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 was 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 Bernardos and see can you borrow that candle of his mothers. 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?”
“Now you take Dusty for her morning walk.” He had his favorite easel set up, and was rummaging through his paper supplies. “Then you go away and write your poem, and you come back when it’s time to take Dusty for her evening walk. Then you go away again. All well within your capacities.” Dusty was his aged cocker spaniel, and the nearest thing I had to the longed-for dog of my own. I went home after tending to her, and sat down at the desk in my bedroom to write the poem I’d promised to the centaur mother. I still remember the first lines:
If I were a hawk,
I would write you letters—
featherheaded jokes,
scribbled on the air.
If I were a dog
I would do your shopping.
If I were a cat
I would brush your hair.
If I were a bear,
I would build your fires,
bringing in the wood,
breaking logs in two.
If I were a camel I’d take out the garbage.
If I were a fox I would talk to you …
There was more and sillier, but never mind. I was very romantic at thirteen, on very short notice, and I had never seen beauty like hers.
Okay, a little bit extra, because I do like the way it ended:
If I were a tiger,
I would dance for you.
If I were a mouse,
I would dance for you.
If I were a whale,
I would dance for you …
When I came back in the evening to walk Dusty again, Phil was working in his bedroom with the door closed, and an unattended dinner plate cooling on the sill. His parents were more or less inured to his habits by now, but it fretted at them constantly, just as my unsociability worried my mother, who would literally bribe Phil and Jake to get me out of the house. I reassured them, as I always did, that he was working on a really demanding, really challenging project, then grabbed up dog and leash and was gone. It was dark when I brought her back, but Phil’s door was still shut.
As it was the next morning, and remained until mid-afternoon, when he called me to say, “Done. Get over here.”
He sounded awful.
He looked worse. His eyes were smudgy red pits in a face so white that his own small freckles stood out, and he moved like an old man, as though no part of his body could be trusted not to hurt. He said, “Let’s go.”
“You’re kidding. You wouldn’t make it to Lapin’s.” That was the candy-and-newspaper store across the street. “Take a nap, for God’s sake, we’ll go when you wake up.”
“Now.” When he cleared his throat, it sounded exactly like my father’s car trying to start on a cold morning.
He was holding a metal tube that I recognized as a tennis-ball can. I reached for it, but he snatched it away. “You’ll see it when they see it.” Just then, he didn’t look like anyone I’d ever known.