The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  “Hey, you listening to me?”

  The Mayor hands Robin his glass.

  “Oh, sure, finish this, I gotta go anyway.”

  The Mayor ignores Robin, who overturns the cup he’s been handed, pouring its contents onto the lawn.

  Something has distracted the Mayor; elated, his buoyed feelings are suddenly sensitive to a small stirring within and he moves to a quiet spot, just off the lawn, in order to hear more clearly the odd little melody that’s just gone through his head. He pretends to be looking at the candy-coloured petunias growing in the squat base of a wooden barrel at the corner of the house. He finds the texture of the flowers helpful. There are fine hairs on a stem like an arm in a cocoon of barely visible lines. And then a wrist of hard green beads. The flower is tissue, cinched at the base by fingers, tossed toward him. Held up to him, not far, but past his knee: a spell has been cast. The Mayor leans over and places his hand on the wall, aware as he does this, that the pose is probably more concentrated than it should be. But for now he needs to focus. He closes his eyes and feels, with a loose gathering gesture, exactly what is turning in his mind against the events of the day. It’s not a bad feeling, not an alarming feeling, but a vast, complete range of lights and colours. In fact, what makes it so compelling is just that. Something about this feeling corresponds with everything that has happened to him today, everything he has seen. He pictures the plastic cups stacked on the tray. These are part of water.

  Not just water but a light in water. Light at a great depth, a captured light shimmering and revolving. A hanging garden of minute organisms, invisible beads near the bottom of the sea, it’s a prism of light fanning brightly against a deep blue. Something has cast a spell. Something very hard and cold. Something very real. The dream. Not the vampire dream, but another dream.

  “Mayor, there’s still some sandwiches. Would you like one?”

  Dr. Mackay, the dentist, is holding a tray of small, white, crustless sandwiches.

  The Mayor opens his eyes onto the flowers beneath him.

  “Oh, you like my petunias. I know they’re a little clichéd for a garden, but they’re easy. I’m no gardener.”

  The centre of the flower, where the fingers beneath are visible as folds, is a black dagger of felt. A tiny red droplet is suspended in the deep cone. Robert can almost feel the detail on the surface of his eye.

  The other dream. I met someone last night. Someone I love.

  The Mayor picks a sandwich off the tray and tips it thank-you at the dentist.

  “They look almost like paper.”

  TWO

  All morning Robin Gorley has been drinking at a picnic table beneath a long awning that stretches out from the front of his trailer. He has a variety of bottles in front of him, red and green and clear.

  There are children and teenagers gathered in chairs and sitting at the table with him. A topless spherical barbecue is filled with tall black sticks arranged in a cone. A blond-haired boy, wearing giant mitts, is squirting fluid from a can onto the wood. He stops for a second and the stream drops and splashes against his leg. He looks over to Gorley who twirls his hand sloppily, encouraging the boy to keep squirting.

  The stream swings back up, reaching beyond the barbecue, splashing the shoulder of another boy. Gorley farts with his lips and tosses a half-filled bottle at the youngsters who have scattered away from the direction of the fluid. The bottle hits a boy on the heel, sending him squealing to the ground. Gorley farts louder and expels a foam down his chin. Then he shakes a hand at the boy and the bottle. The boy lifts it from the soil and tilts it into his mouth. He upends the bottle and opens his throat, knowing that he can’t stand the taste. The contents pour directly into his stomach.

  Gorley drills a lighter into the boy’s side, causing him to jerk the bottle from his mouth and gasp at the pain of liquor squirting from his nostrils. Another boy, older, perhaps thirteen, swoops down and picks up the lighter. He grabs the bottle from the dirt and rattles it over the barbecue, so that its dregs wriggle out over the sticks. Several children step back as he waves the lighter back and forth across the tip of the saturated cone.

  The flame bursts downward first, sending black spears tipped orange through the holes in the base of the sphere. Then a ring ignites upward on the outside of the shell; like a froth it rises and spills in over the rim. Two distinct explosions follow each other quickly and consume the entire barbecue in a single unstable ball of flames. When the black core lightens to yellow the flames whip up, flapping high like cloth. A wall of singeing heat causes the closest boys to curl away their heads. The boy who had initially squirted the fluid is rolling backward in the grass slapping at the bright fire on his shin. A thick cloud swirls down over the picnic table, carrying thousands of shooting drops of jet-black ash, and Gorley raises his face into it, catching the air that clings to his eye-lashes like barbs on a hook.

  “Thass a nice fuckin’ thing. That’s some fuckin’ weather.”

  Gorley slides his tongue down, licking the foam off his chin, and tosses another bottle in the dirt beside the boy clutching his chin.

  “OK, kiddies, it’s Buddy Holly day.”

  The children move closer to the fire, their eyes are now encircled by soot and their clothes have all become grey.

  “Let’s put out the fire in the Buddy Holly way! Wooo!”

  The children stand and begin to pull down the front of their shorts. The first spurt of piss flies against the sphere, a searing slash that instantly becomes steam. Others follow, some heavier, some arcing up directly into the flame. Gorley barks and pounds the table with an open hand before falling off the bench and rolling onto the ground. He is on all fours laughing, and he waves his hand, wheezing out a command.

  “Hurry, boys, hurry!”

  Several of the boys run to him and piss their dying streams against the side of Gorley’s head.

  “It’s rainin’! Oh no! I’m inna fuckin’ rainstorm!”

  One of the boys reaches for a bottle laying on its side on the table; he takes a quick swig and pours it over Gorley’s head. It flattens Gorley’s hair and runs across his cheeks, curving in transparent tails off his chin. Gorley sucks hard at the flowing liquor, inhaling it deep into his lungs. He drops his shoulders into the lawn and coughs like a seal, using the rhythm of his coughing to sing a song.

  “Bumped his head and he bumped his head and he bumped his head in the morning!”

  Gorley closes his eyes and listens to the slither of fire. He can feel the pounding of feet vibrating the earth on the shell of his ear. He suddenly feels very drunk. The ground is spinning. He tries to figure out whether his head is spinning with the earth or independently. The direction is so violent it has to be one or the other. He is going to throw up, but he’s frightened that if he sits up too quickly his head will spin off into the sky. He heaves into the ground, feeling a long, thick column pass his lips. The boys go silent; they’re in awe of the pink blob that Gorley has pushed out onto the lawn. He bends his back down, sticks his ass high in the air, and farts loudly. The children squeal and run toward the fire, leaving Gorley to choke on his laughter.

  He flips over to sit. His chin is capped pink with a pointed gel of mucous, urine, and booze.

  “Hey!”

  The children stop. His voice is harsh.

  “Hey!”

  Gorley lunges across the ground and grabs the nearest ankle. A boy tumbles backward. He holds his grip firmly and yanks the child close.

  “You think iss OK to piss on my head?”

  The boy feels hard fingers boring into bone.

  “You think iss OK to piss on my head?”

  The boy attempts to turn, to twist the ankle free, but Gorley latches tightly onto his wrist, dragging him sideways across the dirt.

  “You piss on my fuckin’ head?”

  The boy pulls his loose arm in over his c
hest to protect his face.

  “You piss on my fuckin’ head?”

  Gorley shakes the boy violently, rubbing his back hard against the ground.

  “Clean it up!”

  Gorley stands quickly, still holding the boy, and starts to whip him back and forth in the spot wet with liquor, urine, and vomit. The boy starts to cry. Gorley heaves the kid up in the air, sending him tumbling toward the fire. He lands thumping, stomach-first on the hot sand around the barbecue.

  “Alright! OK. Thass enough fuckin’ around. I’m the Mayor here. Less get down to businez. First of all. You are all fuckin’ lowlifes. Half your parents owe me fuckin’ money, half your sisters are pregnant by me, all of you would be suckin’ dicks in Caesarea for a bowl of soup if it wasn’t for me. So I figure it’s time you fuckin’ shits start ownin’ up to your responsibilities here in Buddy Holly.”

  Gorley reaches over and puts an arm around the nearest child. The boy flinches, and Gorley squeezes his shoulder.

  “You’know, I gotta say one thing. You all remind me of myself when I was your age. Little trouble makers. But guess what? Nobody is ever gonna see it that way. Nobody is ever gonna see you the way I do. All your life you’re gonna get kicked around by people. I know that. I know that for a fact. We are in a hopeless way … Damn them! If anybody ever lays a hand on one of my little angels …”

  Gorley holds a hand to his mouth and sobs quietly.

  “No one will ever love you the way I do. No one.”

  The children are confused, and the boy beside Gorley makes a face at them, rolling his eyes, wagging his tongue.

  “You probably won’t realize that until it’s too late. Until you’re long gone from here.”

  Gorley slaps the ground and jabs a trembling finger into the air. “I wanna say somethin’ right here and now. I want you all to listen. Years from now, when you’re all fucked up, when the cops are busting your chops, and it’s three strikes and you’re out, I want you to stop and remember this moment. Right here. I want you to remember it, and I want you to think about how you left your Mayor broken and alone in Buddy Holly. And I want you to ask yourselves this question: Where the fuck did I go wrong? I’m doin’ you a favour, ’cause if you remember this day, you’ll have your goddamn answer. You’ll know the answer.”

  Gorley looks to the child in his arms.

  “Think you’ll know, young fella?”

  The boy mouths, inaudibly, yes. When he nods his head, he seems much younger, almost babyish.

  “Yeah, that’s my little man.”

  Gorley rocks the boy and smiles at the blank faces of the children.

  “You’re good kids, aren’t ya?”

  One boy, who is rocking an empty bottle back and forth under his bare foot, slaps his neighbour on the back.

  “Sure we are. Uh, we’re sorry about everything Mr. Mayor. Aren’t we guys?”

  “Hey, sorry nothin’. Let’s just start over again, eh? Let’s have a proper meeting.”

  The boys sit in a semi-circle around the picnic table and Gorley returns to his position on the bench. He reaches under and pulls up a cardboard box.

  “First order of business, we need to get ready for a wee visit to our good neighbours. Here ya go boys.”

  Gorley begins tossing Swiss Army knives into the air. Children scramble all over the lawn.

  ★

  The cloud that had burst over Buddy Holly thins as it is pulled apart by the upper atmosphere. Molecules of water that ascend to the sky in this way, every day, are slowed by dry white threads. The moisture swells at the bottom of this bell-shaped tower, then collects and runs rapidly along the rim. It feels, in the droplets that it forms, the earth pulling from below. And then suddenly, in a single white shriek, the premature rain disappears. A crippled vapour murdered by a monstrous brick of airless air.

  THREE

  Benadryl. Benelyn. Pseudo Ephedrine Hydrobromide. Echinacea. Tylenol. Night time or non-drowzy. Dextromethorhpan.

  Throat. Nose. Chest. All tighter than usual.

  A familiar feeling, yes, but you have to do what you can to stop it, don’t you? Relax the membranes, trick them into falling back within the bounds of their casings. The head should turn freely, unfettered, in a state of readiness. There are pernicious conditions you can fall into, blotted vision, for example; the blots, white and unfocused, might interrupt everything — the good hand of a stranger, extended then lost, caught in a smudge. They wouldn’t know, would never see it coming: fingers hanging expectantly, a terrible misunderstanding.

  Expectorant. Suppressant. Cough drops. Purple bar. Wine. Pricey. The Mayor looks at the back of the pharmacist’s cash register. A Polaroid, nearly entirely green, pushes up, cupping its edges against the resin of stale scotch tape.

  A long time. It takes years to turn pictures green like that. A green Mayor cutting a green ribbon with yellow scissors. He looks ill: like he might fall, perhaps, on his own scissors.

  Robert Forbes puts his hand up to his forehead.

  I can’t tell.

  I think I feel bad.

  Then he spots it, on a rack near the public blood pressure chair: an electronic thermometer. As he reaches for it a child dashes in front of him and leaps up into the chair. He drives his fist through the tunnel on the armrest, and begins to whisper, very seriously, the countdown until take-off.

  “Hey son, that’s not a toy.”

  The boy hits the start button and surges backward as he fights a powerful G-force. The Mayor pauses for a moment, watching the performance, impressed. Irregular vibrations pull at the child’s body, subtle indexes of complex forces, a surprisingly realistic effect.

  “OK, Luke Skywalker, that’s about enough, you’re gonna break that thing.”

  The Mayor plucks the thermometer off the hook.

  “Don’t you know that’s an expensive piece of medical equipment?”

  The boy gently returns to an erect sitting position, and counts off, in the clear voice of an astronaut, the red spray of his systolic pressure.

  “Son, you’re going to have to stop that, OK?”

  The Mayor leans down and hovers his hand over the controls, looking for an off switch. There doesn’t seem to be one. Suddenly he smells the strong odour of alcohol. He looks at the child’s face, reddened eyes and skin like paper, the unmistakable odour of alcohol. Not even fresh, but stale; not entirely on his breath, either. Just the stink of body cells, of blood alcohol. The Mayor recognizes the child: it’s Thomas Finn. Oh no, Jesus, no. Poor little guy. This is not right. The Mayor places a hand on Thomas’s shoulder.

  “I think you better go home, son. Let me get you a cab.”

  Thomas looks up, slides his hand from the black sleeve, and hops out of the chair. The Mayor pays for his thermometer and a small tube of Tylenol, just in case there’s a fever that needs reducing. He asks the pharmacist, who for some reason is pretending not to know the Mayor, to call Tony’s Taxi.

  “Destination?”

  The Mayor looks down at Thomas, who has picked up a Wunderbar and is muttering into one end of it. The Mayor is struck by how adult the little boy looks.

  “Where do you live son?”

  Thomas flips the bar over in his hand, and thrusts it toward the parking lot in a martial stance.

  “Bud-day Holl-lay, U.S. of L.A.”

  The Mayor shakes his head at the pharmacist: the mighty shame on all of us.

  “That’s Buddy Holly, the uh, trailer park out there past the co-op.”

  Once the boy has been tossed in the taxi, his fingers glossy with chocolate, the Mayor tears his paper bag open and fishes inside for his new device. He depresses a button on the tail of the beige plastic dart and carefully inserts it in his mouth. It beeps once as the Mayor unravels the tightly folded instruction sheet. The device will beep every four seconds as it acclimatizes its t
ip to the hot membrane underneath his tongue, and then, when it hits the perfect reading, it will give off a distinctive chain of tones. The Mayor removes the thermometer with great care, careful that the tip doesn’t point away from his mouth, that its LED window isn’t upside down. The temperature is 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Whoops. The Mayor looks around and quickly clips it back into its case. Fahrenheit? I thought I got the metric one. The Mayor had intended on avoiding the Fahrenheit, had hovered his hand over it, remembered warmly its benchmark — 98.6 degrees — and he thought: no, a public official should use the official scale, not the banned one. So, he reached for the centigrade machine. But somehow he had picked up a Fahrenheit one after all. He smiles as he slips it into his shirt pocket. It’s now a guilty pleasure, from a simpler time, before the world-wide Caesarea, before the legislation against beach parking. Before the competition with towns he had never heard of. Back when you couldn’t tell the girls from the boys — the children were all a little nancy back then, but we knew, at least, that it was us who accepted them. They were our own and we threw up our eyes when the boys hit the beach in their make-up.

  Now, the Mayor thinks, as he touches a corner of his blond head, now I have a rebel stick in my pocket. 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh dear. 99.1? I have a temperature! Oh my God! I must be getting ill! The Mayor pulls out the Tylenol and reads the side of the package. For reduction of fever. No coincidence, that. He pushes the tube hard into his palm and turns its tricky head against the muscles in his hand. He taps out two heavy pills and stops. I wonder how high this fever will go. Maybe I should wait and see. He replaces the pills and pulls out the thermometer case from his pocket.

  As he walks, with his jaw jutting out under the lodged thermometer, he beeps every four seconds and recalls where it was he had to go this afternoon: the funeral of a young man, suddenly dead. The suicide of an older brother.

  Jesus, no wonder the kid’s drinking.

  The confused and unhappy Kyle Finn had hung himself three days ago. The thermometer beeps again and the Mayor thinks, it must be broken, where’s the distinctive tone? Surely it’s been in there long enough. As he reaches up to withdraw it, the trill resonates through his sinuses and he stops walking in order to read it properly. 99.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The Mayor slaps a hand to his forehead. He feels a gristle at the base of his throat becoming itchy. How high will this go? He returns the thermometer to its place beside the tube of fever reducers, now an emergency item in his little plastic pantry. At the funeral this afternoon, when they lay that sad boy in the ground, the Mayor fantasizes, I may burst into flames.