Mummers

We stopped just inside the entrance and watched them. Up the dirt-packed slope they walked in train, with king and queen at the head of the column and the rest trailing after: princes and princesses, squires, guards, assorted barons, baronesses, dukes and duchesses, all of them wrapped inside thick embroidered costumes. The procession trod slowly; bagpipers followed at a respectful distance, playing the royals into an open-air canopy where with pomp and pomposity they sat and gazed out at awestruck children and their parents, never smiling or breaking character, but merely gazing: uncurious, oblivious, noble.

“You gotta be kidding me.” Seth removed his sunglasses and winced up at all the king’s men, as though to convince himself it wasn’t some horrible fever dream.

Then he placated his hangover by shoving his glasses back on his face. “This is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had, Twitch. And that’s saying something.”

Baby Duke stayed between me and Seth, shifting his weight uneasily. He looked more afraid than skeptical. “It could be fun,” he said quietly, dropping his eyes. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead; he left them glistening, afraid to draw attention to himself. He didn’t want to be here. Baby wore bluejeans and a Rockies sweatshirt with the left sleeve pinned to his side so it wouldn’t sway as he walked. He’d probably be more comfortable back home under the covers swimming in central air. Probably wanted to be anywhere else but in Larkspur in a dry dirt field on a dry hot day, surrounded by play-acting royals, suburban fair-goers and random costumed freaks.

I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t exactly my crowd either, but Seth and I had made a pact. Baby’s road to recovery would not be a touchy-feely affair. If only because it wasn’t our style and, anyway, we didn’t know how. Instead we’d let him run the gauntlet alone and leave the kid-gloves and the pity with his father and his physical therapist and his other therapist and everyone else he would ever meet. There would be rubbernecking stares and rude encounters and strange faces flush with the kind of cheap sympathy that tries to take a piece of you away, but Seth and I wouldn’t interfere or take the bullet. Baby Duke had better learn to deal with it.

“We’ll make it fun,” I said. “There’s beer.”

Seth perked up a bit. “Of course there is,” he said with conviction. “Take a doctor’s advice–once you black out, this place is a laugh riot.”

“You’re not a doctor,“ I started, but Seth was already halfway up the slope, passing under banners and flags with rainbow patterns and the crests of lions and arrows that were either invented whole-cloth or else too old to matter. Baby and I watched him tramp up through the crowd of musicians playing for tips and pale middle-aged women selling hoop earrings and necklaces. Seth’s cheap, dog-eared copy of Confessions stuck half out of his back pocket. Two months ago he had finished up his second year of medical school in Iowa City, then abruptly quit without a word of explanation. In three weeks he would be in Mount Angel, Oregon, in seminary. Until then, obsessed with Augustine, he had decided that the more sins he had to wash clean, the better priest he could be, and spent his time planning and executing more and more creative ways to be wicked.

Baby turned and gave a wan smile. “I don’t know,” he said, then swallowed and pursed his lips and just looked at me.

I looked away. He’d only been home two weeks and had spent it mostly in bed. Before that he’d been two weeks in Landstuhl, Germany and three months at Walter Reed. He didn’t look ready.

“Let’s get a beer,” I said. We started up the hill and both of us were soon panting. It would break a hundred in an hour. The air felt boiled and hard.

“You should’ve worn your uniform,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“The dress-blues, white hat and gloves and sword–do they really give you a sword?”

He laughed, almost angrily, as though he had decided he’d never laugh again and was discouraged at how quickly the pact was broken. “The dude in the commercial gets one, anyway.”

Seth dropped back to join in the conversation. “Twitch is right, Baby. The whole man-in-uniform angle. You’d be waist-high in comely wenches.”

Baby Duke only shook his head and looked at the dirt.

“Okay, okay,” Seth said. “Syphilitic wenches. But I know of what I speak. I’m a doctor.”

Baby Duke grinned. “You’re not a doctor.”

Seth opened his arms wide to embrace the world. “Soon I will be a doctor of souls, each one a pristine snowflake to tend to as I undertake my peregrinations across this American holy land.”

“You’d make a better lawyer,” I said.

They stood in line for beer and I rounded the corner and lit a cigarette in the shade of the beer tent. I was glad Baby Duke hadn’t mentioned the last time we tried to get him laid in uniform–nearly a year ago, in Las Vegas, right before he’d been sent to Diego Garcia on his way to the desert. It was the last time we’d all been together, and Seth propositioned girls at random: cocktail waitresses, wives, grandmothers. But none of them seemed too impressed by the whole off-to-war spiel. Seth considered it a grave mistake to let our friend leave American soil a virgin, but Baby refused to let Seth buy him a girl. Shades of his old self, when he was just sweet quiet Adam Shepherd, high school troubadour, folk singer in waiting who grew weak-kneed and starry-eyed at Simon and Garfunkel lyrics.

I watched him now. Sweat trickling down his cheeks, his eyes seemed locked in a perpetual squint, desperate not to wilt. I bet he knew all about the sun, things I’d never know.

I hoped someone would pick a fight with him, and even though it was against our rules, I would stand up against astonishing odds, surrounded by a gang of amputee-hating warmongering peaceniks. In the shade, dragging hot smoke into my lungs, I glowered at passersby and imagined the roundhouses and jabs and butterflies that would send them crashing to the dirt. I watched Baby Duke, watched the people around him. But no one gave him much attention. No one seemed all that interested.

Seth appeared out of the dizzy glare and pushed a paper cup of warm light beer into my hand. Baby Duke stepped close to me and seemed to shrink down, bowing his head and staring numbly at his shoes. He looked about to crumble, slumped forward from however many invisible burdens were stacked up on his back; eyes half-closed, he held tight to his beer cup. I thought he was mortified that he might drop it, that people might look.

“I don’t feel so well,” he sniffed.

Seth and I exchanged a quick look, like parents deciding whose turn it was to get out of bed at two a.m. I took the lead. “Is it heatstroke, Baby? Or a regular stroke, maybe? At least you’ll get a free funeral.” I stuck out my beer till it touched his. “Hold this, will you?”

“Please,” he said. He wasn’t looking at us and I knew he didn’t think it was funny anymore.

But Seth was undeterred. “It’s the crowd, Twitch. Baby just needs a little privacy, a few minutes alone in a locked bathroom with the black-and-white J.C. Penney ads from the Post. The saltpeter’s finally run its course and Rosy left him high and dry — gallivanting through downtown Tikrit, jerking off some haji. And our boy’s got to make do with Rosy’s less coordinated sister.”

“That’s no joke,” Baby said, just above a whisper, directing his words at the dirt. “My right hand is useless.” Then he started to laugh, deep guttural laughs. He straightened up and drained his beer in one long gulp. “Refill,” he said.

Seth love-tapped him on his only true shoulder. “At least you won’t go blind.”

We stayed near the beer tent long enough for Seth to guzzle six or seven. I suggested he temper his pre-noon intake with a turkey leg, but he only laughed and pulled me with him back in line. The serving girl was a chubby blonde outfitted in a purple skirt with white trim. “The gentle sir requireth further ale to slake his mighty thirst?”

“You said it, Ophelia. Get your ample ass to a nunnery.”

She didn’t respond, which Seth took as encouragement. “See, nunnery in this sense is utilized as a double entendre, meaning convent, of course, but with an embedded insult, because nunnery, my darling, also meant good old-fashioned straw-on-the-floor whorehouse.”

“Thanks,” she said dryly, mechanically taking his money and slapping change on the counter in front of him.

Seth gave her his slackest grin, which had for years endeared him to women of all ages: his girlfriends, their mothers, their grandmothers. His voice took on a soft edge with just a hint of Southern accent. “Normally I’d tip you, either out of custom or habit, because I’ve tipped you five times already and feel natural sympathy for the demeaning service industry to which I’ll never belong, but–but, if I tip you again you’ll give me that grating ‘hizzah for the tippa’ line that you’ve given me five times already, and it might just drive me to jam a cockful of hemlock down your throat.”

“Seth.” I tried to grab his arm but he shook me off.

“And it’s all motive,” he continued, faster now. “Because really, Juliet, really I’d be tipping you because you’re attractive, at least moderately so, and I’d be thinking somewhere in my irrational brain that an extra dollar would ingratiate me into your heart and you’d be so swept away by my plenary munificence that nothing would mollify your gratitude but to sneak back behind these tents to play a lick of Mozart on my skin flute.”

“Seth,” I said.

“Asshole,” the girl said.

“Skin flute,” Seth repeated.

It was Baby Duke who finally acted, dropping his beer and hauling Seth backwards. Surprised, Seth offered no resistance, and even looked a little repentant. He said nothing, but stared down at Baby’s beer-soaked sneakers.

“It’s okay,” I told the girl solemnly. “He’s gonna be a priest.”

We ambled along the grounds, with Seth giving lip to any barker who dared to address us, and even more to anyone who tried to ignore us. We stopped at an amphitheater where a short bald ventriloquist was talking to a skeletal dummy, then to the main stage where two swarthy men fought a poorly choreographed duel and held ambiguously ribald conversations about their swords. Ending up back near the entrance, we once again picked our way through the flute and harp and lute players. A man juggled fiery sticks while balancing on a miniature teeter-totter; Seth stopped and followed the motions of the sticks with wide eyes. Sufficiently drunk now, he was much more impressed by the music, and he swayed back and forth and didn’t care how silly he looked. Stuck in harmless, infantile drunkenness, everything he beheld was glorious, tangible proof that the old covenant had not been breached–God in His heaven, blessing sinners and bestowing gifts of the keenest mercy.

“They’re called buskers,” he whispered. “They play for tips.”

Neither Baby Duke nor I were very impressed by this information, but I saw Seth drop a twenty into the upturned bowler hat at the juggler’s feet.

“And that,” he said, clutching my sleeve, “is the sound of heaven’s angels in coitus.”

He stumbled over and stood before a young girl, maybe eighteen, who wore a simple blue sundress and played an odd, leech-shaped instrument.

He spun back to us. “It’s called a hammer dulcimer,” he said breathlessly.

The girl’s feet were bare and she had a freshness about her that for some reason reminded me of when young Adam Shepherd, before enlistment and his new nickname, used to walk down to the Walnut Hills Park and sit in the grass under the ancient oak tree near the creek and play old Jackson Browne songs to no one in particular.

Baby Duke took a step back and pulled me with him–far enough away that we could observe the girl without looking unseemly. Her fingers strummed gently and her body moved to the music she made.

“Anyway,” Baby said, “it’s an Appalachian dulcimer. There’s a difference.”

Seth had lost interest in the sound of angel sex and lurched over to a forty-something troll–either in make-up or real life, I couldn’t tell–who was dressed in an Obi-Wan robe. She immediately launched into a lecture about authentic Renaissance folk art. Seth appeared to be listening intently.

Baby Duke kicked at the dirt and stood close to me–too close, with only an inch or two between us where his arm and shoulder ought to have been. Months ago, Seth had explained it all. He stood in my parents’ living room in south Denver, his body jerking with nervous sleepless energy because he’d driven all night from Iowa City to tell me in person. He stood with his back to me, and as he lectured he tore page after page out of a heavy textbook called Musculoskeletal Surgery for Carcinoma. Most of it I forgot, except certain words snapped back into my head sometimes. Interscapulothoracic. Dissection. Neurovascular bundles. Transected clavicles. What it means, he finally told me, is they take off his arm and his shoulder with it. But that’s when it’s cancer, he told me. That’s when it’s amputation. I don’t know what they call it when your arm just gets blown right off.

Baby Duke gave a low whistle, still looking at the girl in the blue dress with her Appalachian dulcimer, the sound of which I couldn’t even hear over the random snatches of crowd conversation. “Remember that folk festival up in Lyons,” he said.

“Uh huh.”

“I love that day. Everybody was nice. Those lesbians we walked with from the parking lot?”

“We decided they weren’t real lesbians.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The one with that stuff wrong with her face? I remember thinking how great that was, real lesbians or not, that the other lady was with her. Like partners, you know, back in old West. Partnering up for safety. But mostly what I remember is how many pretty girls there were, and all of them wearing sundresses and going barefoot in the grass. Jesus.”

He stepped back from me and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “I want to go home,” he said quietly.

My chest froze up a little, that dread fear of knowing he meant something else, that he wanted to go home to his mom, who was two years dead, or else get a million miles away to some green place without sand or even the memory of sand, where he could stroll down to the park on summer afternoons and sit under oak trees strumming Jackson Browne songs and singing softly to young girls in sundresses. Instead we were at some stupid fair and Baby Duke would never play a guitar again as long as he lived.

I tried to catch Seth’s eye, but he was too far gone. He fumbled through the homemade jewelry in front of a merchant, whose Renaissance costume bore an uncanny resemblance to Princess Leia. With his slack flirty grin he bought one of the lady’s wares—a necklace woven together out of twigs—and very methodically broke it under her nose. She cried out; the juggler yelled at him; the girl in the blue dress stopped playing and called him a prick. Seth just stood there grinning, until the juggler came over and grabbed him by the collar and flung him to the dirt. He didn’t resist.

Baby and I hurried over. Seth looked up at us, his face placid and sweetly smiling. “I’m like Gandhi,” he said.

I helped him up and he brushed himself off. Utterly unfazed, he spat dirt from his lips. “Zounds,” he told us. “Let’s go back to modern times and get some beer and hit up Chipotle.”

Outside the entrance, a stocky older woman sat at a card table nursing a shoebox of cheap plastic bracelets. She asked if we wanted to return later in the day. Seth ignored her and I gave a friendly shake of my head. As Baby Duke passed, she reached out and gently touched his hand. “Excuse me,” she said. He froze and smiled politely; she tilted her head and assumed a grandmotherly over-the-top Norman Rockwell look of sweet adoration.

“I don’t mean to bother you, sir,” she said. “But at my church last month we all made a promise not to just walk by. It’s not Christian to just walk by.” She spoke with a kind of nervous pride. “I’m sure people say this to you all the time,” she said. “But thank you for your service. God bless you.”

Baby tried to keep his smile and faltered. His face twisted into an awkward wince, trying to come up with something to say. But Seth stepped in front of him to take the bullet. Seth would soon be a man of the cloth, after all, and had a certain authority with which to speak. His jaw went slack and he used the softest lilt he could muster.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said.