Tom Piccirilli: Sorrow's crown

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!"