There were rumors that Sgt. Moore had been a ballet dancer, sometime before going to the academy and learning how to be a cop. Abraham watched him through the curtain that hung at the window by the front door. The man was still elegant. Each movement seemed calculated. He didn’t waste time sitting in the car like most of the cops Abraham had seen before, pulling up to someplace, and then lingering in the car, fiddling with the radio, or giving a traffic ticket, and then filling in forms on the steering wheel for forty-five minutes before finally putting the cruiser in gear and driving away. Sgt. Moore’s key had hardly left the ignition before the door was open and he was on the pavement, tossing his cop hat into the passenger side, a gesture which Abraham assumed meant he was there to get down to the bottom of something, all formalities aside. The swift grace with which he kicked Mrs. Elbert’s Rottweiler, Spunky, who was not fond of men in uniform, without interrupting the rhythm of his gait, sealed the deal. This man was a dancer. Abraham went to his room.
Before long his mother called him in to speak to Sgt. Moore. She led him into the living room and sat on the couch next to him and held his hand. Sgt. Moore sat opposite them in a straight wooden kitchen chair. Abraham watched Sgt. Moore as the man stared into the swirl of cream in his coffee. He was nearly bald on top like a monk from the Middle Ages, and his polyester uniform was a little too small. He sat with his spine erect, pressed to the back of the chair, his legs spread wide. His coffee sat on the front of the chair between his legs, his privates bulging beneath the polyester to one side. Abraham half-smiled at the proximity of the coffee to the organ by which it would later be eliminated.
“First off, Abraham, my name is Sgt. Moore,” the man said locking eyes with the boy, as he leaned forward to shake his hand above the rug between them. “Second, why don’t you tell me what you’re smirking about? You think this is a joke?”
“He’s just nervous, Mr. Moore. I don’t think he’s ever talked to a police officer before,” the mother said. “Plus, he’s been so anxious about the man in the red truck—”
Moore put his hand up. “Why don’t you tell me what happened then? Why don’t you tell me about the man in the red truck?”
Moore retrieved a little hardback notebook, an ink pen stuck in it, from the back pocket of his trousers. His eyes never left the boy. Abraham could tell he was trying to get a read on him.
“I was riding my bike home from Neal’s house and the red truck was in the parking lot where the butcher shop burned down. The man was in it. I rode past on the street, and he backed out and started following me.”
Abraham stopped and rubbed his eye. Moore had written nothing and had not stopped staring at Abraham. His mom squeezed his hand a little.
“I got kinda scared after a couple of blocks, so I went left on the side road by where the old antique shop was, where Mr. Dawson still keeps some stuff, you know, just over the railroad tracks? And I pedaled real hard into the alley in the back and rode in behind the bushes and watched him, ’cause he went on down the road. He came back around the block, then, and parked on the side by the tracks and got out. So I threw my bike down by the dumpster and went down in the cellar. There’s a door back behind Mr. Dawson’s place. I hid down there. I could hear him walking in the gravel. He opened up the cellar door and came down the steps. So I got out my pocket knife and stayed real still in the corner, but I could see him in the mirror that was on this dresser down there.”
Abraham’s voice broke, as if he were holding back a sob.
“Then the guy pulled out his dick and just walked around like that, like he was looking for me.”
“Say penis, honey,” his mom said, handing Abraham a Kleenex.
“Sorry, Mom,” he sniffled. “Penis.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened then?” Moore said.
“Nothing,” Abraham sighed. “He pushed some furniture around, moved some stuff, with his di—penis out the whole time, and then he went back up the stairs and closed the door. I heard the truck drive away after a bit, but I waited awhile, just to make sure. Then I rode home.”
“You get a look at him?”
“A little. He was thin, probably a little taller than Mom.”
“So, like six feet?” Moore jotted in the book.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’m six feet.” Moore stood up, motioning to the mother. They stood back to back. “Was he about as tall as me?” Moore held his pen in his mouth and his notebook as if it were a ruler between his head and the mother’s.
“Yeah, I think.”
“Hair color?”
“It was dark, but he was mostly bald on top.”
“Hmm. Okay.” Moore jotted. “I don’t suppose you caught his license plates did you?”
“I think the first part was JTM, but I didn’t get the rest.”
Moore scribbled again, but stopped and then stared blankly at Abraham. “Mmhmm.” His mouth puckered and shifted to one side. “You mind if I talk to Abraham alone for a minute?”
“Of course. Yes. I understand.” The mother looked at Abraham. “I’m gonna be right out front pulling weeds, okay?”
Abraham nodded. His mom went outside. Abraham watched her ponytail bounce down the steps and then bob around in front of the wide window above the flowerbed from which he’d watched Moore just a little while ago.
Moore had not stopped staring at him.
“Why don’t you let me ask you a couple more questions, and then this’ll all be over and done with?” He spoke more quietly now.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Moore repeated. “Did you see what kind of red truck this guy was driving?”
“I think it was a Ford.”
“Older or newer?”
“Oh, it was pretty shiny, looked new, but I’m not for sure. But it did have a blue pin stripe down the side.”
Then Moore spoke, almost in a whisper.
“Listen, kid, I don’t know what the fuck you’re tryin’ to pull here, but you’d better lay off it and now. You think you’re pretty fuckin’ smart pullin’ this shit on me don’t ya. I don’t know what you’re after, but you need to cut it out.”
The last three words he said emphatically, as if each one were its own sentence.
Abraham looked wordlessly at him, like he didn’t understand. Moore tore out the little sheet of paper, crumpled it up, and stuck it in his mouth. He chewed it, hard, for a minute or so and swallowed.
“Fuck you.” And then, as if for good measure, Moore said “Fuck you” again.
Abraham opened the door, and as he did, his mom rose from her weeding. She thanked Sgt. Moore, and he said he’d “keep them posted.” Abraham put his hand out to shake Moore’s, saying, “Thank you, sir.” Moore took his hand and forced a laugh in the back of his throat. He looked at the mother and said she had quite a brave young man.
Moore walked off towards his car, as Abraham said something to his mom.
“Wait! Sgt. Moore?” She hollered across the yard. He stopped by the driver’s side door. “Is it true that you use to be a ballet dancer? Abraham loves ballet.”
“No!” he shouted across the yard.
Moore had stopped just long enough to attract Spunky’s attention, and just as he answered her, Abraham’s mom yelled for him to look out. But Spunky had dug into the meat of Moore’s thigh. His mom ushered Abraham inside to keep him from hearing any more curses. About a minute later, Abraham heard a sharp crack from Moore’s pistol, followed by the squeal of his tires.
That night at dinner Abraham’s mom told him that she was so proud of him for being so brave. She said she could not have asked for a sweeter boy. She said, as she was like to do, whenever overwhelmed with sentimental emotion, “My cup runneth over.”
This cup wants to be empty again, Abraham thought. He smiled as he thought of Sgt. John Thomas Moore, driving himself home from the police station in his new red Ford pickup, with its custom pin stripes, to peroxide and bandage his dog-torn flesh, though he was saddened a little at having wasted the finest performance of his meagre twelve years on a cop, who, as it turned out, was not even an artist.
Abraham woke up dizzy in the high summer grass along the roadside near the warped telephone pole which he’d tumbled into from the tar-and-gravel country road where he’d been riding a borrowed bike. At first he wasn’t sure where he was or how he had ended up in the ditch between the road and the cornfield. The sun, alone in the blue above, beat heat into his face. But the confusion cleared a little as he heard two voices in the distance woohooing as though something significant had happened at a rodeo. He raised his head from its sky-borne gaze to see, above the beans on the far side of the road, a beat-up red Chevy pickup bearing left at the crossroads a half-mile down. Two oversized boys in overalls were standing in the bed waving bean-hooks above their heads like savages. They were laughing and knee-slapping like black-and-white cartoons. Abraham thought their high-five was going a little too far, so he raised both middle fingers on his clinched fists.
“Fuck you!” he roared.
They didn’t seem to notice.
He raised himself and inspected the bicycle. It was a large purple ladies’ cruiser with a basket and mirrors, on loan to him from the corpulent sunburned woman who helped her husband run the campground that Abraham and the dwarves had been staying at a few miles outside of Cisco. The bike had escaped the wreck with only a cracked mirror on the left side, which now cast a riven portrait of Abraham back to him. He pulled his hair back to find the protuberance on his hairline, where his head had hit the pole. He pulled a couple of splinters from it and pressed the mashed purple skin around it with his index finger. He walked to his hat a couple hundred feet away as he rubbed blood and gravel off of his elbows. He muttered “Bastards” a couple of times as he got himself together and mounted the bike, soon realizing that the bumpy rhythm of the ride from a warped rim was working against the mild concussion he’d probably sustained when the boys in the truck ran him off the road. Abraham stashed the bike in a little stand of trees, near what looked like a wide stretch of woodland, probably, he thought, not far from where the river went through. He decided to walk a bit in the relative cool of the woods, maybe find the water, until his vertigo cleared. He tied his handkerchief onto a tree branch, near where he’d hidden the bike, and set off along the tree line. Before long, he found a dirt trail into the woods and took it.
He thought that it must have been the red truck which sent him to the dream of his run-in with Sgt. Moore. He had mistreated the man, but Moore had a reputation for being a hardass; one who was known to pimp crack-addled twenty-somethings around to other cops, a hot point for talk among the boys of Oxford. The hypocrisy of it irritated Abraham. If you’re going to be something, then be it; there’s no sense in bullshitting yourself by thinking you’re bullshitting everyone else. Besides, Abraham had been a little late getting home, and he didn’t have good excuse.
At the same time, though, Abraham felt uneasy. It was almost as if the red truck had driven out of the past to brutalize him, then had hitched his mind to its bumper and towed it back into that past, cut it loose in that memory, where events played over and over, where the past went on without him. Or maybe the other way around. He continued his trudge through the woods without much thought as to where it was he was going and what it was that he left behind. He felt the sameness of the woods and the blank brown of the trail, and he found it restful. It seemed to share the principle by which he had learned forgetfulness. For one for whom the past never fades or withers away, forgetfulness is crucial. Since being marooned in these plains, Abraham had come to feel attuned to this country, like it worked within him somehow. It had a just-there-ness. There is no beginning or end to a sheer expanse of land or trees or a field. When you stumble through the corn, where you start is not its beginning, and it is not gone or over when you have left it behind. Prairies do not dissolve into nothing after you’ve passed through them. In this countryside there are no beginnings or endings; everything is already nothing. And it is free.
Abraham had become forgetful in just this way. His life had become, in time, what this country was in space: an expansive nothing, stretching out like a trail to eternity, to oblivion, in both directions, only blankly there, only just there. It was not that he “lived in the now” like some filthy hippie or a New Age guru, but that time had split apart for him. It was time itself that had passed, fogged off in the distance, withered, and all that was left was living forgetfulness, somewhere on this rubber band that widened and narrowed according to the elasticity of his life, or the moment in which he found it. He lived with the rhythm of a wave in a formless sea, of a wind that happened through the grasses, of a warped circle without terminus, with inertia that felt like stillness. No past or present or future crept in because time was dead. He lived out of blind obligation to continue, to be, to become, or to unravel, to diminish, to disintegrate, and return to the earth, beginnings left aside. He was not sure which, and it made no difference. Assurance is a lie. What troubled Abraham now was that this justness seemed to be decaying, drying out in the light, burning and shriveling up, like poor Saul’s cancerous lungs. Now, it seemed, a stake had been driven down, a band of time anchored to it, everything winding around that rupture in the earth, like a drain back into a world of meaning.
“Where to next?”
Saul had not answered the question. He began with a sigh. The old man did not need to go on. Abraham heard, in that breath, everything that Saul had to say. But he listened and spoke and said things he thought Saul would like to hear.
“Abraham, you know I’ve always been fond of you, and I like those boys that travel with you real good. They’re fine boys. Gentlemen even. Well, maybe not that No-no. That sonofabitch ain’t quite right, but he’s good at heart, and that’s important.”
He coughed.
“Well, hell, Abraham, I’m gonna come out and say it. You know I’m not much of a small-talker. Spent too long in the business.”
There was a pause.
“I’m dying, son. Cancer’s come back. Doctor Death says my time is pretty short. Surgeries and chemo again. I’m too old for that shit, you know. Lord knows I don’t want to, but I’ve gotta tie up my dealings. I’ve gotta cut you loose. I’ve got some wrongs to right before I go. That kind of shit. I’m gonna use my last days that way. Seems right.”
“Saul. I’m sorry. I’m damn sorry to hear that.”
“I know I’m putting you out, Abraham, but it’s what I gotta do. Time’s short, doctor says.”
“No, no, we’ll manage. Don’t you worry about us. I’m just, you know, I—”
“Now, Abraham. I never figured you for a sentimentalist. I love you too.” He said it like it was a joke, but Abraham could tell he was making it easy for him. “Now, I figured you’re probably not coming back?”
“No.”
Saul had joked about Abraham having to mail the dwarves back to Italy, but, for the moment, they wanted to stay with him. Saul sent his “settle-up package” a couple days later to the post office in Cisco. The dwarves he had paid out in cash, stuck in little manila envelopes. For Abraham, there was a separate box within the big box. Inside were some old photographs; a notecard with his mother’s phone number; a pocket watch; a small vial containing a human finger, floating in clear liquid, with the name “Sergius” written across a piece of masking tape on the side; a short letter in Saul’s rough scrawl; and a little over thirty-thousand dollars in cash. Saul was making it easy for him.
Abraham looked up the trail. Some large rocks had been built into a makeshift bridge across a little creek bed. He stopped when he reached it, pitched his hat onto the stones, and knelt to rub the cool water on his face and neck. He had forgotten his wounds until they stung with the water. Then he rinsed his battered elbows too and blotted the knot on his forehead with the tail of his over-shirt. He slurped a little water from his hands, noticing a crude pocket-knife etching of a phallus on the flat side of the stone which held his hat. He stood, shielding the late-afternoon sun, looking further up the trail. In the distance, it seemed to widen out and slope gently upwards. He drew his eyebrows together and pursed his lips. He walked on across the water and started up the hill.
A breeze shook the high branches, and they danced and shivered against the blank blue sky. The sun was just dipping behind the thick hickories ahead, and shadows seemed to creep out all at once with the dull roar of the evening wind. Abraham heard someone say “Jacob” against the wind-noise. When he looked behind, though, he saw no one. He continued his march up the hill, until a green-grey figure appeared in a clearing, still a ways ahead. He stopped. The wind had died, and he listened. The crickets had started in, and he heard something moving through the underbrush, beneath the trees, off the trail. When he looked, he saw three wild turkeys, the tom, fanning its tail, seemed to be resting his beak back on his scarlet throat as he chortled a warning. Abraham started a little, and then snickered at himself. The big tom raised his wings and fluttered them. The hens’ red and blue heads shot up, spotted Abraham, and stared.
“Okay, okay, I’m going,” Abraham whispered.
He continued towards the stationary figure in the distance, which still hadn’t taken shape for him. He watched the trail at his feet and the dust clouds that rose with each step in the dry dirt. Abraham glanced back at where he had seen the turkeys, on the edge of where the trees hit the trail. They were gone. A black figure far behind caught his eye though. Even in the coming twilight, the deep black of it rent a slit in the green of the landscape. Abraham stopped and studied it for a moment as it moved towards him. It was a man in a long black cloak, which seemed to cover his body, from his neck nearly to his feet, like something a monk would wear. Abraham fumbled in his shirt-pocket for his cigarettes. He selected one that had been broken in the fall. He bit the filter off the rest of the way and lit the short stub in his mouth. As his gaze found the man again, he watched him take a seat on the little stone bridge and light a cigarette too. Abraham heard a woodpecker add his noise to the crickets’ scream. The wind came back up, and Abraham turned and soon found his pace again.
As he moved up the slope, Abraham’s gaze volleyed between the greyish figure ahead and the black one behind. He finally made out the first as a statue, though he still could not tell of what, and he was utterly confused as to why such a hulking figure would appear in the middle of the woods. The black-clad man behind also began to take on firmer dimensions as he moved in closer behind Abraham. He seemed about Abraham’s age; he wore a sharp black Tartar beard and a black skullcap, and Abraham could see a chain necklace hanging slack, with what he assumed was probably a crucifix stuck in the breast pocket on the left side. A priest. Abraham sighed as he came to this interpretation. He kept moving.
Even from several yards out, the statue was indecipherable. There was obviously a horse involved, but another figure seemed awkwardly bent over the front of it, and there was what appeared to be a human arm reaching out towards the rear of the horse, a smaller object holding its wrist atop the flanks. It was staged upon a wide, low slab of concrete which pedestalled the now blue statue; its green had faded as the light dissipated. And the closer he got to it, the larger and grander the statue appeared. Still ten paces out, Abraham finally recognized it as a centaur and whispered as much to himself as he did, shocked by the incongruence of such a creature among these prairieland rednecks, for whom only Jesus marked the union between men and gods. Abraham stood still, not yet close enough to study the centaur. He wanted to drink in its fullness first, the art of its staging, its friction with the wild woods it hid in. He glanced behind him, and the priest too had stopped and was fiddling with his pocket watch. He had closed the distance between Abraham and himself, and now the three figures, the centaur, Abraham, and the priest, were frozen, equidistant from one another, Abraham’s head slowly turning from the centaur to the priest and back before anyone spoke.
The moment was broken when someone said, “I’m gonna fuck it in the ass.” Two adolescents on bikes appeared, riding around from the far side of the centaur. One of them dismounted and poised himself on the back of the centaur. He clasped one hand around the lyre that the half-man held beneath his wrist, and with the other he gripped the centaur’s closed fist, which extended on above the tail. The priest ambled up next to Abraham. Abraham glanced at the olive-skinned man in profile. Dark curls flowed out from his skullcap and into his bushy black beard. The man glanced back. The two men watched for a moment wearing the same stony, stoic expression, their beards hiding the smirks they wore underneath. As the boy simulated coitus with the centaur and moaned in rhythm with his grotesque gyrations, the priest silently offered a cigarette to Abraham, took one himself, and they lit up. About this time, the other kid, who had been watching from the other side, noticed the men by the scent of the smoke and had come around.
“Holy fuck, Randy! It’s a priest.”
“It’s a centaur, dumbass.”
“No, there,” he yelled, pointing. “A priest. And some weird motherfucker. Let’s go!”
The boy lowered himself, impeded by his own gasping laughter, and the two of them hopped on their bikes and started down the long stretch of concrete stairs that led away from the statue, down to the pine-lined lowland trail beyond.
“Lusty little bastard, no?” the priest said after a long drag. His voice was deep and his speech was ambiguously accented by whatever foreign tongue had been his first.
At once, both men started in for a closer inspection of the centaur. They silently moved around it in opposite directions. Abraham looked in the direction of the boys. They were nearing the bottom of the stairs. Both glanced back, and all at once, they ran into each other and were flung into the grass. This was punctuated at certain intervals with grunts and curses. Abraham smiled.
“That is a troubling age, no?” the priest said. “It is like they are all on leave from the asylum.”
“I can’t disagree with that,” Abraham said, stamping out his cigarette. “What is this place?”
“It is a park. Now, anyway. Allerton Park. I do not know the whole story. I only a couple of weeks ago got into the area. But I have been here a few times and asked around. Glorious, no? This is my favorite piece so far, the Death of the Last Centaur, it is called. The sculptor was Emile-Antoine Bourdelle. I picked up a little guide in the gift shop, I must admit it, but I have got a memory for facts. Details, you see.”
“Chiron.”
“Yes. Yes. So you know the pagans too, no? Robert Allerton, he was apparently something of a monster in these parts himself, you see. Part gentleman-farmer, part collector, part aesthete. A Thomas Jefferson, but with a little Charles Foster Kane and Oscar Wilde mixed in.”
The priest stopped and slowly shook his head as if he were denying something.
“Well, he seems to have been a homosexual, rumors,” the priest went on, “so Wilde came to mind, as the consummate aesthete homosexual. It is not on a par with the Jefferson-Kane association. Those were pretty accurate, no?”
Abraham reached out and touched the centaur. He rubbed the muscled bronze oblique where the bodies of man and horse joined in a line of fur. The priest seemed to be waiting for a response.
“I suppose,” Abraham said after a moment, “but, then again, I can’t really say. I’m learning all of this from you for the first time.”
“Yes. Yes. Of course. There are things you do not know. You really should come back to explore though. This Allerton had a real imagination. He was an artist with the layout of the place. It is a perfect modernist pastiche of the past, of east and west. He has manicured oriental labyrinths made from shrubs, guarded by a statue of Cro-Magnon man. Then these romantic wild forests with Chiron here, and there is an enormous Apollo somewhere called the Sun Singer. Classic English gardens full of tiny Chinese players chiseled out of limestone. Something called a Fu Dog. They are from Korea. He has dozens. A great Georgian mansion with a Persian reflecting pool, flanked by sphinxes. I am not kidding, Abraham, sphinxes!”
Abraham stared at the priest. At length, the priest noticed his error.
“Have you something else to say, father?” Abraham said blankly, his eyes still wide.
The priest raised his palms up close to his ears, as though someone were holding a pistol on him. Then he smiled.
“You have got me, Abraham. I have talked too much.” Then he shrugged, turning his palms up. He laughed a little, noiselessly. “I am a monk. I am fresh out of ten years of silence, a vow I was encouraged to make. That is mother church, my friend. Most of the discipline they dole out they make you inflict on yourself. Brutal, no?”
Abraham turned his head back to the centaur and cocked it to one side, as though he were emulating the fallen posture of the centaur’s head.
“What is it you’re after?” Abraham turned his gaze back to the priest.
“Listen, I know you, Abraham. There it is.” He sighed. “It is my job to know you, learn about you, watch you, find out where you have been, who you have been, what you are up to. They flew me back from France for you, from the Alps. The Alps! Beautiful. Quiet. Silent. Silent and cold as Dante’s Cocytus. But I have got some connections here. They know my talents in reconnaissance, and the job was you. So I am going to be around. Hell, I have been around. I thought it would be simpler this way. Direct. Honest. We can be friends even, no?”
The priest fumbled for his cigarettes. He offered the box to Abraham. They smoked. The faint grey wisps trailed from their lips and into the evening grey around them. Both men were silent. The wood, though, was alive with the noise that had quieted with the priest’s boisterous monologue. Abraham listened to the waves of cacophony with his eyes closed, the cigarette between his lips. He smiled a little when the voices blended for an instant and then fell apart again just as suddenly.
“Did you hear it?” he said to the priest.
“Hear what?”
Abraham said nothing for a moment. The sun was a mere haze of orange around the dark ruffles of tree tops to the west. Its light blended pink into the darkening grey, and the moon was up already, a yellow blot in the almost-dark.
“Yes,” Abraham said, the smirk still on his lips, his eyes still closed. “We can be friends. I’ll tell you whatever it is you want to know. But not tonight. Tonight, I just need a ride back to the campsite. It’s getting dark.”
“We have a deal,” the priest said. “I’ll get the car and meet you where you tied your handkerchief.” Then he laughed a little. “I’ll give you a moment alone with your god.”
Abraham again studied the centaur. These moments suited Chiron’s morte vivant, the fading day beaten back by the bleak black of night coming on, both depicting a change to the known unknowable, to the inevitable, to that eerie rest that is always waiting. The sculptor had captured Chiron’s change, the final shudder of his failing flanks, his hind legs buckling underneath. His right arm leans on the lyre, plucks out the last notes of his immortality, the first sounds of death, the music that closes him off to suffering, that locks him in the stars. The left slopes limply behind. His neck strains as he turns his head down and away from the grim music. Or is he fading away, his head already fallen, hooves alone in holding out the frozen tableau? His doubled cages of ribs, one a beast’s, one a man’s, strain and rattle out a final breath, the breath of a god sacrificed for a man. An old, familiar story. Beastly man and holy god, a sacrifice locked in among the contradictions.
Abraham turned away and disappeared back into the dark woods which had brought him there.