The Color of Night (2 page)

The trailer park was shut up tight with chain-link fence, but I had broken some of the links with a bolt cutter, right behind my tiny deck, so I could walk directly into the desert when I pleased. When I went through I pressed my palm against the jagged ends of the cut wire, not quite hard enough to break the skin, and then I pulled the pieces back together so the tear in the fence wouldn’t be too obvious, in case anyone were to look, which no one would.

In one of the trailers behind me a television was muttering and in another an old woman wept, in harsh, ugly, choking sobs. I walked until these sounds disappeared, holding my back to the spangle of lights of the town behind. I could hear only my own rubber soles crunching on the pale dust of the desert, and that not much, for I walked very softly. Sometimes I took the rifle and didn’t kill anything. Tonight I had left the rifle behind and I was empty-handed.

I crossed fat tracks of an ATV in the sand, and farther south the string of
S S S
left by a sidewinder. No sign of the snake itself. The desert looked flat and empty as the moon. The moon, the real one, had not risen. Selene had not stepped into her car.

The stars were cold and far away and I stood under them with my knees slightly bent and my back to the desert wind, which rushed through my legs and the sleeves of my shirt and dragged my dark hair forward around my face. Ambient light from Las Vegas bled into the sky from the north and dimmed the stars. Rage. Rage. It grew and then faded.

The wind fell then and as it died a great owl stooped across my left shoulder, in a perfect silence that thrilled down my spine through the soles of my feet into the sand. As the owl struck silently, out of my sight, some rodent uttered a desperate shriek—piercing, but it didn’t last long.

There. That would do. But I remained, still where I stood for a few minutes longer. I curled my fingers into my palm, feeling an edge of nail against the skin. I would need to cut my fingernails before tomorrow. I keep them short.

The stillness surrounding me was not quite perfect; I could still hear the drone of cars on a highway somewhere, and maybe, on some distant ridge, white turbines of a wind farm. The wind returned, fitfully now, bringing a soughing sound as it dragged across some cavity, a set of lips, a hole. As sometimes happened, I seemed to hear O——’s voice singing in the space between the stars

fitfully too, intermittent, senseless. Or I would not admit the sense

the longing, the eternal sadness, vexed me. The sonority of his meaninglessness

But of course it was only the wind after all. Or at least it stopped, before my heart turned completely black.

The wind switched direction, bringing grit into the corners of my eyes. I turned away from it, toward the vacant glitter of the town. Soon dawn would come. Fatigue was a gray square in my brain, between my eyes. I might almost be tired enough to sleep.

When I came back inside the trailer I cast about till I found my nail clippers, their cheap metal silver in the first thin light of the morning. I tore open a pack of jerky for breakfast, and without thinking about it I snapped on the television and there it all was. A hole in the world. Through the fissure of the TV screen it all came washing over me.

I don’t know how to begin, because I have no desire to begin.

Again.

It’s again …

The first time I ever saw Laurel, her head was thrown back, laughing. She had completely abandoned herself to that laugh, but I didn’t know what was so funny since I had just walked in the door. Or D—— had just sort of pushed me in, I think, and then he vaporized somewhere. I’m sure there must have been incense burning, and a few other people sitting around on cushions or a couple of bench seats ripped out of cars and dropped bang onto the splintery floor. Laurel looked soft to me, at first, and juicy. She was wearing a ribbed tank top and I could see the areolae of her breasts through the thin cotton. I looked a little longer than I should have, wondering why I might be interested in that. Then her chin came down and her chestnut curls flounced around her face, and she was looking at me steadily, seriously, though little chimes of laughter still spilled from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were green and flecked with gold.

“So you’re it,” she said, and swallowed a giggle. “You’re the new thing.” The titter overcame her. She was higher than an asteroid, naturally; they all were. Whatever she was on I wasn’t, but I began to catch that chokey cedar smell, not quite covered by the incense smoke.

“The next new thing!” Laurel got up and whirled around with her hair flying loose and her plump little hands stretched out to show the room to me and me to the room. There were those other people there, disposable people, I’m not sure who, but certainly one or two of the other girls, and probably a couple of guys with the sunken chests and the Jesus hair … one with a silver ankh on a string of beads, hanging between the open panels of his vest. That would be Ned, I think Ned was probably there that first day.

Laurel sobered up and looked me in the eye again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just … you know!”

But I didn’t know. I knew some things then, but I didn’t know that. She took my hand. It felt very natural, like a little girl taking the hand of her friend, and there was something maternal in it too, I can see now, and the rest was Laurel, being stoned. She was comparing my edge to her softness and showing it to the random people in the room—I don’t remember what they were doing, talking to each other or nodded out or looking at the two of us together. A 45 record was going around and around on a record player that opened up like a briefcase; it might have been one of O——’s early hits. The laughter bottled inside Laurel was making me start to smile, without meaning to, which was rare.

“Look at us,” she said, a mad look dancing with the gold spots in her eyes. “You’re the knife. And I’m the butter.”

The laughter overflowed from her again. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s blow.” She tugged me toward the back door of the room, onto the gangplank that ran along the other rooms of the crazy structure I had just entered. The room we’d left had begun with a school bus that had sort of sunk into the sand when its tires went flat, I suppose, and when they needed more space than the bus, they’d knocked out the panels from one side and framed a bigger room against it and tacked on a tin roof that overlapped the rusted yellow metal of the bus. The whole thing straggled on from there.

The gangplank had a tin roof too, and from under its eaves I could see away, away across the desert to the mountains on the horizon, turning a brilliant violet color as the sun began to sink into them. But Laurel was tugging me along to her room. There wasn’t a door, just a bead curtain. We rattled through it. Another joss stick burned inside. More cushions and a double mattress on the floor, a little table with an oval mirror reflecting up. Instead of a roof on Laurel’s room there was canvas stretched over the two-by-six A-frame, which made it feel like some nomad’s tent.

On a wall was one of those throbbing op-art circles, and I had to look away from that right away so I wouldn’t throw up or have a seizure. My eye caught on another poster, black-and-white: a pale, slender woman lying naked on her back, with her head turned to the right, looking somewhere away. The pool of her thighs was filled with jewels; a vagina dentata with diamonds for teeth. Of course that’s not the way I saw it then. The caption was the sort of thing that passed for insight in those days:
The jewelry is worth such-and-such. The rest is priceless.

The room had filled up with sunset light, and above us the canvas sighed with the breeze. Laurel had let go of my hand, though she still stood close, appraising me. There was a touch of red in her hair, I saw now, and she had a scatter of cinnamon freckles over her cheekbones, and a pleasant scent of musk and light sweat. I began to feel the reef under her fluid surface. Her eyes were taking my measure now. Of course she had to be balling D—— too—we all did that, if we liked it or not. In his theory there was no such thing as jealousy but in practice he used it as a sword.

“Mae,” Laurel said, tasting my name with the tip of her tongue. I was sure I hadn’t told her my name. I had not yet addressed her one word.

“You can stay here, Mae,” she said. “With me.”