“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 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.
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?”