Rachel Goes Uptown

Upper Manhattan lay like a stage set just waiting for its big production. An avant garde version of The Nutcracker, perhaps, or something else fantastical and Russian. The snow lay on the ground and along the bare branches and in the gutters as if it had been sifted there. The dark branches on each tree were illuminated; shadows and curves that had been invisible before were shown to their best advantage. God, in his office of Most Holy Decorator, had come down and made Manhattan over.

Rachel stood at the edge of a baseball field in the northernmost reaches of the island of Manhattan and looked across the diamond to the mysterious foothills and forest at the edge of her vision. Between the fog and the dark, those hills were playing peek-a-boo, coyly slipping a leg out and then covering it up again, hinting of deep dark mysteries and pleasures that they wouldn’t show her.

She took a deep drag on her cigarette. The New York winter had taught her a new set of skills: how to smoke while wearing mittens. She could now pop a cigarette out of its pack, light it up, and manipulate it in and out of her mouth without ever exposing any more than her lips to the cold.

“’Orrible Honoré would be proud,” she muttered, and the thought of sharing anything with her former boss disquieted her so much she pulled the burning stick out and stamped it into the ground. Her heavy snow boots, slick with slush and flat as an elephant’s hoof, which Testy claimed were better suited to hiking across Siberia than strolling up and down Broadway, squashed the cigarette all the way into the mud beneath the snow.

“This is the most uptown you can get and not fall in the river,” Testy had told her. “This is where New York got started. Right over there is a the tree where those Indians sold the whole place for thirty shekels, or whatever it was.”

“I think that’s another story.”

And then they'd gone back downtown, and Rachel had never been up this far north again. But tonight, when Belle had repeated Testy’s message, she’d remembered this scene as if it had happened yesterday, for some reason, and now she stood here and looked out over the ball fields with the mist running the bases and the apartment buildings silent to her left and right, and she’d felt certain, somehow, that Testy was up here.

Somewhere. It was a big park.

What in God’s name was the drag queen doing wandering around a dark and abandoned wilderness in the middle of a wet and foggy night? Or any night?

“Although all the rapists and murderers are probably Downtown in their nice, warm apartments,” she said to herself. What self-respecting criminal would stay out on a night like this?

Rachel gave a heavy sigh, pulled out her pack of cigarettes again, successfully performed her mitten trick without lighting her face on fire, and struck out across the field and into the dark.

NEXT POST: ODD COUPLE #2 (Monday 1/25)