Eddie’s Shorts
Volume I:
Bedlam
7:00 C/M
By M. Edward McNally
Hello, all.
Just a quick word of background about what this is you are looking at. I used to be a writer, or at least I thought I was going to be one. This was back in the 90’s, in Iowa, and I was in school for Lit and Creative Writing, doing some short stories, and having a few published here and there. Then I stopped. For about a decade. Seemed like a good idea at the time - something about getting a “real life” - it doesn’t really matter now as it was the wrong thing to do. Turns out I could stop myself from writing, but I never could stop being what I was.
Anyway, I’m back now. I have a musket & magic fantasy series out which I am sure you can find if you found this, and if my writing makes you think it might be of interest. As to what this is, call ‘em fossils. Possibly the first two of many. Things lost in the sand for years, recently unearthed and dusted off a bit. Polished, too. But mainly just some markers of what was to be, or what I thought was to be, years ago. I have changed since then, it’s true. But I would not be here now without them.
Thanks for reading.
Ed
Bedlam
The Saturday after my dad first shows up, Walter makes his break for the woods, and vanishes.
Walter's run sets the rest of the patient population off. I pull the alarm myself, and right away the bells generally get most of the less-medicated patients up and shouting or crying. After the doctors settle them down one way or another, the staff that was sent into the woods after Walter start trickling back to the Farm without nothing but shrugs. The doctors meet in the main administrative office behind the desk at the front doors, I guess to figure out what to do now. A group of us staff wait for them right there in the dark lobby, so the doctors start their talk in the office real quiet, but it gets loud enough for everybody to hear pretty quick.
"Homicidal? For the love of God, Josh, can you tell me just why the hell you had Walter in the general population? Could you explain that to me?"
Dr. Palumbo tears into Dr. Cester-pronounced-Chester for a good couple of minutes, his voice comes booming through the door and must be thundering in that little office. Dr. Cester's answers are quieter and higher pitched, and Dr. Palumbo keeps cutting him off anyway. In the lobby us staff sort of just glance around, but not at each other. Dr. Palumbo is usually a nice enough man if you stay on his good side, but he can come down very hard sometimes, like back in '89 when nurse June got killed by Sid, one of the Psychotics. There were all kinds of reporters all over the Farm for about two weeks, and Dr. Palumbo was real nice and serious for all the cameras but inside he was screaming all the time at everybody, and he even fired Dan Waddamaker, one of the observers, who wasn't doing anything but reading an Atlanta newspaper in the lounge that had the headline, "HORROR AT WILLOW FARM: The Bedlam of the South."
"Goddamn it, Josh! I don't want to hear about Ritalin reactions! If you even suspected Walter might be a flight risk, let alone displaying HT's, you should have put him in the East Wing!"
Something crashes against the wall in there, and us staff in the lobby cringes.
"You remember the East Wing, don't you, Josh? You painted it that attractive shade of pink? You fucking-surfer-dolt-shithead!"
After another five minutes of one-sided shouting the door of the office busts open and the staff waiting in the lobby all jump and try to look like we weren't listening. Dr. Palumbo stomps out and comes to a stop in front of the desk; he narrows his eyes behind his silver-rimmed glasses and glares around at everybody. He's not a big guy but he carries himself like he's seven-foot tall. Dr. Wallace comes out behind him with her hands in her lab coat pockets and a minty smelling cigarette in her mouth. She stands off behind Dr. Palumbo, leans against the wall, and tries to look like she's not enjoying this. Dr. Cester is still sitting in a chair in the office, with his head in his hands. The desk in front of him is littered with empty syringes, and he looks sort of like he's trying to hide from them, or just from everything.
"Okay people, listen up," Dr. Palumbo says to us in a hiss that sounds almost like the hisses the roaches in his office make. You can't hear his N'Orleans accent hardly at all.
"We have a patient who may or may not be experiencing a homicidal episode loose in the woods, and he is apparently armed with one big mother Louisville Slugger of a flashlight."
Everybody just looks at Dr. Palumbo real serious like, except Dr. Wallace behind him who turns her face towards the wall and bites a knuckle.
Dr.Palumbo starts giving everybody partners and assignments, areas of the woods and grounds we are to search. He sends most all the staff out, calls up those who aren't on shift, and soon there are a good forty people searching the grounds of Willow Farm with flashlights of our own as the sun goes down.
We don't find a blessed thing.
*
Like I said, it was the Saturday before that my Dad showed up. I got off from work at Willow Farm and went home like usual, and in the space in front of my trailer there's this new car I never saw before. It's a big nice thing, and a deep dark blue, but it's got a lot of road dust on it and the day's not real light out yet, so the car looks sort of bruise-colored: Like when a banger gets their helmet off when you're not watching and smashes their head into a post. The car's plates are out-of-state too, they read Connecticut, so I figure somebody has family visiting, maybe Ms. Forester who's trailer is just left of mine, so I park the truck a little further down and walk back.
My Dad's sitting on my little porch, though I don't know that's who he is yet. All I know is that he's a real thin guy and not too tall when he stands up. His hair's brown but grey back along the sides, and he's wearing glasses like Dr. Palumbo's at the Farm - fragile looking with little round lenses - only this guy's have gold frames. I don't know him so I wait for him to say something, and I stay back a ways from the porch on the sidewalk through the lawn. See, I'm a big guy myself, and when I'm standing close to somebody, like say in line at the Winn Dixie in town, I guess I kind of crowd them without meaning it.
So I stay back from the guy with the gold rimmed glasses, but he looks nervous anyway.
"J-james?" he says, which is my name though everybody calls me Jim, or Jimbo, except for Bobby Lee, the Schizo at Willow Farm who calls me either, "General Pete" or his "Old War Horse."
"Yes sir," I say.
The guy is at the end of my little porch now so we're standing pretty near eye to eye. Even though his clothes are nice - beige slacks and brown loafer shoes and a blue shirt - he's got a sort of rumpled and uncared-for look about him. He studies my face real close like he's trying to read something written too small.
"James Braithwaite?" he asks. I nod. I think maybe I should tell him that people call me Jim, or something, just to be friendly and maybe relax him.
He steps off the porch so now he's looking up at me. He licks his lips real quick with a little dart of pink and he holds out a hand. I can smell smoke on his clothes, cigarette smoke.
"I'm Doctor Leslie Vorhees."
I shake his hand and he just keeps looking at me. "Do you know who I am?"
"Sure," I say. "Mom told me lots of times. You're my Dad."
"That's right," he says, and he just keeps on shaking my hand. He doesn't seem to be going to say anything else, so I tell him that people call me Jim.
*
Growing up wasn't the easiest thing I ever did. I don't mean that I remember it as being really hard, but then again I only grew up the once so I don't have anything to compare it t
o.
I guess it was a big deal that my Mom wasn't married; she had to leave her family in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and go live with her Aunt Emma in Tuxedo, Georgia. Mom told me she tried to write Leslie Vorhees, my Dad, but he never wrote back. So I grew up with my Mom on the little bit that was left of my Great Aunt Emma's place after she died when I was six.
I went to school in Tuxedo for a while, and there most of the kids gave me trouble on account of I didn't have a Dad. I don't know how they found out about that - Mom told people he was just dead, but the kids at school seemed to know different. I never had what you'd call a friend. The kids at least stopped giving me trouble when I had my big growth spurt and shot up to six-foot-seven. Everybody left me be after that.
My Mom took sick so I left school during the eighth grade and got work at a peanut farm, where I could tote a good amount due to my size. When Mom's doctor bills started getting bigger I also got part-time work as a night watchman out at Willow Farm, and after Mom died I quit the peanut job and just worked at the Farm full time. I think Mom had wanted me to go back to school, but I was eighteen by then and it seemed sort of old to start over the eighth grade. Besides, there was a staff job out at Willow Farm that opened up and paid pretty good. I had never been very smart in school anyway. I think I only passed grades when I was little because the teachers felt sorry for me, and once I was big I think they passed me because they were scared. Even though I never got in fights like a lot of kids, the teachers would sometimes look at me out of the corners of their eyes like they thought I might, even though I tried to stay sort of hunched down and out of people's ways. So I never did go back to school, and after the bank bought what was left of Aunt Emma's place from me I moved to the trailer park out near Willow Farm. And I guess that's where I'll end up.
*
My Dad's a doctor, but not like Dr. Palumbo, or Dr. Wallace, or Dr. Cester-pronounced-Chester, or any of them out at Willow Farm. He tells me he is a professor, and he works at a college instead of a treatment facility.
"Mom never said that you were a professor," I tell him. We're in my trailer now. I asked him in because it seemed like that's the thing to do, and outside he was just standing there like he didn't have anywhere else he had to be.
"Well I wasn't then, of course," Dad tells me with a little smile that looks embarrassed and goes away real fast anyhow. "I was only twenty, you know."
I nod. We're standing in the little kitchenette area and my Dad's looking around at the cabinets, and the floor, and the blue curtains with the ducks on them, and pretty much everything but me. I guess he's uncomfortable with the whole thing and there should be something that I should do about it, but I'm not sure what.
"So..." Dad takes a breath like he's going to say something but it just trails off, and he licks his lips some more, like maybe they're dry.
"Do you want something to drink?" I ask him.
His eyes snap back up to me and he nods too quick. He smells fairly strong of some kind of aftershave but he's got a couple days of salty stubble so I don't think he actually has shaved in a while. From a little sour whiff I get through the aftershave every so often I don't know that he's showered for a bit either, and it has been hot this week.
"That would be fantastic, actually," he nods real eager. I step over to the fridge and open her up.
"I've got some orange juice," I say. "Or milk. Or some Dr. Pepper."
"Oh," my Dad says. "Nothing stronger?"
I shake my head. Dad takes a juice glass half full of Dr. Pepper from me and then goes back out to his car. He comes in with a suitcase - a nice leather duffel sort of thing with lots of straps and buckles - and takes a silver hip flask out of the side pocket. He leaves the bag standing there on the floor in the living room area. He pours out of the flask into his Dr. Pepper and sets it on the table. We both sit down, and Dad starts talking, sipping along. While he's explaining to me about his "sabbatical" he takes a wide pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. It's a different sort of pack than I'm used to seeing, longer and flatter than what the smokers at the Farm carry, and sort of a fancy reddish-purplish color. The pack reads "Dunhills." When Dad lights one up with a half-gone book of matches from a gas station, though, it smells the same as everybody else's.
Dad keeps talking. He's telling me that Mom had written him once before I was born but because he was what he calls, "In my 'Wandering the Earth' period," he didn't get the letter until after. He keeps sipping and smoking real quick while he's telling me this and I keep looking at the ash that's getting pretty long on the end of his Dunhill while it zips around over my table top (he waves his arms a lot while he's talking). I don't want to interrupt him but I start to ease up from my chair towards the cabinet where I've got a clean butter dish, which I figure would do for an ashtray because I don't have a real one. Soon as I start to move, though, Dad jerks and slides back in his chair and the ash falls off and hits the table top. It holds together and just lies there looking ugly and sad, like in spring when there's an early morning rain that blows off before noon and worms will get stuck out on the sidewalk and fry up into brittle little brown lines.
"Look, you've every reason to be angry with me!" my Dad says real loud and almost panicky, holding his hands up in front of him. They're shaking, and the smoke from his cigarette jiggles in the air as it rises. "I realize that I have been absolutely no kind of father to you for thirty years, and I'm here to apologize, deeply, honestly, to you for that!"
I quit moving when Dad jumped so as not to spook him any more. I speak real slow and soft, like when you're trying to soothe one of the 'pathics at Willow Farm once something wrong has happened. They tend to excite real easy, too.
"I was only reaching for a butter dish, so as you could use it as an ashtray," I say.
Dad looks at me, then glances at his cigarette as if he just now realized he was smoking it. "Oh," he says, then looks at the grey ash worm on the table top. He reaches out and brushes at it, and it breaks apart and leaves a black smear across the yellowed wood.
*
My Dad moves into the trailer with me. We don't make a big deal of it or anything, actually I don't know right away that he has moved in, his dropping his duffel bag in the living room was pretty much it. After a couple days, though, I sort of figure out that he's not leaving.
I don't see him much for those days as I am working long shifts at Willow Farm this week. When I'm leaving for work the day after he shows up and moves in, Sunday, he asks me about work.
"It's not actually a farm," I tell him, "It's just called Willow Farm on account of it used to be a farm, and down by the crick on the property there is still a stand of willow trees."
We are eating breakfast, I made a big pile of scrambled eggs. We are drinking orange juice though Dad has added to his out of another flask from his bag. He seems to have a number of them in there.
"So what is it then?" Dad asks. He holds his drink with one hand and the other switches between his fork and a cigarette he leaves sit on the ashy butter dish. "A spa of some sort?"
"It's a treatment facility," I say. My eggs don't taste very good with smoke in my nose.
"You mean like an asylum?" my Dad asks, looking surprised.
"The doctors don't like to call it that," I say. My Dad does something strange then: He laughs. He laughs to himself, shakes his head, and finishes his drink with a swallow. He starts making himself another one right away, pouring clear liquid from his flask on the table and adding just a bit of orange juice that hardly changes the color.
"How perfectly Tennessee Williams!" Dad says, still shaking his head and stirring his drink with a pinkie finger. Where a wedding ring would be on that hand, there's an angry red band of skin. I want to mention to my Dad that we're a good piece south of Tennessee, in Georgia, but I'm not sure if that's what he's talking about.
"So how long have you worked there?" Dad asks, smacking his lips over his first sip of his new drink and still looking pleased. He seems to be a pr
etty happy guy.
"A bit longer than twelve years," I say. "Since just before Mom died."
He stops smiling then and glances at me a little spooked again. He takes another sip before saying, "Oh. Right. I am sorry to hear that. Your Mother was...a good woman, James."
I nod at him, but I'm a little surprised to hear him say that. I always thought he never knew her all that well.
I clean the dishes and pick up my white jacket for work. When I leave the trailer Dad is still sitting at the table, sipping his drink and ashing towards the butter dish.
*
When I'm going to say something it usually sounds okay in my head. But once I say it I don't blame people for not always understanding what I'm saying, because I think that if I didn't know, if I was just hearing somebody else saying what I'm saying, then sometimes I might not understand it either. So even though I decide to talk to one of the doctors out a Willow Farm about my Dad soon after he shows up and moves in, it takes me a couple of days before I have it pretty-well planned out just what I want to say.
See, I don't want them to get the wrong idea. I mean I want to talk to them about my Dad because there are some things that he says and does that sort of make me maybe think that I should talk to somebody. But then again, and even though they are all really good people, I don't know just how serious the doctors might take it. At Willow Farm lots of people do and say some odd things but it's not always taken the same. I mean lots of times a patient will say something and all the doctors will get together and talk about how important it is, like when Ronnie, one of the MPD's, started talking with a new lisp and a weird accent, but then other times nobody will pay any mind to something that seems just as strange to me, like the box of four-inch cockroaches Dr. Palumbo keeps in his office. So while I want to talk to somebody about my Dad, I don't know that they might either take it real serious and bring him in or something, which I don't think I want, or otherwise just ignore it, and sort of look at me funny for asking. So I plan out just what I want to say real careful, and even then I want to try it out on somebody else first.
I work a day shift on the Wednesday following my Dad getting here, and by then I'm ready to talk to somebody.