The Color of Night (6 page)

In the morning we could hear D—— chunk-chunking an acoustic guitar in the lodge, stopping and starting again, repeating a phrase and trying different words against it. A couple of girls sat cross-legged on the dirt, smudged faces turned up and their mouths open, listening to the sounds that trickled out through the gap in the window. Laurel caught my hand and pulled me away, across the half-closed circle of tent and shack and gutted school bus. Ned was working on a dune buggy engine, with a stringy guy wearing colors of the Pagans motorcycle gang. The biker straightened up to watch us away. I didn’t look back but I could feel his eyes like pinholes on either side of my spine.

We passed the barn and the corral. One cowboy was brushing down a horse and another trundling a barrow of manure. The place still functioned as a dude ranch, sort of; a few people came to rent horses and ride the dry hills.

Laurel wrinkled her nose at the bright greenish smell of the manure. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go down to Clive’s house. There’ll be food.”

The old man Clive, who owned the ranch, sat on a cement stoop outside his cabin, full in the sun, wearing a big Stetson hat and square dark glasses. A blind man’s cane lay between his legs, wrapped with red electrical tape. Creamy squatted on the cement to the left of his seat, with Clive stroking her hair as if she were a cat. She seemed to like it. His hands were wrinkly, liver-spotted, very large. He had a pleasant sort of smile, beneath the black lenses and blind eyes.

Crunchy was frying eggs with corned beef hash in a black iron skillet in Clive’s kitchen. “Share the love!” Laurel told her, with her delirious smile. “The People
share.
” Crunchy shook back her hair and shrugged, gave me a blank look when Laurel told her my name. That look was common enough among D——’s People.

Crunchy divided the food on paper plates. We ate around the stoop with Clive, not bothering to bring out chairs from inside. Crunchy and Creamy put an amazing amount of ketchup on their food, stirring it into a crimson porridge. They both had sandy, sort of wavy hair, and they dressed like twins, with yarn vests over their blue work-shirts, though they weren’t actually related. Sometimes they were both there together; sometimes they worked it as a relay. D—— had told them they should keep Clive happy, which he seemed to be.

“Creamy balls him,” Laurel told me, once we’d walked out of earshot of the place. “She says he’s good.”

If she wanted that to weird me out it didn’t. I’d been there, done it, whatever it took. What was weird was this old-time Western street we all of a sudden seemed to be on. All weather-beaten clapboard buildings, wooden porches with spooled posts. A pharmacy, a saddle shop, a jail, and a saloon …

“What is this?” I said. “It’s like we’re in some movie.”

“Well,
yeah …
” Laurel flashed her smile at me, pushed open the swinging saloon doors. Through them was nothing, just more chaparral. The street was a set, the flats propped up with two-by-sixes wedged from the backs of them into the ground.

I started laughing. Laurel was too. Then we were chasing each other in and out of the dummy doors, up and down the pretend street, crouching to take aim and fire at each other with forefinger and cocked thumb. Laurel actually said
bang bang
when she did this action. Finally we slumped together, breathless and gasping, against the back of the saloon flat.

“Watch out,” I said. “We’ll knock it over.”

Laurel couldn’t seem to stop laughing. Then a motor coughed to life and she did stop, turning her head to the sound, alert, for a second, as a fox. They’d got the dune buggy going, I assumed.

We went swinging out through the saloon doors together, bumping our hips. Then froze, for there was someone at the far end of the street, the morning sun behind her, long legs set like a gunslinger’s. Really a beautiful woman, like a star. She had on jeans and an orange tank top and there was a sort of snake bracelet clasped to her upper arm. Her long hair was crisp and spiky like straw and in the sun it was the color of gold. She had high cheekbones and the eyes of a cat, and though she was certainly looking our way, she didn’t seem to see us.

“Who’s that?” I said, and caught myself whispering.

“That’s Eerie.” Laurel linked her arm through mine to turn us away. “She’s on her own trip. Don’t think about her.”

When we met at the tar pits wasn’t the first time D—— and I had occupied the same space. Maybe the first time we saw each other truly. But our paths had crossed before, and not only in the Haight … where D—— had been quite a visible figure, with his garlands and his maidens. But he knew the Tenderloin as well as the Haight, and so did I.

I’d walked by the house on Cole Street a time or two. Seen an auburn-haired girl in a macramé vest leaning out the bay window on the second floor, dangling a chain of clover blossoms that nearly grazed the top step below. I might even have been inside the place for a party, once or twice, but my memory of that time’s a little unclear, though certainly the parties were better with the Airplane and the Dead. I don’t think I went to D——’s classes on Cole Street, though it seems that I knew they were happening, through word of mouth, or maybe there were posters. The same kind of rap we would hear on the ranch. At the peak of the Haight scene, D—— couldn’t really compete with the rock stars, not when they were all just over the next block. To get the People to pay proper attention, he had to lead them into the desert.

Not that I was paying much attention at the time, but I could see the nucleus of the People forming then. The group around D—— had its own queer vibe already, the hum of everyone thinking the same tight gnarly set of thoughts. I’d feel it when I passed their house, or when they sometimes used to take over the Calm Center of the Psychedelic Shop, and even at free concerts in the Panhandle, though in those circumstances their clustered knot of energy tended to get broken up and rearranged by the movements of much bigger crowds and everything the music let loose.

I wasn’t hearing the voices then, or they weren’t saying much to me. Only my name sometimes.
Mae. Mae
…
I hadn’t yet been seized by the notion that the voices Laurel and I both heard were coming from D——, or through him. They gave me no more than half-formed syllables, sighing on the wind …

I didn’t really live anywhere then. None of us did, or hardly anyone. We washed in and out of the crash pads like surf, or slept in the parks on the warm summer nights. A night in jail was always a possibility, but they didn’t have cells enough to keep anybody too long. And there was a crib down in the Tenderloin that Louie let me use, if I was working.

There’s a picture in my mind of D—— in the Panhandle, a bandanna knotted around his neck, his hair and his expression soft, his eyes half shut, blissed out on the music. A girl or two draped over him, surely—Creamy and Crunchy were already there, or maybe one of them was Stitch. It must have been O——’s big free show in the park, when O—— was in the prime of his glory, those brilliant days before Eerie was lost, and the sunset gilded his half-breed skin, and he raised the guitar and tilted it to the sun so the strings flowed away in red rivers of light …

Seeing D—— in a different context was like seeing a different guy—he had that chameleon quality to him, though I did know he was the same. I was leaving the Ellis Street crib at first light and saw him there with Louie on the corner of Hyde. Louie had probably been up all night, was still tricked out in his velvet bell-bottoms and the tall felt hat with the crazy feather. But D—— was the scarier of the two of them that day. His eyes were small and really hard and I could see, in the harsh early light, the lines that prison had drawn on him. There was a knot between his brows where later he would cut the cross.

There’s two cats that know each other’s business, I was thinking, and I didn’t look at them for more than a flash. I was already walking the other way, so D—— couldn’t have seen much more than my back.

But they did know each other’s business. And D—— would have known, that day at the tar pits, what had happened to Louie not so long before. So he knew me already, or one face of me. In a way, he already knew who I was.

“Give me a penny,” Laurel said.

“I don’t have any thoughts,” I told her, and she smiled. The radiant explosion of it—it seemed to me back then her smile was like the sun.

“It’s unlucky if you don’t,” she said, and took her hand from behind her back. On her plump palm lay a big lock-blade Buck knife, a beautiful one with brass bolsters and brass-headed screws in the brown hardwood handle. Expensive too—I knew the price, because Terrell had always wanted one and never had the money to buy it.

“I already have a knife,” I said. It occurred to me I had been seeing a few of these Buck knives around the ranch of late. For example, Creamy and Crunchy each wore one, in a black web sheath strapped to her skinny hip. Stolen, I guess, for money was tight. Somebody must have boosted a box of them.

“Oh yeah?” Laurel said, her eyes flashing a challenge.

“Yeah …”

I didn’t hesitate for more than two seconds before I dipped into the bundle I brought when I came. The bayonet was clean, though I hadn’t had the blade exposed since I left San Francisco. I held it bolt upright in my hand, my thumb set in the steel ring where the tip of the rifle was supposed to go.

“
Oh,
yeah …” Laurel’s eyes had widened, though not for long; I saw her touch her upper lip with the pink point of her tongue. Then she stooped to her side of the bed and pushed a knot of colored scarves off a long flat sandalwood box. Inside was a knife as long as mine, with a rippling blade like water.

A kris, I’d later learn was the name of it. Laurel had pictures of Malays sticking themselves with these things when they danced, possessed by their demons. At the moment I didn’t give a goddamn whatever the thing was called.

Laurel’s eyes glimmered as she stepped around the foot of the bed, striking toward me in slow motion, and I parried, slowly, very careful—I didn’t much care about not getting cut but I did care about not cutting Laurel. The bayonet was sharp enough to shave, I knew, after the hundred hours Terrell had put into the edge.

We were moving around each other, eyes on fire, our lips just parted. Strike, parry, parry, strike. The electric
ting
of metal meeting metal. My bones were throbbing with excitement—current spouting up to the top of my head through the soles of my feet. D—— had been teaching new uses of fear. She came down overhand with the flat of the wavy blade and I didn’t block it this time, let it reach me, just denting into the top of my left breast. The bayonet swung around lazily to the right and came softly to rest on the skin of her throat. I hadn’t controlled it quite enough or maybe I’d controlled it just perfectly, for there among her cinnamon freckles rose a bright red bead of blood.

Laurel shivered, as if she’d seen the blood bead reflected in my eyes. She touched the spot and raised her finger toward me and I tasted her blood from the whorls of the tip. When we kissed it was like springwater pouring from her mouth to mine. I don’t know where the knives got slung—lucky neither of us was impaled when we fell, when we threw each other onto the bed. Laurel came out of her clothes like a piece of ripe fruit and we were slithering all over each other like a pair of wet squid and I plunged to raise her pearl on the tip of my tongue—

Afterward, I seemed to hear a voice explaining to me why the knives had helped, how they solved the frustration I often felt at the sheer painlessness of doing it with Laurel …

She stretched a languid arm to the floor and came up with the folded Buck again.

“Take it,” she said. “D—— wants you to have it.”

So I did.