The Color of Night (5 page)

So then one night Corey got caught chipmunking. Eye in the sky saw him packing his cheeks till it looked like the mumps. Corey had got a little too greedy. And the system wants all its pieces of silver. Counts them every day.

“Your country’s in crisis,” the pit boss told him. “We’re all under attack here,” Marvin said. “And now you
steal.
”

All of us who could hear this line did our very best to look solemn and dour, though the truth was I wanted to break out laughing, or puke. It seemed to me all those little black globes in the ceiling were pressing down hard on the back of my neck. Like taking a few chips away from the company was some kind of betrayal of God and the flag and apple pie.

Not that I’d cry big tears for Corey. He’d ground up one Oxycontin too many, or he wouldn’t have been so sloppy as to get picked off. I don’t think anybody ratted him out. Eye in the sky just happened to see him—one little squirrel with too big of a nut. Corey was on the tall side, stooping and boney. He had sandy hair and thin skin that colored up fast. His ears were sort of pointy, and thin as parchment paper. He’d turned a deep purple by the time Marvin got through with him. Happily he didn’t take all that long, but my nails had dug creases in the butts of my palms by the time he was done. Even though I had them cut back to the quick.

It was a bigger than usual night for some reason. Once Corey had cleaned out his crap and gone off, they brought Tammy to take over his table. She was glad to get out from the fake diner counter, glad of a chance at some extra money. But Tammy was never much of a dealer. I knew she wouldn’t hold that table for long.

For some reason I thought about Corey again when I got into my car after work. He’d be soaking his sorrows in a bar on the road to Vegas, a windowless bunker known as the Deadwood. I went there once in a while with Pauley, and I think Corey lived nearby. He could take one of his thin pointy ears and crumple it up till the whole thing could be stuffed in the hole. I remember him trying to pick up girls with this trick, though I don’t think he was ever very successful.

Or maybe he was balled up in a set of dirty sheets somewhere, trying to slow down his breath and his heartbeat, wondering where his next vial of pills would be coming from …

I don’t know why I’d spend a second thought on Corey. Though the idea of him somehow abetting our Enemies was idiotic enough to get under my skin. Hopefully Marvin wouldn’t tack that course long. Marvin was normally a practical guy, decent enough to most in the pit. A company man, it goes without saying. I turned my car and aimed it toward the desert and my trailer.

I walked into the desert till the world began to curve, till the electric lights dropped behind the warp of the horizon. You can never get completely away from the light pollution of all those towns, but where I stopped the stars were brighter. Again, no moon.

No tire tracks here, but I found myself squatting next to somebody’s lost muffler. It had been there so long there was nothing left but a lacey filigree of brownish rust. I could have blown the whole thing away like a globe of dandelion seeds. But I didn’t touch it. Nearby, a flat spiny cactus reached across the pale sand. A handful of small bleached stones, worn smooth as coins, scattered without a pattern.

I hunkered motionless on my heels. I waited. Presently a cat appeared, stalking so slow I really couldn’t perceive the movement. For a time I wasn’t even sure that splotch back toward the glow of habitation wasn’t just some inanimate object that had been there all night. But no. I couldn’t see it move but I could see that it had moved. About the size of an ordinary housecat, though maybe, probably it had gone feral. A jackrabbit was frozen, crouched tight to the sand a few yards to my right, completely motionless except for the tips of its long ears revolving, searching for sound. The cat made no sound, but when it had come within a dozen feet, the rabbit got itself unstuck and bounded away at the same moment or a short hair before the cat launched itself hopelessly, too short, too late. The cat pursued anyway. Its silence was strict.

I couldn’t even find any paw prints in the sand, that cat had moved so lightly. Just a couple of scuff marks where it landed from the mistimed pounce.

My back was sore, my thighs and calves cramped, from crouching motionless myself for so long. But still I tried to lay down my feet as soft and weightless as cotton balls, as I walked back toward the trailer park. Orion was there in the eastern sky, with his jeweled belt, and the sword jutting down from it. The dick, Laurel liked to call it, for a joke.

My hands were cold when I came inside, though it wasn’t yet at all cold in the desert. My legs and my back were all right by then but my hands stayed stiff and I couldn’t seem to warm or loosen them. If I got arthritis, I thought, I couldn’t deal. I found a can of Tiger Balm and smeared a dab over my knuckles and palms, rubbing till the grease was all absorbed and the tingling menthol burn had faded. I knew I didn’t really have arthritis.

I dialed the number Pauley had found for me. Two rings, three rings, four. My thumb hovered over the reset button.

“Hello …”

The voice was recognizable, though not unchanged. That huskiness, and a drowsiness in it. Had I expected to wake her up? A shade of alarm, as from someone unexpectedly roused. The night sky was just beginning to shatter. I’d carried the cordless phone to a lawn chair on my wooden deck, where I sat looking over the predawn desert, beyond the diamonds of chain-link fence. It would be later on the East Coast, though. Full daylight there. Maybe it was a weekend, I don’t know.

“Hello?”

Certainly, it was Laurel’s voice. I began to imagine the lines between us, pictured the phone signal bouncing off some satellite up in the slowly lightening sky where my eyes were turned, my gaze dissipating like the beam of a flashlight you shine into the black night of the universe, disappearing there. I could feel her turning blindly toward the silence where my voice remained hidden. Like an antenna searching for a signal. A head tied up in a black silk bag.

When I came to, the sun was up and in the distance I could hear machinery grinding down a mountain. Building, razing, it never stopped. My clothes and my skin were coated with a fine stone grit. The dial tone droned from the wireless handset I held cupped in both hands, clasped into my navel. Laurel hadn’t said another word.

She told me she’d once seen D—— bring a dead bird back to life. In my mind, I didn’t believe it. Laurel had been tripping, maybe, or simply misunderstood what she saw.

Back home a redbird flew into our picture window and knocked itself out. The four of us sitting just inside, eating Sunday pancakes. The Mom-thing had her fork arrested halfway to her mouth. Across the table I could see her gullet trembling.

So Terrell went out and picked up the bird from the damp cold ground. It was early spring, it seems to me; the trees were in bud and the air getting fresher. At first light there’d be a lingering chill but after sunrise the warmth strengthened. I’d seen Terrell with dead animals before but this redbird wasn’t dead. And he did have that gentleness in him somewhere, sometimes—it was not often it surprised me. He cradled the bird in his hands and teased its crest back into place with a fingertip. We watched him. Them. After a minute or so the bird came completely unstunned and flew off.

I too with my own eyes have seen it, when D—— struck the desert floor with his staff and brought everything all at once into bloom. In one stroke the desert was writhing with green and when we crushed the grapes into our mouths they had already turned to wine.

I am your love,
D—— used to say. He had that gentleness in him too. Surprising. Though when he shared the love with you, he made it hurt enough that you knew he was there.

So I didn’t really believe Laurel’s story, but somehow I did see it through her eyes. I can’t say what I mean to say. It was more like she kissed the dry surface of my brain and made it fertile. In the green crystal of her vision I saw D—— stoop to lift the dead bird from the sand. Brown and inert as if it had never lived at all, hard as a clod or any old piece of shale from the desert. D——’s hair blew clean and silky into his eyes and he shook it back unconsciously and lowered his head again over his cupped hands to breathe on the bird, warming it with his breath till it took on all the colors of the spectrum. It lived, and perched on D——’s raised finger. He raised his arms like an apostle. In that instant I could see the hot red heart of the bird, fluttering inside like moth wings. Then it took the air and flew, away into the arid slopes of the Santa Susana Mountains to the north.

Then I knew the same fire burned in Laurel’s head as burned in mine.

From the campsite, Terrell took me out to hunt stuff. We’d gone floating on the river; two canoes and two tents. The Mom-thing didn’t like it much, but she’d go along with Dad for a day or so. Terrell liked it. I don’t remember exactly how I felt. Terrell had been a Boy Scout and dropped out after six months because he thought it was dumb, he said, and also I think he had managed to get into some kind of trouble at the church where they had their dumb meetings in the basement. But he was still wearing some rags and tags of Scout uniform on that river trip. It made him look sort of like a soldier drummed out of his regiment (there was something like that on TV at the time), and I think we both found this appearance somehow bold and a little romantic.

Terrell was good at finding things. He had sharp eyes and spent a lot of time in the woods. He found skulls and snake skins and live snakes in season and all that he found he would carry home. He found dead animals surprisingly often. They might not all have been dead when he first found them.

But I don’t see how he could have killed the longhorn cow … way back in the woods on the ridge behind our house and lot, sloughed down in a red clay gulley, with tendrils of kudzu already wrapping over the rotting piebald flanks. It was the horns that attracted him, me too I’ll admit. He made me help wrestle the half-rotting head back down the hill and through the brush into our yard. Both of us too proud to puke, just barely.

The Mom-thing went completely crazy: a screaming, slobbering, falling-down fit. Terrell took the rap for it, claimed the whole thing was his doing, while I crept under the porch and hid behind the crisscross lattices. She made him swear he’d dump it back wherever it was
in hell you found it.
In fact he only carried it across the creek out back and stuck it on an abandoned pump-house where nothing could get it for a month or so, till finally it was rotted dry and bleached clean enough for him to sneak it up the back stairs of the garage.

You could pull the horns off then. They came away easily from the porous bone. Each was a foot and a half long, and curling. Inside there lingered, for years and years, the faintest smell of rot.

I wasn’t much good at finding stuff, but I liked going out with Terrell. I did find minié balls sometimes—there were such a lot of those from the old battles of the War Between the States, sunk in the furrows like dead seeds. A time or two Terrell dropped an arrowhead ahead of where I was going to walk, plain out in the open where I’d be sure to find it. I knew that he had done that, but I didn’t say.

Water maples screened the campsite on the riverbank. Through the trees we could smell the freeze-dried stroganoff that Dad was heating on the Coleman stove, while the Mom-thing, doubtless, worried about water moccasins and wished that she could take a bath and curl her hair. It would have been early fall, I think, with the leaves just changing on the trees. Fat purple berries buttoned pokeweed, and the fencerows were thick with sumac turning the colors of rust.

We were walking a field that had lain fallow for at least a year. I wouldn’t have noticed that at the time, but Terrell would. I remember now the hummocks of old rows we stepped across, decaying corn-stubble overgrown with weeds. Terrell started along the fence posts, eyes tracking the ground at the edge of old turned earth. I went the other way, across the open space.

In opposite directions, we quartered the field, then finally turned back to meet each other in the middle. It must have been fairly dim by then—the fireflies were starting to come out—so it’s sort of surprising either one of us saw it, much less both at the same time. The stone tip breaking the dirt beneath a corn tussock like a fin. Maybe a flaked edge of it caught the remains of the light.

This is ours,
Terrell said.

Not mine,
mine!
None of that old tug of war. Both our hands covered the stone blade, but with a kind of reverence. We knew already it was different, special. The stone was different from all our other points, black, smooth, and darkly shining. It had been made in a distant place, before it was carried here. Out of darkness and old night. A firefly winked phosphorescent green as it walked among the fine pale hairs of Terrell’s forearm. I could feel the warmth of his hand spreading toward mine, across the obsidian blade. We did not yet have all our secrets on that evening, though they were coming near.

When we had been much smaller, really small, Terrell, playing Indian, used to take me out in the woods and tie me to a tree. He’d go off for a while, not long I think, then return in the role of some frontiersman for my rescue.

I don’t remember anything, really, about the time in between.

The Mom-thing whined and fretted when she learned about it. It’s not
natural.
It’s not
right.
Daddy brushed off her objections. Kid stuff. They’ll grow out of it. It was normal, Daddy told her, and maybe, up to a point, that was so.

Up to a—

Terrell didn’t have much of a narrative for this game, or if he did I have forgotten what it was. The binding and loosing was exquisite. A throb that moved deep from the core of me and spread to my outermost edge. I didn’t know the name for it but I knew you kept it in the dark.