The Color of Night (15 page)

Now when I went out through the tear in the fence it was always too bright, no matter how far I walked toward the distance, like a spider creeping desperately across the fluorescent linoleum floor. Rattle of blades and a bald eye revolving somewhere overhead …

Already I knew, it was all starting to come down.

Again. It’s … again.

Sometimes I longed for darkness of eternal night, and not this wasted pallor of the desert.

As I’ve said, he was a disposable person, and he didn’t need much in the way of persuasion. I let Laurel do the craft of it: a sly smile and a switch of her hip, lure and allure to draw him in.

We took him to Ned’s cave on the hill, so Ned would have to clean up after. I knew there would be nothing he’d dare say.

The striped djellaba spread beneath us. A shadow of padding and a wriggle of color on the stone floor of the cave. He understood that I was strangling him to increase his pleasure, and made no objection to it. A macramé belt, I think I used, and it might even have been his.

I wasn’t prepared for Laurel’s fervor. With every throbbing ounce of him squeezed down from his neck and into her. The whole of his life and death thrust into her.

OhmyGod,
Laurel said.
O. My. God.

At the very last moment she slipped away from him, deft as a weasel. The kris moved like water. It was as if I didn’t know where it was coming from. Such an unimaginable ejaculation—blood and milk.

On my break I went to the fake diner and drank a neat whiskey and ate a slab of bloody meat. Tammy as always averted her eye from my plate. Then, as if she’d just suddenly remembered something—

“Did Marvin find you?”

“Find me for what?” I didn’t get it. Marvin could have found me anytime in the last three hours, since I’d been right where he knew I always was, tucked into the green felt horseshoe of my table.

Tammy’s eyes wouldn’t stick on my face. She’d been a little shifty around me for a few days; I hadn’t troubled to wonder why. She tucked up a strand of her watery red hair, glanced over at the television, which was prattling about homeland security, I think.

“There was somebody …” Tammy mumbled.

“What kind of somebody?”

Tammy shook her head, not looking at me. The poker games under the glass countertop played red and blue flashes across the papery skin that had begun to sag a little at the corners of her mouth. The clump of meat I had swallowed fell leaden to the bottom of my gut.

“Tammy,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, her head wobbling almost like she had some kind of tremor. “I didn’t really see him. I didn’t talk to him. He talked to Marvin.”

And lo, Marvin was waiting for me when I headed back toward the pit. As if he wanted to tell me something but then again he didn’t.

“What?” I said.

“Guy looking for—somebody named Mae.”

“A guy.”

“A cop, maybe.” Marvin’s eyes were as slippery as Tammy’s tonight.

“With a badge and a gun?” Look at me, Marvin.

“No.” Marvin shrugged. “It wasn’t like that.” He looked toward the door. “Just a regular suit. But the shoes. He had cop shoes.”

FBI. I knew. I’d known it was coming.

“He was looking for Mae Chorea,” Marvin said.

“It’s
Cho
rea,” I told him. “Not Korea.” Thinking—
I shouldn’t have said that.
That wasn’t the name on my light bill or my lease or my job application. I’d been living under the false name for so long that it had more weight than the real one.

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Marvin said. “It’s not you, is it?” Now he looked at me, hard.

“Oh no,” I said, and forced a smile. “Not me.”

I had to go back to my table then, though I felt like somebody had dumped a bucket of spiders down the back of my neck. Wait and keep dealing, until Marvin wandered out of the pit. Then I made some excuse and closed my table. I had only a couple of marks on the stools, none of them a regular.

Must act normal normal normal as I carried my chips to the cage to turn in. Eye in the sky boring down on the tippy-top of my skull. But it didn’t matter, what did it matter? Maybe a couple of eyebrows raised as I walked out.

On the steps I felt a moment of false relief, as the pale neon colors washed over me, touch of a soft dry breeze on my face, below and beyond the darkness of the desert. That Indian was coming up the steps as I went down, the one with the black hat and all the silver and turquoise accessories. Our eyes met, held each other for a moment as we passed. He seemed to look at me with pity, with compassion, even.
Why,
I thought,
why me?
Why would he look at me that way, himself a dying avatar of his exterminated race?

And of course from the first moment Marvin spoke to me I knew—I had already known what happened, how it must have happened. Who had made it happen.

Reach out and touch someone. Ping. Ping.

I wanted to be near her instantly, without the least delay. But it wouldn’t be as simple as that, I realized. With all the heat about terrorism it would be the next thing to impossible—or no, impossible outright—to get a firearm onto a plane.

Then they finally found Eerie, dead in that motel. Just one more luckless mortal going back to shapeless clay—no reason that it should especially matter, yet each event has weight enough that when it falls it tumbles some other happenstance down with it. And yes, as D—— kept saying, it was all going to come down.

This time when Eerie died she died forever—no lover could lead her out a second time, away from the black throne. She’d tasted the food of death one time too many. Along with the overdose, she also appeared to have a broken neck, so One knew that Ned was probably involved, though no One said so—not within the People, and certainly not to all the cops who kept dropping by for the next few days.

I seem to see O—— in my mind’s eye, lifting and cradling that sack of bones and carrion, wailing and gnashing his teeth as he carried the carcass of his lover toward the high rock in the dry hills. Singing a song that had no words, only screaming. But that can’t be, because the coroner had surely hauled Eerie’s body off to the morgue before O—— reappeared at the ranch.

His golden skin was drained now, to the color of old ivory, the color of dead bone. And now D—— had the hold on him that D—— had been wanting for so long. At long last, O—— had become One.

Above the dry hills the air turned white—that shimmering electric pallor that pretended to promise rain in the desert, and the hard wind swirling up grit from the ground, while Ned climbed trees to nail up speakers behind D——’s speaking stone, and Crunchy and Creamy stirred up batches of gangster acid, cut with speed, with Tab or Mountain Dew in plastic garbage cans, so that it rained snakes instead of water, and I—I tore my robe to bare one breast and caught such a snake, its diamond back writhing over my hand, meaning to bind it around my brow as a living coronet, wedge head erect and spitting venom while I danced outside the borders of any mortal consciousness, whirling my thyrsus in one hand and a wildcat’s spotted cub in another.

But I saw Laurel looking at me pale with shock or maybe fear—though her own head was a Medusa’s now, festooned with bay enough to poison the whole company if someone brewed it up in one of Creamy’s cauldrons. So then I flung the serpent from me, and when it struck a tree it turned to vine.

It seemed to me a cry of wonder roared up from the People then, and people rushed upon the grapes that burgeoned instantly, crowding and tearing their clothes on the bark, and using their own red-stained teeth as a winepress. And over it all arched the voice of O—— …

More and more people were coming in then, although not all, not even most of them, were One, but they came and came just because it was happening, a
happening
in the parlance of that time, and the thing that was occurring was O——. The album
Western Wind
had been released, so that O——’s bright visage was replicated hundreds of times in the plate glass windows of thousands of stores (along with that small cornered image of Laurel’s higgledy-piggledy foot, which no one but I might ever recognize, and not for a long time) and O——’s voice flourished from the radio whenever anybody turned it on, but O—— wasn’t doing live shows in the places he’d promised but instead was singing only to D——’s People, and it was for that people came and kept coming. Also there were rumors of free drugs.

There was such an avalanche of new people as to wash away the stain of Eerie’s maybe-not-altogether-accidental death, which looked at first like a vexatious problem, the kind of thing that might not go away. One might have suspected in those early days a flicker of uncertainty around the mask of D——’s composure. Laurel had come back from her vagabond moment with O—— in Malibu, a little while before they found the body—dead for quite some time by then. Perhaps it wasn’t wholly a coincidence that D—— had sent Laurel off to the cave with Ned while all the cops were first coming around, so the cops never did get to have a real deep talk with Ned, not until a good while later, when a whole lot more of it had come down.

Then O——’s voice came booming out of the speakers swung up in the trees, and more people swarmed in than the cops could keep track of, so the cops withdrew, though some of them still observed from the perimeter, bracing binoculars on the roofs of their squad cars, parked on the shoulders of the road. “Let them,” D—— cackled, capering behind O—— on the crown of the rock they now used for a stage—“Let them lift up their eyes unto the hills!”

And O—— would transmute that into something more melodious.

Like iron filings courted along by a magnet, the People gathered below the rock. They had guitars up there, both of them, but mostly now it was O—— who transmitted D——’s words in song. These were the songs that ended up on the
Black Album.
How cold the coins that were laid on Eerie’s eyes, we heard, how wide and deep and dark the Styx. But that was only the beginning, for many, many, must cross over. Every phrase full of the black and glittering beauty of death.

Fear coiled through the People, like a glossy blind black snake. One didn’t cringe away from fear. D—— had taught us to embrace it. Fear was the very name of action. Fear brought our great deeds to bear. D—— told us fear itself would be our Savior! … or it was O—— who sang it.

O——’s head a mere receiver for D——’s thought. His diamond throat gave voice to D——’s words. If either words or thought had ever properly belonged to D——. They climbed the rock together, or no, as a single entity, Jesus, Jehovah, and Satan all rolled up into One. Though afterward those words seemed pale and rather flimsy; it was hard to believe they’d brought down all they had.

I stood in reach of Laurel’s hand, although I didn’t reach for it. There was no need. The black fear snake curled tight through both our bodies, binding us together. The voice from the rock above had filled our skulls to bursting. All the People moved as One, the Beast of Armageddon. One’s answer boiled up from dark mouth-holes like the crackle of flames in a great conflagration. That One great voice drowned out those fleeting voices I’d used to hear calling to me from time to time, or maybe they had always been the same voice, joined now in a single flooding stream.

When those congregations ended the men seemed weary and somewhat abashed; they would limp away toward the shelter of the buildings, but the women, boiling with dark energy, ran through the dusk into the bald hills, still singing those songs till the sense fell out of them and there was nothing left but a wordless ululation. Sometimes, and maybe because we were tripping, those desert spaces broke out in lush foliage, so that we seemed to crash our wild way through a wet, vinous, fecund jungle, and finally Laurel and I always outdistanced the others. Her bare heels and mine pounding like a twinned heartbeat as we raced each other, each hunter and prey at the same time, across the stream that ran down from the falls, past the hooded opening of Ned’s cave on the bare stony hillside, till we stopped breathless on the eastern ridge above the highway, Laurel’s breast heaving, tatters of bay leaf still clinging in the snakes of her hair, and what I must have looked like I don’t know.

Miles below, we could still hear the voices of the others winding through the arroyos, now falling away and now rising in pitch, like the howling of the hounds of Actaeon as they closed in on their master, whom Artemis had turned into a stag. Laurel and I were above all that, and yet somehow still awash in the stream of it, shining on each other waiting for moonrise, expecting to see the moon crowned with blood.

On other nights there was no moon. Cities and towns were all far distant, could not yet have stained the whole dome of the sky with the diffusion of their squandered light. Moonless, the color of night was a rich velvet black, as though we were submerged in chocolate, or a dark stream of blood in a deep vein.