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 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.”