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—”
“Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face,-terror, the human form divine, and secrecy, the human dress.”
“Jesus Christ. C’mon, Angela, this guy’s nuts.” The boy tried to move around Erasmus, but the older man moved to block his way to the girl.
The staff spoke up again. “It is human nature to hate those whom you have injured,” it whined.
“Old man, you’re asking for it.”
Kate began to move through the back of the thinning crowd, cursing under her breath and looking for someplace to deposit the remnants of her cone. She knew what those young muscles would do to the old man, to say nothing of the boots. Erasmus bent to look into the young man’s eyes, and for the first time he seemed to be trying to communicate, not just mock.
“I must be cruel,” he said with a small shrug of apology, “only to be kind.”
The boy hesitated, held not so much by the words as by the man’s unexpected attitude, though even as Kate watched, it began to harden.
“What mean you,” he said coldly, “that you beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?”
Silence held,- then, said as a sneer: “The life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and… short.”
It was the deliberate stress given the last word that broke the boy, and his powerful right arm, with the paper-wrapped bottle now at the end of it, shot automatically out toward the old man’s head. Kate threw herself against the arm before it made contact, but the impact swept all three of them into the girl Angela, against the wall behind her, and then tumbled them to the pavement in a heap. The raging boy flung his girlfriend off and was first to his feet, and if three men from the audience had not managed to drag him off, Kate would have had considerably more damage than three oval bruises on her shoulders and shins where his boots had hit home. She scrambled upright and shoved her police ID into his face, holding it there until it and her repeated shouts of “Police officer! I’m a police officer!” finally got through and she saw his muscles relax. The boy shook off the restraining hands but made no move to continue the assault.
The raucous gathering had finally attracted official attention, and several short coughs of a siren signaled the arrival of the local uniforms. The two men climbed out of the patrol car and moved their authoritative bulk into the center of activity, but Kate did not take her eyes from the young man until the uniformed officers had acknowledged her identity and were actually standing next to her. Only then did she turn and help Erasmus to his feet. He brushed himself off as if checking that he was in one piece, then, while Kate was making explanations that downplayed the entire episode, he went over to his staff, freed it from the newspaper box, and tucked it into his right shoulder. The effect was bizarre, like looking at a two-headed being, and Kate had to tear her eyes away.
The two uniformed officers were telling the crowd, what remained of it, to move on, and while the younger one dealt with the young man, the older one took Kate to one side.
“Inspector Martinelli, can you tell me what your interest is in the Brother there?”
“At this point, I don’t know what my interest is,” she admitted. “He’s somehow involved in the cremation homicide in Golden Gate Park, but whether as a witness or something more, I just don’t know.”
“The reason I ask, he’s a nice old guy, but he’s like a magnet for trouble. Not always, or we’d move him on, but this is the third time, and once last fall we didn’t get here fast enough. He got beat up pretty bad. I just thought if he was a friend or a relative, well… You know?”
“Would that have been in November?”
“Around then, yeah.”
“I heard about that. I’ll talk with him, see what I can do, but he has his own agenda, if you know what I mean, and self-preservation doesn’t seem to be very high on it.”
The crowd having dispersed, the two patrol officers turned their attentions to the young man and delivered a warning that even he seemed to find impressive (though, truth to tell, even before they began, he looked ill and without interest in beating up old men). When they had finished, he gathered Angela up and would have walked away, but Erasmus put out a gentle hand to stop him.
“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,” he said quietly. The boy nodded and would not look at him, but Angela did, and to her, Erasmus said in a heartfelt exclamation, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and then, with the emphasis of a judgment, told her, “None but the brave” (and here he pointedly ran his eyes over the boy) “deserve the fair.”
The boy tugged at her and they moved off, but after half a dozen steps, Angela shrugged off the confining arm and the two of them continued side by side.
The two patrolmen suggested firmly that it was time Erasmus moved on. Kate reassured them that she would deal with it, and when another call came for them, they climbed back into the car and drove off. Kate waved her thanks. As soon as they had left, she turned on Erasmus.