The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  “Don’t be like that, Ran-dy…”

  But she was too old to wish for a pony, and too young to ask for peace. Randy said nothing and finally Danielle gave up.

  “None of us speaks a word of this. Ever,” she commanded, and three heads dutifully shook. “It’s our secret. Only ours. For life.”

  Already she was about-facing, about to head back to the forest. But her best friends dallied for a moment, glazed in unalloyed light.

  “But what do we call it?” Marla wondered.

  “Bob.” Came Danielle’s answer, definitive as always. “We’ll call him Bob.”

  “Why him?”

  This was Jane and everyone glared at her, unaccustomed to such assertiveness. “Why not…” she retreated, “Betsy?”

  Marla bounced and clapped. “The Betsybob!” she proclaimed, and her laughter echoed through the woods.

  * * * * *

  When it comes to planning, Randy’s hopeless. With schedules and budgets, too. Never the professional type, she was happy with a string of low-demanding jobs—retail buyer, real estate broker, receptionist—that gave her the time and flexibility for T.J. But then he got sick and there were specialists to consult, hospitals to grapple with. Bills mounted, trash cans overflowed. Way beyond overwhelmed, the last thing Randy needed was to organize a trip to a wilderness up north and for women who, though close childhood friends, had long grown up into strangers.

  Secrets can do that to people. Bind them tighter or nudge them apart. A source or sapper of strength, secrets can be borne in any manner of ways, with pride, humility, or dishonor. Somehow they knew that back then, slipping into the dining hall and taking their places for lunch, barely exchanging a look, that their relationship was forever altered. That each of them, as people, had changed. By the light of the Betsybob, they’d seen themselves for what they really were and wanted. That knowledge, those desires, would soon bear them far from Willowbrook, across the country and to lives propitiously different. Accomplished women, they’d have little time to spare for Randy’s whims and even less for traipsing through forests.

  And so she plans, meticulously. Reservations at the hotel their parents used to stay at the night before visitors’ day, flights for Jane and Marla, and a conversation with Danielle’s driver, giving him pinpoint directions. Dinner that evening, perhaps some drinks, and the next day, at dawn, setting out. The entire excursion will take an hour or two, she figures, and then they’ll say their goodbyes. By evening, Marla will be back to her stand-up and Jane to her congregation, Danielle restored to her heights. And Randy will return to the hospital, to the sanitized room with its instruments bleeping like a rocket ship’s and T.J., strapped in and tube-fed for blast off.

  Only now she will not merely watch. Doctors could pump him with antibodies and nurses might lessen his pain, but Randy will provide him with what none of them ever possessed. A wish. No longer for a pony, dappled or otherwise, but for the miracle he needs to survive.

  But first she must find that forest, the clearing, the cave. Stand once more in the energy and the music and beseech that being with the sunspot eyes and smile. She must let the light envelop her and assure her that, if only she’ll make it, this time her wish will be granted.

  Yet time is what she lacks. The reunion must take place this week, the last in October. Any later and the snows will begin. Later, she knows, is too late. Feverishly, Randy completes the schedule, addressing every question but one. Will they again meet the Betsybob?

  * * * * *

  At least the hotel is unchanged. Decorated in faux-New England colonial, powder horns and muskets on the walls; its anemic light brings out their weariness as they enter. Randy can see that greeting them, not only the fatigue of their trip but a depleted look, vitality drained from their faces. Danielle in a mauve cashmere coat, Marla in pink lamb’s wool, and Jane in an oversized ski jacket, all looking like refugees, but from what Randy won’t guess. She only imagines how she must seem to them, a husk. Yet none of them lets on. They hug one another, girlishly scream and fuss, as if arriving at another summer in camp.

  But summer is over, and Willowbrook’s closed down, and the reason for the reunion is too painful to mention. Instead, they learn about Marla’s gigs around the country, about the redneck crowds that squirm at words like boobs and pussy, and the college kids waiting to pounce on any heresy. About Jane’s work with inter-faith groups and the homeless, assisted by Sarah, her wife. Over a dinner in which everything, even the appetizers, are fried, they hear stories of private equity, of IPO’s and M&A’s and the markets that Danielle manipulates. Randy listens as attentively as she can, nodding and smiling and doing her best not to think about tomorrow’s trek. Struggling against the sense that not every wish, not even her friends’, gets granted.

  But the intuition intensifies through two martinis and a snifter of local cognac. Inexorably, the truth seeps out.

  “Boobs and pussies are funny on twenty-year-olds, less so at forty.” Marla runs meaty hands through redder curls. “And campuses today are courtrooms.” Turns out, she hasn’t had a major contract in over a year, not even a nibble, and even her agent’s stopped calling. She’s had her fame, her late-night appearances and specials, but the world belongs to younger comedians, fatter and dirtier. For once she doesn’t say “whaat,” doesn’t laugh, but instead downs the remains of her cognac.

  Danielle, too, opens up, confessing between anxious peeks at her phone that her entire world is imploding. She’s still statuesque, coldly beautiful and dominant, with eyes reflecting a sky, but success has made her a target. At this very moment, a coup is underway—the terms “buy-out” and “take-over” are spat—a plot to push her out of a top-floor window. “Let ‘em try,” she rallies, raising both fists in defiance, but briefly. “The ceiling’s not glass, it’s the floor,” she laments. “Step on it with your heels and”—her ringless fingers unfurl—“bam!”

  This leaves only Jane, vying with Randy for silence.

  “And you?” Marla prods her. “What could go wrong, with all that God on your side?”

  Danielle addresses her glass. “I could use a bit of your God…”

  The dessert, churros and crullers, is set on the table but Jane merely stares at it. “I have my community. My choir. They swear I’m a good guitar-player, the liars.” The women, even Randy, titter, then issue collective “awe” as the rabbi adds, “And I’m in love.” But she says this joylessly as the others dig in, her brittle face growing more vulnerable, her sloping shoulders stooped. “With Seth.”

  The name is repeated, rapid-fire, with puffs of powdered sugar. “A member of your temple?”

  “Worse,” sighs Jane. “Its president.” Pinching the bridge of her nose, she shifts her head ruefully, back and forth. “They’ll fire me when they find out. My daughters will disown me. And Sarah, who converted for me, gave up her career, she’ll kill me. Already, she suspects…”

  The conversation staggers after that, with Danielle reminiscing about her wildcat days on Wall Street and Marla badmouthing Hollywood. Jane goes on about this Seth—bald, skeletal, a CPA—who’s upended everything she thought about herself and believed, and all the while Randy’s thinking, “This is a terrible mistake.”

  A stupid, unconscionable mistake, bringing together women who no longer have anything in common. Who are preoccupied enough with their own problems without chasing some chimerical solution for hers. Better to call it off now when she can, apologize profusely to each of them and thank them all for trying. Speed to the hospital that very night and sleep by T.J.’s bed, holding his frigid hand for as long as they’d let her, until they tear her away.

  “Well, this has been enlightening,” Danielle states suddenly, “and nutritious, but I think we’d better get our rest.” She is once again the boss, their captain, leading the way through the woods. “It’ll be dawn in a few hours, and we can’t keep the Betsybob waiting.”

  Jane and Marla gawk at her. Randy, too. It’s the first time
any of them has spoken that name in decades, since that day they snuck back into the dining hall. The first time anyone admits remembering it.

  “To the Betsybob!” Marla raises a toast.

  “To the Betsybob!” Jane and Danielle join in.

  Yet Randy hesitates. For the first time, she’s wondering if her friends have really come to help her or rather only themselves, each with her own new wish. And she’s questioning whether she is still that little girl too timid to ask for a pony, or an adult now, a mother, asking for the life of her son. “The Betsybob,” she says finally, uncertainly, and clinks her empty glass.

  * * * * *

  The sign says “Willowbrook Condominiums—Buy Now and Save $$$,” and behind it there is only mud. Bulldozers and backhoes line the entrance, waiting for their drivers and the day’s construction. Dawn breaks over what had once been their camp but is now unrecognizable. The playing fields, the archery range, the cabins—all are erased, the pond scum-covered. The silence of the birdless sky is matched only by that inside the rented SUV, where Danielle’s hands turn white on the wheel and Jane wraps an arm around Randy. “Aw, Sweetie,” Marla mewls, but Randy remains silent. All she says is “Drive on” to Danielle who, for once, seems open to instructions.

  Through puddles and debris, the vehicle waddles, but to where none of them can tell. Shorn of landmarks, they might be in the middle of the parade ground, where once they raised the flag. A consensus is gathering within the car that this is a huge waste of time, that it’s better to turn around now before the tires sink. Danielle is already circling when Randy calls out “look!”

  She’s pointing to what is still the area’s only hill, to the half-demolished country house and its off-kilter porch. That is where Samantha Shapira used to watch them from, Auntie Sam with her cigarette and binoculars, sallow and godly.

  “Go forward. Straight ahead.”

  Danielle frowns in the rearview mirror but does as Randy insists. Past a slag heap and a pile of rebar, toward tree trunks emerging from the mist. The forest. And in front of it, rusted and chipped, the remains of a boiler and loading dock. “It’s still here!” Randy cries. “We’re here!”

  Stiffly, grunting, they pull themselves from the car and stand in the late-autumn chill. “What now?” Marla shivers, but Jane, even in her parka, is too cold to speak. Randy looks at Danielle who, after a regretful glance at her coat, relents and says, “follow me.”

  They do, along the tree line to the remnants of what once was a trail. Danielle turns inward, tripping and cursing, while Marla worries out loud about hunting season. Jane, struggling in the rear, distracts herself by telling Randy a story. The four sages who went into the woods.

  “Nobody knows what they saw there—the Talmud doesn’t say—only that one of them looked on it and died. Another became crazy and the third lost his faith.

  “And the fourth?”

  “Became the greatest scholar of all time. A genius.”

  “Sounds like they found what they were looking for,” Randy says, while impatiently peering through the trees, as the forest thickens around them. Multi-colored leaves still cling to the branches, painting the sun as it climbs. The ground, pressed by loafers and hiking shoes, emits a musky fragrance, and a woodpecker sounds a tattoo. For a moment they’re campers again, pre-teen and carefree, far from fathoming the immeasurable depths to which any life can lead. Even Randy, an early initiate to pain, later its priestess, feels lightheaded.

  But the giddiness soon passes as the thread of a trail dwindles to a fiber, and brambles, once knee-high, tear across their chests. “I think we’re lost,” Marla ventures and Danielle doesn’t disagree. Jane’s arm is on Randy’s shoulder again, hugging as she puffs, “We tried…”

  They did—Randy can’t deny it—took off time that they could hardly afford, traveled, and shlepped, and all to indulge her delusions. Because of her, they can’t find their way out. Disappointment and guilt bandy in her brain as she flails behind the others. And anger. For she knows now that she would have made that wish. If only they’d reached the clearing, she would have demanded it. Plunged into the cave and grabbed the Betsybob or whatever it was, throttled it if necessary. Anything for T.J.

  Anything, and yet she’s abandoned him. How could she have left him like this, Randy agonizes, alone, and for what purpose? Just to prove to herself that for once she wouldn’t be passive?

  “Help!”

  Suddenly, Jane is rushing past her, around Marla’s bulk that largely obscures Danielle no longer looming before them but down and clutching one knee.

  “It’s twisted,” she growls. “That fucking stump…”

  She points at the guilty obstacle but there is more than one. There are many, in fact, interspersed with partially submerged boulders. The trees have retreated in a symmetrical arc and in the center of the clearing, a knoll. A cairn, ancient perhaps or older, composed of moss-encrusted rocks and densely cloaked in ivy.

  Randy runs. Danielle, too, oblivious to her knee as Marla is to her weight and Jane to her frailty. They sprint, scarcely aware of the absence of energy in the air, of music. No bolts of radiance beaming. They reach the knoll and pause for a moment, winded and gaping at one another, wondering who will do it. Randy steps forward, clutches the vines and yanks them apart. And then falls back in horror.

  In grief. The cave is there, the grotto—they now know the word—littered with broken whiskey bottles and moldy cigarette butts, the remains of what might have been a magazine. Otherwise, it’s empty. The Betsybob, if it ever existed, is gone.

  Danielle explains, “We probably made it up,” and Jane consoles, “Hell, we were only kids.”

  Marla sighs a decrescendoing, “Whaat,” followed by an acerbic laugh.

  Randy says nothing, but her body begins to shake. Shoulders, hips, uncontrollably heaving as someone, maybe her, sobs. She can’t feel the embrace of the women who were once her friends and are now her mourners. And she’s unaware of those around her peeling away before the crunch of approaching feet.

  Not feet, it’s soon revealed, but hoofs. Trotting out of the bush and into the clearing to brush a dappled flank on her arm. To tickle her neck with a silky mane and nestle a soft, moist nose on her cheek. Randy strokes it as the others look on enchanted. She caresses it and weeps, this vision of a wish long granted. Her magical pinto of hope.

  The Night Archer

  We’ve never met, yet you join me every night. Your name is unknown to me, though John would be a fair guess, and your last name Fletcher or Bowyer, in acknowledgement of a skill long forgotten by your descendants. I have never imagined your face, never needed to, but let’s just say that your cheeks are stubbled, your remaining teeth black, and your eyes—pale, cold Saxon eyes—at once dull and flinty sharp. Still, as I said, your name and face remain irrelevant to me. Only your filthy fingers reaching down into the mud and grass of Agincourt and selecting one from a batch of arrows.

  A life-long insomniac, sleep has always been my enemy. Where most others see an in-gathering of angels or sheep, the harbinger of peace, I glimpse an army bristling with lances and blades clamoring off to war. I have tried all the soporifics, natural and narcotic, the therapies and meditations. I have counted backwards from one hundred thousand and mentally erected skyscrapers from toothpicks. I rid the bedroom of the digital clocks whose clicking panels pound in my ears or whose faint blueish light penetrates even the thickest eyeshades. Nothing—no drug, no routine, nor any pre-emption—worked. Until I found you.

  How and why that discovery happened, I have no idea. I’m a history buff, yes, and what history buff doesn’t harbor a quiet yet insatiable obsession with the battle given in 1415 by superior French forces to the invading but enervated English? Whose head won’t resonate with paeans to “We band of brothers” and cheers of “Kiss me, Kate”? And the prurient sadness of recalling how the flower of French knighthood was cut down by King Henry’s archers? I know the length of your bow—six feet, on average—the yew
trees it was cut from, the thirty-inch arrows tipped with tempered steel and provisioned in batches of twenty-four. I know its immense 150-pound power and the years you spent amassing the body-strength to draw it. I even know that the two fingers that haul the notch and fletching to the corner of your mouth will become—so the legend claims—the “V” sign raised by future Britons.

  I know all the facts—the armor worn, the weapons—but one. Why you? And why each night when I wage my hopeless war with consciousness, do I turn to you for reinforcement? It is not your smell, which I imagine to be prodigious, the sheen of your helmet or the weight of the mallet you pack to drive the sharpened stakes against cavalry. If I try, I can feel the home-spun weave of your tunic. But I do not try.

  Instead, I watch from a position just behind and beneath you as the bow hoists into the air, and you take aim the way you have since childhood, practicing first on toys, not by yanking the string back with your arm but, on the contrary, by leaning forward, your torso thrust into the curvature. So the arrow inches to your lips and lingers there momentarily. I see no knights, no clay-churned field or rising mounds of bodies. I cannot hear the cries of the pierced and the amputated, the pleas of prisoners soon to be executed. No, there is only the creak of a hard-bent bow and its drawn, flaxen string. There is only the peaceful sky so unlike my bed which, thanks to my thrashing, now resembles a battlefield.

  How many hours have passed? More, I hazard to think, than the entire span of Agincourt. Your right shoulder hitches, almost imperceptibly but enough to expand the range another dozen yards. A cheek muscle throbs. And then, with a spring-like motion too fast for the human eye, your fingers open.

  Launching, the arrow soars. Its shaft contracts into a dot. Impossibly high, improbably graceful, the projectile grapples with altitude and gravity and yields to them finally. A perfect parabola of death.