The second story I wrote, "My Thoughts on What Happened to Timmy Carmichael" had sat untouched since an allusion in "Anger", my 7th story. Being that "Anger" was itself completely isolated insofar as story, it served well for geographic and archeological spacing, Timmy Carmichael and its narrator, Michael, had been left adrift a long time. Thing is, there are so many possibilities that rise from this story, so many different possible leads if I chose, all those boys who were there and the effect that day had on their lives. I'd never touched any of those possible paths. Not one had I taken and long had I set any thought aside. Thing is though, there is my List and in that list, which I had turned to as "The Portraitist" finished up, was an idea with the title "The Testimony of Randall Howe". Randall Howe is mentioned as one of the boys on that trip, one who was last seen by Michael (I had no family name for him) standing in his padded cell pissing himself. Seeing that title, the story that day opened up at last and the elements that had since the start of this adventure lay gathering dust in the earliest boxes of unsorted clues in my mind. It was time for this story to be written and I was no longer afraid of the start.
See, that start is the formatted structure. This is to be a report by a psychologist based upon the first interview with Mr. Howe after he was picked up wandering a forest road naked as a cabin burned up the mountain with his friends dead in the flames. He had been unresponsive for days and, well, I needed to know what such an initial interview might look like formatted. I say this because there are all sorts of specific formats out there for different things. There is that lined double-spaced style of the courts, there are multiple formal letter formats... goodness, just look in Word. There you will find examples of many different formats for many different situations but what would an interview look like in a formal report at a psychiatric institution? Time for a little research...
Now I might not have done the most exhaustive review, but my conclusion would have been the same had I done so. I could have written this in runes on a bubblegum wrapper and it would be in line with any other format I saw as an example. I was looking for structured progression in an interview leading to conclusions or recommendations, something that would look like an official report. Seriously, there is no such animal. I saw no two examples that looked alike and it pretty much seemed that whoever wrote these used whatever style and format they were comfortable with or that they were trained into. In other words, "official looking" meant squat as long as it looked like it was written up in some structured manner as opposed to a narrative structure. Okay, research complete and format problem solved. I was on my own and I had me an idea.
Gotta mention some things here as to things I knew going into this. I knew Randall was in a mental institution and was not coming out. I also knew that a character who first introduced himself to me at the start of this adventure... seriously, the first notes I made after writing my first story, "Where Lies Hope", were about him. He appeared in "The Little Metal Man", story #5, but has been absent since. Thing is, I got me some info on him before he took his powder and shied from my pen. I had my notes and I knew that his cabin was burned down in 2000. I can show you the ruins... it's one of my favorite places to visit on a summer day free with the quad and an afternoon to sit and write on some ruins.
First time I was up at the Amulet mine was 1977. I was on a hike with my older brother, younger sister, and my grandmother. I was 10. I remember that day clearly, not just because the two doberman pincers that came running at us as we were back down on the lower road back nor the black rock that my grandmother asked me to hold so I could see just how light it was (it was lead... she thought it was funny), but because of the bunkhouse there at the Amulet. The mine itself is where I go when I can to dream. My wine-selling friend in the ghost town on the other range there, he and I spent an entire afternoon up here pacing and plotting a story that I hope sees the light of day. I have over 2 hours of it recorded...
That bunkhouse though... it did, as did Willard Reams' cabin, burn down in 2000, but in 1977, it held something that was so very... well, let's just say my brother and sister both remember it and some years ago as my buddy and I were looking for the Poland-Walker Tunnel, we stopped and chatted with a local from Poland who suggested we go up to the Amulet if we wanted ruins. After I told him we had just been there, he reminisced about a summer in 1978 he was hiking up there and got caught in the rain and how he waited it out under the porch of that bunkhouse. Mind you, this was unbidden... I had not prompted this but what he said next turned me white and my friend, who knew my secret, his jaw was slack as well. This stranger said that as he was standing under the eaves of bunkhouse, he saw down in the mud several plastic dolls heads half submerged.
Why was this a jaw dropper? The secret of that bunkhouse, peering into it that day with my siblings and my grandmother, showed that its last occupant had peculiar tastes in decor. Dozens of plastic dolls heads hung on strings from the ceiling of that bunkhouse I visited in 1977. That the guy giving us directions to the Poland-Walker Tunnel would mention this place, and then, of reason, a memory specifically flashing to that oddity of plastic dolls heads and a memory of a deceptive rock, a long hike and my very active fear of large black dogs with pointy ears running at me with anger expressed in fangs that grew with each stride. But yeah, that bunkhouse was decorated with the heads of dolls and it is from that memory of that bunkhouse that both Willard Reams and Colonel William Nesmith descend in the narratives here built.
Just to be clear, Nesmith will pen a book and it will receive a small publication (he financed it himself as no one else would but he was nearing 100 anyway so he paid happily), a copy of which has been in the hands of Professor Van Hooten for a long time. Another copy was at the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, but sometime in the early 1960s, it was discovered to have been stolen. Willard Reams did not mind the "Property of Sharlot Hall" stamp on the inside pages of his volume, but he had him one as well. It is my assumption that Reams' obsession with collecting dolls began with his reading of "Ruminations on a Wicked Life" by Colonel William Nesmith. As soon as I can pin Reams down on this, trust me, I'll let you all know.
Thing is, I'm starting to doubt Willard Reams' very existence at this point with how he's stood me up all this time. Here's the thing... I'm cheating. This story is not about Reams. This is a story about Randall Howe that Reams just happens to be in. I knew not long after finishing "My Thoughts on What Happened to Timmy Carmichael" that I would be getting back to Randall Howe. I also knew that Randall was involved with the burning of Reams' cabin. Thus to discuss what happened to Randall Howe up on that mountain, or better, for Dr. Maurice Adams to draw from Randall that story, meant I had to discuss this most elusive of seriously jerk characters. Trust me, I'm not the only casting doubt on that old bastard right now, Dr. Adams is convinced he's a figment of Randall's imagination at best. That suits me fine and I hope it stings.
Oh, a couple really sweet things about this story that I discovered along the way. I'll do them in order of whichever I recall first. Oh, here goes...
I now know Michael's last name! Yup, Dr. Adams mentions him in the addendum.
Speaking of Dr. Adams, um, I have here a character, time stamped early 2000, who has developed an interest into cult psychology and is considering using the incident with the Gardens of Grace church group, the death of that boy on Bajazid Creek in 1992 and the ramifications it has had on its former members over the years as his primary case study. Here might be a way to collect many of those stories that wait from "My Thoughts on What Happened to Timmy Carmichael".
And, finally, I finished up the Sultans. Yup... I had Old Man Mortenson and 28 of those who had hired on named and most of them at least name-checked in Tales at this point. That last Sultan had been completely hidden from me all these years. I had suspected he left early on in the town's history but I could find no one to back this up. I had heard only rumors that a Sultan had forgone his fortune at the founding but was unsure. I looked around gullies and thickets in those early years to see if there was evidence of anything but nothing was found... no bones, no haunts. I was missing a Sultan and that actually was putting a pinch in what I could do for where was this last Sultan and how could I close that number with one unaccounted?
That rumor I heard that one, on an early trip to Prescott that first year, announced his departure must have been true. Randall Howe mentions how his ancestor, the first of his line to enter Arizona, was a prospector who made his small fortune in a gold mine he had forsaken his partnership in. Imagine that...
"The Testimony of Randall Howe" is the 64th Tale of the Bajazid, finished May 30th of 2020 and punching in at 4,857 words. That 5,000 word limit spell I put on myself a couple years before has, through consistent exercise, paid off.
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