Sleight of Hand Read online

  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?”

  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 Bernardo’s and see can you borrow that candle of his mother’s. 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.

  So we trudged to Van Cortlandt Park, which seemed to take the rest of the after
noon, 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 air-tight 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 doctor’s 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….”

  Phil gave me that crooked, deceptively candid grin he’s had since we were five years old. “I’m a good artist. I’m really good. But I ain’t that good.”

  We sat in silence for a while, while the leaves blew and tumbled past us, and a few sharp, tiny raindrops stung our faces. By and by Phil spoke again, quietly enough that I had to lean closer to hear him. “But we were magic too, in our way. You rounding up every single map between here and Yonkers, and me….” He hunched over, arms folded on his knees, the way he still does without realizing it. “Me at that damn easel, brush in one hand, gas-station map in the other, trying to make art out of the New Jersey Turnpike. Trying to make all those highways and freeways and Interstates and Tennessee and Georgia come alive for a family of mythological, nonexistent…. hour after goddam miserable, backbreaking, cockamamie hour, and that San Juan candle dropping wax everywhere….”

  His voice trailed off into the familiar disgusted mumble. “I don’t know how I did it, Beagle. Don’t ask me. All I knew for sure was, you can’t let centaurs wander around lost in the Bronx—you can’t, it’s all wrong—and there I was.”

  “It’ll get them
to Mexico,” I said. “I know it will.”

  “Yeah, well.” The grin became a slow, rueful smile, less usual. “The weird thing, it’s made me…. I don’t know better, but just different, some way. I’m never going to have to do anything like that again, thank God—and I bet I couldn’t. But there’s other stuff, things I never thought about trying before, and now it’s all I’m doing in my head, right now—my head’s full of stuff I have to do, even if I can’t ever get it right. Even though.” The smile faded, and he shrugged and looked away. “That’s them. They did that.”

  I turned my coat collar up around my face. I said, “I read a story about a boy who draws cats so well that they come to life and fight off demons for him.”

  “Japanese,” Phil said. “Good story. Listen, don’t tell anybody, not even Jake and Marty. It gets out, they’ll want me to do all kinds of stuff, all the time. And magic’s not an all-the-time thing, you’re not ever entitled to magic—not ever, no matter how good you are. Best you can do—all you can do—is make sure you’re ready when it happens. If.”

  His voice had grown somber again, his eyes distant, focusing on nothing that I could recognize. Then he brightened abruptly, saying, “Still got the brushes, anyway. There’s that. Whatever comes next, there’s the brushes.”

  SLEIGHT OF HAND

  This story was crafted out of childhood memories, a chance encounter with a preposterous ad in an even more preposterous location, and the raw, constant terror I felt when my closest cousin was about to go into surgery for a brain aneurysm. At the time I was too paralyzed by fear for her to do anything but call her husband twice a day for news of her condition. Afterward, when she came out of the operation in fine shape, and I could think again, I found myself writing what follows.