"The High Line"...a story

Conflict up above.

Pollard held his attaché case before his chest, warding off the first blow, a wild haymaker from the homeless man dancing about before him.

“What did I do?” Pollard cowered behind the case.

The man took another swing. Like the first one, it collided with the case, and Pollard fell back against a wooden park bench.

“Stop!”

His umbrella flew into the rain. The attaché case fell half on the walkway, half in the plot of flowering succulents that bordered it.

“¡Puto!” The attacker pointed an index finger at Pollard. Middle-aged and stringy thin, the color of his skin like dried-out coffee, he was frayed and bent. He wore a soaked cloth jacket dirtied at the cuffs, faded and beat up. A wool watch cap, red on one side and black on the other, was similarly scruffy and inundated. His eyes had no focus, their black pupils surrounded by red-flecked white. His voice had taken on the crudity of whiskey- and cigarette-induced decline.

“I own this High Line, man! What’re you doin’ here?”

“I…”

 “I live here, cabrón! I own this!”

The man lunged at Pollard again, this time reaching for the lapels of his overcoat. Pollard pushed the attacker away and fell against the bench once more.

The assailant wiped his lips, turned, and ran down the High Line toward Fourteenth Street. His footsteps clopped heavily through the puddles, noisy breathing coming in gasps. He yelled and made an obscene gesture at Pollard.

“¡Gringito maricón!”

His jacket flew out behind him. The retreating voice yet surged once more—“¡Mama ñema!”—from the top of the stairway leading down to the street.

Otherwise, it being early on a stormy Sunday morning, the High Line was almost empty.

Pollard’s breathing was strained. He took up the attaché case from where it had landed in the succulents, whose small white, yellow, and red flowers gushed from them, carefully tended, shivering in the rain, charming.

A couple in raingear, several yards away, had seen the scuffle and appeared afraid to approach him. Pollard waved to them. “I’m okay,” he said. Rainwater pooled on the surfaces of his rimless glasses where they lay on the concrete.

The couple retreated. During the fight, Pollard had thrust his hand against the bench back, slamming it into the thick, curved wood. A rip gleamed from the sleeve of his overcoat. Otherwise, his double-breasted gray suit and navy blue tie—with the exception of the black overcoat, the only mention of color in his appearance—had survived the scrape without much of a scrape at all. Yet he stood silently, wondering What’s that guy got against me? And What’s a mama ñema?

—

The High Line was A. Pollard O’Rourke’s favored route to work. He was a principal in the corporate law firm O’Rourke Testi Moody Grumbold, and the offices took up an entire upper floor of the High Line building on West Fourteenth Street. He and the other 106 attorneys represented Fortune 500 interests against those that would keep them from their goals. The Justice Department, for example. The Democratic Party. Global warming nuts. Pollard was not a cold man, although you would think that he was, were you to read the briefs and memos that he wrote, or to sit in on a meeting with him. He had been so devoted to the flinty eminence of his firm for so many years that his youthful exuberances were now overtaken by the need to appear unjudgeable. He was tough on everyone, even his clients, who absorbed his dismissive demeanor because, in court, he won. Pollard was brilliant, stony, ruthless, and unafraid. Generally, other firms did not enjoy taking him on because more often than not they lost.

He lived in a large brownstone on East Seventy-third near the park, and was now a widower, his wife, Cassandra, having passed away in 2011. It was she who had predicted great success for him, just after he had graduated from Columbia Law School in 1975. They were engaged on that very day, and Cassandra declared to her girlfriends at the party that her Pollard, already so tuned in to the rigor and sacrifice that would be needed to become a famous lawyer, would indeed become more famous than any of his classmates. Cassandra had been devoted even as a young woman to the public good—to which Pollard had paid little attention his entire life—and felt that her husband would need someone like her to steady what she sometimes called, exhibiting a large smile, “Pollard’s fervidly litigious inflammations.” Pollard had always enjoyed the phrase.

Never in his life did A. Pollard O’Rourke care about the welfare of the crazy, the poor, the disenfranchised, refugees from foreign wars, or immigrants legal or illegal. Cassandra did all that, through the Church and Catholic charities. But now she was gone, and he knew that in his heart he had valued his wife’s involvement, even though he had seldom spoken to her about it. Above all, he never once criticized her for it. He knew why. His heart would have suffered alone, were it not for his wife. Cassandra saw in Pollard qualities that he barely saw himself, a vision of him that he deeply appreciated. The fact was, she had loved him, and now that she was gone, he saw how his own heart, to his surprise, mattered to him also. He had followed its counsel whenever it came to his wife, although he now worried guiltily that having opted simply for silence when it came to her charity work hardly constituted a commitment to what she was doing. Pollard missed Cassandra, her caresses of him, the ways she could release his hunched-over emotions. He still thanked her time and again for supporting him in a profession that required the mordant implacability that most people felt made up his entire personality.

His driver chauffeured him every day to the Thirtieth Street stairway to the High Line, and he walked the rest of the way to his offices. The High Line allowed him to stroll. Before he was assaulted, he felt no need to worry about his mortality up there. Such lovely views, enhancing the quiet peace of the river to the west. Since his childhood, the High Line—or as it had been called back then, the West Side Freight Line—had been one of the Manhattan wonders that amazed Pollard.

The morning after he was attacked, he told his driver to take him all the way to his office. As they drove below the High Line, it was impossible not to stare up at it through the limo’s darkened roof-window, trying to make sense of the attack. Pollard found himself also, with considerable pleasure, going over the three different versions of the High Line he had known.

—

When he was a small boy in the late 1950s, his father, James O’Rourke—the founder of the law firm of which Pollard was now senior partner—occasionally brought him on the subway to look at the elevated train tracks on the West Side. Hand in hand, he and his father stood on the sidewalk below and waited for the slow freight trains to meander by, up above. The trains appeared gargantuan to little Pollard, huge metallic animals grinding with thrilling menace through the sky. The boy worried that they might fall down from up there, and the destruction that he imagined frightened him time and again as he saw himself and his father ground under by falling railroad cars filled with fruits and vegetables, lumber, fish, panicked chickens, and bawling cattle, the exploding train engines scattering in flames across the streets below.

The boy loved the fear, holding tightly to his father’s hand as the grinding roar passed above them.

He especially enjoyed the many large goats up there, tan and white. He and his father would see them grazing along the tracks. James explained to the boy that a lot of weeds grew from between the tracks, and that goats were the cheapest and most efficient way of keeping those weeds at a minimum. Pollard wished to go up and see the animals, which was not permitted. But his father asked around and found that there was a vacant lot toward the old docks at the foot of Twenty-fifth Street, where a cyclone fence kept the goats in. He then made it a regular stop, for Pollard to look at the animals.

A shack at one end of the lot protected the goats against the winter cold. But in the warmer months, they came out into the open, which was strewn with a layer of wood chips, and lay there in the sun, chewing. Pollard imagined that the goats were fans of his own favorite Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. His father had first suggested the idea, getting a laugh from the boy. The goats chewed with regal disdain, occasionally looking toward Pollard and his father and the other few viewers as though they—the goats—were celebrities, Pope Pius or John Wayne. You had to be important to be a goat.

Twenty-five years later, the newlyweds Pollard and Cassandra came across town a few times to the Meatpacking District on a Sunday—driven there in a Town Car that would wait for them—to the same spots he had enjoyed with his father. The railroad had been abandoned, and the trestles now were rusted behemoths on which could be found only silence and, now and then, ghostly men walking. The iron supports were covered with graffiti, and indeed the neighborhood was now dangerous. Garbage in piled plastic bags glutted the curbs and corners. Especially in winter, the neighborhood had an air of ruin and empty anger that made Pollard think they should tear these tracks down and do something to spiff the place up.

But he didn’t really want that, and Cassandra especially didn’t want it, because the goats were still there. Strolling along the railroad tracks up above, an occasional bell ringing from one of the necks, they were herded, in Spanish, by an old man with a stick or a young man with a stick. Cassandra worried for these fellows, who seemed to know the other people walking on the tracks. The goatherds would stop to talk with one or two of them, the goats pausing and grazing as the conversations carried on. Bits of English and Spanish dribbled down from the filthy heights.

A policeman once explained to Pollard and Cassandra that those others were bums, homeless guys, junkies. “You know, nowhere to go, losers.” He told the couple that they were never to even think about trying to go up on the tracks. “I’m not talkin’ about the guys with the goats. But with those others,” he glanced upward at the bottom of the rail bed, “you might not make it back.”

The driver took them a few times to the goat lot, and although the goats were there now and then, the goatherds were not. Finally, the district became so notorious for attacks and drug abuse that Pollard stopped taking his wife there altogether. The Meatpacking District was abandoned, and the rust-bitten railroad stood as a sign of its own imminent destruction.

But the West Side Line did not come down. After several years, the structure was saved by civic enthusiasm and millions of refurbishment dollars donated by the sort of culture-attentive people Cassandra knew and liked, to whose efforts Pollard suspected she offered assistance. Restored as a vernal walkway and called the High Line, it now produced only raves of wonder from its visitors and was the cause of a complete re-do of the neighborhood below. When he leased the offices on Fourteenth Street, Pollard exclaimed at the amazing hubris of the leasing guy when he quoted the square-foot fee. His scolding, shaking head had no effect on the leasing guy, and Pollard, realizing that he should jump quick, signed the papers. Now he was glad he did. The rent he was paying was a song compared to what other tenants, who had not at first jumped, were now paying.

Cassandra passed away just after the first stretch of the High Line opened, before Pollard decided to move to the new offices. He knew his wife would have been the first to suggest he get dropped off several blocks away from the offices, to take a morning walk among the trees, flowers, and grasses—every morning—up above.

—

After the attack, it took him a few weeks to resume those walks. He did not encounter his assailant again, and eventually lost the fear that the scuffle had caused in him. He did wonder why the guy had fingered him. The randomness of the violence still made no sense. Pollard had been walking alone in the rain, his thoughts on the paperwork he had to do. He resented having to spend a Sunday—bad weather or not—on such pedestrian, plodding efforts as going over corporate billings, grinding his teeth as he thought about people like Barack Obama, and grumbling about the ever-rising costs of his business. Previously he had preferred Sundays that were devoted to wandering the city with Cassandra. He had loved walking around in the Manhattan parks and finding some special little café or park bench on which to have lunch with her. They had frequently discussed things like the latest at The Frick (Pollard’s personal favorite), the Staten Island Ferry, the Metropolitan Opera (Cassandra’s favorite), or whether fun had to always be reserved just for Sundays.

Cassandra had the good fortune to have been raised up the river, in Croton-on-Hudson. Her father’s gardening talents especially had made their small Tudor house on a hillside a few miles from the village into a kind of thoughtful English manor. For her, it was something a little out of Beatrix Potter or Jane Austen. Cassandra’s own specialty lay in understanding how gardens work, and less in writing stellar masterpieces. She had a sense of color and flow that allowed her to turn the garden that she planted behind the brownstone she and Pollard owned into a little Hudson River painting. But this particular painting changed every day on its own, without the bother of having to consult Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Edwin Church. Cassandra sometimes hoped that those two men, whose art of the Hudson River Valley she revered, would rise from the dead and join her on the back stairs of the brownstone, stretched canvases at the ready, straw hats in place, and brushes primed.

Pollard once asked her why she so loved gardens.

“It’s the stories in them.” He had predicted the answer. Like Pollard, Cassandra was a reader. But unlike his preferred Roman history, ancient war, and weaponry, her preferences in books had always been for myths, the turn to love, fruition, animals, birth. Especially the universal beginning that was held to, she believed, by every belief. “Mother Spider’s story sings through her web, Pollard.” Cassandra blew softly into the web they were examining that particular morning, in Central Park. The web glittered with small water drops, minute diamonds in the morning sun. “No matter in what language she spins it. The minute it comes from her, the story is there.” Cassandra’s grin made a bit of fun of him. “If you get what I mean.”

He didn’t, but he knew that Cassandra would try to help him toward getting it.

Pollard’s caring for the new High Line had been established the very first time he and Cassandra had walked it, a few days after it had been officially opened four years ago. It now was a slim, narrow park that had transformed the broken-down meatpacking and warehouse neighborhoods through which it ran. On a given day, tourists flocked to it, and for once in his life, Pollard didn’t mind a crowd. The completely unique path curved through and around multi-storied buildings, floated through them, as it were, above the street noise, in friendly clarity. For Pollard, it was the best thing that had happened in New York City—except for Cassandra—since he had been living here, which was from the day of his birth.

—

On another Sunday a few months later, a blue one glimmering with morning sun, Pollard was headed to the office once more, for more drudgery, when he spotted his assailant.

This time, the High Line was filled with tourists and numberless New Yorkers. The man was sitting on a bench near the top of the Fourteenth Street stairway, reading. He appeared not to have changed his clothes since the day of his dispute with Pollard, although his clothing was now at least dry. A backpack lay at his feet, and he was the only person seated on the bench. The passing crowds clearly feared him, because he was also muttering—raving, actually—although the voice conveyed nothing from the magazine in his hands. It was, rather, a whispering rattle of incomprehensible observations, one following another as though he were explaining himself to himself.

A small cowbell rested next to him on the bench.

While raving, he studied the magazine, turning its pages carefully and leaning forward to read. His head turned back and forth over the print, his eyes quivering with excitement. Now and again, he spotted a young couple with kids and would take up the cowbell, to ring it. It was a kind gesture but a frightening one. He addressed the parents, waving to the kids and ringing the bell.

Everyone avoided him, but indeed he did not represent the danger that he had when he had assaulted Pollard. Withal, he appeared screwy but peaceful. Recognizing him, Pollard crept past, worried that the guy would see him and fly off once more. But the assailant uncrossed his legs and re-crossed them the opposite way, turning from his right to his left and then back again, babbling and reading. Now and then, he broke into laughter.

Pollard stepped toward a bench across the walkway and sat down. Sunlight fell across the front of his buttoned-up suit coat and tie. He shielded his eyes so that he could watch his attacker carefully. Now and then, the man looked up to wave some more at passersby, who would look implacably ahead. He seemed unoffended and would then continue his reading.

After several minutes’ assuring himself that the fellow was—well, maybe—harmless, Pollard set his teeth, took hold of his nerves, and stood up. He felt much more secure than he had in their previous encounter because so many people were flowing by, providing possible help if Pollard were to need it. He passed through the crowd to the other bench and sat down a few feet from his assailant. He dropped his attaché case to his feet.

“Hello.”

The man looked up from the magazine.

“Do you remember me?”

A look of fevered interest fell across the man’s face. “No, man.”

“Can I ask your name?”

 “Neftali.”

“Okay, I—”

“But my nickname is Eshu.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know, man. It’s just a name. Everybody calls me that.” He sat back and thrust a hand into the left pocket of his jacket. “It’s New York. You know, everybody got a nickname in this town.” He glanced toward Pollard. “What’s yours?”

“Me? Pollard O’Rourke.”

“No nickname?”

“No. Just Pollard.”

“What’s it mean?”

“I don’t know. It was my grandfather’s name.”

“What’d you say it was?”

“Pollard.”

“Like the parrot.”

“Uh…well….”

Eshu grumbled. “Okay, I’m callin’ you Pollie, even though you ain’t no parrot.”

Pollard sat back and gathered the front of his jacket around him. “So, how are you doing?”

Eshu shook his head. He laid the old, ripped copy of the Economist on the bench. “I’m okay, man. What about you?”

“I’m fine.”

Eshu leaned over the magazine and continued reading, as though to get rid of Pollard.

“What are you reading about?”

“I don’t know.” Eshu pointed at the magazine. “None of this shit means anything to me.”

“Why are you reading it?”

“I don’t know.”

Pollard looked off into the distance, toward the river. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Come on, man! I don’t.”

“You attacked me a few months ago.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’m afraid you did.” Pollard pointed across the High Line to the bench where he had injured his hand. “It was right over there. Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

“I just…I just wanted to ask you why you did that.”

Eshu closed the magazine and put it down to his side. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“You don’t.”

“Just leave me alone, Pollie!”

 “But I want to know who you are.”

Eshu waved his hands about before him, uttering a profanity. “I’m the raven, man. I’m the leaf off the tree. What do you think? I’m the guy who tells the joke. I make you feel good.”

 “Eshu.”

“I’m the love-maker, the earth shaker—”

“Please.”

“I’m the zombie. I’m the Zulu.”

“Wait a minute.”

“And I bet you some kind of lawyer, ain’t that right? A cop or somethin’.”

Pollard, who usually monopolized the conversations he had with other men, was unused to repartee like this. “I guess I am, yes.” This Eshu came from some place, somewhere that he, Pollard, would never ever have visited. The leaf off the tree.

“A cop?”

“No…no. A lawyer,” Pollard said.

Eshu fell into silence and stared at Pollard. The whites of his eyes were still sprinkled red. The gaze riveted itself to Pollard’s eyes and seemed to want to burrow into them. Pollard remained silent. He did not turn his gaze aside, until Eshu finally threw up his hands and took up the magazine again. “¡Carajo!”

“Wait a minute. Do you live around here?”

“Me? Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that I’ve been coming down here for years.”

“Not as long as me.”

“Since I was a kid.”

Eshu pouched his lips tightly together. “Yeah, but you never lived down here.”

“That’s true.” Pollard sat back and crossed his arms. “That’s—”

“And I been living in this shithole since I got here.”

“Where from?”

Suddenly, Eshu’s few teeth shined from his smiling mouth. “¡La República Dominicana, carnál!” He tapped the palm of a hand against the magazine.

The cover showed the world being swept up in the claws of a crazed, enormous, multi-colored American eagle.

—

Later that afternoon, Pollard sat on a metal chair in Bryant Park, eating a tuna sandwich. Two young men, clearly boyfriends, sat on a bench nearby, two large plastic bags from Bed Bath and Beyond at their feet. They were going over the cookware they had just bought, chatting excitedly about the meals that would come from it and the laughter from the parties they would have.

Pollard recalled a conversation of similar happiness that he had had with Cassandra, a few years before. It was the last time she had been able to tell him that she loved him, sitting on a bench beneath a tree in this same park. Cassandra was very thin, and walking any kind of distance was so difficult for her that they had changed their favorite Sunday venue from Central Park to this smaller one. Here, Cassandra could take Pollard’s arm, and they could stroll as they had been doing for so many years, just not nearly as far.

She was worried, as frequently was the case, about Pollard. “What will you do when I’m gone?”

She would be gone soon, they both knew. Pollard had asked Cassandra, many times recently, if she realized how much he still cared for her. His affection for her was—by others—so unexpected a feature of their relationship that barely anyone knew of Pollard’s almost devastating worry about Cassandra’s illness, and what was about to happen to her.

He took her hand. “I’ll worry about you some more.”

Cassandra lowered her head as she examined the backs of her fingers. The gesture was a familiar one to Pollard, the quickened settling of her glance on some as yet unrevealed thought. He knew that she had something to say that was compelling to her feelings. When they were a younger couple, he often intervened in such moments, hurrying to ask her what was wrong. But even when there was nothing wrong, Cassandra would wait until the thought was completed in her mind, honed properly, and clear. She was not afraid of Pollard, that she would incur his anger or anything of the sort. She merely wanted to say what she really meant to say, rather than allow an utterance—in such an intimate moment—to be false or half-intended. In the last many years, Pollard learned to wait for Cassandra to utter the suggestion or to wind out the tale.

“I wish you wouldn’t worry, Pollard.”

“Oh, it’s just that—”

“Because I’ll get to see whether…” Cassandra labored with the phrase, short of breath. The completed sentence came out nonetheless with a kind of whispered freshness. “I’ll find out whether any of the stories are true.”

Cassandra was wearing a red beret that held to the right side of her head like a 1920s flapper cloche. It was, she said, the best she could do now that her hair was mostly gone. Her hair had been dark brown and full with the invitation to be taken up in Pollard’s appreciative fingers. Cassandra had always cared for her appearance, and now grumbled at the deterioration that the illness had caused in her during the previous year and a half. Pollard had also learned during that time how to express his own affection for her in ways that he had been unable to previously. She suggested that his new verbal affability was such a surprise that it was simply too unlike Pollard. Maybe he was trying a little too hard to make her comfortable. This was an accurate observation, but Pollard persisted. Trying too hard or not, he would tell Cassandra how he felt rather than let her intuit it, as she had done so well throughout their marriage.

“I predict…” She held his right hand. Sunlight mottled the walkway before them, the morning bright with fresh color. “I predict that you’ll go on for years, Pollard.”

“But doing what?”

Cassandra lowered her head once more. She let go of Pollard’s hand and folded hers together on her crossed right knee. Gazing at the public library building across the way, the view cluttered with hundreds of strolling visitors, children, tall trees, benches filled with chatting couples and friends, she took in a long breath, and let it out as though it were freeing her.

“You’ll tell about the beginning of the world.”

“Money, you mean.” He grinned.

Cassandra sighed. “Yes, I know you could talk about that, but—”

“It’s the basis for everything, you know.”

“Oh, but Pollard.”

“Can’t do anything without it.”

“Pollard….”

He stopped.

Cassandra took his hand again. “Pollard, I so care for you. You’ve been so kind to me.” She sighed, an exhalation of regardful exhaustion. “But I need just one more thing from you.” Cassandra patted Pollard’s fingers. “I need you to listen to this.”

Pollard kept silent, waiting.

“You know how much I care about the stories. All those myths that mean so much to me. The way the universe began. The great egg. The coupling. Earth and sky.”

Pollard had heard Cassandra’s telling of such stories since their first meeting. She had been reading them since her childhood. Because of her, he himself read—in secret, to be sure, not wanting his attorney friends to suspect such softness—about every sort of tribal beginning, every explanation of the birth of animals, the seeding of celestial plants, the jokesters, the birds, the jackals and gods. Oracular mysteries and the upsetting of heavens.

“All I want, Pollard… Please. Don’t forget how much I love those stories.”

“Of course I won’t. I—”

“The story has everything, you know.”

“Yes, I—” He stroked her fingers with his own, precise in his care for her illness-informed delicacy.

“You’ve taken such care of me,” she said. “It’s true.”

“No, I’ve been—”

“Yes, okay.” The index finger of Cassandra’s right hand caressed the underside of her gold wedding band. “But so loving a difficult man. So…radiant, Pollard.”

 “Radiant!” he whispered.

“I’m afraid so. You’re argumentative, Pollard. When you come home, I can tell how much you’ve boiled and steamed that day.”

Pollard smiled.

“I’ve sometimes felt imperfect.” She studied the wedding band a moment. “Marred. Not up to what you’ve wanted.”

“Please.”

“But you’ve given me what I always wished for.”

“Cassandra, I—”

“Love, Pollard.” She put the fingers of her right hand to his lips. “Yes. Love. Dented, but reparable. Almost always.”

—

The next time Pollard spotted Eshu, it was a weekday. He watched as Eshu stood, stuffed the cowbell into his backpack and walked, with what appeared to be an aching back, along the High Line, toward uptown. He was heavily involved in conversation with himself. Pollard let him pass, and then followed him.

At the foot of the Twenty-sixth Street stairs, Eshu appeared unaware of the traffic rattling past. He crossed Twenty-sixth, making the finger at the two Yellow cabs that honked at him, and then paused for a moment to talk with a street hot dog vendor in very rapid and gargly Spanish. The umbrella over the stand carried the stand’s name, in large red colors: Perros Calientes Osvaldo. The vendor, in his twenties and dressed in perfectly turned-out New York football Giants sweat clothes, a pair of black and blue Nike Jordan Melo basketball shoes, very dark, black-rimmed sunglasses, a necklace of seashells, and a black beret, continued talking with Eshu as he prepared a hot dog. Pollard could not understand what they said, since for most of his life he had considered the Spanish language beneath him. Now he wished he hadn’t thought so ill of it, wishing he could understand what a hot dog vendor might say to someone like Eshu. The man passed the hot dog into Eshu’s hands, and waved him away, laughing, not taking any money from him.

Eshu walked very quickly, his right shoulder lower than his left, one hand holding the backpack close. He finished the hot dog, tossing the wrapper to the sidewalk. Several yards further along, he paused in the middle of the block to speak with himself, his left hand held high and making a fist, then an accusatory pointed weapon, finally a caressing palm running itself over his chin.

Eventually, he arrived at, and entered, a one-story brick building that had a sign up above. Pollard could not remember this part of Twenty-sixth Street from his childhood, except that all the buildings then had the same single-story plainness that this one still had. Now, with so many new restaurants and shops, this appeared to be one of the few such buildings left on the street. The bricks were painted brown on the outside, although the paint was chipped everywhere. The sign over the entrance appeared new. Bright red lettering formed an arch over a rendition of a candy-apple red 1968 Chevrolet Impala convertible with the top down, and two brightly smiling dark-haired girls in sunglasses waving at passersby. The lettering announced Basoalto Auto Repair and Wrecking.

The flat-roofed building had a double entrance—on one side, cars pointing in; on the other, cars pointing out.

“Can I help you?” A large man in Levi’s and a blue work shirt, carrying a clipboard that held several sheets of paper, approached Pollard. The shirt pocket was embroidered with his name, written in script: Raúl Basoalto. “Somethin’ wrong with your car?”

“No, I…”

Raúl’s dark brown skin was mottled with black freckles on both cheeks. He had a mustache.

“I’m here because I’m concerned about…about Eshu.”

Raúl looked over his shoulder into the garage, then took a rag from a back pocket of his Levi’s and wiped his hands. “What about him?”

Pollard, too, looked into the garage, but saw nothing of Eshu. “Well, he…he—”

“What are you, from the city or something’?”

“The city.”

“Yeah, you know, Public Assistance? Public Health?”

“No, I—”

“Then why do you want to talk to me?”

“Well, I followed him here.”

“Followed him!”

“Yes, I—”

“Look, man, I’m his brother.” Raúl waved his hand to the rear, into the shop. “I own this place.” Five mechanics were working on several cars. “Is he in some kind of trouble again?”

The shop was not well lit, with only one window, covered over, in the iron door that led, Pollard guessed, to a back office, or maybe outside. Everything in the shop seemed in its place. Raúl’s set jaw bespoke the importance he placed on his business. He had once been a muscled man, Pollard guessed, now softened by middle age and a life of work in the garage. He wore heavy-rimmed eyeglasses and a plastic sleeve with three ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket.

“No, no trouble,” Pollard said. “I—”

“So, what about him?”

“He’s been up on the High Line, yelling at people.”

Raúl’s hand dropped to his side, the papers on the clipboard folding over upside down.

“I think he’s endangering himself.”

Raúl exhaled, a combination of distressed anger and acquiescence to unwanted news. “Yeah.”

“People are afraid of him.” Pollard put a hand on the rear fender of a late-model Cadillac parked in the entrance. “Even me. I was afraid of him.”

“Was?”

“Yes. He attacked me.”

Raúl looked to the back of the shop, and then gestured up the sidewalk. “Okay. Come on. Let’s take a walk.”

The two men entered a decrepit Polish diner a few blocks away and sat at the counter. They ordered coffee. The diner was clean enough, although everything in it was so lined and pouched with age that what appeared soiled—the linoleum floor, the dishes and cups, the guy at the stove—was actually just old.

“What’s your name?”

Pollard began the reply, but then thought better of it. The waitress brought the coffee.

“Pollie,” Pollard said.

“What do you know about Eshu?”

“Hardly anything.” Pollard lifted the cup to his lips. He had also ordered two slices of buttered toast. The butter lay before him, in a pool on the toast. He had described the attack for Raúl, whose worry, and even anguish, were immediate. Raúl, a spoon in his right hand, leaned forward over the counter as Pollard described in more detail what had happened.

“I only know that he’s crazy. I mean, excuse me for that. But he could do real harm to himself.”

Raúl nodded. When he sighed, his jowls, covered with a few days’ growth of graying beard, sagged. “Why does a guy like you care, though?”

“Like me?”

“Yeah, you know, the suit, the tie…” Raúl pointed to Pollard’s attaché case. “That thing.” He studied the case a moment. “What you got in there?”

“Papers. Nothing.”

“So why does Eshu matter to you?”

Pollard understood the reason for the question. “A year ago, he wouldn’t have, but—”

“Then why now?” Raúl took a sip from his coffee.

Pollard did not have an immediate answer. It had not actually occurred to him that he was worried about Eshu. He had not realized the movement of his heart, because he had so little experience of that movement in any instance but those with Cassandra.

“You know, he gets a lot of kindness, Pollie, from people who’ve known him all his life. But—”

“Not from people like me.”

“No.” Raúl’s lips turned down, a passing across them of ironic humor. “I don't think Eshu’s ever met anyone like you.”

Pollard nodded agreement. “Or me, him.” He took up a piece of toast, turned it on end so that the butter could drip from it to the plate, which it did in a slow yellow drool. Eventually he lifted the toast to his lips.

“He’s always been bats,” Raúl muttered. “My older brother. And I knew that, even when I was little. He couldn’t do anything. He just wandered around. Got in the way.” Raúl took up a spoonful of sugar from a small, covered bowl and poured it into his coffee. “But our parents loved him. Everybody did.”

”What about your parents?”

Raúl smiled, studying the coffee. “My father, he got here from Quisqueya.” He turned toward Pollard. “You know where that is, right?”

“No, I—”

“Dominican Republic!”

Pollard nodded.

“And then he brought our mother here, a long time ago. They were young.”

“And you were born here.”

“Both of us, yeah.” Raúl stirred the coffee a bit more, its profound darkness giving off a rising of steam. “My father liked cars. A good mechanic.” His head flowed back and forth in a sighing nod. “But, get a job? Nah, if you were like us…you know, goin’ around in Spanish everywhere and…” Raúl pointed to the skin of his right forearm. “This color…” He placed the fingers of his right hand against the side of the cup, caressing it. “I had to go with my father every time the police picked Eshu up, when we were kids. You know, like, when I was eight or nine, because my father, he couldn’t get the English. Neither of them, him or my mom, neither of them could get it.”

“But you—”

“Yeah, because I was born here. So, the cops would read the paperwork to me, and I’d translate it for my father, and then we’d be able to get Eshu out.”

“How often did that happen?”

“A couple times a year.” Raúl sipped from the coffee. “I bet I’ve met every social worker in Manhattan for the last four decades.” He broke into a saddened grin. “And by the time I grew up, you could get a job. My father had taught me about cars, you know, enough to get on in a garage that a couple of those Irish guys owned.”

“Where?”

“Right here. My place.” Raúl laughed. “You know, they were payin’ protection to the Westies. So, their business was pretty good. The Flynn Brothers.”

“Where are they now?”

“They’re both gone. Joe Flynn sold me the business before he died. He was a good guy.”

The crusts of Pollard’s toast lay mired in butter.

“So, my father couldn’t get work. And Eshu, he didn’t know from nothin’. Everybody was worried.” Raúl finished the coffee and replaced the cup on the counter. The spoon inside it rattled around like a small bell. “And then my father got the goats.”

Raul asked for another cup of coffee.

“Even in the Seventies, see, there still were animals in pens and yards, here and there all over Manhattan. Chickens, turkeys, sheep. All kinds. So, my father couldn’t get a job, and he noticed guys up on the elevated tracks, with shovels and clippers and stuff, cutting back the weeds. And these were substantial crews…seven, ten guys, back and forth, up and down from one end of the line to the other.”

He poured a little milk into his coffee.

“And my father, he and his father had always had goats back home, and he knew that you didn’t have to pay them no wages, and that they were far better than a bunch of guys with shovels. So, he went to the rail yards and talked to somebody.” The milk swirled about in the coffee like tumbling clouds. “Who knows how he found the guy to talk to? But he did. And they said they’d give it a try if my dad could supply the goats. And he knew a guy down in the West Village, some kind of a farmer or somethin’, I don’t know, who had some goats. And they worked a deal. He’d rent the goats, with an option…an option—”

“To buy.”

“Yeah. And you know, eventually, he did buy them, and then some more. So…” Raúl beckoned toward the guy at the stove and ordered a couple of fried eggs, sunny side up. “So then, he had a job, and so did Eshu.” He reached to his right for a bottle of catsup. “You know, Pollie, my father was good with the goats. But Eshu…Eshu, he was great.”

“How so?”

“He talked to them. None of the rest of us could understand him half the time, but they could.”

“But how did you…. How did you know?”

“Because—I swear to you, Pollie—because they talked to him.”

—

Pollard saw Eshu again the next day. This time he wasn’t reading. Rather, he lay on one of the wood chaise lounges on the High Line, sunning himself.

“I know you’re from Quisqueya.”

Eshu had entwined the fingers of both hands behind his head. He wore a pair of cheap sunglasses. He was not wearing his wool cap, and Pollard noted that his hairline had receded quite a bit, and that his hair color was cobbled here and there with gray.

“You know about Quisqueya?”

“No.” Pollard stretched his legs out on another chaise, next to Eshu’s, that was also facing the sun. “It’s next to Haiti, I know that.”

“Yeah, but nobody goes to Haiti.” Eshu lowered his head. “That place…you saw that earthquake.” He laid his head back against the bench headrest and allowed himself to become bathed in light. “That was God’s laughter, man, that earthquake.”

“You know, years ago, I used to see an older man and a kid, a teenager, herding those goats up here.”

Eshu did not reply. His face remained immobile, his hands behind his head. His lips began working against one another, as though some sort of fever were building in his mind. Pollard leaned toward Eshu, his hands held open, the fingers splayed.

“Was that you, Eshu, back then, up here?”

“Don’t ask.”

“No, come on, was it? Were you the kid?”

A gleam of spittle rested on Eshu’s lower lip, which he wiped clean with his left hand.

“Was that your father?”

Eshu raised the hand once more to the back of his head. Sunlight glistened from the lenses of his dark glasses. The image of the round sun itself, halfway up the sky on this late morning, popped from the surface of each lens like a burning coin.

“Eshu….”

The suns began to quiver. Eshu brought a fist to his mouth, and held it there. A gasp came from him. Pollard realized that it was an expression of grief.

“Yeah, man. So what?”

“Well, I…” Pollard gathered his hands, watching as Eshu ground the fist against his tightly closed lips. “I loved those goats when I was a kid. My wife loved them.”

Eshu’s glasses quivered with new ferocity. The sun was rising. “Me, too,” he whispered.

“So, it was you and your father.”

“Of course it was, cabrón. What did you expect?”

“What was your father’s name?”

“Eshu, man. Eshu Senior.”

—

“A hot dog, please,” Pollard said. “Catsup, mustard, and relish.”

“Somethin’ to drink?”

“Yes, a Coke, please.”

The young man set about preparing the meal.

“Can I ask your name?”

“Listen, pal, it’s up there.” The vendor pointed at the umbrella.

 Pollard looked up. “Osvaldo. And you’ve been doing this for long?”

Osvaldo took a bun from a heated metal drawer, and then swirled around with a pair of tongs in the boiling water kettle, searching out a frankfurter that was fully cooked. “Gotta make a living,” he said without looking up. He paid little attention to Pollard himself, treating him, actually, as though the attorney were some kind of Upper East Side rich idiot slumming down here on the West Side, and therefore to be ignored.

 “Eshu told me about you.”

Osvaldo looked up from the can of Coca-Cola now in his right hand. His sunglasses glared. “You’re Pollie?”

Pollard took the Coke. “That’s me.”

An immediate change altered Osvaldo’s demeanor. “He told me about you, too.” He stuck his hand out in greeting. His smile revealed bright teeth perfectly aligned. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. You been nice to Eshu, and…you know, that can be tough sometimes.”

“I do know that.”

“But he told me you know about the goats.”

“I do.” Pollard lowered his attaché case to the ground.

“Yeah, you saw them even when old Eshu was alive.”

“I did.”

“I wish I’d known him.” Osvaldo looked over his shoulder at the High Line, which was, as usual now, the source of laughter and celebration thirty feet up, children shouting. “When they put this new High Line up, they made it illegal for the goats to go there. So, Eshu was out of a job.” He took up the bun and began making a hot dog for Pollard.

“Pardon me, I don’t like a lot of bread in the bun. Could you…could you—”

“Dig it out?”

“Yes, please.”

Osvaldo nodded. He picked at the center of each half of the bun, removing much of the white-paste bread. “You got to realize that Eshu never actually had a job after the trains stopped running in 1980. And his father died a couple years after that. I mean, nobody paid him any more. And in those days the railroad tracks were really bad. I mean, it was junkie heaven up there. But Eshu kept going, and took the goats with him, because he knew—at least he told us kids that he knew—all along that the tracks would be open again someday, and that they’d need the goats.” Osvaldo showed the dug-out bun to Pollard, seeking his approval. “You see what I’m sayin’?”

Pollard nodded. He took up the catsup bottle and passed it to Osvaldo.

“So, he’s been pretty angry about this.” Osvaldo pointed with the catsup bottle over his right shoulder, up at the tracks. “He doesn’t fully get it that his being angry doesn’t mean a thing to the city guys who run the High Line.” Osvaldo laid a trail of catsup into the long crater of the lower bun, a kind of abstract expressionist garnish. He plopped a frankfurter into the bun as well. “He doesn’t like suits.”

“The clothes they wear, you mean.”

“Yeah. But I really mean the guys that wear them. You know, bureaucrats and stuff. Business guys.” Osvaldo pointed with the semi-completed hot dog at the front of Pollard’s suit coat. “Guys like you.” He looked away briefly, grinding his teeth. “No disrespect, man. But you know…suits!”

“So, no goats.”

“That’s right.” Osvaldo held up a bottle of relish and raised his eyebrows at Pollard. Pollard gave his assent. “And it drives him nuts.”

“Yes, he seems pretty hurt.”

“Hurt? What do you mean?”

“Damaged.”

“No, man.” Osvaldo spooned a large glob of relish across the hot dog. “He’s the air itself.” He hurried the paper wrap around it. “Especially when I give him one of my dogs. Shifty. Cloudy.”

He handed the hot dog over, and Pollard passed a ten-dollar bill into Osvaldo’s hand.

“He always tells me that. He once said the hot dog makes him static, you know what I mean?”

Pollard held his breath. The hot dog warmed his hand. What was this language?

“He told me lots of things when I was a kid. Smoke. From human fires, see?” Osvaldo’s bright teeth flashed, perfect. “Food. Dreams. Stories, man.”

Pollard surveyed the red meat, the fern-colored relish, and the blood-seeming catsup.

“You eat that dog and you’ll get what I’m sayin’.” Osvaldo examined the bill in his fingers, and then handed it back. “Hey, you need this more than I do.”

—

The next few days, Pollard waited for Eshu on the Fourteenth Street bench, but he did not show up. Pollard sat reading—the Wall Street Journal. The Post. The Economist—and no Eshu. He decided to get a hot dog.

“I don’t know,” Osvaldo said. “Sometimes he just gets moody, you know? Gets into himself.” The hot dog vendor tapped the side of his head with an index finger. “Thinkin’. ‘New words,’ he says. ‘Somethin’ new up my sleeve.’”

Raúl had a similar response. “There are times when you just can’t reach him, that’s all.”

“What, you don’t know where he is?”

Raúl chuckled. “No, Pollie, I mean, you talk to him, but he’s just not there. He’s gone.”

“I see. But, can I see him?”

Raúl grumbled with unexpected impatience. ”He doesn’t want to be bothered.”

“But—”

“Pollie. You just got to listen to me about this. Eshu’s thinking about things. He’s, like, in solitary, you know? Contemplatin’ stuff.”

Pollard went to his office, and then returned to the bench every morning and every afternoon for the next several days. His desk took on an uncustomary messiness, its usual pristine orderliness suffering some sort of distraction. Paperwork remained outside the manila folders in which it had hitherto been so carefully organized. Parts of documents fell to the floor. He missed the wastebasket when getting rid of stuff, something that had almost never happened before. Pollard spent long periods of time looking out the window. Standing in the glass-intensified light, watching the passing crowds on the High Line down below, he sighed with the continuing absence of Eshu’s raggedy speech and drooped shoulders.

He went out one day at lunchtime, to get a hot dog from Osvaldo, when, suddenly, like a strike of hurried lightning, he heard the dissonant jangle of bells coming up the Twenty-sixth Street stairs, the scattered clopping of dozens of hooves, the confused baa-ing and cacophony of animals hurrying up from the street. A dozen goats burst onto the High Line.

Eshu came up behind them, a long stick in his hands, his voice shouting out orders at the goats in no perceptible language. He was herding them, directing them, consoling them.

There was immediate delight among the children on the High Line. Held back by their parents, taken up into their parents’ arms, they nonetheless were charmed by the animals, amazed by them. Eshu herded the goats into a circle and started inviting people to come look at them. Especially the children, who seemed so much better prepared to be entertained by the goats than were their parents. iPhones came out. Cameras, pictures, laughter....

Just as quickly, a phalanx of policemen came up the stairs. They charged the goats, the children now being grabbed up by their parents, pulled away, pulled from harm.

The police ran for the goats. They carried billy clubs and wore flak jackets and helmets with plastic face guards.

“Hang on, guys,” Pollard shouted. None of the officers acknowledged him. They surged ahead, intent on the goats. “This isn’t necessary.”

One of the policemen approached him, pointing at him with his billy club. “You! Sir! Get out of the way.”

Pollard grabbed him by the elbow. “Son, you don’t need to do this.” The cop punched him in the ribs with the end of his stick, and Pollard went down.

The goats stampeded. Eshu had lost control of them, and the animals scattered, seeking alarmed escape. The neck bells rattled and rang gracelessly. Parents ran away with their children. Some hid behind benches. Others sought the stairways leading to the street below. The goats appeared to turn on the tourists, to attempt to defend themselves against them, although Pollard, rolling over in pain and watching, could tell that they were themselves just scared of the rampaging police. The goats were trying to get out of the way. They were as afraid of the cops as the tourists were.

As the goats scattered, so did Eshu’s mind. He attacked the police with his stick, flailing at them with it. A few of them retaliated, and Eshu took two severe blows. A club to the head brought a spatter of blood down his face, and as he knelt to try to recover himself, he was kicked from behind. He sprawled on the walkway but recovered so quickly that he once more rose up and continued shouting, still attempting to fight the police off. But they backed him from the walkway, into and through a large plot of flowers, toward the side wall of the High Line. Continuing to defend himself, Eshu was staggered by a rough blow to his left shoulder.

Pollard stood, holding his ribs, bent over in pain. “Officers! Stop!”

Eshu raised a fist. He railed at the cops, shouting that they were nothing but maricones and mama ñemas. Finally, lurching backwards, driven and shouting the whole way, he fell over the low railing to the street below.

—

The following day, a spontaneous altar arrangement appeared before the entrance to Basoalto Auto Repair and Wrecking. The central object was a cross made from spliced-together pieces of painted wood, nailed upright to a wooden plank. To either side of the cross was a black-and-white photograph of Eshu in a metal frame. Or at least Pollard supposed that they were of Eshu. One showed him at the age of about fourteen, dressed in a suit coat, a white shirt and tie, glaring at the camera. He looked like he had just won a prize at school, the look on his face of dazzled hilarity. The other photo showed him standing on the railroad tracks of the old West Side Freight Line, about twenty years old, two goats posing with him, all three, as it were, smiling for the camera. Both photos were brown-yellow with age. A collection of candles had also been assembled, many of them now lit, big and small, slender and fat. Wax puddled up and down their shafts or at their feet, bunched and piled. A dozen new votive candles sat in a cardboard box to the side, to be lit, Pollard assumed, by passersby. A few art objects also lay about the altar, small statues of the Virgin Mary, little skulls made of hardened sugar and painted with food dye, an old rosary, and many, many indistinct amulets, stones and shells.

Osvaldo had wheeled his stand to the sidewalk outside the garage and was open for business.

A line had formed at the stand. A lot of children accompanied by their mothers stood behind homeless men and women and other general passersby, while a half block away, a group of chatting New York City firemen approached. Pollard knew there was a station on West Thirty-first Street.

He stood to the side of the stand. He felt all right, although his bruised ribs had been wrapped at the hospital the night before. Quickly, the line grew and grew.

Osvaldo shook Pollard’s hand. He had heard about the lawyer’s attempt to protect Eshu. Pollard sipped from the cold Coke that the vendor had given him.

“Listen, Osvaldo, could you give everyone a dog today? Everybody who comes here?”

“Of course, I always do that.”

“But I mean, on the house, like you did for me the other day.”

Osvaldo placed a hand on the counter-top, his gaze centered on Pollard as though the attorney were out of his mind. “Listen, there are going to be hundreds of people here today.”

“Hundreds!”

“Yeah, everybody knew Eshu.”

“I…I know that.”

“You’re talkin’ thousands of dollars.”

Pollard lowered his attaché case to the sidewalk, hunkered down and opened it. From among the half-dozen manila folders holding sheets of paper covered with tight, word-processed paragraphs—many, many paragraphs, one after another—he took his billfold and, turning his back to the ever more lengthening line, removed ten hundred-dollar bills. “I’ll pay. This’ll get you through the morning, won’t it?”

Osvaldo gawked at the bills. “Sure, but—”

“Keep a tab.” Pollard looked back over his shoulder at the line, now being joined by some uniformed bus drivers, a few street workers in neon-yellow-striped jackets and hard hats. There was even a policeman, a Latino of some sort, who had removed his hat and was saying with obvious feeling to one of the bus drivers that this was a disaster, that it shouldn’t have happened, that…. The policeman shook his head, grimacing and appearing to Pollard to be anguished, perhaps in mourning.

“I’m good for it,” Pollard said. He pushed the money into Osvaldo’s hands and glanced into the garage. “I’ve got to go to the bank, and I’ll be back this afternoon. But first, I want to talk with Raúl.”

—

Raúl lowered his head, his hands in the pockets of his work pants. He leaned against the fender of a blue Volvo.

Pollard buttoned the suit jacket. “You know, I’ve never paid attention to crazy people on the street.”

“That’s for sure, a guy like you.” Raúl gestured toward the sidewalk outside, and the now joyful crowd that was gathered around Osvaldo’s stand. A few musicians had arrived. “You don’t have to, like we do down here.”

“But you paid extra attention to Eshu.”

Raúl nodded as he studied a couple of spots of engine oil on the shop floor. His teeth worked, causing his mouth to shift back and forth. “You’ll never get how much we loved him, Pollie.”

Pollard suddenly went back over his years at O’Rourke Testi Moody Grumbold, and how few of the conversations that he had there were like the ones he had had with Eshu, Raúl, and Osvaldo. None, in fact. “Look, I miss Eshu,” he said. “How many times do you get to talk with the raven?”

Raúl grinned. “He told you that, too, eh?”

“Yes. Or the Zulu? Or the zombie?”

A long silence ensued, during which Raúl mourned.

“What can I do, Raúl? Please.”

Raúl removed his glasses and wiped the front surfaces of them against his shirt. He replaced the glasses. “You’re a lawyer, no?”

“Yes.”

“All right, come with me.”

They walked to the back of the garage, to the single iron door with a small window in it, the one taped with cardboard. As they approached the door, Raúl looked over his shoulder toward the shop entrance, toward the firemen waiting with the rest of the throng for free hot dogs. Seeing that everyone outside was for the moment occupied with the party atmosphere, he reached for the doorknob and gestured to Pollard to follow him.

A sparse vacant lot, surrounded by the backsides of other low brick buildings, contained a large shack in one corner. More a small barn, it featured a couple of oblong tin water buckets in front and several shallow metal bowls with animal feed of some sort. Six very old goats lay in the lot in the morning sun. Grizzled, all of them.

 “These are all that’s left.” Raúl looked toward the door, which had closed behind him. “You know, they were too old to get to the tracks yesterday, even though, man, I can tell you they wanted to go. We used to be able to keep the goats in a vacant lot, which our father did for years, and then Eshu after him. Over on—”

“Twenty-fifth.”

Raúl looked up, surprised. “You been there?”

“I used to go and visit them.”

Raúl scratched his head, shrugging. “But now, we’re not supposed to keep them. The city would get after us if they knew. So…” He approached one of the goats and leaned over to pet the animal. The goat stopped chewing for a moment, enjoying the affection. “The neighbors, they keep it quiet, too. They like the goats. They…they…” Raúl sighed, lowering his head.

The goat sought another caress.

“Would you help us with the city?” Raúl stood back and placed his hands in his pockets. The goat observed him, the animal’s look that of a companion offering solicitude.

Pollard leaned over and pet the goat as well. “So that you won’t have to give them up?”

“Yeah. We want to keep them here.” Raúl studied the animals, and Pollard easily saw how much they meant to him. “All of them.” He fingered the ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket.

Pollard barely hesitated. He knew that Cassandra would have enjoyed being here, and suddenly felt that, in fact, she was. “Sure, I’ll do it.”

“We don’t have any money to pay you.”

“Nah. The money doesn’t matter, Raúl.”

The vacant lot, the shed, and the plainspoken wood chips that covered the ground began to change. Gradually, they became for Pollard a wooded glen, a meandering pathway leading through forests deciduous and evergreen, through ferns that opened themselves to the light, across rock-clinging mosses and strewn-about boulders lined with veins of obsidian and shining silver, the light itself filtered by the trees, glimmering between them in narrow shafts, through which beacon-like bugs floated and twirled, bringing the light to further light as they passed.

All the goats were chewing and, were it not so silent, you would think that they were talking, although not in a babble of amused, crazy monologues. Rather, they were conversing, asking questions, and pursuing suggestions. A charm of goldfinches fluttered about, above which a kettle of soaring hawks kept watch. Were there an ocean in view, Pollard would have expected to see a fluther of jellyfish or a shoal of mackerel. But in fact he noticed friendly swarms and flights of every kind of bright insect, a fleet of mud hens, a parliament of owls, and many others, all of them back and forth, talking, discoursing.

He felt Cassandra’s hand caressing his. “Pollard…love.” Together, they listened to it all. Raúl listened too. Talk of birth. Shades and phantasms. Rain falling. The bird rising. Who the gods were, so many of them, so diverse, yet all of them telling tales of the beginning of life and its end, of children supplanting their parents, the living and the dead, of humans changed to celestial creatures…the raven, the fox, the coyote, the leaf off the tree.

© Copyright 2017. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

Note: “The High Line” is a story from my collection titled New York, so named because all the stories take place in that city. Available everywhere.

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