The Color of Night (9 page)

Ursa Major clambered up the ink-black sky, casting cold light on the alkaline desert floor. I had walked a long way, far enough that the stains of city light had faded to sulfurous blooms on the horizon at my back. Ahead, the faint ribbon of a jackrabbit trail, packed to a just slightly paler shade than the loose sand surrounding it, wavered into a tumble of boulders that spilled down from the mesa there.

I crouched on my heels, beside a gnarl of juniper, clenching its dry roots into cracks of one great stone. The shadow of the bush fell over me, covering me with the dark.

High on the mesa, coyotes sang. The wild, high, half-hysterical crying sound. Sound carries strangely in the desert, so they might in fact have been miles away, and there might have been no more than a pair of them, though it sounded like a chorus of a dozen or more.

I watched for rabbits; there were none. Time passed, while overhead the stars kept turning, with that faint, scarcely audible music, as when you rub your spit-wet finger around the rim of a crystal glass.

The coyotes had stopped their concert long before. But now one came cautiously along the jackrabbit trail, out of the boulders, all covered with those clinging knots of juniper. Skulking, pausing often to hump up his back and turn his muzzle over his shoulder. Then with his ears rotating forward, pricked, he advanced again, with a spring in his step and a sharpening attention on the surface of the trail, though there was nothing to stalk that I could see, no rabbits, not a lizard, mouse or squirrel.

Maybe the coyote could see me in my hood of shadow. Maybe he could smell the blood, pumping the long circuit from my heart.

I stood up, clear of the shadow, making myself large. The coyote balked, cringing backward on folding knees, ears flat back to the fur of the head. His eyes pale globes of yellow, under the weak starlight.

Tonight I hadn’t brought the rifle. The coyote and I remained in a frozen balance. Eventually I took a few slow backward steps; the coyote stayed right where he was.

I turned away and walked, not quickly, feeling a pale spot on my spine, though I knew very well a lone coyote would not attack a full-grown person, unless rabid, and this one showed no sign of that. Even that possibility was nothing to me.

Behind me, just possibly, a dry whisper of paws on the sand. When I looked back the coyote was still motionless.

Again. Next time I looked, the coyote’s distance from the boulder might have changed a little. He was still.

Next time I looked I’d walked a mile or more and was near enough to the trailer park to pick out individual points of light from the blur. The coyote came loping after me now, but at a considerable distance on my back-trail.

I went on slowly, toward the artificial lights, thinking of how the first wild dogs must have come into camps, for whatever reason, to enslave themselves to men. When I reached the tear in the chain-link fence, the coyote was nowhere to be seen.

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The open wound of emptiness …

Careless, I’d scraped my forearm going through the fence; blood beaded and absently I licked it clean as I climbed the wooden steps of my deck. The thick salt taste at the back of my throat. I wasn’t hungry, thirsty, sleepy. There were still hours of night yet to pass.

I sprayed antiseptic on my arm; the sting of it barely seemed to reach me. Somehow the wireless phone was in my hand. For a second time I dialed the New York number.

“Hello …”

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“Hello?”

Oh, I could certainly picture her then; I didn’t need to watch the tape. On her knees with her head flung back, heavy breasts lifting through the cloth, crooked fingers clutching the sparkling dust-filled air.

“Mae,” Laurel’s voice burrowed in my ear. “Mae?”

I never gave her the penny, I thought. That was what I thought I wanted to say. But my lips were sealed, as if copper had been laid upon them, and my eyes were heavy under metal weight.

I didn’t come to for a long time after, finally waking to scorched daylight, phone in my limp hand again, the robot voice advising me
if you would like to make a call
to hang it up.

I woke to the rattle of the bead curtain over Laurel’s door. A dry wind from the desert shivered the strings. It died away and the beads fell still. I watched the light illuminating the colors of the glass. Early, but the heat was rising. Sweat glued the inside of my arm to Laurel’s belly; I watched it rise and fall with the rhythm of her sleeping breath.

When I looked at her face again her eyes were open, though still blurred with sleep. She sat up suddenly, threw her hair back. Lifting the beads aside with the back of her wrist, she stood naked in the doorframe for a moment, looking out across the plain. Then she came in and fished out some clothes from the pile on the floor.

“Hot,” Laurel said. I nodded.

I dressed myself, while Laurel packed her little metal hash pipe. We each took a hit and Laurel capped the pipe and kissed me, just on the edge of my lips; both of us had cotton mouth. She dug the water bottle out from a stale swirl of sheet, and held it to the light to show it empty.

We went to the lodge to get more water. D—— was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he had gone to town, but none of the vehicles seemed to be missing. Two men leaned into the guts of one, holding a screwdriver and a wrench.

The sun, though scarcely risen, seemed to screw down on both of us like a clamp. A bad idea, maybe, to toke up so early in the morning. I’d drunk as much water as I could hold and still my mouth felt parched.

“Come on.” Laurel smiled at me, with her chapped lips, and caught my hand. Her secret, knowing smile. “I know where we can go,” she said.

I followed her down past Clive’s cabin, through the collapsing Western set. A horned toad squatted on the steps of the saloon. Laurel made a feint at it, to make it hop, but the toad only blinked at her and inflated its slack gullet.

On the rise beyond the set, a trail wound past the big round rock, where D—— would sometimes assemble the People, to tell us his End Time stories. A crow perched there now, at the top of the boulder where D—— would sit cross-legged like a shaman or, when he became excited, caper in tight loops and brandish his fists. I had never been past that point, but Laurel seemed to know where she was going. A trail of sorts climbed through the piñon, over a fall of rocks. It was steep, and the tread of my sneakers was worn out, so sometimes I had to crouch and use my hands to get over the stones.

Laurel had pulled a pair of green flip-flops out of the communal clothes heap in the lodge. One of the thongs tore loose as she climbed; she held it up with a disgusted look, then flung it away. It hung on a branch of a stunted pine, and Laurel went on barefoot, carrying the whole flip-flop in one hand.

Ahead of her I could see the bushy tops of oasis palms, springing up from a cleft in the ridge. I stopped a minute, and turned my face to the moist breeze that came from that direction. It was cooler now. When I looked back I could see stick figures moving around the lodge, way down below. The distant racket of a motor that had finally caught was like the whirring of an insect. The whole scene rippled in my sight, from a mixture of heat shimmer and hash.

When I caught up with Laurel, she had dropped the other flip-flop and was standing with her bare toes wrapped over the lip of a cliff. Twenty feet below, a blue pool was boiling with the water that rushed into it from three waterfalls, climbing in stair steps, right to left, up the face of the higher cliff on the other side. Here was where those palm trees grew, the fronds of them trembling, high above us. There was such a wealth of water that the froth of the falls spattered us with cool drops where we stood on the far side.

Laurel smiled, and touched the back of my hand with one finger. In two smooth motions she came out of her clothes, then threw herself down into the pool.

Over the roar of the falls, I couldn’t even hear the splash. I hesitated before I followed, but Laurel seemed to know what she was doing, and now I could see the heads of another pair of swimmers moving in the water, near to hers.

I went down as deep as the space of empty air through which I’d fallen, but I never touched the bottom. At first it was so cold it made my back teeth hurt. There was a calm center down in the sapphire blue, like the opium core of the hash we had smoked. I opened my eyes underneath the water, and saw Laurel’s bare legs swiveling like seaweed in the lens of distorted light at the surface. I kicked up and broke into the air beside her, gasping and laughing; Laurel was too.

I trod water, watching her swim. She did all her strokes correctly, like she’d learned at summer camp. I couldn’t have matched her strength as a swimmer, but I didn’t mind; it was pretty to see. After a little while she backstroked to the lowest fall and let the water shower over her upturned face. I paddled over to her, and rested on a shallow rock. Laurel came out of the water like a mermaid and sat on a wet stone with her legs folded under her. Her right breast lifted with the movement of her arm as she roped her hair back over one shoulder.

The other pair of swimmers had emerged on the other side of the pool from us. Though the rocks were surely slippery, they climbed surefooted and gracefully upright, until they reached a ledge below the middle fall. They turned in our direction then, although they didn’t seem to know that we were there.

“Wow.” Laurel touched a finger to her lower lip. “I think that’s O——.”

I recognized him then myself, from all the album covers and posters. O—— came around the ranch sometimes, I’d heard, but this was the first time I had seen him here. Supposedly D—— had lived for a while in O——’s house in Malibu, with some earlier configuration of the People, but that was before Laurel’s time, or mine.

For me, O—— got his beauty from his music, but I could see Laurel was struck by his looks. And I suppose he was a handsome man, or boy, with the golden skin he got (some claimed) from a black father, the dark ringlets of his hair flattened down around his shoulders by the wet. But I was more impressed with Eerie on that morning; I don’t think I have ever seen so beautiful a mortal body.

They were as unaware of us as if we’d been a couple of fish in the pool, but we did watch them, as they moved under the waterfall together. His gold hand slipped over her ivory hip to the small of her back, and they seemed to caress each other with skeins of the falling water. All their movements were so delicate, and marvelously slow. It felt as if their love rained down on me and Laurel, and watered all the places where we had been dry.