the side where Kate stood, his face above the beard seemed slightly more dusky than usual, but when he turned around, she saw that the left side of his face was pale, almost chalky. Subtle, and disconcerting.
The most striking thing, however, was not Erasmus himself but his wooden staff: Propped upright against a newspaper vending machine, it wore on its carved head a miniature Raiders cap and a pair of child’s sunglasses, and beneath its chin a scrap of the blue-and-white T-shirt fabric covered the worn piece of ribbon. Kate had not really noticed how like Erasmus the carving was, probably because the wood was so dark that the details faded, but it was all there: the beard, an identical beak of a nose, the high brow beneath the cap. The staff was Erasmus reduced to fist-sized essentials. Only its eyes were invisible behind the miniature black lenses.
Erasmus was talking to the staff. He seemed to be reciting a speech in a Shakespearean cadence (speaking with a clipped midwestern sort of accent), striding up and down in the small area of sidewalk that was his stage, seemingly unaware of any audience but the staff, which stood erect, gazing back enigmatically at him from the orange metal newspaper box.
And then the staff spoke. For a moment, Kate felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise at the hoarse whisper, until she realized it was merely a very skillful ventriloquism she was hearing. Around her, the people in the crowd, particularly the newcomers on the outer fringes, stirred and glanced at one another with quick, embarrassed smiles. It was eerie, that voice, hypnotic and amazingly real. Across the shoulders, she caught a glimpse of two children on the other side of the circle, their mouths agape as they listened to the mannikin speak.
“A pestilent gall to me!” it said.
“Sir, I’ll teach you a speech,” offered Erasmus eagerly. He stood slightly bent, so as to look up at the face on the end of the wooden pole, and his stance, combined with the expression he wore of sly stupidity, changed him, made him both bereft of dignity yet somehow more powerful, as if he was under the control of some primal buffoon.
“Do,” said the staff in its husky voice.
“Mark it, uncle: Have more than you show,- speak less than you know—”
As the speech went on, Kate licked her ice cream absently, the wad of gum tucked up into her cheek, and tried to remember where she had heard this before. It must be Shakespeare, she thought. One of those things Lee had taken her to. What was it, though? One of the dramas. Not
“This is nothing, fool,” hissed the staff.
“Then it’s like the breath of an unpaid lawyer,” said Erasmus gleefully. “You gave me nothing for it!”
This brought a laugh, from the adults at any rate. The children did not giggle until the fool offered to give the staff two crowns in exchange for an egg.
“What two crowns will they be?” said the staff scornfully.
“Why, after I’ve cut the egg in the middle and eaten the meat, the two crowns of the egg.” And so saying, Erasmus pulled two neat half eggshells out of thin air and placed them on the heads of two children. He turned back to the enigmatic wooden figure.
“I pray you, uncle, keep a schoolmaster, that can teach your fool to lie. I would like to learn to lie.” He wagged his eyebrows up and down and the children laughed again.
“If you lie, sir, we’ll have you whipped,” growled the staff.
“I marvel what kin you and your daughters are!” Erasmus exclaimed. “They’ll have me whipped for speaking the truth, you will have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I would rather be any kind of thing than a fool, and yet—I would not be you,” he said, marching up to the staff and shaking his head at the wooden face. “You have pared your wit on both sides, and left nothing in the middle—and here comes one of the parings.”
He raised his voice at this last sentence and looked pointedly over the heads of the people at a spot behind them. As one, they turned to see. Kate, with the whole mass in front of her, stepped away from the street to look down the sidewalk and saw—Oh no. Oh shit, Erasmus, you stupid old man, don’t do this. Can’t you see what you’re messing with?
But of course he could. That was why he was standing there with his head down, grinning in wicked anticipation as he met the eyes of his target.
The young man was startled at the sudden spectacle of thirty or more people turning to stare at him. Wary, but constitutionally unable to back away from any confrontation, the young man stopped dead, his eyes shooting from side to side as he tried to analyze the situation.
He was a small but powerfully built boy of perhaps nineteen or twenty wearing a tight tank top that showed off the muscles of a weight lifter. His chin and cheeks were dusted with a slight blond bristle and he swaggered in snug blue jeans and black Doc Marten boots that boosted his height almost to average. In his left hand he had a small brown paper bag with the glass neck of a green bottle protruding from it. His right arm was draped over the shoulder of an emaciated girl of seventeen or eighteen who had acne on her chin and chest, black roots in her blond hair, a fading bruise on her upper arm, a lip whose puffiness was not hidden by the lipstick she wore, and a pair of enormous black sunglasses that obscured a large part of her face. Kate had been on enough domestic calls to read the signs without thinking about it: Her careful walk and the arms crossed in front of her told Kate the girl’s ribs hurt,- her body language (leaning both into and away from the possessive arm) told Kate who had been responsible.
Erasmus, too, knew that something was wrong here. He held out a hand to the pair and called jovially, “Come my lad and drink some beer!”
“Uh, thanks, I got some,” said the boy.
“Hasten to be drunk,” Erasmus said smilingly. “The business of the day.”
“I ain’t drunk.”
The staff now spoke up. “First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.”
The young man stood with his mouth open, his eyes going from the man to his curiously dressed stick and back again. He suspected mockery, but the number of spectators made it impossible either to shove the old man around or to back off.
“Wha‘ the fuck?” he asked.
“Where the drink goes in, there the wit goes out,” commented the staff.
The boy squinted at the wooden object, then took his arm from the girl’s shoulders to walk around and see it face-on.
“How’s he do that?” The audience had begun to respond to this new act (all except for those with children, who had already faded away) and a murmur of chuckles greeted the drunk boy’s confusion. He spun around belligerently to face them, and the onlookers glanced around for Erasmus to intervene, but he had moved, and they saw him now standing before the girl, her sunglasses in his hand.
Her left eye looked like something from a special-effects laboratory, swollen and black, the eyeball itself so bloodshot, it resembled an open wound. Silence fell immediately. With the others, Kate watched Erasmus bend slightly to look into the girl’s good eye.
“A wounded spirit who can bear?” he said quietly, and reaching up with his right hand, he cupped it gently over her eye. The girl gazed up at him, as hypnotized as a rabbit, and did not even wince. After a moment, he stepped away and held out her sunglasses. She took them and her face once more disappeared behind them. No one watched her, though. Their eyes were on Erasmus, who turned back to the youth.
“A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be.”
The boy was confused by the old man’s friendly smile and voice, and he nodded stupidly.
“Speak roughly to your little girl,” Erasmus continued, “and beat her when she sneezes. She only does it to annoy because she knows it teases.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” objected the boy. “I never—”
“Hit hard, hit fast, hit often.” Erasmus was still smiling, but he did not look friendly now. He looked large, his eyes easily half a foot above those of the boy.
“I didn’t hit her—”
“Jealousy is as cruel as the grave.”
“What are you—”
