The Color of Night (8 page)

The black knife was our secret and our treasure. We never showed the blade to either of our parents. The Mom-thing would have taken it away for fear we’d harm ourselves, we thought, and Dad would have wanted to sell it as a rarity.

It had come a long way and both of us knew it. Terrell, ordinarily no scholar, went to the library and boned up. The stone might have come from volcanoes out west, the Sierra Nevada or Medicine Lake. Points and blades like the one we had found were traded by Indians all over the continent. But Terrell liked to think ours came from South America. Had maybe been used, on top of some Aztec ziggurat, to carve out a living, beating human heart.

Terrell carved a handle from a stub of deer antler he’d squirreled up in the loft above the garage since he’d found it in the woods a year or so before. At the library he looked up diagrams that showed how the Indians had set about it. He was a long time filing a tight notch in the yellowed bone, and binding blade to shaft with strings of fresh, wet hog gut. I watched him, studied him while he worked. A rare thing to see him so absorbed. He had the same precisely focused attention as when he pulled the wings off flies. That rapt and ravenous concentration he always gave to hurting me. I bit my lips and held the stone blade while he did it. Sometimes there’d be a hairline cut across my palm when we were done. It helped me take the pain, and to withstand the pleasure that was braided with the pain.

Blade and bone were perfectly balanced. The warty curve of antler seemed to fit my hand exactly, the butt of my palm resting snug against the spreading base where it had once sprung from the skull of the buck. Terrell, possessive of most of his things, shared this weapon equally with me. The blade was a glossy smooth black, like glass, and if we turned it at a certain angle to the light, we saw flecks of gold drifting deep down inside it, like warm stars in a faraway galaxy.

Walking in the woods one day I came across the flayed cat in the fork of a tree. Eviscerated, a flat cat, reduced to the merest profile of itself. Its hide so dry it had grown harder than the bone. The shrunken skin pulled back the jaws and bared the needle teeth in what appeared to be a silent scream.

O—— pursued Eerie across the Styx and raised her up from her bier of death and led her back, for a little while, to the light and the warmth of the sun. But Eerie had eaten the food of death, and so she was bound to return to the shadows and the cold, there to remain forever …

! O—— wailed then.
 … That was her secret name. The same four syllables I still hear sometimes, crying in the desert.

After O—— had lost Eerie once and for all, he sang to us that we should kill our parents. But we had already done that, my brother and I—we killed them with our actions.

“I think you’re hung up on your brother,” D—— told me as soon as Laurel had left the room. It surprised me that he’d say that—it really kind of set me back. His usual line with the girls was that they had a father hang-up. An easy con—you didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to suppose that most of the ragged company of runaways D—— was gathering to himself had had some problem with their fathers, somewhere along the way.

I’d been with the People for two or three weeks—among them though not entirely one of them. Laurel delivered me to D——’s room in the lodge herself. I suppose I must have been expecting it. Yes, I certainly had been expecting it from the start, but D—— had hardly seemed to look my way since he first picked me up at the tar pits and brought me here, so I was left to wonder if he wasn’t really interested, if after all he didn’t really care …

Every pimp has that same bag of tricks. And I knew it well, but it didn’t help me.

Laurel turned her eyes demurely down and strolled out of the room, with a sweet little swing to her hips. I was aware that D—— wasn’t watching her go.

The lodge had been used for a dining room, I think, back when the ranch served overnight guests. It was an octagon-shaped building, with a central fireplace and a round stone chimney that shot up through the cupola on top, which D—— had taken for his room. The cupola had an uninterrupted line of windows wrapping around all its eight sides, so there was a lot of light. D—— was reclining on his bed, draped in a striped blanket like an Indian brave, or a Roman in a toga, or the sheik of freaking Araby, for all I know.

What he had said disarmed me somehow. I’d made a success of not thinking about Terrell since I left.

D—— sat up and shook back his hair. It was silky today, and he looked gentle, all over somehow. The shoulder the blanket didn’t cover looked smooth as milk to me.

When he stood up, I looked down at his bare feet on the wooden floor. I didn’t like that I was doing that; I remembered how Laurel had turned her eyes down before leaving, and I thought I should have found D——’s eyes and held them, made him be the one to look away.

I felt Laurel pulse in the back of my mind. Only the tone of her voice, no word. Below the frayed hem of the blanket, D——’s calves were covered with a surprising amount of long fine hair, like angora.

“I know,” he said. He came to me and touched me then, not much, maybe lifting my chin with a fingertip. His eyes were the deep fluid blue of the Gulf Stream and they seemed to see all the way into me, to read all the history carved on my core, so that I felt that he really did know.

“I can break that down for you,” D—— said. “If you let me.”

He touched me a little more, backing me against the chimney. I could feel the rough stone on my bare back and the backs of my legs, my whole nakedness spreading against the stone, and I still don’t know how that came about, because I surely must have been wearing something when I went there.

“I’ll be your brother to you,” D—— said. “Will you let me?”

Then the ivy came boiling out of the cracks in the masonry and wrapped around my limbs and bound them—the ivy crawled over me like snake skin—and D—— was in me everywhere, not just the purses but my brain and my bloodstream too, and we were inside each other so completely it seemed that we could never come apart, and I was crying out my consent so loud they could have heard it on the highway.

It was hard to return to Laurel after that, because that was no ordinary con. D—— really had broken something down in me, and known me in ways that no stranger could know, and occupied a place in me that only my brother had touched before. A place that Laurel couldn’t really reach.

And of course I knew that Laurel had her thing with D—— as well. From now on that would have to lie between us.

My brother put his palms on the slight swellings where my breasts would be, and told me in a husky croon how Indians would have cut two straps of flesh, there where his hands lay moist and warm above the shriveled beans of my nipples—they’d thread those slits with leather thongs lashed to a pole, then make me dance until I tore my own flesh free. In those days Terrell didn’t really know which Indians were which and had the most mixed-up ideas of what they did. The Sun Dance was all jumbled up with Shawnee or Iroquois torture, then reassigned to Cherokees who’d once lived more or less where we did then. Not that Indians ever tortured women anyway, and not that the confusion made any difference to what we were about. These fantasies didn’t need to make more sense than dreams did, and we didn’t dare to take them out of fantasy. Terrell only hurt me inside, where it didn’t show.

Already he had his peculiar fascination for those Indian captives who were proud to take the punishment without flinching. A brave who’d seat himself on the spit, unforced, unbound, tranquilly smoking a pipe while his own flesh roasted. With that image raised before me, I learned to go toward pain like a warrior.

We used to smoke together afterward, Terrell and I, the Newports we had filched from Mom. Those were the only times I ever smoked tobacco; in other situations I never felt the urge. Two or three times a week we’d have a couple of hours alone after school, before Dad came home from work, the Mom-thing off at some meeting or club. We’d lie covered with the musky sleeping bag, paired filaments of smoke rising up from our nostrils, wreathing themselves among the snake skins that shivered from the rafters, first blue, then gray, then finally vanishing into the heavy air. My head gradually coming back together from where it had been scattered by our deeds, because whenever he did what he wanted a part of me would leave my body to hover in the sky, far above the peeling tarpaper shingles but still able to observe the girl getting fucked by her brother, to see and hear how she moved and moaned, writhing under the onslaught of sensations she didn’t even know how to distinguish as pleasure or pain.

And afterward, my head would be blank, empty as two halves of a vase, glued back together. Sometimes a voice appeared in the vacancy.

… 
Mae … Mae …

… 
 …

I made nothing of that then. By nightfall, by suppertime, I wouldn’t remember that echo in the hollow of my skull.

Sometimes I heard a voice saying … I couldn’t make it out. Or maybe it only made sound, without ever naming.

And I seemed to feel the bayonet stabbing and stabbing, impaling something that first resisted and then gave way to a lurching emptiness inside, so that I bashed the heel of my fist against the spot where the hilt stopped. The shock of it up my arm to the shoulder, over and over again.

Terrell whetted the bayonet relentlessly, till it was sharp enough to shave. He let me try it on his calf, the silver edge of it bringing away the stiff dark curls from the pale skin, like at a hog-killing, I thought. Maybe I slipped and maybe I didn’t, but I nicked him slightly, so the blood rose up. He lost control and slapped me then—I saw the nowhere in his eyes and stiffened my neck like one of his Indians, left him staring, puzzled, at the red spot on his palm.

I touched my finger to the bead of blood and tasted it. His eyes softened, and went far away.

Here’s what I want to do,
he said.

It was as if he had persuaded me instead of forcing it, but then it often felt that way. I lay with knees up and my legs open, green calico dress bunched above my waist, looking up at the daddy longlegs walking over the rafters, the slow tremor of the snake skins. Terrell held the blade at both haft and tip, like a bone scraper, and worked with an entranced, extraordinary care.

In all the times we did this thing, he never cut me there. I never looked but I always pictured it, the clean white edge slipping over the soft curve of flesh, the astonishing sensation of cool steel. Now and then Terrell paused with the blade, moistened the ball of his thumb with his tongue to smooth away the little hairs he’d cut. I couldn’t seem to stop myself (whatever self I had left then) from sighing as he stroked the new-smooth lobes … I bit my lip for a taste of my own blood. My brother kissed my blood away, snaked his tongue inside to claim it.

Sometimes, after such an afternoon there might be some careless, visible sign, a swollen lip or the fattening bruise on my jawbone where Terrell had been startled into striking me. Once in a while, the Mom-thing noticed things like that.

You play too rough,
she’d say. And look at me.