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.