New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  To the untrained eye, I appear bumbling. You can see my blood vessels strain tight to support my girth. My hands are ungainly and callused. For a man who makes such heart-wrenching, subtle melodies, I am not delicate. But if you were to watch me in slow-mo, you would then understand that really I am a panther. A slow, overweight panther, perhaps, but still, there is a fluidity to me—a certain poise. I flowed, gigantic and cat-like, down the five flights of stairs to the lobby, pausing at each landing to catch my breath and check for signs of stroke or heart attack. Infarto, in Spanish, so that in addition to perhaps dying you have the added discomfort of it sounding like you were laid low by a stinky shot of gas.

  The lobby is covered in posters that are supposed to make the children feel better about having been abused and discarded. Baby animals snuggle amidst watercolor nature drawings. It’s a little creepy.

  The noise was still coming from somewhere down below, definitely the basement. I wasn’t thrilled about this, was hoping the muertos had simply gathered in the lobby (perhaps to enjoy the inspirational artwork) but can’t say I was surprised either. I opened the old wooden door that leads down the last flight of stairs and took a deep breath. Each step registered my presence unenthusiastically. At the bottom, I reached into the darkness till my hand swatted a dangling chain. The bulb was dim. It cast an uneven, gloomy light on a cluttered universe of broken furniture, file cabinets and forgotten papier-mâché projects.

  I followed the noise through the shadows. I could now make it out definitively to be a melody, a lonely, minor key melody, beautiful like a girl with one eye standing outside a graveyard. I rounded a corner and then held perfectly still. Before me hovered all my friends, the muertos, with their backs turned to me. I tried to see past them but they were crowded together so densely it was impossible. Ever so quietly, I crept forward among them, their chilly undead shadows sending tiny earthquakes down my spine.

  The muertos were gathered around a doorway. I entered and found myself in this dank boiler room. At the far end, little Marcos sat calmly in a niche of dusty pipes and wiring. He held my carry-along in his lap. His eyes were closed and his fingers glided up and down the keys. Between myself and Marcos, about thirty small muertos, muertocitos, bobbed up and down, their undivided attention on the boy. You know—I never think much about those who die as children—what their wandering souls must deal with. Who watches over them, checks on those small, curly-bug lumps at night? The ghost children were transfixed; I could feel their love for this boy and his music as surely as I felt the pulse pounding in my head.

  And, to be quite honest with you, at first I too found myself lost in the swirling cascade of notes coming from my little keyboard. It is rare that I feel humbled, rarer still that it would happen because of a ten year old, but I’m not above admitting it. The song filled the heavy boiler room air, so familiar and so brand-new. It was a mambo, but laced with the saddest melody I’ve ever heard—some unholy union of Mozart and Perez Prado that seemed to speak of so many drunken nights and whispered promises. It tore into me, devoured me and pieced me back together a brand new man.

  But now the song has ended, breaking the quiet reverie we had all fallen into and ripping open a great painful vacancy where it once had been. The rapture is over and we are just in a boiler room, which is about as good as a gutter when it comes to places to die.

  I’m strong, and not the addictive type, so I shake my head and welcome myself back to the strange silence. But the muertocitos are not so quick to move on. A furious rustling ripples through their ranks, and the small, illuminated shadows nudge towards Marcos. The boy looks up finally, and turns to me, eyes wide. He starts to play the song again, but he’s afraid now. His heart’s not in it and the ghostlings can tell. They continue their urgent sway, a tough crowd, and begin to edge closer to him.

  I carry a few saints with me and I find more often than not, they do their part. They tend to really come through when my more basic human instincts, like caution, fail. This is definitely one of those times. I surge (cat-like) through the crowd of wily young ghosts. Their cool tendrils cling to me like cobwebs but I keep moving. I scoop up little man and his living body feels so warm against me compared to all that death. He’s still clutching the keyboard. Eyes squeezed shut. His little heart sends a pitter-patter pulse out like an S-O-S.

  I decide if I pause to consider the situation around me, I may come to my senses, which would definitely mean an icy, uncomfortable death for myself and Marcos. So I make like a linebacker—fake left, swerve right (slowly, achingly, but—gracefully) and then just plow down the middle. They’re more ready for me this time, and angrier. The air is thick with their anger; any minute the wrong molecule might collide and blow the whole place up. Also, I didn’t gain quite the momentum I’d hoped to. I can feel all that stillness reach far inside me, penetrate my most sacred places, throw webs across my inner shrines, detain my saints. It is seriously holding me up.

  But there is more music to write. I won’t be around to see my legacy honored properly but I have a few more compositions in me before I can sleep peacefully. Also, I enjoy my family and Saturday nights playing dominos with the band after rehearsal and my morning café con leche, bacon, eggs, papas fritas, and sometimes sausage. Young Ernesto who’s not so young and whatever crazy creation him and Janey will come up with in their late night house-rocking—there are still things I would like to see. Plus, this little fellow in my arms seems like he may have a long, satisfying career ahead of him. A little lonely perhaps, but musical genius can be an all-consuming friend until you know how to tame her. I have room under my wing here, I realize as I plow through this wee succubus riot, and many things to tell young Marcos. Practical things—things that they don’t teach about you in books or grad school.

  Is trundle a word? It should be. I trundle through those creatures, tearing their sloppy ice tentacles from my body. The door comes up on me quicker than I thought it would, catches me a little off guard and I’m so juiced up thinking of all the beautiful and sad truths I will tell Marcos when we survive that I just knock it out of my way. I don’t stop to see how the mama and papa muertos feel about the situation; I move through them quick.

  At the corner I glance back. An intervention of some kind seems to be taking place. The muertos have encircled their young. I can only suppose what must be happening, but I’d like to believe it’s a solid scolding, an ass beating like the one I would’ve gotten from Papi (God rest his troubled soul) if I’d trapped one of my younger brothers in the basement and made like I was gonna end them.

  When we reach the c’mon-get-happy lobby, I notice that dawn is edging out onto the streets. Marcos’s song must’ve been longer than I realized. I put the boy down, mostly because I’m losing feeling in the lower half of my body and my shirt is caked in sweat. Wrap my fat hand around the banister and slowly, languidly, huff and puff up the stairs behind him. I pause on the landing, listen to the quick, echoing tak-tak-tak of his footfall bound up the next three flights. He will be curled in his bed by the time I reach the second floor, asleep by sunrise.

  At six, the morning crew will come in, smiles first, and I will chuckle with them nonchalantly about the long, uneventful night. Tomorrow evening, as I show my new student a few tricks to keep his chops up, my friends will return. In their Sunday best, they will slither as always from the shadows of the fifth floor hallway. And this time, they will bring their young along with them.

  Peter S. Beagle revisits the Van Cortlandt Park of his 1950s Bronx childhood with one of his oldest friends. He’ll swear on his grave that this “really did happen just like this, back when Phil Sigunick and I were thirteen. Some things you can’t make up.”

  THE ROCK IN THE PARK

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  Van Cortlandt Park begins a few blocks up Gunhill Road: past the then-vacant lot where us neighborhood kids fought pitched battles over the boundaries of our parents’ Victory Gardens; past Montefiore Hospital, which dominates the entire
local skyline now; past Jerome Avenue, where the IRT trains still rattle overhead, and wicked-looking old ladies used to sit out in front of the kosher butcher shops, savagely plucking chickens. It’s the fourth-largest park in New York City, and on its fringes there are things like golf courses, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, bike and horse trails, a cross-country track and an ice-skating rink—even a cricket pitch. That’s since my time, the cricket pitch.

  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 hoof-beats 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 looseleaf 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.�
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  But he did: not the next day, when, of course, we cut PE 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, charcoals 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.