The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  “Hey, you fuckin’ idiot! You think this is fuckin’ funny?”

  Kyle looks down between his knees and through tears he sees the words “I can’t” and thinks, stunned, that’s exactly what that means.

  “Funny? You havin’ a good fuckin’ laugh? What’s your name?”

  Brian pushes a finger into his eyebrow and winces.

  “K(eye)l Fin(n).”

  “How old are you?”

  “ATE tea(n).”

  “Eighteen? Eighteen? And you’re playin’ little fuckin’ games? This is not your property to play on, little man. Ya wanna be an eighteen-year-old fuckin’ retard you oughta be under supervision, eh?”

  Brian stands and plucks little stones from his belt buckle.

  “I’m officially tearin’ this little meat house down.”

  Kyle pushes his head further down so he’s speaking to his heels.

  “(Do)nt worry a(bout) it, /eye/ am (Finn)ished anyweighs.”

  Brian pulls back and takes the kid in: This little fag’s cryin’. And I can’t understand a word he’s sayin’.

  “Uh, yeah, whatever.”

  Thomas has emerged about thirty feet out from where Brian and Kyle sit. He dives back down and his bare white ass flips up toward the shore. Brian rises and looks down at the tied-up form at his feet.

  “Are you alright? Listen, just get outta here and maybe I won’t do anything. But you tell the tadpole that I got a fifty-gallon drum of whoop ass with his name on it and he’s given me lotsa reasons to lift that fuckin’ lid. Got it?”

  “/Eye/ (do)nt c(air).”

  “Come again?”

  “/Eye/ s?a?i?d, why(how do)nt you j(us)t l+eave (us) al@ne.”

  “Huh?”

  Kyle feels a flash of bright rage and he squeezes his eyes shut. In the back of his mind, through a clear window surrounded by the usual storm of breasts slurping over the tops of bras and pubic hair that pulls like a fine comb along a pantyline, he sees his brother’s small, cold scrotal sac; it’s not sexual, but frozen solid, dense with feeling.

  “Buddy, I can’t understand a word you’re sayin’. I’m sorry, maybe you better wait here till that little bastard comes and gets ya.”

  Kyle opens his eyes in the dark little hut of his body and sees long ropes of saliva looping from his mouth to his ankles.

  “Well, he’s not gonna come up here with me standin’ here, the little piece of shit. But before I go, here, take this.”

  Brian cannot resist. The moment of concern he felt for the young man quickly becomes anger. The conversion happens, for Brian, almost automatically. In fact, most emotions are very quickly resolved as cruelty in the hard jacket of the Deputy’s heart. He slams the side of his foot against Kyle’s leg, but it only bounces there. Not connecting, the action almost seems encouraging. He turns his foot and then kicks hard, once, driving his toe into the boy’s hip. Kyle calls out.

  When Brian has climbed back into the woods, looking from side to side as he goes, little Thomas paddles to shore and looks up — without leaving the water — a tiny head bobbing in the waves.

  “OK, Fagissimo. This is war. We can get that guy. I know who that guy is. You OK?”

  Kyle’s eyes are closed again. He is trying to disappear into his own thoughts. They are a brightly lit buffet of sexual treats featuring prostitutes and cheerleaders. The light of these thoughts hits him and he seeks out a shadow to hide in. He forces his naked brother out from between a woman’s large, glittery buttocks and brushes his hands across him. He feels nothing. And then, suddenly, the slap of the Deputy’s hand against his thigh. The sharp toe in his hip. He feels the dimension added to this environment, that it’s been added to him. A blonde woman rolls her lips off a nipple and pulls her girlfriend away from Kyle’s growing erection.

  “Hey, dickhead, are you listening to me? I got plans for that asshole.”

  Kyle leans on one arm, away from his brother, and vomits on his hand.

  SEVEN

  Kathy and Jack live in a trailer park that’s not actually in Caesarea.

  The Buddy Holly Trailer Community is located along a sideroad leading east of town, beside a cattle farm. Long ago, when laws were more lax, the farmer had managed to register a portion of his property as a town. It was all pure invention, of course, and the place existed only on paper. He described a town hall with a clock tower, a volunteer fire department headed up by one of Holly’s finest sons — he twisted the pencil in his mouth for a second — headed up by Holly’s own, uh, Richie Valens. The town crest, sketched first on a napkin, depicted a small airplane crossed by a lightning bolt. This, in fact, represented the only near truth of the matter: small planes had from time to time, over the years, landed and taken off in the field. Kathy and Jack pulled their cozy white trailer into the park about three years ago, and, after paying for six months of water and hydro, have squatted for free ever since. Since then, hydro and water have only been available sporadically — thanks to the pirating efforts of some of the other squatting residents of Buddy Holly, Ontario, Canada.

  Kathy spends most of her time, when the hydro is flowing, on the internet — using the nickname Grable — in the shady chat rooms at MisinformationInc.com.

  ★

  GRABLE: Of course I’m willing to go the distance.

  LAMB: OK. All I need from you is some commitment. I can do for you, but first, you gotta do for me.

  GRABLE: I’ve thought about this, and people in this town are willing to go to great lengths to make their dirty money. I’ve got to be willing to go further to stop them. A lot further.

  LAMB: A lot further?

  GRABLE: A whole lot further.

  LAMB: OK. I’m going to send you an address and a file. I want you to send the file to the address at the times that I designate in the letter.

  GRABLE: Nothing to it.

  LAMB: You don’t think so? You got to send this file about sixty times a day for three weeks.

  GRABLE: Really? What? A kind of spam job?

  LAMB: Not quite. Bigger. I can’t say more. Think you can do it?

  GRABLE: Yeah, sure.

  LAMB: Awright, now what can I do for you?

  GRABLE: OK. I live in Ontario, Canada. Do you have any operatives here?

  LAMB: Everywhere.

  GRABLE: OK. I need some people who can get out and around and freak the shit out of some bastards in town.

  LAMB: What do you mean by: “Freak the shit out of some bastards.”

  GRABLE: As far as they can go.

  LAMB: OK. I respect the request. Email me names and locations.

  ★

  “Hey, Geek! I gotta make a phone call. How long you plan on dickin’ around on that thing?”

  Jack is standing outside, leaning through the open storm door. He has a large dripping hamburger in his hand. Kathy finishes inputting a line and lifts a finger over the mouse.

  “Just one second and I am …” She brings her finger down, clicking the mouse, “Done.”

  Jack puts his elbows into the doorframe and lifts himself up inside. He shakes the drips from his burger into a bowl of popcorn sitting on the narrow counter that juts across the middle of the small trailer. Kathy reaches under the table and strains to twist the phone cord out from behind the computer. She flips it across the room and it hooks on the edge of the popcorn bowl.

  “There ya are, go nuts.”

  Jack continues eating the burger over the bowl. It catches the green and yellow droplets that swing off his chin. He talks with a fair-sized mouthful of food rolling up and down on his tongue.

  “Yeah, I wanna go fishin’. I wanna catch me Mr. Whiskers tonight. Gonna call up some of the boys, see if I can’t generate some interest.”

  “You’re so oblivious.”

  Jack closes his lips slowly around a lump.

&nb
sp; “Huh?”

  “Do you realize that while you’re making foolish plans, a steady stream of poisons is chokin’ the life out of your fish. Think about it for a second, will ya?”

  “I know. I hate it. Mr. Whiskers hates it. We all hate it. But what are we gonna do?”

  “That is precisely the question I’m trying to answer. If there was a way to give your fish back his clean water, would ya do it?”

  “Sure I would.”

  “Even if it meant, even if it meant, doin’ something very serious?”

  “I guess.”

  “And it meant that your fish would be there forever, but you had to do something illegal?”

  “Sure, I suppose. If it meant Ole Mr. Whiskers was OK. And as long as I didn’t get caught. Why? What the hell are you up to?”

  “Well, that’s the beauty of it. Ya see. You don’t need to know, and it’s possible I might not either. Except, I have a feelin’ that this summer some people are gonna start to feel a little different about things around here.

  EIGHT

  A vulture flies over Caesarea, fanning its purple wingtips and swooping on the rudder of its tail. Its head is clear of feathers and toughened by urine, and its eyes are stung by the wind. Like most things in Caesarea, the vulture is taking a moment, all by himself, high above the ice sculptures of summer, in order to make a decision. The vulture is asking itself whether the weight that draws him to the earth is stronger than the sucking pins sweeping through the night above him. He turns his head and closes his eyelids across yellow polyps and assesses the influences on his flight. The earth below, sharp with roads and laying cold in the water, is the vulture’s pillow, a smooth cool linen. He pushes his ribbed head back into the soft planet and looks outward. The vulture has known the hardest passages: the blighting loss of weight, the murder of a mate, the frightening happiness of crows. Its own beak has broken down, accidentally piercing the frail skulls of its young. It decides to sever these ties and feels — in a single, abrupt loss — a sudden leap through the sky.

  ★

  Kyle is sitting on his rock again, alone. A full moon cuts yellow across the ripples that run from his bare feet, outward, in a broadening expanse of light, to the top of the lake. Kyle is watching this shimmering triangle move, changing from top to bottom, turning into a glittery tornado in the air before him. He experiences the shift; in weight, from glance to glower, as a painful memory. An animal dead. Probably a pet, he thinks. But no, it was the feeling he had when he was sixteen and he failed his driver’s test. That was it. Standing back from the hood of the car, knowing that he had begun to fail in ways that were irrecoverable. He understood then, that the gleam of metal was shaped by men with giant arms, who, when asked, flip up the black visor of their faceplates and say: “Oh no, he’s not going to drive this. Doesn’t matter though, there’s lotsa people who will.” Kyle thinks about it for a second and remembers that he did in fact pass his test.

  No, it was something else, it was standing in the playground at school.

  It was ten minutes after nine. He could see the other children at their desks, a framed picture of the Queen, the beige speaker of the telecom beside her. In the back row the fluorescent light that had flickered since September fifth was now shrill along the edges of a rain puddle at his feet. Everything had begun ten minutes earlier. Fall coats had been hung on hooks. The pitch pipe had been blown.

  Kyle leans forward to pull off his shirt, then stands to remove his pants.

  He steps down to the limit of his rock and draws a deep breath. He plans to die here tonight. To swim so far out that he cannot return. He wants to feel the strength drain from his arms, his legs dissolving, his entire body, pushed into service this way, to say to him, once it knows for certain: “Kyle, it’s finally time to stop.”

  He closes his eyes before jumping and imagines the ease with which he will slip to the bottom, no longer living, but still thinking, still remembering. Feeling, for the first time, the long slice of his life as an endless pleasure.

  He jumps.

  The first fifty metres are experienced exactly as every other fifty metres he’s ever swum: the feeling of pursuit alive in his limbs, a quick control of movements that don’t propel him, a stilling of the body’s lines, and then the gentle rise along the surface. When he has gone out a certain distance, a distance greater than he has ever gone before, Kyle feels the water change around him. It feels much deeper, though it is not; though it is no colder, it freezes around him; and though it is no darker the sleek black feathers of birds start to beat against him. He stops suddenly. His body is betraying him. It doesn’t accept the last leg of this journey. In fact, he can feel his shoulders twisting against his arms, and his stomach sailing down deeper, vertical to the water, holding his progress. He becomes aware of all the little swirling movements he makes with his hands to keep afloat. He stops them but his legs lunge sideways, driving his body up.

  He stops these movements as well.

  He closes his eyes and feels the water around him.

  Am I sinking?

  A pressure grows around his face and he realizes that he has left the surface. He doesn’t know how far above it is, only that it is getting further and further away.

  Ripples are tossed across the flat circle his body has left, and soon an equilibrium is restored. The surface tensions disappear, lost to directional waves that crispen the plain between water and air.

  The Mayor is watching the tiny light cast off the bow of a boat that advances in the dark across the lake. He notices the way that the light, as tiny as it is, is multiplied by reflection: thousands of lights, each five times their original size, are falling in an uncontrollable way across the water. The Mayor is suddenly taken by the fact that the cascade of light is always falling toward him, a shimmering plumb that is perpetually drawing directly from his joined toes in the water. He wonders if there are other people sitting in the dark all around the lake — just like him. And, what if he could see the lake from above? Would it appear like a star? Would long points radiate out from the tiny bulb to touch feet that hang in the water all around the shore? The Mayor grins in the dark, knowing that this is an illusion, an effect of perspective. And then he sighs: special effects are always the most meaningful because they are false, because nothing is the way it appears to be.

  No, nothing is the way it appears to be.

  He hears a cough. What the hell was that? Somewhere out there, a fair distance out there, someone has coughed. The Mayor jumps to his feet and brings his hands up to his face.

  “Hey!”

  He hears a splashing but can’t see where it’s coming from.

  “Hey! Out there! Are you OK?”

  The Mayor hears a muffled voice. He kicks off his shoes and plunges into the water.

  Robert Forbes is an excellent swimmer. Having grown up beneath over-turned canoes he has a natural self-confidence in the water. Soon he’s draping his golf jacket over the shoulders of a sputtering, naked young man.

  “What happened? Did your boat go down? Was there anyone else aboard?”

  Kyle is so cold that the warm night air seems to avoid him. He extends his fingers under the edge of the coat and raises his open palm into the biting zipper. The teeth rattle in his hand.

  “No(thing) HA-HA — penned.”

  The Mayor rubs his hand quickly across the boy’s shoulders for friction and warmth. He is surprised by the tiny bones of this skinny young man.

  “I’m sorry son, I can’t understand you. I think you’re in shock. Can you just tell me if anyone else is out there?”

  Kyle bunches the sleeve of the coat against his mouth and shakes his head.

  “/Eye/M so-so ti(red) of (eve)ry(thing).”

  The Mayor gives the kid’s shoulder a light pump. The bone is struggling in his hand, Kyle’s trembling pushed into a corner, angular and tight.
r />   “I’m sorry son … I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “/Eye/ (off)only (eve)r f(eel) 2 things (eve)r.”

  “It’s OK, it’s OK. Listen, maybe I should take you to a doctor or something.”

  “/Eye/ eve (on)offly (eve)r felt WONder(full) either/or (terra)BULL. /Eye/ just w(ant) to f(eel) some(thing) L(s), any(thing) L(s).”

  “OK. That settles it then. I’m taking you to see Dr. Mendez.”

  “HELLhelpamea.”

  NINE

  Night is falling over Caesarea, bringing up soft lights within homes that sit across the tall horseshoe wrapped around the Lake Scugog’s eastern shore. From a distance this speckled band, orange globes and red panels shedding patterns down onto the crinoline of the harbour, appears like a princess. She emerges from the anonymous recesses of her family to reach for her sceptre, to adjust her tiara and shake out her shimmering gown. Unfortunately, this princess has — like all perfect figures — her share of unmentionables. And so, as soon as she appears, her charms become more peristolic than parasolic. Squatting, she feels the tickle of steeples against her and evacuates.

  As is the custom of late in Caesarea, a number of its citizens have, for one reason or another, not returned home. They are curled up in the dark on the only natural substitute for a mattress: the soft, flowing green hammocks that grow in the slack rectangles of earth over failing septic tanks.

  The most prominent citizen sleeping this way is the Mayor, Robert Forbes. He has taken advantage of the fact that the Treasurer hasn’t come home for the night: this allows him some measure of privacy when he crawls out of his sweet-smelling digs to pee on the side of her house.

  Marion has been ghoulishly shuttling herself around town for two days and nights in the car she refuses to leave — that she has taken to living in, restlessly parking or rolling. She’s curled up in her back seat, sleeping with the sharp pain of her purse clasp nearly piercing her temple.

  The suicidal poet Kyle, another of Caesarea’s growing homeless, is curled on the couch of Dr. Mendez.