The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [94]
Corwin got out of the car and carried the violin into the mall. In his own mind, he liked to quote himself. There are two kinds of people—the givers and the takers. I’m a taker. Render unto Corwin what is due him. His favorite movie of recent times was about a cop with a twisted way of looking at the world so you couldn’t tell if he was evil or good you only knew that he could seize your mind up with language. Corwin had a thing for language. He inhaled it from movies and rock lyrics, television. It rubbed around inside him, word against word. He thought he was writing poems sometimes in his thoughts, but the poems would not come out of his hands. The words stuck in odd configurations and made patterns that raced across the screen of his shut eyes and off the edge, down his temples into the darkness of his neck. So when he walked through the air-lock doors into the warm cathedral space of the central food court, his brain was a mumble of intentions.
He was very proud of his leather jacket which had most of what he owned inside of it, in the inner pockets. And as always he was hyperaware of his own good looks. People treated him like a good-looking person. Others, who knew him well or whom he had burned, avoided him. But this problem was nothing he could fix now. The only way, he imagined, to redeem himself was through impressing people on a level he had not yet reached. He fantasized. As a rock star, the subject of a Rolling Stone interview. Who was the real Corwin Peace? Now, taking a seat in the central court, peering at the distracted-looking customers, he understood that none of them was going to outright buy the fiddle. He got up and walked into a music store and tried to show the instrument to the manager, who only said, “Nah, we don’t take used.” Corwin walked out again. He tried a few people. They shied away or turned him down flat.
Gotta regroup, Corwin told himself, and went back to sit on the central length of bench he had decided to call his own. That was where he got the idea that became a gold mine. It was from a TV show, a clip of a woman passing a musician in a city street and he was playing a saxophone or something of that sort, and at his feet there was an open instrument case. She stopped, and smiled, and threw a dollar in the case. Corwin took the violin out of the case, laid the open case at his feet. He took the violin in one hand and the bow in the other. Then he drew the bow across the string and made a terrible, strange sound.
The screech echoed in the food court and several people raised their lips from the waxed-paper food wrappers, then lowered the wrapped food when they saw Corwin. He looked back at them, poised and frozen. It was a moment of drama—he had them. An audience. He had to act instantly or lose them. He made a flowery, low bow. His move was elegant, the bow in one hand and the instrument in the other. It just came out of him. As though he was accepting an ovation. There were a few murmurs of amusement. Someone even applauded. These sounds acted on Corwin Peace at once, more powerfully than any drug he had yet tried. A surge of zeal filled him and he took up the instrument again, threw back his hair, and began to play a silent, swift passage of music.
His mimicry was impeccable. Where had he learned it? He didn’t know. He didn’t touch the bow to the strings, but he played music all the same. Music ricocheted around between his ears. He could hardly keep up with what he heard. His body spilled over with drama. He threw every move he’d ever seen and then some. When the music in his head stopped, he dipped low, did the splits, which he’d practiced not knowing why. He held the violin and bow overhead. Applause broke over him. A skein of dazzling sound.
The Fire
THEY PICKED UP Corwin Peace pretending to play the fiddle in a Fargo mall and brought him to me. I have a great deal of latitude in sentencing. In spite of my conviction that he was probably incorrigible, I was