Crazy Lou
By Darrel Bird
Copy©right 2014 by Darrel Bird
Psalms 34:7 The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them. (King James Bible)
Crazy Lou
Voices awakened her from a drugged sleep, her eyes burned as they opened up to her cardboard world.
“Hey in there in the box?” A voice called out at her feet.
She felt herself slipping as she was being dragged by her ankles, “That is my box!” And she was looking up at a tall fellow with a full beard. She had snagged her pack as she slept with it close to her chest. Another man stood beside him grinning through broken tobacco stained teeth.
“Kick the crap out of her Mike!” the other fellow glared down with hatred and contempt, as he scratched at his privates.
The early morning light revealed a woman with torn and stained clothing. She had black going to grey; matted hair that she had cut in chunks with a knife.
“I’m going to teach this bitch a lesson.” Mike shot the words through his teeth as he grabbed for the bag. She deftly moved it away, crushing it too her under her left arm.
“Lets do her and then slit her throat Mike.”
“Sure, we’ll leave her to the rats.” Mike spewed that with a string of expletives as he drew a wicked knife out of its holster.
“Please, please don’t hurt me, I’ll give you something good.” Her begging voice seemed weak as she cowered before the two on one knee.
“Well give it quick!” The one called Mike said, his eyes going greedy.
She shifted the bag down until she clutched it in her left hand. She looked at the green bag that had an angel stamped on it in white. It was a small angel, but she loved it, and she stroked the angel with her hand as it moved toward the brass zipper. She bent her head over the bag as she peered inside. Her hand moved inside the bag, and closed over the straight razor. She straightened up, and lunged at Mike, slicing cleanly through his juggler. Then her hand flew to the other one and sliced through his jaw and his nose.
Both men looked at her in shock as Mike choked on his own blood. The other one screamed as he felt the awful extent of his wounds. She struck again, and both men were strangling in their own blood.
She ran out from under the bridge still clutching her bag to her chest. She ran north along the I-5 freeway until she fell by the side of the road gulping for air. She looked back along the long thoroughfare where at the end was the bridge over the Columbia River. She could make out the steal girders of the beginning of the bridge, and she saw no one.
It was dark the night before when she had come to the Mill Plain Road overpass and had spotted the large box, and she had crawled into it and went to sleep, grateful to shut out the world for just a little while.
She just sat beside the side of the road, and looked back. She knew perfectly well where she was in the city of Vancouver. She had lived in Portland before, and after, she had been homeless from Astoria to Salem, and then back to Portland. Today, her mind just wandered as it sometimes did. She knew where she was, but she had to think to remember who she was. She couldn’t quite remember today, but maybe soon she would remember it.
A week ago a woman had tried to take her stuff, and she had almost killed the woman. People only knew her as crazy Lou as she would go through the homeless camps preaching out of her Bible. Sometimes she made sense, and at other times she babbled to where no one could understand her at all. One old fellow remarked. “Crazy as a bedbug.”
She had been beaten, raped, and robbed, but there came a day when she was dangerous to mess with, and the people that knew her left her alone.
She remembered some two days ago when she had been sifting through a pile of garbage in the downtown area of Portland, the rats screamed their indignation, crawled over her hands, but she didn’t mind the rats. Her hand found something buried in the garbage. She lifted the thing out, and saw it was a tiny thing, its face chewed away by the rats. She stared at it until it finally soaked into her hounded mind that it was an infant that had been tossed into the garbage heap. She cradled the tiny thing in her arms as her mind grasped for the past. “Rock a bye baby, in the tree tops… When the wind blows, the cradle will rock…” She sang the song with broken voice as she hugged the broken thing to her chest, until she remembered the glass angel she had found.
Her mind said, “You can’t keep it, its soul has gone where the angel went.” Then she remembered, she had lost the glass angel, but she still had the white angel. When the soldiers had come she had dropped it in her efforts to get away from them.
She had carried the tiny thing to where grass was growing, and laid it gently in the green grass. She sat beside it for a few minutes as the wind moaned around the corner of a broken brick building. “Move on Crazy Lou.” A voice called to her out of the moaning wind.
She plodded on beside the road for three more miles, until she felt the blister rising in her boot and knew that she would have to stop soon. She looked across a fence and saw a sign that said nursery, and she chuckled, “I do need a bit of nursing.” She found a low place in the ground. A place where she could wriggle under the fence, she lay down on the ground and drug her head and shoulders under the fence, and she was through.
She climbed the gradual embankment to the nursery, and found that the fence had been cut. She went through the cut to the low canopy with its semi-clear shading. Buckets of dead trees and flowers sat around the room. Some old burlap sacking lay against the wall and she laid her exhausted body down, and promptly dropped off to sleep.
She dreamed, in those dreams, she was shopping in a great mall and all around was glass angels in every window. Hughes of blue light shot through the glass like fire. A being walked up to her, and asked, “Do you like the angels? They are mine.”
She awoke with her eyes burning and it was dark. She listened but heard no sound except a gentle rattling of dead leaves in the potted trees. She moved her aching body a little and then went back to sleep. This time she did not dream, and when she awoke it was again light. She lay there and shivered a little in the early morning cold, wishing she could go to the place of angels, but the slivers of the dream comforted her. She moved to sit up, and her guts gave an embarrassing growl. She hadn’t eaten anything in two days. She looked at the white angel on her bag, “I must eat soon miss angel, or I will starve soon enough.”
She took her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and began walking again. At least her feet felt better this morning, but she knew the blister on her big toe she had taken a needle to would soon give her problems again. She walked down the same road as the nursery was on because it paralleled the free way. She did not intend to return to Portland, ever, because Portland was a dead place with evil monsters to attack her, a place where they threw babies in the garbage. She walked on until her walk became a hitching walk. There was a small sign that read ‘GRIST MILL’. The place where the blister had arisen was now raw flesh, and burning as if someone had built a fire in her boot.
“I remember this place, we came here once.” She tried to remember when, but couldn’t. In her minds eye she recalled the log house by the stream, and the great mill that turned in the stream to grind meal from corn. She walked up the road in the direction of the sign for two miles. She was just about ready to lie down beside the road when she saw the bridge up ahead. She remembered the grist mill was right beside the bridge. “Old lady, just a little way, and we shall see the grist mill.” Am I such an old lady? But she could not recall how old she was, for in her pain the past seemed to dim to coals of a dying fire.
She slogged across the bridge, and there was the old log house. It wasn’t exactly the way she remembered it but there it was. She walked up the path to the door, and opened it to peak insid
e. She saw the shelves with little sacks of something in them, and then her eyes followed the log walls around the room. That was when she spotted a modern thing in the room in the corner to the left. It was a red sleeping bag. A large back pack sat against the wall beside it. This startled her because a sleeping bag meant people who might want to do her harm. Her eyes narrowed as she called out, “Anyone here? Hello, is anyone here?” She listened, but heard no sound but the stream as it gurgled past the great wheel.
She knew she couldn’t run fast or far, “Oh please angel, help me.” She rubbed her hand over the white angel. She stood long minutes staring at the sleeping bag, her