Page 14 - WTP Vol. XII #2

While others went to the park to see and be seen, to flirt and promenade, Peter did not. He pre- ferred to ride his bike past the long meadow where the soccer players were cursing their grass-stained knees, down past the duck-pond where the young Puerto Rican girls were throwing beer bottles at the honkers who hid in the weeds, up across the highway bridge where little kids from Duncan Garden Projects peed on cars passing underneath, down onto a dirt path that led through the deserted rushes which grew so high that they swallowed him whole, until finally he left the noisy city behind.
Peter followed the dirt track as it got progressively quieter and only the birds started up at his approach. The redwing blackbirds rocketing out in alarm then settling back down on their nests in the rushes. The males hanging from the reeds sideways, their slight weight swaying the slender shoots forwards and back all the while their eyes darting about in search of dragonflies and cicadas.
Peter rode on down until the thick rushes broke open and he came out upon his Secret Avenue. A neglected and forgotten unpaved road from the last century when the park was built and whose presence was only slightly suggested by the ancient overhanging willow trees that followed it on either side like temple senti- nels for a good hundred yards. The road was built by earlier generations when the whole park down to the river had been used but now, in less affluent and more dangerous times, it had been left to the seasons and the Hackensack River that flowed beside it in the sum- mer morning heat.
Peter loved it there. It was quiescence in the heart of the thundering city. When he rode his bike into the hanging canopy of willow branches the hot summer air dissolved into a cool arboreal cave, the sunlight filtering through the leaves a silent cascade of greens and yellows against the broad ashen trunks, which processed past as he pedaled farther and farther
into their shadowy depths until the lane suddenly ended, stoppered by a huge hummock of red earth and brown roots upthrust from a deep hole where the last willow in the row was felled by a hurricane last Fall and left to hang unceremoniously and ashamedly prone, half of its bulk stretched out above the silty water of the tidal river.
Peter loved that one tree even more than the magical boulevard. It was his aerie! The trunk a ramp of fallen
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wood whose leaves still blossomed and whose roots still drank from the hidden waters beneath the red soil. He thought of it as a fallen yet not defeated giant upon whose back he climbed barefoot like an anthro- poid ape or a pirate into a crosstree over the sweep- ing tidal flow of the river. Then, once in the heights
of the Willow, he propped himself squarely in a fork to scan the horizon for all intruders, and once satis- fied that he was truly alone, he pulled his sketchbook journal from his backpack and began recording the bright lines at the edge of the horizon.
Once little Black boys from the bridge ventured down as he watched their approach keenly from his nest. Inevitably they saw his parked bike and broke into
a scrambling felonious run, not seeing his crouched shape in the overhanging branches, till he dropped silently amongst them and they fell back disjointed and scrambled upon the ground.
But most days, he was alone and safe in his tree to sketch the boys while they stripped to their skins and jumped flailing like windmills into the emerald wa- ters swirling though the submerged branches. Some would crab from the trunk out over the river using bare Popsicle sticks as bait. Every few minutes they’d pull a beautiful Blue Crab from the water and drop
it in a basket pulled from the mudflat. Slowly, they’d fill it with bubbling fury, twenty or thirty crackling crustaceans, their eyestalks so devoid of feeling, just following the shadows like snake-whips dreaming.
Once in a while a curious muskrat would creep to the marsh’s edge and peer out scowl-faced at the noisy intruders then with an animal shrug would slowly turn and disappear into the yellow weeds.
Kids didn’t frighten Peter-by-the-Bay! But he was careful to avoid the adults when he saw them coming. He had a secret way out through the swamps where he’d walk his bike through ankle-deep mud or else, he’d just hide amongst the rushes until they left and he’d return to his magical aerie. But most certainly it was the dogs he feared the most. The feral packs that rooted in the reeds and harbingered the city streets by night. For them he always carried the ice pick in his pack; his sword, his special protection against monsters.
Peter would look out upon the light dazzled waters of the Bay and imagine warships breaking the sound; its sun-speckled distance a sheet of fireworks; the oil
Peter-by-the-Bay
thoMas Belton