Vespers

Six

The Hudson River is one of the most heavily traveled waterways in the world.

The river begins in upstate New York at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondack Mountains and flows 315 miles in a mostly southward direction. It divides New York State from New Jersey for seventeen miles before spilling into the Atlantic Ocean.

Grant’s Tomb, the final resting place of President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, is among the most famous landmarks along the river. This is primarily due to the old joke about “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” and not because the mausoleum is a popular tourist stop. Located in an isolated area off residential Riverside Drive and West 122nd Street, inconvenient to pedestrians because of heavy vehicular traffic to the east, the monument has become a hangout for drug dealers and graffiti artists.

At 150 feet tall, the top of the domed rotunda is one of the highest points on the upper New York City side of the river. Whether travelers are coming south by water or by air, it is considered the beacon that welcomes them to Manhattan.

The bats glided gracefully to the top of the tomb.

Their powerful feet found clawholds in the wind-pitted stone, on the marble knob at the top, at the decorative ridges. Their wings settled gracefully on the sloping sides of the dome, and their bodies slumped forward. Many hung upside down from the eaves. They preferred letting gravity work for them to help them take flight or keep their ears erect.

A strong, persistent river wind washed over and around the monument. A tiny claw at the apex of each wing helped the bats hold on wherever they were. The wind carried with it the strong scents of the city and of the streets directly below.

They listened. First, they listened for the high, drumming cries of their kind. Some of the voices were faint, bouncing here and there before reaching them. The bats focused on the location of the nearest members of the colony. They were coming from a cave in the direction of the lightening sky. They marked the mouth of the cave not just by sight and sound but also where it was relative to the direction of the wind and the first glow of the new day.

The bats would go there-but not yet.

They also listened for the sounds of insects flying toward them. Nourishment for themselves. They listened for the sound of the bat that had summoned them. The bat that had not yet arrived.

A short time later a sound reached them from the north. It grew louder, until finally a large shadow passed over them. A shadow accompanied by a high, whistling cry. A sound that stirred them to activity by its strength and the ringing pain it caused inside the head.

Relaxing their claws, the bats released their grip on the tomb. Some walked awkwardly down the sides as they raised their wings and flew into the dawn. Others just dropped off the sides, snapped out their wings, and took off like flying devils in the wind.

It was days like these that made Barbara Mathis glad she hadn’t gone into another profession.

Look at her husband. Hal had once said that there was nothing worse than being a stockbroker who was heavy into the European markets. He was right. He left their home on the Upper West Side at threeA.M. each morning and headed down to Wall Street. He came home dead tired at sixP.M. They had dinner together, and he was asleep by eight.

Barbara’s brother was a journalist. He was never home. Her sister-in-law wrote computer software. Things changed so fast that no sooner was something written than it had to be rewritten. She was never home.

But Barbara was smart. She’d turned her teenage fancy into a profession and became a makeup artist. She freelanced for several modeling agencies in town. Most of the time her hours were tenA.M. to two or threeP.M. Models didn’t like to work early in the morning or late in the afternoon. They didn’t look their best then. That worked for Barbara. It left her time to work out in the afternoon, play around with her oil paints, and read.

But once in a rare while one of her clients had a great idea to shoot on top of a building and catch the sunrise. Like today. So Barbara had gotten up with Hal, who seemed way too happy to have her with him. She’d loaded her makeup kits into the baskets on the back of her ten-speed, armed herself with helmet, cellular phone, mace, and a loud battery-powered siren bracketed to the handlebars-to use against reckless drivers or would-be attackers-and headed into the morning.

She was happy that days like this happened only once every few months.

Barbara left the old building she and her husband had bought, gutted, and renovated and pedaled quickly down Riverside Drive. The morning air was smooth and the streets cooperatively deserted. She hunkered down over the bars and turned up the speed. She smiled, savoring the healthy slap of her heart and the just-short-of-painful burning in her thighs.

Suddenly there was a burning in her neck, then along her scalp, up the backs of her arms, and across her shoulders and down her spine. She saw something flash past her on the left, then come back at her. Something small and black that her mind registered as a pigeon. When it doubled back and flapped at her face and closed her left eye with its claws, she saw that it wasn’t a bird.

She tried to hold the handlebar with her left hand while she reached for the bat with her right. She screamed with shock and then pain. She had trouble seeing. The bike wobbled.

A moment later Barbara thought she’d hit a pothole. The nose of the bicycle dipped. She felt herself being thrown forward, but she didn’t fall. She continued forward. The muscles of her shoulder cramped for an instant, and then knife-sharp pain ripped across her back from the tops of her arms to the middle of her neck. Her back stiffened and her mouth fell open and she wanted to scream. But she couldn’t. The pain had slapped the air from her lungs, and all she could do was squeal.

She felt her throat tighten with sound, but she didn’t hear it. All she heard was the rush of the wind and something beating all around her. It sounded like when she was a little girl and hid in the sheets on her mother’s clothesline and wondered if that’s what it felt like to be an angel in the clouds.

Barbara was dimly aware of the bicycle falling to the ground in front of her. Or the street growing dark and her back trembling and weak, hot and then cool. She tried to reach up, but there was no strength in her arms. Then her lungs stopped. Her eyelids sagged.

For a moment before they shut, she thought she saw the comforting clouds of her youth…