The Color of Night (14 page)

I turned back once I’d slipped through the tear in the fence behind my trailer, and looked again across the desert. Pale glow of dawn on the white flats and a low wind tumbling the weeds. On the horizon I seemed to see the figure of a person, no bigger than a matchstick in my eyes, unusually and so effortlessly lithe and erect that he was clearly not a member of our kind. Framed in the chain-link diamond I peered through, he seemed to hold an arrow, or perhaps a spear. I felt then he must have come to announce something to me. Something.

I strained my ears, heard nothing. The windblown cry of a bird. Flittering, diminishing. The black-throated sparrow, possibly.
Zacatonero garganta negra.
I don’t know all the voices of the desert birds.

A grumble of machinery in the mountains to the east, grinding, powdering. The line between the ragged ridgetop and the sky glowed incandescent red, increasing its intensity. Burning. That figure on the horizon now no more than a vertical dark line. Lost when the sunrise finally spilled over and poured its red gold light all over the white barren like a bloodstain.

I want you to go with so-and-so,
D—— would tell a girl sometimes.
Go with Bobby Bo,
or
Go with
Long-John Larry.
(There were girls who liked to go with Long-John Larry, who didn’t have that nickname for no reason.)
Go with
meant to let the guy have you for … as long as he wanted, in any and every way he wanted.

There were a couple of half-derelict motels up on the highway that the guys could use for this purpose—and D—— often preferred they leave the ranch, if hard drugs were going to be involved. Eerie was found dead in one of those. And Ned had furnished a cave up on the dry ridge—a laborious walk, and well out of earshot of the buildings, though just a short hop in one of the dune buggies, supposing any of them were running. He might let the other guys use it, depending. Most girls didn’t like to go with Ned.

One went, however, if One was asked to go.

Ned liked to watch things suffer. He liked to pull the legs off bugs. He could spend a whole afternoon shooting horned toads in their loose bellies with a pellet pistol, watching their fluids leak out on the sand, perusing them for symptoms of sensation. In his flat green eyes the same neutral curiosity as when he’d wire up a new room or tinker with a motor.

Ned was a mortal, a bondsman of death, and even his cruelty was shallow, like his eyes.

D—— wanted me to go with Ned one time … the time that Laurel was away with O——, I think. I know. I didn’t refuse, exactly, but somehow it didn’t happen.

D——, Ned, and I were standing in … some space somewhere. On three vertices of a triangle with the dry air crackling between us.
Trust me,
I thought,
you wouldn’t enjoy it.
I didn’t have the bayonet, but I ran my thumb along the air where the edge of it would have been.

It wasn’t that I had no taste for pain. I just didn’t have any taste for Ned. If you needed something fixed he was fine, but after that forget it.

Ned went slack and dropped the subject. Wandered off. Then again, taking Laurel to the cave was probably an even better way of hurting me.

D——’s reasons were—D—— didn’t need reasons. Of course he didn’t do it merely out of spite. It was all about breaking down the ego, doubtless, and to ensure the People would be One. Then too, when D—— forced upon you something lesser, it increased the value of his own satiric love.

In Laurel’s case, One wouldn’t have called it punishment. D—— wasn’t jealous of O——, not in that way. He was jealous of the piece of O—— he wanted for himself. D—— wouldn’t have liked it if he’d known that either Laurel or I had deflected O—— from the ranch … and probably he did have his ways of knowing that.

So. Laurel had been back from Malibu for only a few hours when D—— looked at her piercingly:
I want you to go with Ned.
My blood jumped in me, but I didn’t move. Laurel lowered her head and obeyed.

I was late to San Francisco because I got off the bus in Denver and started talking to a guy with jet-black hair and creamy skin and a cold spot in his eyes somewhere, that seemed to recede all the way through the back of his head. It drew me, that quality of the eyes, like I’d seen it somewhere long before, out there in the wine-dark emptiness of the universe where it came from. He’d whip his girls (there were four or five of us) high up on the backs of the legs where the marks wouldn’t show, with a coat hanger or an extension cord. The marks showed anyway, a little, in the miniskirts and hot pants he made us wear. Besides the street he had a little call business, which seemed to specialize in rough trade.

So I learned something: there were ways I didn’t want to be hurt. That wasn’t my
bag,
as they put it back then. Did I know what was? In the end it wasn’t hard to get away—he was lord and master of four square blocks but outside that territory he wouldn’t have known where to go or what to do, so I didn’t worry much about stealing his money. After all, he had stolen mine. The other girls were too limp to go with me, and I didn’t trust them enough anyway. Maybe they’d been there too long, or maybe they liked what they were getting, or maybe it was the thin air up there in Denver, which did sometimes make it hard to think straight.

When I finally did arrive at the Haight, I learned something else: you can’t make a living out of free love. It might be your bag, or it might not be your bag, but pretty soon my bag was empty. Not one bone to rub against another.

A woman has two purses.

Doing it with Louie was exciting at first because at the time, for a white chick who came from where I did, it was breaking a big important rule. But apart from that there was no real difference, or at least not a very interesting difference. Louie was full right up to his neck with ordinary mortal meanness, which worked well enough on the rest of his string, but didn’t really do anything for me. In fact he reminded me of Ned in that way, except that I hadn’t met Ned yet.

But despite his limitations Louie was kind of a cosmopolitan cat, who had no trouble stepping out of his turf in the Tenderloin. If I tried to lose myself in the Haight, he’d come find me. Once I went all the way to LA and he found me. And I by then knew there were ways I didn’t like to be hurt.

When it came to the point, the answer was simple. I just hadn’t known that I already knew. Louie made it easy for me, because when I touched the bayonet against his rib cage, he really didn’t think I’d do it, didn’t know I would until, for him, it was too late.

I’d learned the essence from my brother, long ago when I was small. You don’t have to worry about resistance. Just keep pushing, and it goes right in.

I’ll kill you if you tell,
I said to Laurel, as we were coming out of Ned’s cave that time, but I didn’t mean it in an ugly or threatening way—it was more as if I’d said to her,
I love you.

And Laurel seemed to take it as I’d meant it. As she came up blinking into the stark daylight, she swept back her hair and lifted her chin and gave me her most winsome smile. She said, “But you just told me I can never die.”

I don’t know fear, but I began to feel … uneasy. A new sensation, or one I’d not felt for a very long time. As if something were watching me, like prey.

I began to need the rifle with me always. Or as close to me as was feasible, which was often not quite close enough for comfort. Aside from the Pauley-related issues with this particular weapon, it was chancier now to travel with any sort of gun. Since the towers had come down in New York, there was endless trouble and shit about terrorism, and that not only in the east.

As if they really knew what terror was.

I couldn’t take the rifle into work, of course, but I did have it stashed in the trunk of my car, whenever I left the trailer park. At night I took it into my bed and caressed it there, receiving the cold bright taste of metal on my tongue.

I missed the knives I used to own, the steel blade and the stone one. A gun, by comparison, lacked intimacy. But I had lost the knives I once had claimed, cast them away, despite their numinosity. Where did they go?

Sometimes by night there came the wash and clatter of helicopter blades, circling over the rim where the town met the desert. In the silence after the chopper was gone, I felt the pressure of regard more keenly. Even through the trailer’s flimsy roof. The eye of some invisible raptor high above.

I couldn’t touch Laurel when she came back from her excursion with Ned. I couldn’t reach her in any way. She had been raped before, one time or several. I knew it, though I’m not sure how I knew. Her eyes were blank. She lay curled in a ball. She didn’t want me or anyone else to lay a finger on her.

D—— knew. D—— witnessed the depth to which she was cast down, and I think that may have been part of the reason he asked both of us to go to the canyon that night—not only because he knew what we could do. He wanted to give her something to get her over it, get her past the harm that he had caused her.

But I had already done my part, to help her rise above it. My part, which was probably also his. Where else after all could the voice have come from? The One voice that spoke to me louder now and at greater length and in more detail than was usual. That told me what I must convey to Laurel.

How nothing of such mortal nature could touch either one of us anymore—not where we lived forever. Because we were One with the mask of D—— we had only to know our immortality.
Zoë
—the great wheel of our exit and return. All of these powers were already ours, if we but knew it. We had only to seal our knowledge with a sacrifice.