The Color of Night (17 page)

I did throw the phone out the window after all, because I suddenly felt I must repel it, like it had some kind of spy widget inside, a beacon that would draw my enemies to me. I was all alone on the highway, and I yanked the car into a bootleg turn, and fetched up on the grassy median, facing the way I had come. The phone screen still glowed on the roadbed, about a hundred yards behind.

I unpacked the rifle from the trunk, sighted with my elbows propped on the car roof. That sneezing sound. With a tiny pop, the light of the phone screen disappeared.

Reach out and touch that if you can.

A lone car passed on the other roadway, the suck of dark air and the headlight cone dragging away off to the west.

No,
I thought, to Pauley, or whoever, or to nobody.
You don’t know me.

The car seemed undamaged, despite the brusque handling. I swung it back onto the road and drove on.

Sometime after it all came down, after the raid on the ranch, when D—— and the others were hauled off to jail—I went back to my brother.

Chillicothe, up on the Scioto River, had been a Shawnee town a couple of hundred years before. Daniel Boone had been a captive there, as I knew from Terrell. Maybe that was why he’d moved there. Or because he had a job, in the paper mill or the dog-food factory, something. Or because he couldn’t be home anymore after he came back from Laos and Cambodia and Nam.

I couldn’t go home either, and I had to go somewhere. You wouldn’t say they were especially glad to see me. Mary-Alice was busy with her spawn, two of them by that time. My niece and nephew—what were their names? Billy and Bobbi. Bobbi was the girl—they spelled it with the
i.
They crawled around the TV room like fat and slightly sticky caterpillars.

And then the trial was on TV. Or not, because cameras were still forbidden in courtrooms, so there were only sketches. There was film of the girls on the corner outside the courthouse, but of course they couldn’t have been Creamy and Crunchy and Stitch at all, because those three were inside, on trial with D——. It was another handful of girls who looked and behaved exactly like them, resembling one another completely, as insect larvae do.

Terrell, naturally, liked the story, and Mary-Alice hated it but she kept watching it all the time anyway, like a bird hypnotized by a snake. We would all watch it in the evenings, eating TV dinners off trays. Of course I never said anything, how could I? But I did wish they knew.

I’ll kill you if you tell.

The war had finished Terrell, by which I mean it had perfected him. He’d come home with a string of shriveled ears he kept inside the closet door where you’re supposed to hang your ties. Two Purple Hearts and a hard drug habit. So a lot of the time when he wasn’t at work, he’d be driving off to Columbus or Dayton to score. Or he’d shut himself up with Mary-Alice and have me watch the children. Take them out of the house somewhere. There was a shabby little park.

Shawnee Chillicothe was never the same place the town is now. Chillicothe was wherever the clan leader lived, so it floated around all the time, like a dark dream. The Shawnee women would blacken their captives with ash before they killed them, burn and impale them on stakes before they killed them. They would skin small patches of the captives’ arms or legs to see how well the captives bore the pain. Or maybe they didn’t do such things at all and Terrell only said they did them.

Eventually I went back west. Partway back west. I couldn’t stay there. Not only because they didn’t want me to. I saw that it could never be the way it was. As for the children, they were only children, and Mary-Alice acquiesced in a different way than I had done. Where I’d learned to rush toward pain like a shark, she only whimpered haplessly beneath it.

A victim. She had made herself a victim. Terrell didn’t want a partner anymore.

I wove the wreath of bay for Laurel, and set it on the cinnamon crown of her hair. The green of the leaves was fresh and luminous at first, then slowly dried to brittle gray in the parching heat of the desert. Those days she seemed to wear little else: the wreath, a shift; she walked barefoot till her heels parched too, and cracked and bled and dried again without her noticing.

All One had wine and smoke and song and screaming. There was not only the dry floor of the desert, caked with blood. In secret seams where water flowed beneath the falls there were tall trees, and grass and sometimes a few pale musky night-blooming flowers; Laurel knew those places and she knew where to find thick ropes of ancient grapevine hanging from the trees. Nights when we outran the hounds of Actaeon we might sometimes end up there, swinging in the loops of old vine
hairy as a monkey’s tail,
as Laurel said, amidst the silver ringing of her laughter. Pumping in tandem, opposite, equal, so that Laurel rushed forward as I flew back. And once through a little tear in time I looked into my half-human childhood where the girl I’d been rocked on a tube-metal swing set screwed into the ground halfway between the house and garage, the movement soothing her, numbing her, washing her mind clean till nothing mattered, nothing at all, and she not even aware of the black empty eye of the garage attic window or the fountains of kudzu around and above her, smothering, strangling down the trees.

But with Laurel it was different, gladder and more powerful, for we could swing ourselves from giddiness through trance to
, flung upward to the sharp steel sickle of the moon with one star floating between its horns.

Eoui!

There, the voice of D——’s devoted women, running the pale floor of the night desert, their fierce cry now receding, now coming near—or it was Laurel’s voice twinned with mine and neither of us knowing the purpose of those syllables born out of our throats by their own independent vitality.

Eoui!

Eouiiiiiii!

A thrill like fear when we heard that shrieking, even if it was ourselves that sounded it. Or less fear than awe at a life everlasting, resurfacing as it dived through death,
zoë
in its eternal cycle of return.

Then silence, save the creaking of the vines, the rush of our excited breathing, the whistling of stars across the inky sky. A phrase that whispered itself in the form of a small white stone.

 … I am your love …

D——’s thought, long since, had married the voices in my head, and in my head and Laurel’s was now one and the same utterance, and still in spite of all in the very thickest part of those nights there was our strange tenderness for D——, as if in the end
he
was the one who would be torn from us, torn by us, meat from bone.

Blood spilled on the sand would spring back green and limber, and from its berries would flow wine.

I want to say that maybe none of what I am about to tell is true, but only a version I prefer to dull reality, in which my kin still live their lives: the mother and father and the two children no longer small, no longer children, still here in the same place where they settled and began, or maybe elsewhere, some other indistinguishable place, imperceptibly sinking into the banality of mortal existence like meat dissolving slowly in a stew. If so, I have blotted them out of my mind with a story, as you may blot the stars with the palm of your hand.

If so, there would have been no graves, or only the graves of strangers.

On the third night, or maybe the fourth, I drove across the river north of the town, pulled over, and looked back. A peaceful vista, I suppose. In the small hours of the morning the windows of the houses were dark. A few had eave lights burning, for fear of prowlers.

In the air, the heavy sour smell of paper mill pulp fermenting. Downriver, the factory sparkled and hummed, emitting a great cottony cloud of yellowish smoke, spreading, dissipating into the night sky.

Close your eyes and think of Shawnee town. But then that hadn’t ever really been exactly here.

The cemetery was there in a bend of the river, whose muddy coils twisted away to the south. It was cold here, much colder than Nevada at this time of year, and I hadn’t thought to buy real winter clothes.

I looked into the star-speckled sky, then again down into the graveyard, the gray stones like crooked rows of teeth. The chill persisted. I got back into the car, cranked up the heat, and crossed the river on another bridge, back toward the center of town. The names were what you would expect in a little town like Chillicothe. Bridge Street. Main Street. Terrell’s house had been off Water Street, on a short little spine running back to the fence of a golf course that blocked the way to the river from downtown.

I idled past, then let the motor die. The house was nondescript, a little brick ranch. It appeared to be inhabited now, though for a long time afterward no one had wanted to live there. In the starlight I could make out toys scattered on the patchy lawn, a soccer ball and a multicolored plastic tricycle. In a bedroom window was the glow of a night light and one of those round stickers that lets the fire department know there is a child inside.

I read about it in the papers, and watched it replayed on TV. But I’ve forgotten most details, or else I never learned them. Suffice it to say that my brother’s life ran off its rails of quotidian cruelty, its humdrum routine of domestic abuse, to bloom into something more spectacular, complete with the mother and children held hostage, the siege and rings of police with their weapons and bullhorns, negotiators bullying or pleading on the phone. Terrell had brought in gas cans to set the place on fire, but he didn’t get a chance to light it. A SWAT team sharpshooter picked him off, but by then the others were already dead.

I was surprised, and not surprised, to learn that I had missed the rapture. It was as if I’d always known that he’d take everyone who mattered. All but me.

As for what went on inside, imagination fails me. What I did picture was the pyre that didn’t burn. The house and whatever world it contained collapsing to its molten core. The hide and bone and tallow crackling, and the smoke of my brother’s offering rising to the mottled sky.

But now the house was distinguished by nothing. It harbored other mortal lives.

I got back in the car and crossed the river. The cemetery was enclosed by a spear-pointed iron fence. The gates had been locked with a chain since my last visit. I broke it with the bolt cutters and went in.

The long grass crunched beneath my feet, white and brittle with glittering frost. I hadn’t been here in some time and it took me a while to find the spot. Let us suppose no sentiments were carved into the stones, only the dates and the four names. I’d dressed a way he would have liked, in a short skirt with no underwear, so I had only to stand and open my legs to piss all over his grave.