surface in spurts. When it has climbed onto the last step, it sails its chin out into the air, breathing deeply and drawing its shell halfway out of the water. With small adjusting stabs the turtle turns to face the bank. Beside the turtle’s tree sits the dog. Shelley’s tortured whines are convulsing his tail into the ground. Leaves and twigs are flying out around the dog’s hind end and they flip across the water. The turtle hangs still, watching the dog as it barks at the debris it has just set afloat. The turtle remains here for nearly an hour, suspended on its own toxic effluence, trying to wait out the dog, which has settled down now, sitting with its paws crossed, its mouth open. The turtle eventually turns itself and notices that its tree is also located down the bank, a safe distance from the dog. It tunnels along the bottom of the lake toward its tree and emerges silently onto the stones that have dropped out of the bank supporting the tree.

  The turtle sits in front of the tree and before long it begins to shine like tinsel. Dozens of rose-coloured eggs burst in the air and some kind of powder drifts out of the sky, laying a fine dry patina on the lake. The turtle looks around suspiciously at these transformations and then concentrates on the tree again. Of course the ghostly sound of children laughing can be heard from across the lake and the turtle blocks this out. A sudden terror seizes the turtle as unfamiliar images spill around, as if through windows in the air. Large grey saucers covered in lime flames hover over the lake. The arms of men dangle from them, and in their hands they clutch snowballs. Each contain a blood-rimmed eye that races around in circles. The immense skull of a rabbit rolls out of the water, draining a thick, black fluid which curls up into the air. This skull cracks open at the jaw and screams. The turtle notices the sky turning into a grainy black-and-white image of soldiers marching through snow and at this, the turtle relaxes, in fact becomes bored, knowing now that this isn’t the right tree at all. In a kind of appalled curiosity the turtle watches a thin, tall man climb out on top of the giant rabbit skull. The man puts a megaphone to his mouth, causing the sky to abruptly flash on thousands of hands manipulating chopsticks. The hands blur into an applauding multitude and when they are finally transformed into praying hands, the turtle winks laterally goodbye to the rabbit skull and shuts its eyes. He waits for these idiotic images to
evaporate from his eyelids. When the tall man’s bright orange vest finally pulses into dark red, the turtle opens his eyes to see a huge tongue flapping in front of its face. There is no surprise that Shelley has found him. Shelley leaps backward as he sees recognition harden in the turtles little black eyes.

  Shelley drags the turtle by its tail up the bank and into the woods. Occasionally the turtle manages to whip its head in a direction counter to the one it’s being dragged in with enough power to pull itself out of the dog’s mouth. Shelley is such a tiresome animal, and his conversation is embarrassing really.

  Shelley was given his name because Shelley Industries was painted on the side of the drum that his siblings were drowned in. A little boy — who else? — reached in and saved one of the puppies before his grandfather sealed the lid. This same little boy is now running across the field toward the turtle and his talkative kidnapper. Now it follows that terrible things are fated to happen. Shelley’s boundless enthusiasm combined with his saviour’s awakening imagination will, typically, lead to those acts of sadism which can outweigh all attempts to pull free. For the rest of his life, quietly hateful and permanently polite, this boy will grow into someone who watches us too closely. There may be little motivation to save this boy from himself. He’s probably already done what he’s going to do. And it’s important for one reason or another that he does it; however, for the turtle’s sake, no one will witness this, it will not happen. Instead the boy runs with Shelley up to a shed at the corner of the field. He emerges seconds later, swinging a battered washbin in front as he runs, tripping three times before he reaches the turtle. The boy pulls a can of white paint and a brush out of the washbin. He walks around to the back of the turtle, lifting him by the tail. The turtle’s head explodes again, this time clapping its jaws just short of the boy’s crotch. Rather than drop the turtle, the boy, who only barely outweighs it, heaves it by the shell into the washbin. The edges of its shell scrape against the sides of the tub, wedging it solidly, its head safely pushed back into armour. Its long claws, however, are free and they scratch furiously against the metal bottom, raising a sound that tears at the open air. The noise drives Shelley off, while the boy, his heart pounding, pops open the paint can and paints something on the back of the turtle. When he’s done he flips the bin over and shimmies it off the turtle, which is now perfectly upside down. The boy is far too excited to really think clearly and he runs after Shelley, squealing in fright. From a distance the boy and the dog watch the turtle’s vain attempts to aright itself. Its claws whip at the air as its head gyrates. The turtle attempts several complicated moves, trying to outwit its own centre of gravity. The boy watches fascinated, until he realizes that the turtle has begun to repeat itself and that it will not succeed. He picks up a four-foot two-by-four that lays on the ground and plunks the end into the palm of the turtle’s foot. The turtle blasts against the wood, throwing itself into a high tip. The boy impulsively brings his foot down on the edge of its shell, rocking the turtle onto his knee. The boy shrieks and springs into the air as the turtle falls heavily onto its belly. He runs to join Shelley, who has grown quiet and serious. When the boy reaches his dog, he too becomes silent. There are brown twigs stuck to the white paint like macaroni on black velvet. The turtle slowly raises itself on its feet and fixes its eyes on the boy. The look is unmistakable, something like “If you come near me again, I will kill you, I swear to God.”