Sorrow's Crown Read online

  Bus boys went running. The maitre d' threw menus on the floor, and a young waitress grabbed a fire extinguisher, ready to douse the edgy stranger if she needed to—which I thought was extremely level-headed of her.

  "Crummler," Katie told him. "You're freezing. Come sit by the fire."

  He jitterbugged and snapped his fingers, following her dolefully. He trembled as much from the night as from his own fiery, burning nerve-endings. "I have been in battle with forces," he moaned. "I have been in battle."

  He still wore the same pair of work boots I'd bought him a couple months back. Odd to realize that he'd been there when I'd first met Katie in the flower shop, like the living embodiment of the excitement I felt for her, his eyes blazing with love and madness. He glared at the wild boar's head on the wall, then down at our table and especially at my plate, and I got the unsettling feeling that he was thinking the same things I was.

  "I am here, Jon!"

  "Want some lasagna?" I asked.

  Katie said, "He probably eats neater than you."

  "Well, his elbows are clean, anyway."

  Melting rime rolled off his neck, and despite the shuddering he actually did manage to eat more neatly than I had, carefully cutting up the pasta and forking it into his mouth with a trained and cautious maneuvering. I could tell a hundred hours of harsh training had probably gone into that conduct, someone at the orphanage forcing him to repeat the action until he got it down perfectly.

  "Armadas roared across the roiling waves," Crummler continued. "Met at the shore by the infernal war devices of ancient beasts, pyres burning in the antediluvian skies."

  Anna loved listening to his impressive vocabulary that only filtered out when he told tales of ocher nights and ancient empires of other galaxies. It seemed that about a fifth of the patrons in the place recognized him and tried their best not to be bothered. The rest gaped, whispered in a near panic, or hid their faces behind the centerpieces.

  I heard the manager in the alcove hissing loudly into the phone. "Don't give me that jurisdiction crap, he's your loony, you come get him out of here. Yeah, we've heard about this gravekeeper you got. What, if he's three feet over the county line you're going to let him ruin my business?" I could just imagine Sheriff Broghin lumbering to his feet, the gun belt angled into his belly rolls and leaving ugly welts.

  Everything seemed to catch Crummler's interest, so that he spun and wheeled, wet hair whipping like shaggy fur. Brown water dripped off his soaking clothes. He broke from the table and waved to people, some of whom fondly waved back. Forever ignited, Crummler moved and reached. He started dancing with somebody's veal piccata.

  "That son of a bitch has my dinner!"

  I wrestled the plate away from him and put it back in front of a guy with big teeth, who sputtered and glared at the veal as if it might infect him with lunacy or rabies.

  "I'll take him to his shack," I said. "I'll be back in forty-five minutes."

  "Jon, be careful," Anna told me. "Something's wrong.”

  “I know."

  "Maybe I should go with you," Oscar offered. "He's sorta the overactive type, ain't he?"

  "I have been in battle," Crummler said. "I have been in battle ... with myself."

  "Come on," I told him. "I'll take you home."

  His mouth fell in on itself and the reckless energy drained from his face. He shivered as though all the cold had finally caught up with him. He stood straight and idle, squinting into the distance, blind to me, his voice thickening with lucidity. "Not to Maggie's."

  "Back to the cemetery," I said.

  "Huh?"

  "Where you take care of our families."

  "Yes."

  "Where you watch over my parents."

  "Yes, Jon!" His eyes re-lit and held their fervor, the wire on fire once more. "They say hello, Jon. They say they love you, Anna." He reached down and embraced my grandmother, rocking gently. She brought the back of her hand to her mouth. We never got used to the way he spoke of the dead as if he'd had recent conversations with them, and I think Anna and I both hoped that, somehow, with his innocence he might actually be telling the truth.

  "Thank you, Crummler, that is wonderful to hear," Anna said. "Thank you for telling me."

  "Yes!" He shot up and hugged me, too, his hand rubbing my back in gentle and loving circles. "Thank you for the shoes. They fit well. They remain in good shape."

  "I'm glad you like them," I said. "Come on, let's go get in the van, okay? We'll put the heat way up for you."

  "Like them I do, though they are even more muddy. They suit me well when traveling through the swamps of ten thousand leagues of dwindled empires, fighting the dark orders of ocher nights."

  When he talked of ancient obsidian towers in the far reaches of lost dimensions on the borderlands of time, he put so much into it you could almost witness his travels. Crummler snapped his fingers and stomped his heels in a weird but genuine fandango. I didn't know what to do except watch him. Children clapped and got off their seats and danced around with him. A few people left in a big hurry, but most just continued their dinner and conversations without furor, more kids joining in like they were at recess.

  "This is why I prefer staying home with a bag of chips," I said.

  "Sounds good to me right about now," Katie whispered.

  The door crashed open again and Broghin bustled in. His perpetual scowl and flat, bloodless lips were so much a part of him that I couldn't tell anymore if he was truly incensed or if his bran wasn't quite cutting it. Even odds, I decided. The level-headed waitress lifted her extinguisher once more and kept it trained on him, for which I gave her even more credit.

  He didn't expect to find my grandmother, whom he'd loved for decades, to be out on a date. It took only a few seconds for all the rest of his usual rage to wash up into his face, veins in his neck and temples suddenly thick and crawling. He stalked forward to our table, kicked some of the dropped menus without noticing, and said, "And what the hell are you doing here?"

  Oscar drew his chin back. "That's the way you ask?”

  “I'll ask any damn way I please, Kinion."

  "Then I'm a damn fool is who I am, because I voted for you."

  The sheriff turned to me and said, "Not a word out of you."

  I said, "If the forty-percent bran isn't working, you might want to skip directly to a high colonic." I knew he'd miss the joke; he thought a colonic was something you mixed with gin.

  Anna reached up and put a hand on Broghin's belly; she didn't have the arm length to get anywhere else besides his stomach. The sweater, recently unboxed and smelling of lost Christmas pine, reminded me of my parents' deaths, as well as Broghin's inept handling of the investigation, the ensuing embarrassment, and my time in jail. "Please, Francis, this is no place for histrionics."

  "I might be obliged to agree with you, Anna, except I never know what you're talking about."

  "She means you were called in to calm folks and escort a man back to his place, not act like a jackass," Oscar remarked pleasantly.

  "Is that so?"

  "I believe it is."

  Broghin liked poking people in their chests, and I could just imagine his plump fingers thumping the tight, coarse flesh over Oscar's heart. I'd thrown a chair at Broghin's head for doing that to me once and wound up in a cell. I wondered if Oscar had only two racks of rifles out in his truck, or three, or more, and just what caliber he might have tucked away in the glove compartment. He wasn't the kind of man who would take kindly to being poked in the chest. In such situations you needed to count the number of guns within close proximity. Anna and Katie both looked at me imploringly, and I kind of shuffled feet without knowing what the hell I should do. Crummler and the kids came dancing over in an impromptu rumba line. "I am here, Sheriff!"

  "You know you shouldn't be, Crummler," Broghin said. "Isn't that right? You should be at home. It's much too cold to be walking around. I think we've talked about that some before, too, haven't we?"

 
"Yes," Crummler admitted. "We have talked. It is cold.”

  “Did you walk here?"

  "I did. For my boots fit well. I did!"

  "Why?"

  We'd all asked that question.

  "To see my friends!"

  Broghin had actually proven to be good with Crummler in the past, and did just as well now. He had a genuine appreciation for him, just as I did, because we were people devoted as much to the past as the present. I called it being moribund; Anna deemed it sentiment. Broghin probably put no name to his feelings, and for a man like him it was just as well. He smiled and touched Crummler gently, and even managed to put a melodic sort of giggle in his voice, bouncing on his toes to match the gravekeeper's dancing. They twirled in a circle for a moment and, leading the waltz, Broghin spun Crummler toward the door, through it, and outside into the police car. He drove off in no hurry, and I saw him put an arm around the gravekeeper, the way my father had done for me, and Oscar had been doing all through dinner. I felt very old in one respect, and too young in another.

  A couple of the children stared forlornly through the window, watching the car recede, and started to cry. The guy who'd lost his veal piccata said, "Somebody ought to shoot that psycho son of a bitch before he goes into a second grade classroom and takes over the school."

  "Lighten up a little," I said. "He doesn't cause any trouble."

  "He ruined my dinner!"

  "I'll pay for it."

  "You gonna pay for my wine, too?"

  "No."

  A thousand-yard stare came over him at the thought of his paying for his own liquor bill. "Somebody still ought to shoot the bastard."

  Oscar grinned and said, "Kinion's Hunting & Tackle, right on Fredrickson in Felicity Grove, you know where that is? Come on down to my store, I've got a rifle I can show you. A Springfield M-6 Scout, improved and updated from the original U.S. Air Force M-6 Survival Rifle, stainless steel construction, an optional lockable marine flotation." The smile dropped off, like it had never existed at any point in the history of his face. "Of course, it'll be butt stock first up against your peckerwood nose, you horse-faced ass."

  The guy stood and Oscar rose to his feet and Anna went, "Oh dear," the way she usually did when I was about to get into trouble. I found it deeply gratifying that I didn't initiate anything this time, and relished that fact for a moment. The guy with big teeth reached for a bottle of wine on his table, to either throw, drink from, or shatter on the edge of the table so that he could hold the jagged end like a knife. I found myself wishing that the moose and quail actually would go rampaging through the restaurant, anything but something like this. Anna deserved a better night out than this. So did Katie.

  I slid out of my seat and quickly slipped in front of Oscar, gliding forward until the horsey-faced guy swung around to confront me, grabbing the bottle like a club. Without really meaning to, and not completely in self-defense either, I just sort of ... slapped him, the way a girl would. It was the kind of silly slap that somebody would give while saying, "Oh, pooh."

  I looked at my hand and the guy looked at me, and Oscar stopped short, and you could feel the entire situation defuse in a heartbeat. The horsey-face laughed and shoved me away, sat down, poured himself another glass of wine, and started to eat his wife's dinner.

  ~ * ~

  In the parking lot, as we said our goodbyes, I thought Oscar was shaking my hand, but he had actually palmed something to me: a gym membership card. "They got this guy," he said, "used to be golden gloves, he can teach anybody to box. You should go see him."

  I wondered if, after all the death and blood of the last several years, I'd suddenly become afraid of ever hurting anybody again, and if so, what that would be like from now on.

  A soft sound faded in, rustling like the hail on my shoulders.

  After a few moments I heard it again, and once more, much sharper. My grandmother, the lady of silver rarity, called to me. "Jonathan."

  "Don't mind him this evening," Katie told her, trying hard not to show any dismay. "He's just been a bit put off lately because I'm pregnant."

  TWO

  Anubis threw me long, tense glances as he watched me putting on my sweats, getting ready for an early-morning jog. His dark, thick Rottweiler face seemed to have the same muscles it took to make every human expression. He proved to be especially adept at looking pissed and appearing skeptical and suspicious. Ever since the last time we'd run in the park, when he'd saved my life, he grew agitated whenever he saw me lacing my sneakers. After mauling a murderous punk named Carl who was trying to stick a knife in my throat, Anubis had been through hell; cops and photographers wiped evidence from his face and took dozens of pictures of him from every angle. Some of the townsfolk had demanded to have him put to sleep, and he apparently knew all about it, and held grudges.

  "Come on," I said. "We'll stay away from the park, okay?"

  It didn't placate Anubis. He slinked off to lie in the corner facing away from me.

  Anna wheeled herself in the kitchen, busy with spatulas and cups, rattling pans and bringing platters to the table. She enjoyed cooking enough food for breakfast to choke six lumberjacks: eggs Benedict, French toast as well as pancakes, hash browns, heaps of bacon, and always more coming. She never told me to finish everything on my plate because of those starving kids in China and India. We both enjoyed the morning ritual, despite the disquieting heaviness in the air between us lately.

  "Please darling, sit," she said. "Don't wait. Start eating." I did, and had half a forkful of pancakes in my mouth when she leaned in close and asked, "Why didn't you tell me? A child. Your first child."

  I'd correctly guessed that small talk remained anathema to her. It also seemed like all the major conversations in my life occurred while I was trying to eat. I stared at the heaping piles of food on the table and knew neither one of us would take another bite.

  "We just found out for certain yesterday," I said.

  Disappointment threaded her features, and she had a hard time keeping the caustic tone out of her voice. "Even with numerous and various types of birth control available, and the information and statistics on hand, two intelligent people refuse to practice safe sex in the age of AIDS."

  "You might want to amend that to 'two people in love.' "

  "I'm not unaware of that," she said.

  "Okay."

  She wouldn't smirk the way some people might have at the idea of two people falling in love after only a few weeks, especially for a man of twenty-eight already once divorced, with an ex-wife who wore enough leather to put cattle on the endangered species list. Bringing up the subject of AIDS proved to be more focused on me than Katie. Anna was aware that my ex-wife Michelle and I had continued to make love on occasion even after our divorce, and nobody liked to think of the quality of health care where her biker boyfriends were concerned, least of all Michelle. Or maybe, least of all me.

  Before taking over the flower shop, Katie had been in medical school, leaving the field when she realized that while she had the proficiency, she didn't have the love for it necessary to deal with the stress involved with being a fine doctor. She knew the realities and hazards of our sexual era.

  "We were both tested," I told Anna. "And Katie and I are in love, and Michelle and I haven't been together in nearly a year." It came out sounding way too whiny and defensive.

  "I know that, dear," my grandmother said, as if the knowledge didn't mean much, really. "But you must understand that even love is not an excuse where inescapable realities are concerned." Her smile grew broad and a lot more light-hearted, but her gaze remained firm, maybe even a little cold. She seemed caught between bursting with delight at the prospect of a great-grandchild in her life and wanting to break a wooden spoon over my head. "I know you're in love and happy, and I'm overjoyed for you both, but Jonathan, what were you thinking?"

  I didn't really believe she wanted to hear the kinds of things I thought about when I was in bed with Katie. I shut up and drank some mil
k.

  One of the reasons Michelle and I had been driven apart—besides the fact that she'd started growing overly fond of guys named Sycho-Kila and Wrecking Ball—was that she didn't want kids. A strange urgency sporadically possessed me. Some might call that instinct, others ego.

  Anna couldn't keep from glancing over at the wall where she'd rearranged some of the photo collages. "Marriage might not hold the same sanctity it did several decades ago, but rearing children is another matter altogether. There is no greater responsibility or commitment."

  "Despite the facts at hand not painting me as the most responsible person in the world, do you really think I'd be a second-rate father, Anna?"

  "No, you will be a wonderful father." The severity cleared from her face as she imagined Christmas with laughing children again, a season full of presents other than ties, cologne, gift certificates, and cold cash. Lots of colorful paper and breakable parts, with un-followed directions in Japanese wafting to the floor. "But a stable family life is equally important."

  "If one can be made, I'll make it."

  "Of that I am assured."

  "Are you?"

  "That you'll do your very best at whatever you put your mind to? Yes, absolutely. Always, dear. However, I fear that these ... complications might work against yours and Katie's relationship."

  "So do I."

  "Lord, that sounded shamefully indifferent. I apologize.”

  “Don't. I know what you mean."

  I got up and stood at the collages, witnessing my grandfather reading a copy of Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus. I had a first edition at the store that I couldn't look at without thinking of this picture: a man I'd never met nor even heard much about. Anna remained oddly silent about him, and I often thought the worst of him for that. It's difficult to give the dead the benefit of the doubt.