So we trudged to Van Cortlandt Park, which seemed to take the rest of the afternoon, as slowly as Phil was walking. He had clearly been sitting in more or less the same position for hours and hours on end, and the cramps weren’t turning loose without a fight. Now and then he paused to shake his arms and legs violently, and by the time we reached the Park, he was moving a little less stiffly. But he still hardly spoke, and he clung to that tennis-ball can as though it were a cherished trophy, or a life raft.
The centaurs were waiting at the Rock. The boy, a little way up the forest slope from his parents, saw us first, and called out, “They’re here!” as he galloped to meet us. But he turned shy midway, as children will, and ran back to the others as we approached. I remember that the man had his arms folded across his chest, and that there were a couple of dew-damp patches on the centauride’s coat, the weather having turned cloudy. They said nothing.
Phil said, “I brought it. What I promised. Here, I’ll show you.”
They moved close, plainly careful not to crowd him with their bodies, as he opened the airtight can and took out a roll of light, flexible drawing paper. He handed the free end to the man, saying, “See? There you are, all three of you. And there’s your road to Mexico.”
Craning my neck, I could see a perfectly rendered watercolor of the oak forest, so detailed that I saw not only our Rock with its long groove along the top surface, but also such things as the bird’s nest in the upper branches of the tallest sycamore and its family of occupants. I couldn’t tell what sort of birds they were, but I knew past doubt that Phil knew. The centaurs in the painting, on the other hand, were not done in any detail beyond the generic, except for relative size, the boy being obviously smaller than the other two. They might have been pieces in a board game.
The man said slowly, not trying to conceal his puzzlement, “This is very pretty, I can see that it is pretty. But it is not our road.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Phil answered him. “Look, take both ends, so.” He handed the whole roll to the centaur. “Now … hold it up so you can watch it, and walk straight ahead. Just walk.”
The man moved slowly forward, his eyes fixed on the image of the very place where he stood. He had not gone more than a few paces when he cried out, “But it moves! It moves!”
His wife and son—and I—pressed close now, and never mind who stepped on whose feet. The watercolor had changed, though not by much; only a few paces’ worth. Now it showed a distinctly marked path in front of the centaur’s feet: the path we ourselves took, coming and going in the oak forest. He said again, this time in a near-whisper, “It moves … ”
“And we too,” the woman said. “The little figures—as we move, so do they.”
“Not always.” Phil’s voice was sounding distinctly fuller and stronger. “Go left now, walk off the path—see what happens.”
The man did as directed—but the figures remained motionless in the watercolor, reproving him with their stillness. When he returned to the path and stepped along it, they moved with him again, sliding like the magnet-based toys we had then. I noticed for the first time that each one’s painted tail had a long, coarse hair embedded in the pigment: chestnut, gray, dark-bay.
Almost speechless, the man turned to Phil, holding up the roll to stare at it. “And all our journey is in this picture, truly? And all we need do is follow these … poppets of ourselves?”
Phil nodded. “Just pay attention, and they won’t let you go wrong. I fixed it so they’ll guide you all the way to Nogales, Texas—that’s right on the Mexican border. You’ll know the way from there.” He looked up with weary seriousness at the proud, bearded face above him. “It’s a very long way—almost two thousand miles. I’m sorry.”
“We have made longer journeys, and with no such guide.” The man was still moving forward and back, watching in fascination as the little images mimicked his pacing. “Nothing to compare,” he murmured, “not in all my life … ” He halted and faced Phil again. “One with the wisdom to create this for us is also wise enough to know that there is no point in even trying to show our gratitude properly. Thank you.”
Phil reached up to take the proffered hand. “Just go carefully, that’s all. Stay off the main roads—the way I drew it, you shouldn’t ever have to set foot on a highway. And don’t ever let that picture out of your sight. Definitely a one-shot deal.”
He climbed up onto the Rock and instantly fell asleep. The man seemed to doze on his feet, as horses do, while the boy embarked on one last roundup of every last acorn in the area. For myself, I spent the time saying my poem over and over to the centauride, until she had it perfectly memorized, and could repeat it back to me, line for line. “Now I will never forget it,” she told me. “The last time anyone wrote a poem for me, it was in the Greek, the oldest Greek that none speak today.” She recited it to me, and while I understood not one word, I would know it if I heard it again.
Phil was still asleep when the centaurs left at twilight. I did try to wake him to bid them farewell, but he only blinked and mumbled, and was gone again. I watched them out of sight among the oaks: the man in the lead, intently following the little moving images on Phil’s painting; the boy trotting close behind, exuberant with adventure, for good or ill. The woman turned once to look back at us, and then went on.
I don’t remember how I finally got Phil on his feet and home; only that it was late, and that both sets of parents were mad at us. The next day was school, and after that I had a doctors appointment, and Phil had flute lessons, and what with one family thing or another, we had almost no time together until close to the end of the week. We didn’t go to the Rock—the weather had turned too grim even for us—rather we sat shivering on the front stoop of my apartment building, like winter birds on a telephone line, and didn’t say much of anything. I asked if Phil thought they’d make it all the way to Mexico, and he shrugged and answered, “We’ll never know.” After a moment, he added, “All I know, I got a roomful of stupid maps, and my whole body hurts. Never again, boy. You and your damn hallucinations.”
I said, “I didn’t know you could do stuff like that. Like what you made for them.”
He turned to stare intently into my face. “You saw those hairs in those little figures? I saw you seeing them.” I nodded. “Well, each was from one of their tails—Mom, Pop, or the Kid. And I plucked a few more hairs, wove those into my brushes. That was the magic part: centaurs may have a lousy sense of direction, but they’re still magic. Wouldn’t have worked for a minute without that.” I stared, and he sighed. “I keep telling you, the artist isn’t the magic. The artist is the sight, the artist is someone who knows magic when he sees it. The magic doesn’t care whether it’s seen or not—that’s the artist’s business. My business.”
I tried earnestly, stumblingly, to absorb what he was telling me. “So all that—I mean, the painting moving and guiding them, and all … ”