The Burnside Winked
Blue lights strobed across The Burnside’s brick façade and flashed off a wall of clouds in the west. The October day had
started out mild and crystal-bright, and I was sure it had stayed that way right up until the moment I was marched outside
to stand and deliver in my short-sleeve cotton scrubs. Now, I leaned against the patrol car’s front fender and sang silent
hallelujahs for the warm air rising from the hood. Drumming my fingers while Deputy Kady scribbled a novel on the police
report was not likely to keep me warm against the wind. Every little bit helped.
Even if it had been sun-screen, shorts, and shades whether, the waiting wouldn’t have been easy. Over the sounds of
humming engine and scribbling ball-point, I could hear laughter bursting out the Burnside’s smashed-out front doors.
Yes, laughter. Bizarre events create bizarre effects.
For the first time in the six years I’d worked at Burnside Manor Veteran’s Home, I was outside those doors and I could think
of nothing I wanted to do more than rush back in – and not only because the chill bumped my skin like a plucked goose. I
was fond of the old soldiers when they were at their crankiest, and considering what the day’s happenings might have
wrought, hearing the whole gaggle all atwitter felt like some sort of miracle. I didn’t want to miss the happy ending.
But I had to wait because I accorded Deputy Kady’s stamped tin shield all due respect. Honestly, that badge would have
been sufficient. The blaring lights, Kady’s loose-in-the-holster .357, her steroid-fed partner lurking beyond the black-and-
white – taken all together they reeked of overkill.
The Burnside stands in the trees six miles from town, two miles from the county landfill, and a quarter mile from the ruts
and potholes we locals call State Highway Forty-seven. Who would be around for those strobes to warn away? Besides,
no crime had been committed, and it had been a decade since Kady, known then as Suzie K, had harried me like a jilted
Chihuahua in grade school. Why she was treating me like a felon now, only God and Lucifer could ever know.
After five minutes – or days, or decades – had gone by, she finally finished writing her epic saga. She flipped over the
page, cleared her throat, and looked up at me. At least, I think she was looking up at me. She loomed a good four-
eleven, so from my six-and-a-quarter foot vantage I couldn’t see past the brim of her Smokey-the-Bear hat. She asked
her first question, and I reminded myself about badge, gun, and steroid-man. Accordingly, I curbed my witty, sarcastic
tongue, and told the truth – so-help-me, whole and nothing-but.
“Your full name,” she said, in a Sergeant-Friday-of-Dragnet monotone.
Okay, so I almost curbed my sarcastic tongue. “Blaine,” I said, leaning down to put my chest in her line of sight,
enunciating clearly, and pointing at my name tag. “Wright. L for Licensed, P for Practical, N for Nurse.” Silently I added,
get yourself some gingko biloba, Deputy Su. I’m the one you framed for Grand Theft Lunch in the third grade.
But allow me to clear my throat with meaning and say this for the Walker County Sheriff’s Office. They know how to train
up an interrogator. Suzie rattled me. By the time she was done, I needed to convince myself – more than her – that I was
not to blame for any of what happened.
I wasn’t.
Five hours earlier, I’d rolled my pea-green Gremlin into my parking space in the third row, even though the rest of the lot
was empty but for Marilyn’s boyfriend’s muddy S-10 Blazer, same as every day. Same as every day, I had forty-nine
seconds, give or take a wink, to get to the time clock. I had too many things to carry, and I was half-dressed. I wriggled
into my blue scrubs-smock, clenched the handle of my lunch cooler in my teeth, stuck my paperback copy of the latest
Dresden Files under my left arm, and used my right to pin my badge above my heart, all the while trotting toward the
entry. I smacked the automatic-door button with my right knee – no mean feat but I’d had a lot of practice. Athletic as
always, I was able to time my pass through the glass doors perfectly, and punched in for my six-thirty start time with four
seconds to spare.
It’s true, I’m the senior LPN, but that does not mean I was in charge. I refuse to shoulder the blame simply because the RN
– surprise – once again had a hangover and never showed. And, even if I had been in charge, what could I have done –
especially once crazy Joe Leonard pushed the whole fiasco over the top?
Seriously, what could I have done? I’m one guy – a practical nurse for the love of Pete – in a rest home full of fighting
men. Sure, most of them have shrunk a size or two, and unless you count Big Marty Johnson I’m as heavy as any two
residents put together. They’re all well beyond their prime years, but believe me, these are some tough old birds. They
might be heavily drugged, but they’ve grown accustomed to their meds. These soldiers are alert and, as I found out
today, they can mix it up.
***
By eight, I had finished my check-in and med trays as well as my daily self-inflicted pep-talk. I had re-dedicated myself to
life without sunlight. I was indoctrinated, responsible, and immersed in the smell of old men at breakfast. Eau de
pancakes, Ben Gay, and half-smoked Viceroy’s. Yes, I said to myself, Blaine Wright, you are living your boyhood dreams.
Right.
Last year’s funding cuts had relegated the truly demented and the bedridden to other, less stately hell-holes, and left the
Burnside two-thirds empty. All those left are mobile to some degree, and every day they gather around the foyer after
breakfast, prepared to greet with friendly smiles the constant parade of visitors.
Right.
On rainy days, the old boys paste themselves to the glass on either side of the double doors. I always think they want to
crowd as close to the real world as they can without setting off the exit alarm, which was installed two years ago after a
training session about wanderers. It’s okay for people to wander in, I guess, but no one’s supposed to wander out unless
a key-card toting official – such as a high-ranking LPN – allows it. But when the sun shines – as it did this morning – the
vets seem to want to keep their distance from the windows. They worry, I suppose, that the washed-out light squeezing
through the UV-blocking tint will fry their knees. They don’t risk it.
Instead, those who can independently stand belly up to the reception counter, even though there’s no secretary there to
badger since Congress hung the funding out to dry. They lean on their elbows and practice looking like ruffians who’ve
just ordered whisky and plan to start a bar fight. Their henchman, the vets on wheels, plant their chairs and oxygen
cylinders to block the aisles that wing off left and right from the foyer, ensuring that anyone fated to wander into this trap
will find escape unlikely.
Well practiced at this gauntlet, I had threaded my way through their midst, checking a tube here, a pouch there, slapping
down Jack Ridley’s fond caress. I'd made my way to thirteen north, where I was tidying up after Jay Krump’s breakfast-in-
bed ritual, which involves flinging his oatmeal and dousing his sheets with pink juice. Of course, I was fully absorbed in
that pleasant task. That’s why I can’t be sure how the doe – yes, as in deer – managed to tap the button for the automatic
doors.
Deer do like to eat bark, though, especially tender young bark. And out front of the Burnside, just to the right of the entry,
a seedling cottonwood had sprouted after a puddle dried up, April before last. The best I can figure, that little tree must
have been what the doe was aiming to get. To reach it, she would have had to squeeze between the wall and the end of
the handrail. Probably all unknowing, she shouldered up against the switch, and voila, the door was ajar. Maybe she’s
the curious type, or maybe she likes eau de pancakes, because once the door eased open she waltzed in, I’m told,
dancing on her pointy little hooves like a lady on high-heeled slippers.
***
Right off, the story goes, she pranced up to Jimmy Carulli’s wheelchair and started nosing his ear. Jimmy shouted, “Holy
MAC-A-ROLI,” but that’s nothing unusual. It’s the way he starts the stream every time he’s about to spew obscenities,
which – being an ex-sailor instead of a soldier – he’s better at than all the other residents teamed together. So, I did hear
him, from back in Mr. Krump’s bathroom where I was flushing the oatmeal. I just didn’t think much about it.
Next, though, for about half a minute, that old brick building was more silent than it has ever been in the last six years,
even in the dead of night. Before that moment, I never knew that the wall clocks actually tick. Then a wave, I’d call it, a
wave of sound arose, rumbling down the hall from the foyer as if from the pit of The Burnside’s belly. Something with cold
toes skittered up my spine. The sound began as a ghostly drone, all those deep, tobacco-flavored voices growling almost
too low to hear like the beginning of the New World Symphony. Then, they rose into a swell, building all the way to double
forte.
Frankly, except for Jimmy, and of course Joe Leonard, I had no idea the old codgers had it in them to make that much
noise. Their voices alone splintered my nerves, never mind the special effects – feet sliding, and chair wheels clicking,
portable O-two compressors keeping up a hoodoo beat, tap-tap-tap, whhhshsh.
And then it got spookier. The whole sound together seemed to shift, unholy buzz gathering strength, pulling inward from
all sides toward the foyer’s center, bees swarming in a twister.
I admit I’m not the brightest bulb on the holiday tree, but I’m not a complete fool. Something was happening to the
Burnside, something big. Muttering four-letter words that some may choose to think of as a prayer of thanks for nurse’s
shoes with high traction soles, I threw caution to the recirculating air and took off down the hall in a mighty sprint.
As I drew close, Marilyn – who’s almost as tall as me and takes up twice the air space – came banging out the kitchen
doors, shouting “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, no!” Janelle, the only nurse’s aide that had shown for duty, was leaning out the
door that squared off the end of the opposite aisle – room forty-one south – timid as the mouse from whom she borrowed
her brownish hair color. Her eyes were stretched wide and her skin had blanched two shades pastier than usual. She
stood in the door and her bottom jaw fell and then bounced back up like a spring-loaded hatch. She never spoke nor
twitched a muscle again until everything got wound up tight a little later, and her big moment arrived.
Naturally, none of the docs were on duty; also absent, as I mentioned, was our trusty RN. Any one of them – the
professionals – would have exerted enough authority; they would have assured that order and calm prevailed. Old Miss
Hibbs, the so-called social worker, would have hauled out her British accent and – with strictest attention to grammar and
usage – verbally whipped all the old men ‘til they ran to their respective rooms, tucking their bald, wrinkled tails between
their quaking knees.
Marilyn and I are popular. The residents like us. But they don’t listen to us. If they’d heeded us she and I would be hailed
as heroes across the continent, but they kept their own counsel and madness prevailed.
I breezed in from the north hall and grabbed for Jimmy, while Marilyn was reaching for Joe. If we’d only had time for two
more strides apiece we’d have licked it. As it was, before we got there, Jimmy had his dentures in hand, snapping them at
the doe like castanets. Then Joe leaned across the intervening crowd, slapped her tawny rump, and yelled, “HYAH,”
something like, I imagine, he used to do to red-eyed bulls as a rodeo clown.
That poor doe reared like a Lipizzaner and leapt straight over the tops of the old men’s variously-haired or shiny heads,
and commenced to stomping the doors. Did I mention they were glass doors? Two solid kicks of those deceptively dainty-
looking split hooves did them in. The resulting shatter echoed with a sound like faerie bells, deep into the dim and
hallowed corridors of Burnside Manor. I have in my mind a slow-motion picture of pretty bits of glass exploding in brilliant
sunlight. Truthfully, I never saw it at all. I was otherwise occupied.
Joe’s duster, as he liked to call the robe he wore every day of his life at The Burnside, was an ugly blue thing beneath
which he always wore exactly nothing no matter how we coaxed, hounded or ordered him to put on his shorts. No surprise,
in the midst of the action, it gaped open, and Jack Ridley – whom everyone calls Sweetie – just happened to have his chair
parked right next to Jimmy’s. Grinning like a toothless shark, Jack closed in on his prey and made a grab for the meat.
Joe’s eyes went so wide his brows looked like a hairline, and he sucked in a breath deeper I’m sure than any he’d taken in
the last ten years.
I don’t know if Joe did what he did next on purpose, or if it was a defensive reflex. His knee sprang chinward like a
snapping jackknife. He may have meant to knee Sweetie someplace vital, but whatever he intended, what happened was
that his knee cracked into my nose as I bent forward, unable to stop the momentum of my head-long rush to stop Jimmy
even though I already knew I’d left it too late.
Joe, meanwhile, had been holding onto Jimmy. As Isaac Newton would have predicted, when Joe jerked his knee a
reaction ensued with a measurable effect on Jimmy’s chair. Jimmy started spinning and – true to form – instantly
commenced firing off cuss-words in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spray. Now, I’m not one to underestimate people,
but I swear I never would have believed that seventeen old men – some with so many tubes and containers attached they
could double as lab equipment – could have moved so fast. The vets that were up on their feet actually jumped, and
wheelchair tires screeched, haulin’ ass and burnin’ rubber.
Marilyn, when she saw the swarm of old soldiers rolling her way, apparently wanted to comment. As it turned out, she had
just enough time to belt out one unspellable syllable before her breath was knocked away on impact. She reeled
backward, arms wind-milling in an effort to stay upright, and she might have succeeded if the reception counter had not
interfered. She slammed into it and slid straight to the floor, landing – flomp – on her most well-padded region, then
slumped down with her back to the wood, benched for the rest of the game.
Not me. No such luck.
When Joe kneed my nose, I fell forward, if you can believe that. Counterproductive attempts to recover tangled me so
thoroughly in Jimmy’s spinning chair that it snatched me off my feet and dumped me – smack – into Jimmy’s lap. Next
thing I knew we sailed as one down the aqua-tiled hall.
In that instant, we left time behind, Jimmy and I. Alive fully in the moment, we entered an illusion of motion slowed to the
graceful tempo of a Strauss waltz. Our conveyance held us snug and spun us lazily, a skiff adrift on the gentle blue
Danube.
I snapped out of it right away, to the sound of Jimmy shouting in my ear, “Holy MAC-A-ROLI.” It made no difference. I might
as well have been asleep, for all that consciousness availed. All I could think to do was squeak out a prayer to Saint
Christopher, the traveler’s patron saint, and clamp my eyes shut. I opened them just as we approached the door to suite
forty-one south. Janelle stood there, statue-still as ever, and maybe if she’d tried she could have caught us. Instead, as if
she’d been waiting for this moment her whole life, she stood up a little straighter and shouted out what may have been her
very first swear word ever. The she stepped back and slammed the door.
The doors inside the Burnside are not as flimsy as they look.
***
I woke up with Joe Leonard pressing a cold towel to my head and saying, “C’mon now cowboy, suck it up! Are you a man
or a ballerina?” Deputy Kady and her partner, whom I’ll just call Satan, had already arrived. The deer had escaped out the
busted doors but so had Wayne Crimmins – whom we call The Wanderer. No one had paid any attention at all to the exit
alarm except Satan, and he just crushed it like a fly.
While the officers of the law investigated the scene, I swept away the glass, and cleaned up the blood that had splashed
the entryway. It wasn’t, I calculated, as copious as imagination might suggest, still I hoped it belonged to the deer, and not
Wayne Crimmins. Reflecting, I also hoped she wasn’t too badly hurt. She was, after all, the first unpaid visitor to pass
through the Burnside’s doors in two weeks.
Marilyn’s boyfriend DeWayne came as usual for lunch, but today he arrived just in time to rush her to urgent care. He
installed her in the back of the Blazer, covered her with a blanket, and rolled his coat as a pillow for her head. He was
shaken, and I was surprised. I never thought he was the sort to really care. Score one for Marilyn, I thought, and admitted
I was a little jealous.
Janelle came strolling up the south corridor slow and cautious and stopped, turning toward me with an actor’s on-the-mark
precision. Staring at me as if I had turned purple and grown horns, she drawled, “I’m quittin’ now, Blaine,” giving all the
words two syllables. She picked her way through the shattered glass, and then stepped out of The Burnside and – one
would hope – into the light of a more predictable day.
***
Out in the empty parking lot, a fine, cold rain now began to fall. Kady finished questioning me, told me not to leave town,
and snapped her pen into its place on the clipboard. She and Satan drove away, ignoring the crackle of their official
police radio, too busy tossing me the evil eye. I assumed that meant they expected the search for Wayne Crimmins to
make them late for burgers, and I finally understood the nature of my crime – interfering with lunch in the first degree. I
would surely be punished.
I sighed at the inevitability of my doom, and unrolled the cold towel I had been wringing during the inquisition. I held it
against my aching head, and it helped. My ears stopped chiming. The gleeful noise from inside the Burnside surged, and
– reminded – I turned to go in. I stopped after only a step. I looked at the place I’d walked into day after day for six years,
and every brick in the wall seemed strange, brand new, never before seen by the likes of man.
What with the rain-darkened skies, the lights off, and the glass gone, the doorway to the Burnside at first looked like a big,
blank eye. Then all at once the lights came on, and I swear to you The Burnside winked. I laughed, winked back, and
walked in.
The men were in an uproar, clapping each other on the back and “haw-hawing” like they’d just snatched victory straight
out of Mussolini’s teeth. As I moved among them checking tubes, pouches, and bruises, I collected several pats on the
shoulder and a couple of high fives. Jimmy was cussing up a blue streak and Joe was saying “Shut-up, Jimmy, shut-up!”
But even they were smiling.
The guys who could swallow swigged back cold coffee like single malt Scotch, and unlit cigarettes dangled from several
bristly faces. I had to swat the lighter from Joe Leonard’s hands to keep him from igniting the O-two and blowing us all
through the pearly gates. He said, “Watch it there, son. I’ll be treating you to a mouth full of knuckles if you try that
again.” I looked over to see a twinkle in his eye, and when I laughed, he did, too.
Jay Krump, that old instigator, had busted into the kitchen and stolen a box of barbecue flavor potato chips and a plasti-
pak of flash-frozen meatballs. The chips were turning fingers orange all around, and the meatballs had been converted
into chips for the hi-lo poker game that Jay and four others had dealt out on the reception counter.
Three hours remained on my shift. Sometime between now and the end of it, someone important was bound to show up
intent on getting things back to what they’d call normal. But for now, at the Burnside, it was just the soldiers and me,
Blaine Wright, L for Licensed, P for Practical, N for Nurse.
So what the hell? I was still on the payroll, the air inside was fresh for a change, and life was full of surprises. “Shut-up,
Joe,” I said. “Sweetie, deal me in.”
Blue lights strobed across The Burnside’s brick façade and flashed off a wall of clouds in the west. The October day had
started out mild and crystal-bright, and I was sure it had stayed that way right up until the moment I was marched outside
to stand and deliver in my short-sleeve cotton scrubs. Now, I leaned against the patrol car’s front fender and sang silent
hallelujahs for the warm air rising from the hood. Drumming my fingers while Deputy Kady scribbled a novel on the police
report was not likely to keep me warm against the wind. Every little bit helped.
Even if it had been sun-screen, shorts, and shades whether, the waiting wouldn’t have been easy. Over the sounds of
humming engine and scribbling ball-point, I could hear laughter bursting out the Burnside’s smashed-out front doors.
Yes, laughter. Bizarre events create bizarre effects.
For the first time in the six years I’d worked at Burnside Manor Veteran’s Home, I was outside those doors and I could think
of nothing I wanted to do more than rush back in – and not only because the chill bumped my skin like a plucked goose. I
was fond of the old soldiers when they were at their crankiest, and considering what the day’s happenings might have
wrought, hearing the whole gaggle all atwitter felt like some sort of miracle. I didn’t want to miss the happy ending.
But I had to wait because I accorded Deputy Kady’s stamped tin shield all due respect. Honestly, that badge would have
been sufficient. The blaring lights, Kady’s loose-in-the-holster .357, her steroid-fed partner lurking beyond the black-and-
white – taken all together they reeked of overkill.
The Burnside stands in the trees six miles from town, two miles from the county landfill, and a quarter mile from the ruts
and potholes we locals call State Highway Forty-seven. Who would be around for those strobes to warn away? Besides,
no crime had been committed, and it had been a decade since Kady, known then as Suzie K, had harried me like a jilted
Chihuahua in grade school. Why she was treating me like a felon now, only God and Lucifer could ever know.
After five minutes – or days, or decades – had gone by, she finally finished writing her epic saga. She flipped over the
page, cleared her throat, and looked up at me. At least, I think she was looking up at me. She loomed a good four-
eleven, so from my six-and-a-quarter foot vantage I couldn’t see past the brim of her Smokey-the-Bear hat. She asked
her first question, and I reminded myself about badge, gun, and steroid-man. Accordingly, I curbed my witty, sarcastic
tongue, and told the truth – so-help-me, whole and nothing-but.
“Your full name,” she said, in a Sergeant-Friday-of-Dragnet monotone.
Okay, so I almost curbed my sarcastic tongue. “Blaine,” I said, leaning down to put my chest in her line of sight,
enunciating clearly, and pointing at my name tag. “Wright. L for Licensed, P for Practical, N for Nurse.” Silently I added,
get yourself some gingko biloba, Deputy Su. I’m the one you framed for Grand Theft Lunch in the third grade.
But allow me to clear my throat with meaning and say this for the Walker County Sheriff’s Office. They know how to train
up an interrogator. Suzie rattled me. By the time she was done, I needed to convince myself – more than her – that I was
not to blame for any of what happened.
I wasn’t.
Five hours earlier, I’d rolled my pea-green Gremlin into my parking space in the third row, even though the rest of the lot
was empty but for Marilyn’s boyfriend’s muddy S-10 Blazer, same as every day. Same as every day, I had forty-nine
seconds, give or take a wink, to get to the time clock. I had too many things to carry, and I was half-dressed. I wriggled
into my blue scrubs-smock, clenched the handle of my lunch cooler in my teeth, stuck my paperback copy of the latest
Dresden Files under my left arm, and used my right to pin my badge above my heart, all the while trotting toward the
entry. I smacked the automatic-door button with my right knee – no mean feat but I’d had a lot of practice. Athletic as
always, I was able to time my pass through the glass doors perfectly, and punched in for my six-thirty start time with four
seconds to spare.
It’s true, I’m the senior LPN, but that does not mean I was in charge. I refuse to shoulder the blame simply because the RN
– surprise – once again had a hangover and never showed. And, even if I had been in charge, what could I have done –
especially once crazy Joe Leonard pushed the whole fiasco over the top?
Seriously, what could I have done? I’m one guy – a practical nurse for the love of Pete – in a rest home full of fighting
men. Sure, most of them have shrunk a size or two, and unless you count Big Marty Johnson I’m as heavy as any two
residents put together. They’re all well beyond their prime years, but believe me, these are some tough old birds. They
might be heavily drugged, but they’ve grown accustomed to their meds. These soldiers are alert and, as I found out
today, they can mix it up.
***
By eight, I had finished my check-in and med trays as well as my daily self-inflicted pep-talk. I had re-dedicated myself to
life without sunlight. I was indoctrinated, responsible, and immersed in the smell of old men at breakfast. Eau de
pancakes, Ben Gay, and half-smoked Viceroy’s. Yes, I said to myself, Blaine Wright, you are living your boyhood dreams.
Right.
Last year’s funding cuts had relegated the truly demented and the bedridden to other, less stately hell-holes, and left the
Burnside two-thirds empty. All those left are mobile to some degree, and every day they gather around the foyer after
breakfast, prepared to greet with friendly smiles the constant parade of visitors.
Right.
On rainy days, the old boys paste themselves to the glass on either side of the double doors. I always think they want to
crowd as close to the real world as they can without setting off the exit alarm, which was installed two years ago after a
training session about wanderers. It’s okay for people to wander in, I guess, but no one’s supposed to wander out unless
a key-card toting official – such as a high-ranking LPN – allows it. But when the sun shines – as it did this morning – the
vets seem to want to keep their distance from the windows. They worry, I suppose, that the washed-out light squeezing
through the UV-blocking tint will fry their knees. They don’t risk it.
Instead, those who can independently stand belly up to the reception counter, even though there’s no secretary there to
badger since Congress hung the funding out to dry. They lean on their elbows and practice looking like ruffians who’ve
just ordered whisky and plan to start a bar fight. Their henchman, the vets on wheels, plant their chairs and oxygen
cylinders to block the aisles that wing off left and right from the foyer, ensuring that anyone fated to wander into this trap
will find escape unlikely.
Well practiced at this gauntlet, I had threaded my way through their midst, checking a tube here, a pouch there, slapping
down Jack Ridley’s fond caress. I'd made my way to thirteen north, where I was tidying up after Jay Krump’s breakfast-in-
bed ritual, which involves flinging his oatmeal and dousing his sheets with pink juice. Of course, I was fully absorbed in
that pleasant task. That’s why I can’t be sure how the doe – yes, as in deer – managed to tap the button for the automatic
doors.
Deer do like to eat bark, though, especially tender young bark. And out front of the Burnside, just to the right of the entry,
a seedling cottonwood had sprouted after a puddle dried up, April before last. The best I can figure, that little tree must
have been what the doe was aiming to get. To reach it, she would have had to squeeze between the wall and the end of
the handrail. Probably all unknowing, she shouldered up against the switch, and voila, the door was ajar. Maybe she’s
the curious type, or maybe she likes eau de pancakes, because once the door eased open she waltzed in, I’m told,
dancing on her pointy little hooves like a lady on high-heeled slippers.
***
Right off, the story goes, she pranced up to Jimmy Carulli’s wheelchair and started nosing his ear. Jimmy shouted, “Holy
MAC-A-ROLI,” but that’s nothing unusual. It’s the way he starts the stream every time he’s about to spew obscenities,
which – being an ex-sailor instead of a soldier – he’s better at than all the other residents teamed together. So, I did hear
him, from back in Mr. Krump’s bathroom where I was flushing the oatmeal. I just didn’t think much about it.
Next, though, for about half a minute, that old brick building was more silent than it has ever been in the last six years,
even in the dead of night. Before that moment, I never knew that the wall clocks actually tick. Then a wave, I’d call it, a
wave of sound arose, rumbling down the hall from the foyer as if from the pit of The Burnside’s belly. Something with cold
toes skittered up my spine. The sound began as a ghostly drone, all those deep, tobacco-flavored voices growling almost
too low to hear like the beginning of the New World Symphony. Then, they rose into a swell, building all the way to double
forte.
Frankly, except for Jimmy, and of course Joe Leonard, I had no idea the old codgers had it in them to make that much
noise. Their voices alone splintered my nerves, never mind the special effects – feet sliding, and chair wheels clicking,
portable O-two compressors keeping up a hoodoo beat, tap-tap-tap, whhhshsh.
And then it got spookier. The whole sound together seemed to shift, unholy buzz gathering strength, pulling inward from
all sides toward the foyer’s center, bees swarming in a twister.
I admit I’m not the brightest bulb on the holiday tree, but I’m not a complete fool. Something was happening to the
Burnside, something big. Muttering four-letter words that some may choose to think of as a prayer of thanks for nurse’s
shoes with high traction soles, I threw caution to the recirculating air and took off down the hall in a mighty sprint.
As I drew close, Marilyn – who’s almost as tall as me and takes up twice the air space – came banging out the kitchen
doors, shouting “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, no!” Janelle, the only nurse’s aide that had shown for duty, was leaning out the
door that squared off the end of the opposite aisle – room forty-one south – timid as the mouse from whom she borrowed
her brownish hair color. Her eyes were stretched wide and her skin had blanched two shades pastier than usual. She
stood in the door and her bottom jaw fell and then bounced back up like a spring-loaded hatch. She never spoke nor
twitched a muscle again until everything got wound up tight a little later, and her big moment arrived.
Naturally, none of the docs were on duty; also absent, as I mentioned, was our trusty RN. Any one of them – the
professionals – would have exerted enough authority; they would have assured that order and calm prevailed. Old Miss
Hibbs, the so-called social worker, would have hauled out her British accent and – with strictest attention to grammar and
usage – verbally whipped all the old men ‘til they ran to their respective rooms, tucking their bald, wrinkled tails between
their quaking knees.
Marilyn and I are popular. The residents like us. But they don’t listen to us. If they’d heeded us she and I would be hailed
as heroes across the continent, but they kept their own counsel and madness prevailed.
I breezed in from the north hall and grabbed for Jimmy, while Marilyn was reaching for Joe. If we’d only had time for two
more strides apiece we’d have licked it. As it was, before we got there, Jimmy had his dentures in hand, snapping them at
the doe like castanets. Then Joe leaned across the intervening crowd, slapped her tawny rump, and yelled, “HYAH,”
something like, I imagine, he used to do to red-eyed bulls as a rodeo clown.
That poor doe reared like a Lipizzaner and leapt straight over the tops of the old men’s variously-haired or shiny heads,
and commenced to stomping the doors. Did I mention they were glass doors? Two solid kicks of those deceptively dainty-
looking split hooves did them in. The resulting shatter echoed with a sound like faerie bells, deep into the dim and
hallowed corridors of Burnside Manor. I have in my mind a slow-motion picture of pretty bits of glass exploding in brilliant
sunlight. Truthfully, I never saw it at all. I was otherwise occupied.
Joe’s duster, as he liked to call the robe he wore every day of his life at The Burnside, was an ugly blue thing beneath
which he always wore exactly nothing no matter how we coaxed, hounded or ordered him to put on his shorts. No surprise,
in the midst of the action, it gaped open, and Jack Ridley – whom everyone calls Sweetie – just happened to have his chair
parked right next to Jimmy’s. Grinning like a toothless shark, Jack closed in on his prey and made a grab for the meat.
Joe’s eyes went so wide his brows looked like a hairline, and he sucked in a breath deeper I’m sure than any he’d taken in
the last ten years.
I don’t know if Joe did what he did next on purpose, or if it was a defensive reflex. His knee sprang chinward like a
snapping jackknife. He may have meant to knee Sweetie someplace vital, but whatever he intended, what happened was
that his knee cracked into my nose as I bent forward, unable to stop the momentum of my head-long rush to stop Jimmy
even though I already knew I’d left it too late.
Joe, meanwhile, had been holding onto Jimmy. As Isaac Newton would have predicted, when Joe jerked his knee a
reaction ensued with a measurable effect on Jimmy’s chair. Jimmy started spinning and – true to form – instantly
commenced firing off cuss-words in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spray. Now, I’m not one to underestimate people,
but I swear I never would have believed that seventeen old men – some with so many tubes and containers attached they
could double as lab equipment – could have moved so fast. The vets that were up on their feet actually jumped, and
wheelchair tires screeched, haulin’ ass and burnin’ rubber.
Marilyn, when she saw the swarm of old soldiers rolling her way, apparently wanted to comment. As it turned out, she had
just enough time to belt out one unspellable syllable before her breath was knocked away on impact. She reeled
backward, arms wind-milling in an effort to stay upright, and she might have succeeded if the reception counter had not
interfered. She slammed into it and slid straight to the floor, landing – flomp – on her most well-padded region, then
slumped down with her back to the wood, benched for the rest of the game.
Not me. No such luck.
When Joe kneed my nose, I fell forward, if you can believe that. Counterproductive attempts to recover tangled me so
thoroughly in Jimmy’s spinning chair that it snatched me off my feet and dumped me – smack – into Jimmy’s lap. Next
thing I knew we sailed as one down the aqua-tiled hall.
In that instant, we left time behind, Jimmy and I. Alive fully in the moment, we entered an illusion of motion slowed to the
graceful tempo of a Strauss waltz. Our conveyance held us snug and spun us lazily, a skiff adrift on the gentle blue
Danube.
I snapped out of it right away, to the sound of Jimmy shouting in my ear, “Holy MAC-A-ROLI.” It made no difference. I might
as well have been asleep, for all that consciousness availed. All I could think to do was squeak out a prayer to Saint
Christopher, the traveler’s patron saint, and clamp my eyes shut. I opened them just as we approached the door to suite
forty-one south. Janelle stood there, statue-still as ever, and maybe if she’d tried she could have caught us. Instead, as if
she’d been waiting for this moment her whole life, she stood up a little straighter and shouted out what may have been her
very first swear word ever. The she stepped back and slammed the door.
The doors inside the Burnside are not as flimsy as they look.
***
I woke up with Joe Leonard pressing a cold towel to my head and saying, “C’mon now cowboy, suck it up! Are you a man
or a ballerina?” Deputy Kady and her partner, whom I’ll just call Satan, had already arrived. The deer had escaped out the
busted doors but so had Wayne Crimmins – whom we call The Wanderer. No one had paid any attention at all to the exit
alarm except Satan, and he just crushed it like a fly.
While the officers of the law investigated the scene, I swept away the glass, and cleaned up the blood that had splashed
the entryway. It wasn’t, I calculated, as copious as imagination might suggest, still I hoped it belonged to the deer, and not
Wayne Crimmins. Reflecting, I also hoped she wasn’t too badly hurt. She was, after all, the first unpaid visitor to pass
through the Burnside’s doors in two weeks.
Marilyn’s boyfriend DeWayne came as usual for lunch, but today he arrived just in time to rush her to urgent care. He
installed her in the back of the Blazer, covered her with a blanket, and rolled his coat as a pillow for her head. He was
shaken, and I was surprised. I never thought he was the sort to really care. Score one for Marilyn, I thought, and admitted
I was a little jealous.
Janelle came strolling up the south corridor slow and cautious and stopped, turning toward me with an actor’s on-the-mark
precision. Staring at me as if I had turned purple and grown horns, she drawled, “I’m quittin’ now, Blaine,” giving all the
words two syllables. She picked her way through the shattered glass, and then stepped out of The Burnside and – one
would hope – into the light of a more predictable day.
***
Out in the empty parking lot, a fine, cold rain now began to fall. Kady finished questioning me, told me not to leave town,
and snapped her pen into its place on the clipboard. She and Satan drove away, ignoring the crackle of their official
police radio, too busy tossing me the evil eye. I assumed that meant they expected the search for Wayne Crimmins to
make them late for burgers, and I finally understood the nature of my crime – interfering with lunch in the first degree. I
would surely be punished.
I sighed at the inevitability of my doom, and unrolled the cold towel I had been wringing during the inquisition. I held it
against my aching head, and it helped. My ears stopped chiming. The gleeful noise from inside the Burnside surged, and
– reminded – I turned to go in. I stopped after only a step. I looked at the place I’d walked into day after day for six years,
and every brick in the wall seemed strange, brand new, never before seen by the likes of man.
What with the rain-darkened skies, the lights off, and the glass gone, the doorway to the Burnside at first looked like a big,
blank eye. Then all at once the lights came on, and I swear to you The Burnside winked. I laughed, winked back, and
walked in.
The men were in an uproar, clapping each other on the back and “haw-hawing” like they’d just snatched victory straight
out of Mussolini’s teeth. As I moved among them checking tubes, pouches, and bruises, I collected several pats on the
shoulder and a couple of high fives. Jimmy was cussing up a blue streak and Joe was saying “Shut-up, Jimmy, shut-up!”
But even they were smiling.
The guys who could swallow swigged back cold coffee like single malt Scotch, and unlit cigarettes dangled from several
bristly faces. I had to swat the lighter from Joe Leonard’s hands to keep him from igniting the O-two and blowing us all
through the pearly gates. He said, “Watch it there, son. I’ll be treating you to a mouth full of knuckles if you try that
again.” I looked over to see a twinkle in his eye, and when I laughed, he did, too.
Jay Krump, that old instigator, had busted into the kitchen and stolen a box of barbecue flavor potato chips and a plasti-
pak of flash-frozen meatballs. The chips were turning fingers orange all around, and the meatballs had been converted
into chips for the hi-lo poker game that Jay and four others had dealt out on the reception counter.
Three hours remained on my shift. Sometime between now and the end of it, someone important was bound to show up
intent on getting things back to what they’d call normal. But for now, at the Burnside, it was just the soldiers and me,
Blaine Wright, L for Licensed, P for Practical, N for Nurse.
So what the hell? I was still on the payroll, the air inside was fresh for a change, and life was full of surprises. “Shut-up,
Joe,” I said. “Sweetie, deal me in.”
Loretta Sylvestre
Loretta Sylvestre spent her early years in Southern California and was later transplanted to the green and wet western half of
Washington State, where the tales grow as tall as the trees. She holds a Liberal Arts BA from The Evergreen State College. Her
short fiction has appeared in SN Review (Autumn 2007) and Foliate Oak (February 2008). She has completed a first novel, and
works-in-progress hang around her desk in small groups brewing rebellion.
Washington State, where the tales grow as tall as the trees. She holds a Liberal Arts BA from The Evergreen State College. Her
short fiction has appeared in SN Review (Autumn 2007) and Foliate Oak (February 2008). She has completed a first novel, and
works-in-progress hang around her desk in small groups brewing rebellion.
