But the heart of Van Cortlandt Park is a deep old oak forest. Inside it you can’t hear the traffic from any direction—the great trees simply swallow the sound—and the place doesn’t seem to be in anybody’s flight path to JFK or LaGuardia. There are all sorts of animals there, especially black squirrels, which I’ve never seen anywhere else; and possums and rabbits and raccoons. I saw a coyote once, too. Jake can call it a dog all he likes. I know better.
It’s most beautiful in fall, that forest, which I admit only grudgingly now. Mists and mellow fruitfulness aren’t all that comforting when bloody school’s starting again, and no one’s ever going to compare the leaf-changing season in the Bronx to the shamelessly flamboyant dazzle of October New Hampshire or Vermont, where the trees seem to turn overnight to glass, refracting the sunlight in colors that actually hurt your eyes and confound your mind. Yet the oak forest of Van Cortlandt Park invariably, reliably caught fire every year with the sudden whoosh of a building going up, and it’s still what I remember when someone says the word autumn, or quotes Keats.
It was all of Sherwood to me and my friends, that forest.
Phil and I had a rock in Van Cortlandt that belonged to us; we’d claimed it as soon as we were big enough to climb it easily, which was around fourth grade. It was just about the size and color of an African elephant, and it had a narrow channel in its top that fit a skinny young body perfectly. Whichever one of us got up there first had dibs: the loser had to sit beside. It was part of our private mythology that we had worn that groove into the rock ourselves over the years, but of course that wasn’t true. It was just another way of saying get your own rock, this is ours. There are whole countries that aren’t as territorial as adolescent boys.
We’d go to our Rock after school, or on weekends—always in the afternoons, by which time the sun would have warmed the stone surface to a comfortable temperature—and we’d lie on our backs and look up through the leaves and talk about painters Phil had just discovered, writers I was in love with that week, and girls neither of us quite knew how to approach. We never fixated on the same neighborhood vamp, which was a good thing, because Phil was much more aggressive and experienced than I. Both of us were highly romantic by nature, but I was already a princesse lointaine fantasist, while Phil had come early to the understanding that girls were human beings like us. I couldn’t see how that could possibly be true, and we argued about it a good deal.
One thing we never spoke of, though, was our shared awareness that the oak forest was magic. Not that we ever expected to see fairies dancing in a ring there, or to spy from our warm, safe perch anything like a unicorn, a wizard or a leprechaun. We knew better than that: as a couple of New Yorkers, born and bred, cynicism was part of our bone marrow. Yet even so, in our private hearts we always expected something wild and extraordinary from our Rock and our forest. And one hot afternoon in late September, when we were thirteen, they delivered.
That afternoon, I had been complaining about the criminal unfairness of scheduling a subway World Series, between the Yankees and the Dodgers, during school hours, except for the weekend, when there would be no chance of squeezing into little Ebbets Field. Phil, no baseball fan, dozed in the sun, grunting a response when absolutely required (“Love to do a portrait of Casey Stengel; there’s a face!”). I was spitballing ways to sneak a portable radio and earpiece into class, so I could follow the first game, when we heard the hoofbeats. In itself, that wasn’t unusual—there was a riding stable on the western edge of the Park—but there was a curious hesitancy and wariness about the sound that had us both sitting up on our Rock, and me saying excitedly, “Deer!”
These days, white-tail deer dropping by to raid your vegetable garden are as common in the North Bronx as rabbits and squirrels. Back then, back when I knew Felix Salten’s Bambi books by heart, they were still an event. But Phil shook his head firmly. “Horse. You don’t hear deer.”
True enough: like cats, deer are just there, where they weren’t a moment before. And now that it was closer it didn’t sound like a deer to my city ears—nor quite like a horse, either. We waited, staring toward a grove of smaller trees, young sycamores, where something neither of us could quite make out was moving slowly down the slope. Phil repeated, “Horse—look at the legs,” and lay back again. I was just about to do the same when the creature’s head came into view.
It didn’t register at first; it couldn’t have done. In that first moment what I saw—what I allowed myself to see—was a small boy riding a dark-bay horse not much bigger than a colt. Then, somewhere around the time that I heard myself whisper “Jesus Christ,” I realized that neither the boy nor the horse was that small, and that the boy wasn’t actually riding. The two of them were joined, at the horse’s shoulders and just below the boy’s waist. In the Bronx, in Van Cortlandt Park, in the twentieth century—in our little lives—a centaur.
They must operate largely on sight, as we do, because the boy only became aware of us just after we spotted him. He halted instantly, his expression a mix of open-mouthed curiosity and real terror—then whirled and was gone, out of sight between the great trees. His hoofbeats were still fading on the dead leaves while we stared at each other.
Phil said flatly, “Just leave me out of your hallucinations, okay? You got weird hallucinations.”
“This from a person who still thinks Linda Darnell’s hot stuff? You know what we saw.”
“I never. I wasn’t even here.”
“Okay. Me neither. I got to get home.” I slid down off the Rock, picking up my new schoolbook bag left at its base. Less than a month, and already my loose-leaf notebook looked as though I’d been teething on it.
Phil followed. “Hell, no, it was your figment, you can’t just leave it on a doorstep and trust to the kindness of strangers.” We’d seen the Marlon Brando Streetcar Named Desire a year earlier, and were still bellowing “STELLA!!!” at odd moments in the echoing halls of Junior High School 80. “You saw it, you saw it, I’m gonna tell—Petey saw a centaur—nyaahh, nyaahh, Petey saw a centaur!” I swung the book bag at him and chased him all the way out of the Park.
On the phone that evening—we were theoretically doing our biology homework together—he asked, “So what do the Greek myths tell you about centaurs?”
“Main thing, they can’t hold their liquor, and they’re mean drunks. You don’t ever want to give a centaur that first beer.”
“I’ll remember. What else?”
“Well, the Greeks have two different stories about where they came from, but I can’t keep them straight, so forget it. In the legends they’re aggressive, always starting fights—there was a big battle with the Lapiths, who were some way their cousins, except human, don’t ask, and I think most of the centaurs were killed, I’m not sure. But some of them were really good, really noble, like Cheiron. Cheiron was the best of the lot, he was a healer and an astrologer and a teacher—he was the tutor of people like Odysseus, Achilles, Hercules, Jason, Theseus, all those guys.” I paused, still thumbing through the worn Modern Library Bulfinch my father had given me for my tenth birthday. “That’s all I know.”
“Mmmff. Book say anything about centaurs turning up in the Bronx? I’ll settle for the Western Hemisphere.”
“No. But there was a shark in the East River, a couple of years back, you remember? Cops went out in a boat and shot at it.”
“Not the same thing.” Phil sighed. “I still think it’s your fault, somehow. What really pisses me off, I didn’t have so much as a box of Crayolas to draw the thing with. Probably never get another chance.”
But he did: not the next day, when, of course, we cut P.E. and hurried back to the Park, but the day after that, which was depressingly chilly, past pretending that it was still Indian Summer. We didn’t talk much: I was busy scanning for centaurs (I’d brought my Baby Brownie Special camera and a pair of binoculars), and Phil, mumbling inaudibly to himself, kept rummaging through his sketch pads and colored pencils, pastels, gouaches, charc
oals and crayons. I made small jokes about his equipment almost crowding me off the Rock, and he glared at me in a way that made me uneasy about that “almost.”
I don’t remember how long we waited, but it must have been close to two hours. The sun was slanting down, the Rock’s surface temperature was actually turning out-and-out cold, and Phil and I were well past conversation when the centaurs came. There were three of them: the young one we had first seen, and the two who were clearly his parents, to judge by the way they stood together on the slope below the sycamore grove. They made no attempt to conceal themselves, but looked directly at us, as we stared back at them. After a long moment, they started down the slope together.
Phil was shaking with excitement, but even so he was already sketching as they came toward us. I was afraid to raise my camera, for fear of frightening the centaurs away. They had a melancholy dignity about them, even the child, that I didn’t have words for then: I recall it now as an air of royal exile, of knowing where they belonged, and knowing, equally, that they could never return there. The male—no, the man—had a short, thick black beard, a dark, strong-boned face, and eyes of a strange color, like honey. The woman….
Remember, all three of them were naked to the waist, and Phil and I were thirteen years old. For myself, I’d seen nude models in my uncles’ studios since childhood, but this woman, this centauride (I looked the word up when I got home that night), was more beautiful than anyone I knew. It wasn’t just a matter of round bare breasts: it was the heartbreaking grace of her neck, the joyous purity of the line of her shoulders, the delicacy of her collarbones. Phil had stopped sketching, which tells you more than I can about what we saw.
The boy had freckles. Not big ones, just a light golden dusting. His hair was the same color, with a kind of reddish undercoloring, like his mother’s hair. He looked about ten or eleven.
The man said, “Strangers, of your kindness, might either of you be Jersey Turnpike?”
He had a deep, calm voice, with absolutely no horsiness in it—nothing of a neigh or a whinny, or anything like that. Maybe a slight sort of funny gurgle in the back of the throat, but hardly noticeable—you’d really have to be listening for it. When Phil and I just gaped, the woman said, “We have never come this way south before. We are lost.”
Her voice was low, too, but it had a singing cadence to it, a warm offbeat lilt that entranced and seduced both of us even beyond her innocent nudity. I managed to say, “South… you want to go south… um, you mean south like down south? Like south south?”
“Like Florida?” Phil asked. “Mexico?”
The man lifted his head sharply. “Mexico, yes, that was the name, I always forget. It is where we go, all of us, every year, when the birds go. Mexico.”
“But we set out too late,” the woman explained in her soft, singing voice. “Our son was ill, and we traveled eastward to seek out a healer, and by the time we were ready to start, all the others were gone—”
“And Father took the wrong road,” the boy broke in, his tone less accusatory than excited. “We have had such adventures—”
His mother quelled him with a glance. Embarrassment didn’t sit easily on the man’s powerful face, but he flushed and nodded. “More than one. I do not know this country, and we are used to traveling in company. Now I am afraid that we are completely lost, except for that one name someone gave me—Jersey Turnpike. Can Jersey Turnpike lead us to Mexico?”
We looked at each other. Phil said, “Jersey Turnpike isn’t a person, it’s a road, a highway. You can go south that way, but not to Mexico—you’re way off course for Mexico. I’m sorry.”
The boy mumbled, “I knew it,” but not in a triumphant, wise-ass sort of way; if anything, he appeared suddenly very weary of adventures. The man looked utterly stricken. He bowed his head, and the color seemed to fade visibly from his bright chestnut coat. The woman’s manner, on the other hand, hardly altered with Phil’s news, except that she moved closer to her husband and pressed her light-gray flank against his, in a gesture of silent trust and confidence.
“You’re too far east,” I said. “You have to cut down through Texas.” They stared uncomprehendingly. I said, “Texas—I think you’d go by way of Pennsylvania, Tennessee, maybe Georgia….” I stopped, because I couldn’t bear the growing fatigue and bewilderment in their three faces, nor in the way their shining bodies sagged a little more with each state name. I told them, “What you need is a map. We could bring you one tomorrow, easy.”
But their expressions did not change. The man said, “We cannot read.”
“Not now,” the woman said wistfully. “There was a time when our folk were taught the Greek in colthood, every one, and some learned the Roman as well, when it became necessary. But that was in another world that is no more… and learning unused fades with long years. Now only a few of our elders know letters enough to read such things as maps in your tongue—the rest of us journey by old memory and starlight. Like the birds.”
Her own eyes were different from her husband’s honey-colored eyes: more like dark water, with deep-green wonder turning and glinting far down. Phil never could get them right, and he tried for a long time.
He said quietly now, “I could draw you a picture.”
I can’t say exactly how the centaurs reacted, or how they looked at him. I was too busy gawking at him myself. Phil said, “Of your route, your road. I could draw you something that’ll get you to Mexico.”
The man started to speak, but Phil anticipated him. “Not a map. I said a picture. No words.” I remember that he was sitting cross-legged on the Rock, like our idea of a swami or a yogi; and I remember him leaning intensely forward, toward the centaurs, so that he seemed almost to be joined to the Rock, growing out of it, as they were joined to their horse bodies. He was already drawing invisible pictures with his right forefinger on the palm of his left hand, but I don’t think he knew it.
I opened my mouth then, but he cut me off too. “It’ll take me all day tomorrow, and most likely all night too. You’ll be okay till the day after tomorrow?”
The woman said to Phil, “You can do this?”
He grinned at her with what seemed to me outrageous confidence. “I’m an artist. Artists are always drawing people’s journeys.”
I said, “You could wait right here, if you like. We hardly ever see anybody but us in this part of the park. I mean, if it would suit you,” for it occurred to me that I had no idea what they ate, or indeed how they survived in the twentieth century. “I guess we could bring you food.”
The man’s teeth showed white and large in his black beard. “The forage here is most excellent, even this late in the year.”
“There are lots of acorns,” the boy said eagerly. “I love acorns.”
His mother turned her dark gaze to me. “Can you also make such pictures?”
“Never,” I said. “But I could maybe write you a poem.” I wrote a lot of poems for girls when I was thirteen. She seemed pleased.
Phil was gathering his equipment and scrambling off the Rock, imperiously beckoning me to follow. “Quit fooling around, Beagle. We got work to do.” Standing among them, the size and sheer presence of all three centaurs was, if not intimidating, definitely daunting. Even the boy looked down at us, and we barely came up to the shoulders of his parents’ horse-bodies. I’ve always enjoyed the smell of horses—in those days, they were among the very few animals I wasn’t allergic to—but centaurs in groups smell like thunder, like an approaching storm, and it left me dizzy and a bit disoriented. Phil repeated briskly, “Day after tomorrow, right here.”
We were halfway up the slope when he snapped his fingers, said, “Ah, shit!”, dropped his equipment and went running back toward the centaurs. I waited, watching as he moved swiftly between the three of them; but I couldn’t, for the life of me, make out what he was doing. He came back almost as quickly, and I noticed then that he was tucking something into his shirt pocket. When I asked what it was, he told me it wa
s nothing I needed to trouble my pretty little head about. You couldn’t do anything with him in those tempers, so I left it alone.
He didn’t say much else on the walk home, and I managed to keep my curiosity in check until we were parting at my apartment building. Then I burst out with it: “Okay, you’re going to draw them a picture that’s going to get a family of migrating centaurs all the way to Mexico. This, excuse me, I want to hear.” His being on the hook meant, as always, us being on the hook, so I felt entitled to my snottiness.
“I can do it. It’s been done.” His jaw was tight, and his face had the ferocious pallor that I associated entirely with street fights, usually with fat Stewie Hauser and Miltie Mellinger, who never tired of baiting him. “Back in the Middle Ages, I read about it—Roger Bacon did it, somebody like that. But you have to get me some maps, as many as you can. A ton of maps, a shitload of maps, covering every piece of ground between here—right here, your house—and the Texas border. You got that? Maps. Also, you should stop by Bernardo’s and see can you borrow that candle of his mother’s. He says she got it from a bruja, back in San Juan, what could it hurt?”
“But if they can’t read maps—”
“Beagle, I have been extraordinarily lenient about that two bucks—”
“Maps. Right. Maps. You think they came down from Canada? Summer up north, winter in Mexico? I bet that’s what they do.”
“Maps, Beagle.”
The next day was Saturday, and he actually called me around seven in the morning, demanding that I get my lazy ass on the road and start finding some maps for him. I said certain useful things that I had picked up from Angel Salazar, my Berlitz in such affairs, and was at the gas station up the block by 7:30. By 10:00, I’d hit every other station I could reach on my bike, copped my parents’ big Rand McNally road atlas, and triumphantly dumped them all—Bernardo’s mother’s witch-candle included—on Phil’s bed, demanding, “Now what, fearless leader?”
Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle Page 53