The Color of Night (13 page)

I came to myself sitting on the deck. Cold phone cupped between my hands. Worn out with complaint, the battery had died.

How many times I must have called. Over and over, hour on hour. But never, not once, another answer.

I could picture the phone ringing in her place. Or maybe it rang only in my ear, if she had switched it off. Or maybe she sat there and watched it ring. It couldn’t be true, her claim that she was dying.

First light. On the horizon, a circling of black wings, where carrion birds had found the carcass. The empty skin where I’d left it, shriveled to the stones.

At loose ends, with Terrell out on a
date,
I took his pipe and the bayonet and went into the woods. Once the houselights had disappeared behind me I stopped and fired a bowl of the cheap green Mexican that was everywhere in those days. Then I went on along the deer trails, the metal of the little pipe contracting as it cooled in the front pocket of my cut-off jeans.

In ten or fifteen minutes, I could see better in the dark. By then I was climbing higher on the ridge, through stands of oak and maple trees whose leaves had mostly fallen now. I had brought the bayonet along because I found it comforting and who knew what you might meet in the woods? It was deer season too, and the thought popped into my mind that maybe it was unwise to be walking those trails in the dark, in the nondescript colorless clothing I wore.

I stopped, scanned the hillside with my dilated pupils; the scene appeared almost as bright as day. I was trying to swallow my unease when I heard the
crump
of a heavy rifle firing, not at all far off. And nearer to me still, across a leaf-filled gulley that ran water in wet weather, a grunt and a speckled thrashing on the opposite slope.

I ran for a clearing, a pale space nearby. Burst out panting into one of those hillside turnarounds, where construction had stopped for the season or for want of funds. Down in the valley a single earthmover still crouched motionless, like the skeleton of a dinosaur. Much of the thin coat of gravel had been washed out or worn away and the red mud was rutted by the tracked equipment or by the tires of vehicles like Terrell’s truck, parked now at the edge of the flat gray griddle of the turnaround, throbbing gently there.

That must surely have been a trick of my stoned eyes, but it got worse. It wasn’t just movement but also sound; not only squeaking on its elderly shocks, the truck was whimpering like a live thing … It took me a long rubbery time to construct the idea that Terrell must have spread a camp mat on the truck bed. Spread Mary-Alice on the mat …

I ran back into the woods with the bayonet thrust out before me, gripped in my two hands, as if I were charging some enemy battle line. My mouth was wide open but I don’t think I was screaming—dark air rushed into me, not out. I stumbled in the gully, and got wet all the way up my bare shins; under the surface of dry leaves was a foot of water and rot and muck—I slowed down then, abruptly conscious of the risk I’d impale myself if I tripped and fell with what I carried.

The hunter had abandoned the dead fawn, because it was too little to be legal, or maybe because he was too poor a tracker to find it in the first place. So young that it still had its spots. That seems impossible to me now—it would have been too late in the season—but at the time that’s what I saw.

A red haze came swimming over my vision, throwing out tentacles like a squid.

 … and the next thing I saw, remember seeing, was Mary-Alice popping upright, covering her breasts with her pudgy white hands, gaping and gasping, her eyes going wide. Flung from her, Terrell knocked his head on the wall of the truck bed, old metal ringing back like a dull school bell.

Before the two of them I stood revealed, barefoot and bloody, naked but for raw fawnskin, my pine-branch thyrsus wreathed in poison ivy or crawling with snakes for all I know. My shoes were gone, my clothes I never found again, nor the little pipe in the jeans pocket, but I must have hung on to the bayonet, because I found it again later, among Terrell’s things.

Presently Mary-Alice began to scream, on an automatic clockwork rhythm. She went on screaming like a little dog yaps, the kind of dog that doesn’t know why it’s barking, may not even know that it
is
barking.

What did Terrell do then? I don’t remember. I have no image in my mind.

Then, more red haze. My vision flickering. In the clear spots there are certain pictures. Bare bloody footprints across the curling linoleum of the kitchen floor … from the front room, the crackle of the television, funk of cigarette smoke and Sanka, querulous sound of Dad and the Mom-thing bickering, or the Mom-thing bickering all by herself … I picture her brandishing the fawnskin at me, shrieking or making the motions of shrieking. Her black mouth round and silent as a lamprey’s …

But that must have been days or even weeks later, when she found the skin crumpled under the bed or in a corner of the closet, after it had begun to smell. If indeed it happened at all, for I no longer seem to know if all these things really did occur, or if I dreamed them.

I got out my old copy of
Western Wind
again, and opened it up to look at the pictures. It was sad how everyone appeared to be so young. Though we’d managed to make O——’s youth eternal. Thanks to our devotion, everyone would always see him in the high bloom of his prime.

The songs were all about Eerie, I knew, but she couldn’t have been there when those pictures were taken. O—— had led her from Ned’s room directly to—they didn’t call it “rehab” in those days. Too discreet to have a word for them, such places surely did exist, secluded gardens full of orange juice and sunshine. And rubber rooms, because I seem to know that Eerie had to kick cold turkey, banging her head against walls and floor …

I sat back from the album cover, pressing my fingers on closed eyelids—yes, Laurel had gone on a detour for a week or so around that time—
detour
was what she liked to call them. Laurel still got money from home and unlike the other members of the People she had enough of an undissolved ego to keep most of her money out of D——’s reach. So if she needed to go on a detour once in a while, she didn’t have to do it as a beggar.

These little sequences of events purled through my brain like beads on a string. What did they matter? There was no cause in them that could bind an effect, and yet I seemed to know quite clearly that Laurel had dropped out of sight for a spell sometime after that day of mushroom tea and D——’s daisy chain—Laurel often needed a good detour after one of those sessions, which did make it hard for any two individuals to be comfortable with each other in the way that they had been before. Hard to be at ease in your own skin. That was the point of the exercise, in fact, as D—— would be happy to explain to anyone whenever.

So Laurel had quietly abstracted a small sum of time from the sum she had dedicated to the People and to D——, and gone off with it somewhere all on her own … and Laurel had a marvelous gift for making her most calculated moves look like air-headed, mute and helpless accidents. So she might have—almost certainly had—simply stuck a couple of flowers in her hair and turned up on O——’s doorstep in Malibu, or more likely happened to run into him while frolicking, fairylike, on the beach.

Of course she’d have known she was only a stand-in (as I had known it during my sojourn) when O—— sang his songs for Eerie to her. I don’t suppose it bothered her, really. Laurel was a practical girl in a number of ways, so she’d have known that she was getting all she could. When I looked at her foot on the album cover I could picture as well her satisfied smile, just beyond the photographer’s frame. And I knew that foot most intimately, not only the toe ring and the vinous swirls of henna but its every muscle, tendon, and bone.

Could Laurel have had the influence to get the rest of her cropped from the shot? No, I don’t think so. It was only that the photographer was more interested in O—— …

 … who should have been looking only at Eerie. Who should never have taken his eyes off Eerie. For he did love her like no other, if he learned it only when it was too late.

In the winter Terrell began picking up Mary-Alice to take her to school with us, and even in springtime this habit continued. Still half asleep or pretending to be, I got out when we pulled into her driveway, staring dazedly at the cement Saint Francis on the lawn, tilting between their rock garden and a murky tarnished fish pool. Her mother waving cheerily from the doorstep or the window.

Mary-Alice climbed daintily to the middle of the bench seat and, when I got in behind her, made her snuggling into Terrell seem more like shrinking away from me. Maybe it was because of the talk in the halls—or that peculiar night in the woods (if she hadn’t managed to shriek all memory of that away). Or maybe Mary-Alice was aware of something different, something other … In any case, she drew her skirt away, she shrank, avoiding all contact.

Until that morning when she turned from him and threw herself across my lap, so that, I realized after the first astonished second, she could vomit out the open window on my side. Terrell pulled over, with a half smile of puzzlement, a ghost of concern for her discomfort. Mary-Alice didn’t drink (she’d hold a rum and Coke at a party, now and then wetting her tongue in it like a kitten), and she didn’t get high, so it wouldn’t be the aftermath of partying too hearty.

She was wearing a fuzzy angora sweater, pink with white buttons, and through it I could feel her soft torso limp against me, like a fallen soufflé. I could feel her heartbeat and her fear. Her heart was going as fast as a rabbit’s. A few droplets of bile clung to the long pink hairs of the sweater.

Terrell asked if she was all right. If he should turn around and take her back home. Terrell gave her a stick of gum. Dentyne, I think. Terrell took fanatical care of his teeth and believed Dentyne to aid in that mission. Mary-Alice blinked her wet eyes and said, no, no, that she was fine … Terrell smiled, shrugged, put the truck on the road. So far, he had no idea.

But the rest of the reel went by very quickly. A good Catholic girl. A whole Catholic
family.
So of course there was no question of— The Mom-thing biting her lip as she smoked. Dad seemed to take it rather more leniently. They weren’t the first couple to get started early. When life comes your way you ought to accept it. A priest or a pastor must have furnished that line.

Mary-Alice wasn’t showing a bit, but she sat demurely on the edge of her seat, eyes downcast and her soft hands cradling her navel, like a prim little pink-and-white Madonna. While Terrell looked around the room with the eyes of a wolf in a trap.

Small hurried wedding,
intimate,
one might have said—just the two families, and those not complete. The Catholic Church—the Romans, as we called them then. Did they burn incense? Not in our little town. But I can still picture the Mom-thing bridling as the priest murmured Latin, as though she were a witch being exorcised.

I have to imagine all that part, because I wasn’t there. And Terrell himself was barely there, though no one yet knew he’d already enlisted, would be hustled off to boot camp in a matter of days. Then over to Nam. Somebody, everybody else, would get left holding the baby.

Not me. I stripped Dad’s wallet and the Mom-thing’s purse, then climbed into the garage attic room. Just a few lengths ahead of Mom’s certain arrival, armed with doilies and ruffled curtains, vacuum and Lysol. I inhaled a last whiff of the close dark smell of smoke and rot, old blood, and dried spunk. But I wasn’t there for sentimental reasons. I took the two packs of Newports and the half-pint of whiskey and the half-ounce of pot and the bayonet and our stone knife too, because I wanted to be sure to leave him nothing.

Nothing at all of what we once had. I had lived for sixteen years and my brother had been fucking me for five of them. I hitched downtown, to the corner where the Greyhound stopped, by the bank, and bought myself a ticket to the Summer of Love.