Though he’d obtained more desirable sleeping arrangements, the nights still troubled August. It was in the night that the enormity of his situation threatened to devour him. The first few evenings he’d kept fear at bay by thinking of Percyfoot. He’ll come soon. He’ll come soon. It had been his mantra against the dark. But now nearly a week had passed with no sign of his mentor. Not an hour went by without August cursing Barreth. If it weren’t for that unholy miser, he’d be sleeping on a cozy equity cot instead of massaging a stubborn cramp out of his neck while trying to fashion a blanket out of newspaper. He couldn’t go on like this; hope was stretching thin.
Tears were coming, and that wouldn’t do. August had been constantly terrified this entire week. He didn’t want to become a man with a rat on his shoulder. He wouldn’t.
August forced himself to take a deep, restorative breath. Percyfoot would rescue him, August was sure of it. But for whatever reason, Percyfoot wasn’t back yet. Perhaps he’d gone on a bender and hadn’t read the news. Or more likely, he was wrapped up in some film and had forgotten about everything outside his character’s motivations. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t here yet, and the sooner August faced that fact, the better. He needed to find a home. Sleeping on rooftops was already losing its charm, and it wasn’t even winter yet. He couldn’t sit around waiting for Percyfoot to find him.
When the solution came to him, he shuddered, but it was his best option, his only option. He needed to impress Sycamore so that the man would let August stay with him, just until Percyfoot returned. It was impermanent, a transitory fix, but it was what had to be done. However, there was no way Sycamore would deign to live with a delicate moppet like August. The man was too hard.
“I’ll toughen up until I’m as callused as any ruffian,” August promised, wiping away some tears he hadn’t quite admitted were there. “Then he’ll have to take me in.”
For practice, August cursed at a pigeon he was sharing the roof with. “Damn you, you winged wretch! A hex on all your eggs!”
It was a start.
* * *
When August next met up with Sycamore, the magician act was back in full swing.
“There’s a cop that’s been trailing us around town for a while,” Sycamore explained. “Wears a gray coat and hat. Haven’t seen him in a week or two, but just in case, you’re going to play lookout today, got it? If you see that cop, or anybody else who looks suspicious, give a whistle. The guys’ll know to lay off when they hear your signal.”
“I can’t whistle,” August admitted.
“Jesus. Well, what can you do?”
“I know all of Shakespeare’s major soliloquies, and more than a few of his minor ones,” August offered.
“We can’t have some toddler spouting off poetry in the middle of the act. You’ll steal focus.”
August started to explain the difference between poems and soliloquies but then remembered his pledge to be rougher and interrupted himself by spitting.
Sycamore eyed the attempted loogie, perplexed, then pretended nothing had happened. “It shouldn’t be a problem. Like I said, we haven’t done the act for half a week and we keep a random route. I’m sure the heat won’t turn up, but if they do, get our attention somehow. Got it?”
August gave his best approximation of a serious, thuggish nod.
Sycamore sighed. “God help me.”
Within a few minutes, the show was under way. August watched from across Broadway, trying to look casual as he scanned the area for any sign of the police, but it seemed that suspending the act for a few days had done the trick; there wasn’t a single cop in sight.
Ten minutes in, August stopped standing sentry and instead watched the pickpockets at work, trying to acquire some of their techniques. He was about to applaud a particular thief’s deft handiwork when he spotted him: the cop in the gray coat, sucking down a cigarette. Blast and double damnation! He’d failed at the simplest of tasks! August needed to warn his compatriots lest the entire outfit be incarcerated due to his negligence.
He moistened his lips and attempted a whistle, knowing the exercise would prove to be fruitless, but determined to follow orders nonetheless. Alas, though he expelled copious amounts of both breath and will, August could create no sound, and as he blew in vain, he saw the cop rather pointedly stamp out his cigarette. This was to be the bust! All would be lost if he failed to act!
August hurled himself across Broadway, darting through traffic, and tumbled into the crowd. A few confused murmurs and swear words were tossed his way, and then the circle parted, all eyes on the boy.
The limelight. August had seen countless performers rise to its call, but he had never been forced to do so himself. His mouth was dry. His nerves were raw and sharp. What to do?
August opened his mouth and was surprised as anyone when he started singing.
Hey there, boys, I’m mighty lonely.
Hey there, boys, I want you only,
For my own. Let’s have some fun tonight.
Hey there, boys, I’m awful frightened,
Hey there, boys, turn off the light and
Be my friend. Let’s have some fun tonight.
It’s been said that even someone suffering from the most terrible case of dementia can recall every word of a song supposedly long forgotten. August was having such an experience now.
He’d heard the tune only once, a late-night act at the Backstage Bistro. Now, slightly older and slightly wiser, August understood some of the implications of the lyrics and found, as they sank further and further into depravity with each passing verse, that he was now in danger of being arrested for inadvertently soliciting sodomy. However, for the sake of the gang, the show had to go on. He undid the top two buttons of his shirt and exposed his bony shoulder, as he’d seen the singer do those many years ago, adding a lurid wink as a bit of punctuation.
The reactions of the crowd varied. A few were red in the face from laughter, others from embarrassment. Needless to say, August created quite a stir, and as he belted out the last few notes, he saw that all the members of Sycamore’s gang had slinked off to safety.
The applause was scattered at best, but August didn’t take this half-heartedness personally; good art was polarizing. Besides, now that the deed was done, he had to make his escape before the plainclothesman, bewildered as Caesar on that fateful March afternoon, decided to haul him off for prostitution.
* * *
After his burlesque fiasco, August was taken off lookout duty. Abject failure notwithstanding, Sycamore could see that August had a certain utilizable panache. The trick was diluting the boy’s natural excitability and his tendency toward logorrhea.
“What am I to do, descend into a state of aphasic muteness?” August moaned after being chastised yet again for an overabundance of vocabulary.
Sycamore was exhausted; he’d taken to carrying around a pocket dictionary so he could understand August. “Even now you’re doing it,” he said, locating the word aphasic with frazzled fingers. “Kids don’t talk like this.”
“Of course they do! Haven’t you read Great Expectations?”
“No. And you shouldn’t have read it either! That’s my point!”
Both parties were at their wit’s end. Sycamore had ordered his band of pickpockets to lay low for the time being. With the dissolution of his syndicate, however, he’d lost the most sizable portion of his income. He was depending on August to haul in a big score.
The boy, on the other hand, was near starving, but what was really rattling August was his lack of shelter. He needed Sycamore to take him in, and for that to happen, August had to prove his worth.
So the pair commenced with what seemed like hundreds of tense rehearsals, where the quoting of Shakespeare was explicitly banned, until Sycamore finally decided that August was ready to pull off a con.
That morning they set up camp at Grand Central Station beside one of the larger ticketing booths, just outside the footpath of bustling commuters. Some unseen s
ign seemed to assuage Sycamore, and he gave August an imperceptible nudge on his shoulder: their signal.
August started trickling tears while Sycamore rubbed his back, parodying a comforting parent. The intended victims, an elderly couple, passed them by without sparing them so much as a glance. August didn’t worry; perhaps he’d been mistaken, and their mark was still in line. But after a couple minutes, Sycamore knelt down and whispered to August, “All right, save some of that salt water for later.”
August used his sleeves to dry his moistened cheeks. “I don’t understand. Why isn’t it working? Perhaps I should play it bigger.”
“No! God, no! It’s New York, kid. You stop for every person sobbing on the street, it would take you half an hour to move a block. I thought that couple might’ve been coming from Toledo or something, but they’re probably just a pair of Park Avenue prigs. We’ll wait for the rubes.”
A drought seemed to be sweeping through Grand Central Station, however, for though Sycamore had promised a plentiful crop of marks, the landscape was an arid badland of hardened New Yorkers. The morning perished, and most of the afternoon with it.
A nudge from Sycamore roused August from his vegetative trance of boredom.
“What?” he asked.
In response, Sycamore raised his eyebrows and tilted his head toward the ticket line. This was the signal! Tears leaked from August with Pavlovian speed, and he felt the warm touch of faux assurance from Sycamore.
“What seems to be the problem here?” came the question, languid but sharp somehow, like honey cut with arsenic.
While Sycamore dove into the well-rehearsed sob story about a dying woman in Boston, August commenced a lidded study of the mark. He could see why Sycamore had picked her. She was old. Not elderly, but well over sixty, and to a boy of elevenish she might as well have been a reanimated corpse. It wasn’t her age that had caught Sycamore’s eye, however, but her wealth. Genuine jewels dripped from her neck, dark and rich as molasses. A manservant stood a breath behind her, dragging an elaborate set of alligator-skin luggage. Impressed as he was by all this finery, August was most taken aback by her clothes. Though Miss Butler had failed in most ways as an educator, the boy could sew like the dickens and appreciated a good piece of stitchwork better than most. The woman’s travel wear was all drama, clearly custom, with none of the popular do-it-yourself rayon technique sweeping the postwar nation. August was dazzled. So dazzled, in fact, he hardly heard the question barked in his direction.
“Why aren’t you in school, boy?”
Immersed as he was in the woman’s attire, August hadn’t noticed the actual woman. Though she was finely bedecked, she clearly possessed a hardened cunning that put August in mind of a gruesome stone gargoyle.
Caught off guard, the boy was temporarily struck dumb, but Sycamore had a hardened cunning all his own, though his variety of guile was decidedly more ferretesque. “His absence is excused, dear lady,” Sycamore explained. “After all, what administration could be so coldhearted as to keep a boy from his mother’s deathbed?”
“What school does he attend?” asked the woman, unfazed by Sycamore’s attempts at sympathy. August, still weeping, could easily see that the scam was doomed. Though she was from out of town, her dialect distinctly southern, she was no rube.
“P.S. Thirty-Nine,” Sycamore lied.
“A public school?” gasped the woman. “He should be in a private institution!”
Sycamore, finally seeing the lost cause for what it was, barked out, “If you ain’t gonna help us, lady, why don’t you scram?”
The southerner huffed. “I’m trying to decide whether to report this case to the authorities. A child’s well-being is no laughing matter!”
Mention of the police threw Sycamore, and he was struggling to extricate himself unscathed. It seemed the gargoyle would soon devour the ferret if August didn’t intercede. He knew they’d get no money from Lady Antebellum, but he had no wish to involve the authorities. Despite his homelessness and all-around destitution, he’d rather be dead than in an orphanage. Honestly, how dreadful to beg a second ladleful of gruel off a man with a name like Bumble?
“My good lady,” August whispered, “please, I implore you, let me and my poor father alone so that we may wallow together in our miserable grief. My mother, bless that darling woman, is dying a most wretched death. Before we put her on a train toward Boston to stay with my sainted aunt, Father and I were her sole caregivers. You can’t imagine the strain. She could hardly walk. She couldn’t keep food down. Father lost his position as a high-powered prosecuting lawyer, not daring to leave the side of his beloved for even the briefest of instants.”
“What is her sickness?” asked the woman, with none of her former ferocity.
“Consumption,” said August, while Sycamore at the same moment replied with, “Cholera.”
“Choleric consumption,” August corrected, without missing a beat. “The doctors were baffled. When a bout of explosive diarrhea quite literally lifted her off the bed, Father and I knew we could do no more. She had to be sent up to Boston where, as I’m sure you know, specialists from around the globe deal with these sorts of diseases. Alas, even these men of superior learning were at a loss, my mother’s case being the worst the world has ever known. We do not ask for your money. Perhaps by denying it, you are in fact doling out a blessing, for surely my sweet mother’s condition has worsened, and it might be better to remember her as she was, a gaunt and hollow specter desperately clinging to life, than as what she has almost certainly become: a corpse. But give us not your pity, either, for as of this morning she was still alive, and after all, the weariest and most loathed worldly life that age, ache, penury, and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death.” The Shakespeare was blatant mutiny, but August was on a roll. “Perhaps, when Mother surrenders and leaves behind this earthly plane, Father and I will be able to pick up our lives where they left off, or better yet, relocate to our country’s celebrated Dixieland, which I hear is quite lovely,” he added, not above a bit of flattery.
The woman grasped at the clasp of her necklace and deposited the blood-red gems in August’s hands.
“Madame,” August began, “we couldn’t—”
“Silence!” she cried. She shoved a sizable wad of money against Sycamore’s chest. “Take this,” she whispered, “and may God have mercy on her soul.”
August had apparently learned more from Miss Butler than needlework; he could spin a lie with nearly as much aplomb as the old laundress could.
* * *
“I got you something,” Sycamore teased as he led August through the Lower East Side.
August had been worried that Sycamore would be angry with him for going so far off script, but his anxiety proved baseless; Sycamore was elated. August was now his cash cow, and Sycamore frequently said things like “Good job” and “Incredible!” It was borderline affectionate.
“Gosh, what could it be?” August said, feigning innocence. He’d already guessed what Sycamore’s surprise was: a room all his own in Sycamore’s apartment. But even though he had it all figured out, he wasn’t going to spoil Sycamore’s fun. He played dumb.
Just as August suspected, Sycamore stopped in front of a run-down building, produced a set of keys, and unlocked the front door.
“Right this way, sir,” Sycamore said with mock formality, holding the door for August.
They walked up five floors, the keys came out again, and Sycamore unlocked the apartment door with a flourish. “Ta-da!” he cried, just as he did in his street magician act.
It was a studio. One room that contained a half-stove, an old mattress on the floor, a single window that faced an alley, and a wooden chair.
“Where are the other rooms?” August asked.
“Bathroom’s down the hall,” Sycamore replied, mistaking August’s question. “You share it with the rest of the floor.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Sycamore
got defensive. “Look, I know it’s not the Plaza, but it’s a good place. We made a lot of cash off that lady, but believe me, money doesn’t last forever, especially when—”
“No, it’s not that,” August interjected. “I guess I just thought that I was going to live with you.”
Sycamore’s eyes bulged with stupefaction before he burst into laughter. “What? Live with me? Are you joking?”
August shuffled his feet in awkward shame. But why was he embarrassed? He’d gotten shelter. That had been the goal.
But there was more to it than that, August realized, his face flushed with humiliation. He hadn’t just wanted a roof with walls. He wanted someone to be there, someone who noticed if he came home at night. August didn’t even like Sycamore, not really. But Sycamore had been inside the Scarsenguard. He remembered it too, and his remembering made it more real. Made Miss Butler still alive, and made it so that Sir Reginald would come and get him and—
“Oh, Jesus, kid, don’t cry,” said Sycamore, kneeling down to August’s level. “Listen. If you lived with me, I would kill you. I wouldn’t want to, but I would. It just wouldn’t work. I’m not the fatherly type. But here you got a place all to yourself. You can have your friends over and stay up all night, whatever you want! No parents! Right?”
August steeled himself, something he was getting good at. “Right,” he replied.
“Good,” Sycamore said, shaking off the guilt. “Here’s your keys, and I paid rent for the first three months, but after that you’re on your own. Got it?”
“Got it,” said August. “See you tomorrow?”
“Actually, I’m off to Atlantic City with the missus for a holiday. Let’s meet on Monday.” Sycamore stood in the doorway, about to leave. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” August lied.
Sycamore smiled, shut the door, and left August.
Alone.
* * *
Months later, August was kicking around on the outskirts of Times Square waiting for Sycamore. They were going to run a few surefire cons before lunch, then call it an early day. But of course Sycamore was late. Probably nursing a nasty hangover, August thought, now aimlessly strolling through the crowded avenues.
The Astonishing Life of August March Page 8
