A Bid for Bedlam
by Melissa McGinnis
The 12th Street exit was the one he was going to want. Then, it was six blocks down past the old burnt-out bed and breakfast, the fifth house down from the dog park. Twelve plus six plus five was 23. … He was vaguely aware of someone speaking to him.
“This is the fourth time you’ve been late to work this week. Just ’cause you’re new doesn’t mean you can get away with anything and everything, buddy. Camden. Camden, are you listening?”
The voice was sounding progressively more irritated by the moment. Camden counted the syllables (12, 16, nine) in his head as he straightened the bed sheets on the display mattress in the front window. It was snowing outside. It was beginning to stick on the sidewalk.
“Camden!”
“Yes, Mr. Willets.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, Mr. Willets.” Camden turned down the top sheet.
“You better have. If you’re late tomorrow, don’t even bother coming in. Your other bosses may have been pushovers, but I’m not gonna go easy on you. I’m paying you. You do what I say.”
“Yes, Mr. Willets.” Camden meticulously smoothed the wrinkles from the pillowcases. The color of the cloth was a soft, dusty blue. Camden liked blue. It was cool and calm and never laughed at him. The sheets in his aunt’s house had been blue. Blue was safe.
“Finish up here, then go home. I don’t feel like staying here all night waiting for you to stop rearranging the damned pillows.” The supervisor strode off, not waiting for the final, superfluous “Yes, Mr. Willets.”
Camden took precisely 16 minutes silently adjusting the tilt and angle of the display bed to his liking, and then he slipped into the break room to retrieve his hat and coat. He spent two minutes before the lavatory mirror, slicking his graying hair back with a comb.
Camden brooded over what the supervisor had said as he walked down the stairs into the subway station. The words and threats were similar to those of all of his past bosses. Several of his employers had fired him because he unsettled the customers with his abnormal quietness and often refused to answer any questions if he was interrupted from his work. They did not like that Camden seemed to always be listening to some bizarre inner symphony that drowned out all distractions and made it impossible for them to get any sort of satisfaction out of a good tongue-lashing. Twenty stairs.
The penitentiary had been like that as well. His cellmate was a cruel, arrogant man named Trent. Trent’s mother had found him playing basketball with a human head in their back yard. Trent loved to belittle and verbally attack his fellow prisoners. Camden quickly became his favorite target. Trent knew that he could batter and ridicule Camden without any fear of retaliation. The little man would just sit in the corner of his cell and fold and refold his clothing in silence. This attitude of complete anti-conflict made Camden, to some extent, infamous. The corrections officers were leery and gave him a wide berth whenever they encountered him in the hallways. Sometimes, it was the quiet ones you had to fear.
A row of benches stood empty along the wall at the bottom of the steps. The wall, itself, was entirely taken up by a mural. It advertised Elliot’s Gardens, a large outdoor complex on the outskirts of the city. Vibrant colors and precise brush strokes depicted flowers of all shapes and sizes. Camden sat down in front of the rhododendrons and waited, motionless except for his darting eyes. Three scarred pillars divided the open space at even intervals. A man with pale eyes and hands like birds fidgeted by one of them, shifting constantly from foot to foot and impatiently looking down the tracks for headlights. A young couple necked at the bottom of the stairs. Camden laced his fingers and stared straight ahead.
The 12th Street exit was the one he wanted, he thought, as the subway cars screeched to a halt. He filed through the sliding doors with the other passengers, nearly getting his coat caught as the doors shut behind him. There were 14 seats in this car, but every one was occupied. Before Camden had time to reach for the overhead hand-hold, the car lurched forward. The unexpected motion threw him off balance and he fell, colliding with the woman in front of him. The brown paper of her bags tore and groceries rained on them both. A jar of olives shattered and soaked the front of Camden’s work shirt. Flailing his arms, he made one last attempt to remain upright but slipped on the glass and spilled olives. As he lay stunned on his back, he heard a snigger from the rear of the car. The man with pale eyes watched, hands flapping before his face to conceal a gap-toothed grin.
Camden had been a clumsy child. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t trip and scrape his knee or knock something over at school. When Camden was in third grade, school bully Brian Matthews declared it his personal responsibility to make Camden’s life unbearable. The day Brian cornered him on the playground would haunt him for the rest of his life. Camden had been in the sandbox with two other children. It was sunny and warm and so far a not-so-clumsy afternoon. But he had built a teetering sand castle in the wrong corner of the faux beach.
“Hey, Camden! Get your stupid bucket out of my spot! That’s my corner and I don’t want your crummy castle in it!”
The blue bucket and shovel went flying.
“It don’t even look like a castle anyway, just a stupid lump.”
“Stop!” Camden wailed as the other boy raised a heavy boot threateningly. Camden scrambled over and curled his body around the unsteady structure. “Please, I’ve been working on it since lunchtime!”
“What, am I supposed to care? Ha!” Brian pretended to kick out with his foot and Camden cringed. In his terror, he lost his balance and slumped over, flattening the fragile mound under his weight. When the reality of what had happened sunk in, he began to cry.
The other children laughed long and loud. The bully was a year older and much bulkier. He hit hard. The bruises his meaty fists left stayed for days. Brian Matthews had a snigger that sent chills down Camden’s spine, even in memory
.
After that day, Camden learned not to be clumsy. He punished himself when he broke something accidentally or tripped over his own feet. He would deny himself meals or force himself to stand completely still in one corner of the playground during recess. It was in those years that he began to compulsively organize things around him. Even in houses that weren’t his own, he could straighten pictures or scrub bathroom sinks. His mother marveled at how neat her son’s room stayed. The room given to him at his father’s house was just as clean and orderly. He began to count things as well, everything he came in contact with. Numbers and angles became an obsession that he would never grow out of.
When the man with the fluttering hands got off the subway nine minutes later, Camden followed. This was not the 12th Street exit. This was not the stop he needed. But going home was not so important at present. He was of a singular mind now, with a singular purpose.
It was bitter cold outside of the subway. The man with the pale eyes walked along 10th Street for three blocks before cutting down an alley. Camden followed at a safe distance, keeping to the shadows with his coat pulled close around him. He brooded as he walked. Camden could brood like no other. The scene in the subway replayed over and over in his head like a wounded DVD skipping. The tear of the brown paper bags, the sloshing of liquid down his front and onto the floor, and the snigger seemed so loud in his head that he was amazed that it did not reach his quarry a block ahead and betray his presence. The sound his brown leather shoes made against the uneven concrete sidewalk seemed to echo like gunshots. Twenty-six paces to the end of the alley. The man from the subway, the sniggering fool, walked, oblivious to his tail, past the glaringly bright street lights (there were four) of a convenience store to the traffic light on the other side of it. Both the hunter and the hunted waited for the light to turn green. The man with the pale eyes crossed the street and walked up the shadowy path leading to a small ranch house with high hedges hiding it from the street.
The convenience store bathroom was filthy and made Camden’s skin crawl. He scrubbed at the blue-green stain on his shirt with a wet napkin that shredded. He suspected, as well, that the water was dirtier than what he was trying to clean. It took intense restraint not to scour the bathroom before he left. The tiles were grubby and there was toilet paper and paper towels piled on the floor. He did, however, stack the eight clean toilet paper rolls into a neat pile in the corner by the door. He had to do something.
The music was too loud. Between the aisles of salty snack foods and over-caffeinated drinks, the lyrics to some popular song Camden had never heard blared in an obnoxious din. “All day staring at the ceiling, making friends with shadows on my wall. All night hearing voices telling me that I should get some sleep because tomorrow might be good for something…”
The back yard of the house was fenced off on three even sides and by a hedge on the fourth. Ivy had overgrown the fence near a neat, little white gate, stretching curling green fingers toward the latch. It seemed somewhat less than ironic that the latch, itself, was broken. There were fresh footprints, 19 of them, in the snowy path, but even these were being smothered by the swiftly falling snow. Just inside the gate was a small green tool shed. To the left of its small door was a disheveled pile of kindling and larger chunks of wood. Camden could smell and see the wood smoke slithering out of the little house’s chimney. The silver doorknob, situated precisely five inches below the door’s window, was locked. Camden kicked aside the mat under his feet and found, almost to his disappointment, a rusty old key. He tried it in the lock, fumbling a bit in his gloves and slipped inside.
Once, when he was 17, he and his friend, Rory, had broken into the empty house down the street from his father’s house. It had been Rory’s idea, of course. But she was one of the few people who had never laughed at him, so he would have followed her anywhere.
“C’mon, don’t be such a baby,” she’d said.
“I’m not a baby.”
“You’re whining like one. Here, look, the door’s not even locked.”
Her red hair shone like fire where the light caught it, light that filtered through the collapsed roof of the house. It was easy for her to maneuver between fallen crossbeams and around broken glass. Camden had a harder time.
“My dad’ll kill us if he finds out.”
“Calm the hell down, Cam. He’s not gonna find out unless you tell him.”'
Camden balked, appalled at the idea. “I’m not a snitch.” He jumped quickly over an old chair. “Besides, he’s got that sixth sense, you know? As soon as we get home, watch, he’ll say ‘Where yinz been all day?’ ”
“Just lie to him. It ain’t that hard.” Rory grabbed his hand to pull him up the stairs after her. “’Sides, we didn’t leave any evidence behind us. You know, like in those shows on TV? No fingerprints.”
“Guess so. Wait, I thought I heard somethin’, Rory …”
Rory had stopped in her tracks there, spun around, and planted her hands on her hips. “Man up, Camden. You’re always so damn jumpy. That’s why people laugh at you. Just man up. Seriously.”
Thirty-six-year-old Camden was reminded of that rundown old house. Things inside this house weren’t so much placed as piled. There was clutter everywhere. The sight of the mess made the bile rise in Camden’s throat. Six old takeout boxes were piled on the easy chair and on top of the television. Eighteen beer cans were piled around a mostly empty case just inside the door. There was mud all over the carpet.
He wasn’t going to touch anything, he told himself firmly. Rory taught him that. She was the reason the cops had had such a hard time getting an arrest warrant for him in Toledo, years later. They’d had no proof. It was an eyewitness who had turned him in. A man had identified him in court, a man with fluttering hands. A snitch. Camden was no snitch.
It had been 21 years, eight months, and 11 days since that day in the courthouse and Camden had changed quite a bit. That would explain why the pale-eyed snitch had not recognized him in the subway. His then curly brown hair was now a cut-short-and-slicked-back steely gray. The hair had started going gray during the first months of his jail time, and the transformation was complete by the time he had gotten out on parole. Working out in the prison had taken care of a lot of the weight he’d had, though he did not have the body structure to look muscular. Months back in the minimum-wage working world had put bags under his eyes and a slump to his shoulders. Camden looked like any other white male in his 30s: the guy behind the counter at the gas station, the guy doing your dry cleaning, the guy hauling your trash away. He was completely forgettable.
Forgettable, but he did not, himself, forget. He remembered the snigger. The snigger not so very much unlike the snigger of the bully Brian Matthews, the demeaning, haughty expression of pleasure seeing another person being ground into the dirt. The snigger was the reason Camden had killed Brian, though no one could truly prove it. It was why he had taken those automotive courses in high school, so that he could learn what lines to cut. So that, no one would ever snigger at him again.
But then it happened again. That snitch did it in the courtroom, after he had singled out Camden as the guilty party, at least for being directly involved. He had sniggered and his hands had flapped as he fidgeted there in his seat. Second row from the back, fourth seat from the right. All the police could prove is that Camden was seen working near Brian’s car when it had been in the school tune-up shop. Brian Matthew’s racy little red car. The tiny thing had flattened like a pop can under a boot. Or a sand castle under the weight of a small boy.
Camden turned the split log he had appropriated from the woodpile over in his hands. The bark that remained on it was coarse on his calluses. It was of a good size and weight and felt solid under his grip. He caught sight of the age rings on one end of it and automatically started to count them. Ten, 15, 25, 35 … 36. … Camden stopped counting. He heard a noise coming from down the hall. The man with the pale eyes was in the kitchen.
A plethora of scenes now swirled through Camden’s mind. He saw Rory’s fiery hair, remembered the scent of brake fluid mixed with the stench of olives, saw the guards step back as he passed on his way to the mess hall, heard the sound of his footsteps ricochet off the walls in the alley, saw the snitch’s hands twitching and heard the sound of two voices, one high and one low and thick, sniggering.
“Holy shit!” The startled exclamation shook Camden from his ruminations. His feet had continued to carry him after his mind had shut off, and now he stood in the kitchen doorway, chunk of wood in his white-knuckled hand. There were three buttons on the snitch’s shirt. The bottom one was missing. Eleven vertical stripes, alternating red and yellow.
“Who the hell—?!”
The sound the chunk of wood made against the snitch’s head was a sickening, resonating thwack. He kept swinging the log, batting aside the quivering hands that the snitch brought up in an attempt to save what was left of his ruined face. Camden struck again and again, smashing the man’s face in so he wouldn’t be able to scream. Blood sprayed from a broken nose. The lips split and teeth snapped. Soon it was hard to tell the torn flesh was human. Still, Camden could hear the sniggering.
“Shut up!” he screamed as the snitch crumbled to the floor in front of him. Camden followed, going down onto his knees. Thwack, thwack, thwack. “Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!”
It took another three minutes for the snitch to stop moving. To Camden, it seemed like an eternity of sneering laughter. And then finally, finally, all was quiet. Blood pooled around him on the cheap, yellowing linoleum. He was bemused by how much blood one body could hold. And by how much of it had gotten on his face.
He’d done it again. They’d locked him away for years the last time he’d killed someone, and now he’d gone and done it again. He’d promised himself, never again. But the bastard had laughed at him. Unforgivable. He would never learn the man’s name or if he had a family. Nor would he ever care. He was sick of people laughing at him.
It was still snowing as Camden stepped over the frozen begonias in the back garden. He would leave the way he came, through the neat white gate with the broken latch. He had been careful this time; he was careful to leave no trace of himself behind. No fingerprints. The bloody hunk of wood was still in his hand. Unless, of course, the police found the shattered remains of his promise to himself on the kitchen floor beside what was left of the sniggering bastard. Then, perhaps, he was doomed.
The night air was deadly calm. This seemed appropriate. The freshly fallen snow was pristine and unmolested by inconsiderate feet. It made a crunching noise as Camden lowered himself into it, not unlike the sound the wood had made against the man’s skull. The coolness of the snow felt lovely against his hot, panting body. He spread his arms out to his sides, grinning like a child again.
The only thing the bewildered and frustrated investigators found the next morning that seemed out of the ordinary on a crime scene was a single, bloody snow angel on the back lawn.
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