Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold (32 page)

Brother Charley nodded sagely. “Lots of city kids are that way. I had a friend who moved to Arkansas. After three weeks she came back to Yonkers. She said the quiet just drove her nuts. And she was terrified of the snakes and the bugs.”

Nora chuckled. “She’d rather deal with muggers and boom boxes?”

Brother Charley shared her amusement. “Yep. That was what she knew. People can learn to live with just about anything.”

“Including a lot of things they should never have to live with in the first place,” Father Francis said.

Everyone nodded their heads. The results of the evil of societal breakdown were all around them, and too many—especially children—grew up accepting that the kind of abuse they lived with was normal.

“Well, that’s why the Lord sent us here,” Father Francis said briskly after a moment. “Blessed be His name. Speaking of which, how are plans going for the Feast of the Assumption tomorrow?” He turned to Father Bernard.

“We’re having a party for the neighborhood people,” Father Bernard explained to Nora, and cleared his throat. “At noon, we’ll have a procession with the Blessed Sacrament around the block, and pray the rosary when we return to the church. Then, refreshments in the courtyard. Brother Charley has been stockpiling Danishes and doughnuts from the local bakeries. I think we’ve managed to get some juice—Brother Matt is picking it up tomorrow from the Knights of Columbus. That’s about it.”

“What about something for the kids?” Brother Leon asked. “I mean, they’ll love the procession and the doughnuts, but isn’t there something we can do for them?”

“I haven’t had any brilliant ideas,” confessed Father Bernard. “I mean, it’s not like it’s Christmas and we can have the novices put on Santa Claus costumes and clown around. It’s a bit more serious.”

“What about a play?” Brother Matt asked, suddenly inspired. “We could put on a short play on the church steps, like they did in the Middle Ages.”

“All right, you novices come up with something,” Father Bernard said. “Something about Mary would be good.”

“And which of them is going to be Mary?” Father Francis asked, sipping his coffee with his eyebrows raised.

“Nora!” the three novices chorused, and Nora looked up from her soup bowl to find all eyes on her.

“That is, if you want to,” Matt said, embarrassed.

She paused, and swallowed the food in her mouth. “I’m not an actress.”

“That’s fine. None of us are actors,” Leon assured her.

“Wait, but what are we going to do? Act out Mary’s Assumption?” Brother Charley scratched his head. “Uh, that might be a bit complicated.”

“No problem!” Leon said expansively. “We’ll hook up a pulley to Brother Herman’s scaffold and have Nora raised up into the heavens...how does that sound, Nora?”

“Perhaps something a little less ambitious,” Nora said softly as the others chuckled.

“I’ve got it,” Father Francis said suddenly. “Why not the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe? There are a lot of Hispanics in this neighborhood. They’ll love it.”

“Fantastic! That way, all you have to do is appear, Nora, and hand Juan Diego a bunch of roses.” Matt pointed to an image on the wall. “Can you dress up like the image that appeared on Juan Diego’s tilma?” he asked.

They all turned to look at the picture of Mary, dressed in a cloak covered with stars, standing on a crescent moon, rays of the sun coming out all around her.

“She’s dressed as an Aztec princess,” Brother Leon said. He had always loved that picture, especially Mary’s mild face.

 “I can do the narration,” said Matt. “Charley, you be the bishop. And Leon can be Juan Diego.”

“We don’t have to be too fancy with costumes, but I can do some things. Nora, what do you have in the storeroom?” Brother Herman asked. “If you get me a sheet for a poncho, I can sketch Our Lady on it. Leon, you can wear it inside out until the scene with the bishop. Then you can step offstage and reverse it. Then when you come on to see the bishop, you can empty out the roses at his feet and voila!” he gestured.

“That would be great!” Leon enthused.

“And if you can find me something like a blue sheet, I could paint stars on it, and that would work for a mantle for you, Nora,” Brother Herman went on.

“I think there is a pale blue sheet there, actually,” Nora nodded, still looking unsure.

“
Hermano
Herman, you could use the canvas from your drop cloths for a poncho,” Brother Leon suggested.

“What about that monstrous pink dress?” Nora asked suddenly, turning to Leon. “That might make a good robe for Our Lady. I think it’ll fit me—it’s huge, but I could belt it.”

“With a purple or black sash,” Brother Herman said.

“There’s a bunch of old neckties—I can use one of those,” Nora said. She sighed. “All right, you win. I’ll do it.”

“Hurray!” the novices cheered.

They were such an odd company—a half dozen or so bearded men in gray and one black and white girl, seated round a rough table in a squalid kitchen. But from the roars of unchecked laughter that engulfed them, it was evident that there was a unique bond melding. A ring of plain metal set with the jewel of a girl.

Yes, it was unusual, Brother Leon reflected. It would not last—there was little practical way Nora could remain with them. But the image was a lasting one, and he tucked it away in his store of memory as an unusual glint of light from the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s odd reflection.

“Well, thank you for lunch. Let me see if I can find the dress,” Nora said after they had prayed grace after meals.

“And the blue sheet,” said Brother Herman.

Brother Leon followed them out to the vestibule, and halted in admiration at the neat stacks of folded trousers and shirts, and the rows of coats hanging from pipes fitted into the niches on the sides.

“This looks great!” he said. “It must have been a lot of work.”

“I was happy to do it,” Nora said, sorting through a handful of ties that were hanging from a wire hanger bent into a loop. “Here’s a blue one—and a purple one.”

“Where’s that sheet?” Brother Herman asked.

“Over there with the dresses,” Nora said. “I threw everything that wasn’t men’s clothing over here.” Brother Herman began to dig through a pile that represented the last bit of the former chaos.

Leon was still shaking his head. “It’s neat to see how your hours of work have paid off—” he was saying, when suddenly Brother Herman stopped with a puzzled look. He fished in the pile and pulled out a crumpled brown paper bag. “What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s just some junk jewelry and loose buttons I found among the other things,” Nora said dismissively. But when Brother Herman emptied some of the contents into his hand, she paused. Leon stared. Inside the bag were dozens of pink, green, and white pills.

III

In the crisscrossing madness of Grand Central, Bear almost lost the man, but he caught a glimpse of him strolling down the ramps to the Metro North trains. On this lazy Saturday afternoon, the commuter rails were nearly deserted, so Bear had to be more careful. He slowed his steps and paused by a bank of ticket machines, keeping his eyes on the man. His target meandered up and down several terminals before choosing the Harlem line.

Bear slipped down to the platform when the man’s back was turned, and waited behind a pillar, wondering if he should just go up and speak to the man in this public place. But before he could act, a train pulled up, and the man got in the first car, which was empty. A crowd of day-camp kids surged down to the platforms, their counselors shouting, “Hurry! Everyone stay together!” Bear joined their melee as they piled into the second car of the train. No one else got on.

The camp kids shouted and ran around the car as the counselors tried to get them to sit down. Making his way through them, Bear walked to the front of the car and squinted through the Plexiglas windows of the barrel doors at the front of the car. He couldn’t see much, but he could see the broad-shouldered shape of the man. It looked like he was sitting down, reading a paper.

A conductor walked through the car and Bear bought a ticket for White Plains. As the train started with a burst of air that sounded like a dragon gasping, Bear sat down, giving one last look at the man’s black cloth-covered shoulders. Only New Yorkers would wear black in this heat.

Emerging into the artificial daylight of the Harlem station, the train deposited the day camp kids. The big man didn’t move. Neither did Bear. Now the train was empty, except for himself and the man. Bear wondered if the man knew he was being followed.

Through the darkness of the underground the train surged, and Bear looked out the window next to him. His eyes focused on his own reflection upon black. No other reality was present, just the man in black and himself on a train speeding out of the underbelly of the City. The phantom of Blanche, the white and black girl he was seeking, hovered in his thoughts. Maybe they were both seeking her.

The cell phone rang, and he answered it automatically. “Fish?”

“Where are you? Where is my phone? I’m still at the banquet hall, reduced to asking to use their phone. Rita said you left.”

“I’m following the man on a train heading North to Hartsdale.”

 His brother groaned. “I
knew
something like this would happen if we split up. Okay, what’s your position?”

“Uh, we’re getting towards Melrose, I think,” Bear said, glancing at a train map he had picked up.

“All right. I’ll get Rose off to her house, and then I’ll drive up that way as soon as I can.”

“Right.” Bear hung up, and focused again on his quarry as the train emerged from the tunnel into daylight. A sun boiled somewhere in the haze in the vaguely western end of the City. They were coming to a station.

The big shoulders stood up and started to move. Like the shadow that he was, Bear watched him go, and then followed.

The man hurried down the steps of the train platform to the parking lot, his paper rolled in his hand like a truncheon. But as Bear walked down the steps, he saw the man pounding up the staircase that led to the other side of the platform as a southbound train pulled into the station. The big man was doubling back on his trail.

Slowly Bear crossed to the staircase as the man vanished over the top. Tense, he waited at the base of the steps, listening as the train screeched to a stop. Then he slowly climbed up the steps until he could look over the edge of the platform. There he got a glimpse of the man getting onto the train. The third car.

Bear took a deep breath and waited. The conductor made his last call for passengers, signaled the engineer, and the four-car train started to leave. Bear hurried up the steps as the train began to pull away, and sprinting, grabbed the door handle and leapt onto the last car just as it cleared the platform.

“You shouldn’t do that!” the conductor reprimanded him. “Very dangerous!”

“Sorry,” Bear said, pulling out his wallet and buying another ticket.

He knew he had better call Fish again and tell him he was now heading in the opposite direction, but first he wanted to locate his quarry. Moving through the empty car in the same direction as the train, Bear opened the barrel door in the front of the train and stepped onto the small platform between the cars. A rubber diaphragm kept him from falling between the cars to the tracks, which clattered beneath his feet. The yellowed plastic of the next car’s window was too opaque to see through, so Bear cracked the door. The car was empty, except for his prey.

Then the train roared into the tunnel again and all was black.

He cracked the door again as they rushed deeper into the tunnel. The man was moving. He was walking forward to the front of the car and yanking something red. For a moment, Bear wondered what he was doing, but then there was a long wheeze of compressed air and the cars clanked together harshly beneath Bear’s feet. Grabbing the safety handles on the back of the car, he realized the train was coming quickly to a halt. The emergency break had been pulled and the train was stopping...

The train was several hundred yards into the twilight of the tunnel entrance. Bear could make out arches beside the track, running by swiftly but more and more slowly as the train ground to a halt. He looked back at the man, and saw he was pulling the door handle to open the door. Then he was gone.

Bear immediately guessed what had happened. The man knew he was still being tailed, and was trying to lose his pursuer in a most unconventional manner.

And most people, Bear thought, would give up the chase at this point. He didn’t like the look of the tunnel himself.
But there was Blanche—

With a bare pause, he crashed through the barrel door into the car, yanked open the back door and jumped out into the hot roar of the dragon’s cave.

The noise outside the train was horrendous, and Bear got away from it as fast as he could. He went with his instincts: that the man was switching directions again and running towards the tunnel entrance.

Black on black is nearly impossible to see, but Bear tried to orient himself. He made out the third rail, a metal cable to his left running parallel to the tracks, with the words DANGER 700 VOLTS spray painted on it at regular intervals. He could make out the light from the north end of the tunnel, a barely-seen glow, and started towards it, giving the cable a wide berth. The row of archways was to his right, and beyond them were two other train tracks with more pillars and arches in between. The tunnel must be some kind of merge point for several rail lines.