On an overcast summer morning, Raymond, seven years old and free from school for another month, was stepping in and out of the long sweeping shadows the blinds made on the living room rug. Just a little while ago, his mother was clanking across the kitchen floor in her high heels and then clanking across the bare floorboards in the hallway before she went out the door.

His father was sitting on a kitchen stool, in the robe that looked like it was shot through with bullets, drinking from a cup of black coffee, the fringe of hair he had left around his head sticking up in furry needles. His scalp looked patchy, with areas of red surrounded by pale, flesh-colored plateaus. Raymond felt squeamish when he looked at it. His father’s hands shook on the cup and the coffee formed a dark pool on the white table in front of him.

Raymond didn’t think it was fair that he was yelled at all the time for spilling things. Yesterday it was a bottle of his father’s black shoe polish, that turned over by accident as Raymond skipped past, pouring into the neat, ceramic tiles of the coffee table, so that his father had to rub it out with a washcloth dipped in Pine Sol. It didn’t work anyway; it stained the cloth and the cracks remained black, but Raymond thought it looked fine. His father yelled at him and punched his fist in the air, which cleared Raymond’s head by about a foot. He knew he didn’t mean to hit him, that he was just whacking at the bad child who had come out of Raymond and done a bad thing. But it would be of no use to remind his father of that now, as he sat with the spilled coffee in front of him. His father was in a bad mood in the mornings, his dark brows webbed together with a bulge of worried skin above his nose. Raymond had already learned to dress himself and he did it perfectly, only sometimes he would purposely button his shirt crooked, putting the top button in the second buttonhole, so that his mother would have to stop what she was doing, pull him over and unfasten him. She would congratulate him anyway, for he’d been careful to do everything else correctly, the zipper on his shorts, the laces on his sneakers. He didn’t want her to think of him as a dummy, like his cousin Tal, who everyone referred to as “slow”.

He walked up to his father and peered up at his heavy whiskered jaw and hairy nostrils. When he opened his mouth he could see his dark yellow teeth, some of them crossing over each other, his lips when he pressed them against his cup, got all white and pale. His mother told him that he mustn’t bother his father, that he often didn’t feel well, and she reminded Raymond how he felt when he had a cold or even worse, a stomachache. Sometimes his father looked to Raymond like he was very old. His mother told him he had troubles with his heart. It embarrassed him a bit, when the other kids brought their fathers to events at school and they were all so robust and keen and his father seemed to wilt next to him, lisping to the side like a rotting ship. He didn’t understand what his mother meant about his heart and wondered if his father was sad.

He passed him, careful not to make too loud a sound on the floor as he went by, keeping his hands close to his body and stepped into the living room where his parents slept. The convertible was still opened out in the room and the bars from the blinds gave a fuzzy texture to the humped-up sheets. He went into the bedroom and threw himself on his double bed. Something hurt under his ribs, it was a stuffed giraffe. Most of his stuffed animals slept with him at night. Under the covers he felt their soft fur against his feet and in the crook of his arms, and lay his face against his favorite, a zebra named Luis, who smelled like sawdust. Sometimes he would wake up and find the soft imprint of Luis’ head in his face, the impression of its fur fanning out in tender spokes across his cheek.

His mother told him it was cruel to have a real animal in such a small apartment, that he would feel cooped up and unhappy. It didn’t make sense to Raymond, who dreamed night and day about having his own dog. Wasn’t he already taller than a lot of the dogs he saw on the street? Yet he lived inside an apartment. He sat up and lined up the animals so that they formed a train at the foot of his bed, Harry, a striped tiger acting as the caboose. He laboriously pulled the animals across the bed, using the lumped-up blankets to impersonate mountains and the deep well made by the pressure of his knees as valleys, but he was careful to hoot only very softly.

His father didn’t like sound, he knew this about him, not only because he got mad at him if he made any, but because after he had his coffee, he’d sit in front of a silent keyboard, which he placed on the coffee table and pad his fingers in various combinations across it. His father had been a musician. He’d made a mistake on the first day of kindergarten when his teacher asked him what his father did for a living, and he said he was a magician and got all this wonder and attention from his classmates and hadn’t yet set them right about it. His mother said that the apartment was too small for a real piano, but that his father had the sounds of the notes in his head – invisible to everyone else but playing for him as clearly as anything.

After Raymond tired of playing the train game, he went into the living room and found his father already kneeling in front of the table, leaning over the mute board. He sat cross-legged beside him. His father’s playing became a strange geometry in his head, the notes arching up toward the ceiling in the same invisible curls as the cigarettes his father inhaled but never lit, circles within circles, tunnels of sound like the caves he made with the blankets that he would roll his animals through. The keys made a gentle thudding sound against the green cloth under them, and his father swayed a little. He didn’t seem aware that Raymond was there and would bump into him sometimes as his wrist suddenly crossed over to the extreme right side of the keyboard. But Raymond didn’t mind because he knew his father meant no harm, that he was only inside the music in his head.

When he was finished, he stiffly raised himself and carried the keyboard back to the top shelf of the hall closet. The apartment seemed suddenly empty and silent.

“Do you want something for lunch?”

“Yes” Raymond said, “Peanut butter.”

“That’s what you had yesterday”. Still his father went into the kitchen, his leather slippers slapping against the floor. He made the sandwich with raisin bread, which was Raymond’s favorite and sliced the brown part of an apple on top of it. They sat at the table, Raymond on a telephone book, his father drinking from a fresh mug of coffee. He only saw his father eat at dinnertime, when his mother came home and made mashed potatoes and peas and hamburgers. Maybe she made other things too, but it seemed to Raymond that it always looked the same on his plate: something white, something green and something brown, with a glass of milk. He liked to watch his father whack the ketchup bottle, it always came out too much and drowned his potatoes and peas.

After lunch, his father put on his socks and the thick shoes he had polished the day before-polish coming off on his fingers as he tied them and took Raymond down the three narrow flights of stairs to the street. Raymond wore only a sweater over his T-shirt and shorts, yet it felt too warm when they opened the door and entered the heat of Lexington Avenue.

Raymond was proud of himself because that day he had not fallen down the stairs. He seemed to do it frequently, moving too fast, so his foot caught on the steel rim of the steps. Once he’d fallen with such momentum that he rolled all the way down the flight, hitting his head against Mrs. Yosi’s door. She came out of the apartment and when she saw what had happened went back inside for ice and a washrag. But it didn’t hurt so much. His father stood next to him, his hands in his pockets.

But today he hadn’t fallen, he had carefully aligned himself to his father’s gait, fitting his whole foot into each rectangular step. His father took his hand when they got outside and, to Raymond’s joy, turned them in the direction of the park. When they had gotten as far as Fifth Avenue, Raymond, who had been as quiet and cooperative as he possibly could, looked up at his father’s shaven face as they waited for the light.

“Daddy I was thinking that if we got a little dog, a very small one, it wouldn’t need much exercise and I could carry him around, so that he wouldn’t make on the carpet, and we could take him to the park-”

“No!” His father held his hand as they crossed the street so tight that his fingers were crushed together, and the nail of his thumb pressed painfully into his palm.

“But a little dog like that one that Mrs. Yosi has.”

“I told you no.” His father stopped and faced him. “Do you still want to go to the park?” He didn’t wait for an answer and Raymond knew that his father had won. He walked silently beside him, doodling with the shape of the dog of his mind, the one that would be like Mrs. Yosi’s except he wouldn’t put something as wimpy as a barrette in his hair. He hardly noticed that they had come to the 80th Street entrance of the park, but as they crossed the threshold there came to him the smell of cherry blossoms and dogwood flowers. The trees were full around him. He stopped so he could pull his sweater off and tie it around his waist. They were walking up the hill and turning right to the Needle, the pointed cement tower that came from the time of the Egyptians. They found a bench under the thin white branch of a tree. His father took out a small pad and retractable metal pen, which he would not let him touch and Raymond peered up at the stone prism in front of them, its great geometric tower reaching so high up and with so sharp a point, Raymond wondered that it didn’t pierce a cloud.

His father bent wordlessly over his notepad, scribbling rows of numbers and words in tiny script. He’d get annoyed with him in a moment, anyway, reading over his arm. He wanted to show his father how clever he was at reading, that he could even, if given the chance, decipher the pinched, shaky script he put on the tiny pad. Instead, he looked ahead of him, through the sunlight that glanced against the stone wall of the obelisk. He got up and skipped around it and then reversed himself and skipped around the other side. He hopped backwards, making sharp pointed circles and imagined he was drawing a tight coil around the tower so that any minute it might spring loose and shoot through outer space.

Suddenly, around one of the sides, a girl appeared in a bright red dress, an orange nylon jump rope in her palms. She was slightly taller than he, with pale skin and curled hair. He watched her as she followed a course on the outer quadrants of the needle, as if she were jumping through invisible squares. He watched the intricate geometry she created and then stepped forward when she missed a step, the rope catching on the strap of her shoe.

“Are you O.K.?”

She looked at him without surprise, as if the sudden appearance of a boy were a frequent occurrence. “Oh, I just spilled. I do it all the time.” There was something pretty about her face when she spoke, the way her lips lifted and showed her missing front tooth.

He stood back as she started another square.

“Can I try it?” She was passing him again.

She stopped and putting the handles together, handed him the rope. He had never done it before. It was too long for him, and he tripped on it. He expected at any second to hear her laugh, which he knew that girls tended to do at odd moments, but she just took the rope back, rolled it up in his hands and did a couple of skips through it before it snagged again. It was a lot to keep track of, between the excess rope in his hands and the timing of his feet, his knees and his arms. He sensed that timing played a part. He walked over to his father who made a strange angle with the tree behind him as he leaned into his pad.

“I can jump rope, look!” He did two perfect jumps in a row and then snagged on the third just as his farther looked up.

“No, let me do it again.” He tried several times and snagged each time, on the last occasion getting the rope tangled around his leg. His father didn’t seem to be looking at him anyway, he was scrunching his eyebrows together, looking past him at the girl and through her maybe to the obelisk. Then he returned to his pad.

“My name is Elizabeth” the girl said.

“Raymond.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“My friends call me Ray.”

“Oh, that’s better.” She shook his hand. Hers was sweaty and a little sticky in the middle.

She was a pretty girl; he liked the golden strands of her hair. If they were in school together, he might have made her his girlfriend, but the Park was different. Sometimes he’d meet nice kids at the playground and then never see them again. You had to be cautious.

She started jumping rope again, across the square and onto the path that led to it. He followed her down a few yards to the foot of the hill, the grassy lawn surrounding them on either side and in the distance the castle and the little algae-filled pond in front of it.

“I want to show you something” she said. He followed her to a little sandy hill, that bracketed the tunnel. She pointed to a mound of earth with a popsicle stick sticking out of it.

“Can you read?”

“Of course.” She pulled out the stick and gave it to him. It said, “Lucky, June 15th.” He handed it back.

“This is the grave I made for a little bird I found by the pond over there. It must have fallen from its nest. It had no hair, and its little heart was beating so you could see it through its chest. But it was crippled. I took it here and buried it.”

“You buried it alive?”

“Almost not alive. Half-dead. It couldn’t move. I knew that it would smother.”

“Maybe it’s not dead yet.”

“Of course, it is. Things die when they can’t breathe.”

“Don’t you want to dig it up and see?”

“No.” He turned from her and looked away. Across a patch of grass and down another road was the pond.

Raymond longed to see the pond up close, to bathe both his feet in it and build a castle on its muddy shore. But his father had only taken him there once. He said you couldn’t find enough shade.

“Let’s go to the pond.”

“I’m not supposed to” Raymond said, feeling ashamed.

“I go wherever I want.”

“Where is your mother?”

“I don’t know. Maryann takes me here.”

“Who is that-your sister?”

“My governess.”

“What’s that?”

“A person who takes care of children. She’s waiting for me on the other side of the tunnel”. Raymond tried to see through to its other side, but it was too dark.

“She lets me go wherever I want if I come back. She likes to sit and read the newspaper. That’s all she does.”

Raymond was amazed and looked at the girl with nervous awe.

“There are all these pussy willows and sometimes you see dragonflies. I caught one the other day.”

Raymond felt himself reddening. “I can’t.”

“Oh, come on!” but she saw he wasn’t going to change his mind.

“Well, suit yourself”.  She took off down the road, jumping rope as she went, faster and faster. He watched her all the way to the pond and then he turned back and slowly walked back up the hill to the Needle. His father was where he left him, crouched over his notebook.

“I want to go to the pond Daddy”. Raymond said. His father squinted at him.

“No. We’re going to leave soon anyway.”

“But it’s early.”

“I have to get back. I’ve got things to do. And your mother said you must fold your clothes and make your bed.”

“This sucks” Raymond said as he sat down and his father cuffed him in the back of the head. Raymond started to cry, glad that the girl couldn’t see him, but anyway, she was already part of a different world, with her bright hair and jump rope and governess, a world of ponds and castles that he was never going to get close to again.

He felt like kicking his father’s heavy shoe, but he probably wouldn’t even feel it, he was so engrossed in his numbers. Raymond imagined Elizabeth wading into the pond. He imagined the green water surrounded by lily pads and beneath the surface, schools of flying fish and turtles and sea horses, a kingdom where you could breathe underwater. He could sit under the waves like a king, Belvedere castle upside down in the water and Elizabeth, turned into a mermaid, could sit by his right side, where he held his scepter planted in the mushy bottom. He looked at his father, under the brim of the straw hat which he wore all summer and he thought, you are keeping me from it. For Raymond was certain it was a magic pond-it had to be.

In the late afternoon his father tucked his pad back in his pocket and hooked the pen to his breast pocket and that was the signal for Raymond, who was playing with some broken twigs at his feet, that it was time to go. He had found in the twigs, the odd shapes he sometimes saw in clouds. One had a splintered stump on the end of it that resembled the head of a short-eared dog, maybe a schnauzer. He put the twigs against his waist and tightened his sweater around them.

They walked down the small path that led under the tunnel, then out the other side, where Raymond scanned the benches for the mysterious governess that Elizabeth told him about, but not finding her there, concentrated on the pavement in front of him, which led down another hill and finally past the statue of the three bears that sat in front of the playground at its entrance. They passed through to the hot noisy street. Raymond could be as quiet as he wanted when he walked beside his father and, unlike his mother, his father would never ask him why or think that he didn’t feel well. When they had already covered a couple of the blocks from the park, Raymond realized that he had dropped his twig, the most important one, with the dog head. He stopped and unwrapped his sweater and shook himself.

“I dropped my stick. It fell out of my sweater.”

His father turned back up the street. “You’ll get another one tomorrow.” This was in a way a promise, it meant that his father intended to take him to the park again tomorrow. But that didn’t help him now, the stick was missing.

His father was already half a block ahead of him, obviously confident that Raymond would soon come up galloping behind him. Raymond turned and ran in the opposite direction. He went to the far end of the block and covered their tracks slowly, peering into the gritty squares of the sidewalk, along the terraced trees at its edges and around its rounded curbs. He even checked the narrow doorways to the medical offices, but the stick was nowhere in sight. He was aware that his father would be angry if he happened to glance over and find that Raymond was not there. He would notice as soon as he came to a light, because he wouldn’t let Raymond cross the street without taking his hand. He would have to give up his search, so with one last lonesome look around he threw himself into a run back up the block.

His father was no longer ahead of him, at the curb, or as far as Raymond could see into the block ahead. He must have turned a corner, so Raymond did the same. Ahead of him at midblock, he recognized the familiar outline of his father’s hatted frame. He caught up with him and took his hand.

“I couldn’t find it, could we please go back to the park? Please daddy- I dropped it there.” They continued to walk, though it was a different route than they usually took. Raymond didn’t recognize the stores and even the streets smelled funny.

“Where are we going daddy?” Maybe they had to go to the drugstore, that was what his father called it, where he picked up that minty stuff for his nostrils. Or maybe they had to pick up mommy’s clothes at the laundry. They crossed the street and went down another unfamiliar block. He shook his father’s hand roughly.

“Daddy, I want to go back to the park. I must find my stick.”

He looked up and the man who peered down at him from their joined hands was a total stranger.

“Do you want me to take you to the park?” Raymond shook himself free of the man’s grasp and ran back in the direction they had come from.

The universe had turned upside down suddenly. He was like a ship without a compass, everything looked different and sinister, all the buildings and people who were passing rimmed in mystery. He took a right turn and saw the park about a block ahead of him. At least it was something familiar and he walked toward it, feeling himself growing a little stronger, gaining strength as he was pulled by a familiar place. But when he reached the park, he didn’t see the entrance with the statue of the three bears, this opening had a sloping hill and two paths that forked to the left and right in front of him. He wasn’t sure what to do, turn back and retrace his steps? But they were alien streets with strangers. His mother taught him to read the street signs, so he looked at the silver pole on the corner, but it had no metal plate. He wondered if the park had streets. He had crossed a big street alone to get here, which his mother told him never to do, was he supposed to cross again? He looked around to see if there was a police officer who might tell him where he was but there were none around and his mother told him to never talk to strangers unless they were policeman.

He entered the park, taking the road that swelled to the right. His father might look for him at the pond or at the Needle. But as Raymond walked, he wasn’t sure where he was going, the park seemed less and less familiar, the tall dark trees hung over the path like hunched goblins. It was already not as light as it had been and there were shadows on the road in front of him. He sat on a bench and tied his shoelaces. He was a little cold and pulled his sweater over his head. There was no one on the benches that lined the path except an old woman with a shopping cart in which an old dog was lying down on a pile of blankets. She was feeding a flock of pigeons in front of her from a plastic bag and mumbling out loud. Raymond stood up and continued down the path, the woman cursing him because he had frightened the birds. He didn’t know where he was except that it felt like the dark side of all the places he had ever been, where enchantments were lifted, and people were left in places where the shadows reached long into the night and the ghosts of the dead harbored ill-will toward the living.

Finally, he came to the rise of a steep hill and again the path veered off left and right. He kept to the right and that took him to something familiar, the slope of the hill that led, at its lower end, to the little tunnel. He followed that road, even though it looked different than it had earlier, colored by his being alone and the fading of the light. He walked through the tunnel quickly, and when he came out to the other side, he recognized the gentle swell of dirt where Elizabeth had buried the bird. He walked over to it and pulled up the popsicle stick and then replaced it. Proof that he was on the right road. Ahead of him was the fork that led on the right side to the Needle and on the left to the pond. At his feet were a pile of twigs. He reached down and in the waning light made out the head of the dog. He felt no joy in his discovery, still he picked it up and held it tightly in his palm like a charm and took the road down to the pond.

The surface of the water was gleaming, as if the clouded rays of the sun were cascading a few last beams across. In the distance, the castle was dusted with a silvery glow, watching him like the eyes of a wizard. The pond smelled of something rich and strange. There were marshes of green, slimy things that were almost indistinguishable in their mass and thickness, except for the hairy tails that divided them. He stared at the water, its fragile surface broken by the dragonflies, who seemed to feed on its moldy texture. He got no pleasure out of it, not the kind he would have if he weren’t alone. It suddenly didn’t seem like a magic pond at all, but something dark and treacherous, like the moats he’d read about in books. Ringing the surface in front of him was something he mistook for a twisting snake. He squatted down and looked more closely, the amber twilight throwing its orange glint on the pods and flags of algae surrounding it. He reached out a hand and felt its hard slippery surface and pulled it toward him.

It was Elizabeth’s jump rope- ringed in mud and mildew. Raymond felt joy overtaking him. That meant she must be here. Perhaps there was a world under the surface after all and she had dived down and left her rope as a marker for him. Suddenly he didn’t feel afraid, and he stepped into the pond, forgetting to pull his sneakers off. It wasn’t what he expected, thick and gunky, almost like a quicksand under him. He got hold of the rope and tugged at it. Maybe there was a way to let them know he had arrived. The rope seemed to be tied around something and he imagined it to be a door that opened to the kingdom below, he pulled it again as hard as he could, and something came toward him with such force that he sat down. It was heavy and rotted smelling. He stood up and peered through the shallow water at the strands of golden seaweed that blew out of something round and bulky. He brought it closer and bent over it.

She looked like a mermaid drowned by snakes.  But it was Elizabeth, her hair tangled in milky ringlets, her eyes open and clouded and her dress soaked through and sticking to her body like a dark red paste, the bottom third of the jump rope tied around her neck. He let the rope go and she drifted a little and then started sinking. She did not seem to be sinking to an underground kingdom, but to somewhere dark and thick with decay.

Raymond backed out of the pond, falling on the dark soft soil of the beach and started to cry. He knew that what he had touched was nothing to do with a good enchantment but rather was in the same world as the strange man whose hand he had taken, he felt all around him the shadows stretching over the pond joining hands – the castle that overlooked him possessed of an evil so great that he imagined serpents and snakes snarling back from its shore. Any second they might leap up and bite his feet and pull him back in. He turned around and scrambled up the sandy slope and onto the road, falling a couple of times on his knees and opening a cut his mother had just taken the Band-Aid off that morning.

It was dim now, with a smoky mist that rose from the pond. On the road ahead of him was a large dark tree, its twisted branches stretching over the water as if it were a caldron. As he came closer, he stopped suddenly. Something had drawn his vision to its center and his eyes scanned the trunk. Behind the trunk and visible from the profile was the black silhouette of a man with a hat, peering out toward the pond. With a sudden terror that seemed to rip his heart out of his chest, Raymond took off across the grass that bordered the paths. His knees hurt him terribly and his shorts were torn. The water squished in his sneakers and sticky horrible things seemed to be chewing on his ankles. He stopped when he got to the fork in the paved road. One side led to the tower that stood in the distance like a great shining knight and the other led back through the tunnel. If he took the road through the tunnel, he was certain he could find his way to the street and maybe there would be someone there who could take him home. But then he thought again of the stranger whose hand he had taken and the man behind the tree and without his deciding about it, his feet carried him up the winding path to the tower. He sat on the bench he had shared with his father earlier that day, curling his legs around its edge. Then he saw a shadow, poking out from the right angle of the obelisk. The shape detached itself from the tower and walked toward him.

He covered his eyes and screamed.

“Stop it, Raymond.” He looked up and standing before him like a great tree was his father. He knelt and grabbed his father’s legs. His father pulled him to his feet.

“Let’s go home.” The boy walked beside him, breathing his sobs back in. He couldn’t speak until they had passed through the tunnel and had come out to the other side.

“Daddy, Elizabeth is stuck in the pond. She sank. I tried to get her out, I saw her.”

He wondered if he had spoken out loud for his father registered no reaction at all, he seemed intent on walking, on covering as much distance as possible. Raymond had to skip and run to keep up with him.

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Yes” his father said and bending down put his hands on his shoulders. “But you must stop talking like that. If people hear you, they’ll think you’re crazy and they’ll take you away. Your mother and I will not be able to stop them. Do you understand?”

He shook him so that Raymond felt things falling out of his shorts and socks – squirmy things. “Do you understand?”

“Yes”, Raymond said, and his father took his hand again. When they reached the statue of the bears, Raymond said,

“Daddy I never want to come back to the park again.”

 

Raymond’s mother made him take a bath and change his clothes before dinner. Then they sat at the table, Raymond staring without hunger at the lumps of mashed potatoes and meat and string beans on his plate.

“You two” his mother said, shaking her head. “You take him home smelling like a sewer and you’re no better. Look at your sleeves.” Raymond glanced up at his father, noticing for the first time that his wrists and hands were stained with a faint green paste. He looked at them, seeing the way the green darkened in the crevices and then he looked up at his father’s face, which was closed and pinched, and the deep line his hat had made on his forehead.

He remembered then that he had dropped the twig with the head of the dog again someplace in the park.

“I was thinking that if I had my own dog, I could walk him over to the park myself, but I would never let him go into the pond and get green and slimy. No, I would never go near that pond again if I had a dog.”

Raymond felt his father’s eyes on him. “A dog just like Mrs. Yosi’s, daddy. With shiny white fur.”

“I thought we decided the apartment is too small for a dog” his mother said.

His father shrugged, and giving Raymond a faint smile, reached for the ketchup.

Pia Quintano: New York-based writer/painter. Love to explore the dark side of characters. Received a 5-week MacDowell Colony residency in fiction and have read my stories at the Telephone Bar and Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village. My poetry has appeared in Light, a Poetry Review and Walrus.