Blue Light (26 page)

“So much boring chatter for one so deep. Of course, the iron atom will say only his name. Water too and even granite or glass. Because iron has only one note; water two, maybe three. But you, my friend, make the violin seem simple. You are a song of the gods in the mouth of a fool. You can’t help it. So much promise in one so weak attracts disease.”

Juan Thrombone sat again and smiled. We looked at each other, and even though my head had begun to ache from the words, which seemed to go directly into my mind, I asked, “Are you saying that blue light is a sickness? That one who sees the light is sick?”

“Sick?” Thrombone said, chuckling softly. “No. But weak as kittens in a cave full of stones. They feel mighty, but there is no strength in them. Only ambition and youth. They cannot hunt or mul-ti-ply. Only can they play like the big cat who has left the den carrying their milk in her udders.”

“What do you mean? Alacrity was born from Ordé and Addy.”

“First Light,” Thrombone’s eyes filled with fondness. “Her child is rare but no different from the rest. The next generation is coming, but not yet. Maybe never. Maybe not at all.”

By then I wanted to know everything that the little madman knew.

“So this isn’t what Ordé said?” I asked. “This isn’t the beginning of the change of the world?”

“It might be some kind of start,” he answered. “But this is story-time and not school.”

“But —” I started to say.

“I have answered your question, and now you need to ask another. Not about blue light, though. With that I am through.”

“Why didn’t you want us to come here?” Alacrity asked. “Why’d you send those butterflies to hurt us?”

“Because, little one, I was afraid. I was afraid that Death would sniff at you even here and come to kill the puppy trees as he did their big mama redwood. I was afraid and so I sent my butterflies to sting you with their love.” Juan Thrombone almost lost his benign smile for a moment. “But when you fought so hard and killed so many I” — He held his palm to his lips and sucked suddenly, pulling his hand away from his mouth. This caused the same thumping in the air that had rendered the butterflies, and me, unconscious. This sound, however, wasn’t as violent as the first — “so you wouldn’t kill all of my beautiful friends.”

“What did those butterflies do to the children?” Addy asked.

Thrombone smiled again, holding up the baby finger of his left hand to the point at his left eye.

“You mean to ask,” our odd host lectured, “what are those butterflies that they could do what they did? But the answer is no story. I made water every day in a clearing of rotten wood. In a year there were wild flowers everywhere. In another year there were butterflies. From butterfly to worm, and then from the worm rose the creatures that suckled on blue.”

Thrombone smiled to himself.

“Maybe it is a story,” he said.

Wanita asked, “Then why did you let us come if you was scared? Ain’t you scared no more?”

Thrombone was looking into Addy’s eyes at that moment. She stared back while running her finger down the healing wound on her face.

“I can hear people’s dreams also, Dreamer. I can hear all living things when they dream. Dogs and trees and fish and bears. I can speak to dreamers. I spoke to all of you. I knew in our talks that you were not bad — at least, not yet. And I was lonely, but that’s not why I let you pass.”

“Why then?” Wanita asked again.

“To sleep with you, Dreamer.”

“Say what?” That was me. “Hey, man, I know you livin’ up here with the bears and shit, but down the hill, in civilization, no matter if you got blue light or Thunderbird wine, men sleeping with little girls is just not happenin’.” I was angry and used street talk like a hapless frog puffing up his throat to bluff his way.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Juan said. If he was in any way intimidated, he hid it well. “You are right, of course. I’ve been up here so long that I forget how to talk. I don’t mean sex. I like sex. I want sex. But for Wanita, it is only her dreams I wish to share. I can hear dreams, but she — she can travel in them, she can see with them. Her dreams are the most beautiful I have ever seen.”

I was not convinced. I made up my mind right then to tuck Wanita in every night — and to sleep close by.

Bomp bomp bomp
resounded in the air.
Bomp de bomp. Bomp de bomp.

“It’s Reggie!” Alacrity cried.

The sound came closer and closer. Finally Reggie emerged from the woods with a big hollow log in his arms. He beat the drum with a thick branch.

Thrombone leaped up and so did Addy and the girls. They all danced and laughed happily. No one else seemed to feel that the world was falling apart. No one else seemed afraid of what might happen in the days to come.

I fed the fire while my friends and Juan Thrombone danced. Reggie beat his drum with an amazing ear for someone untrained. They were all wild and abandoned, but Alacrity was by far the most primal. Her movements were like nothing except maybe the flames I fed. She leaped and gesticulated, bounced and sang out. Her whiteness was fearful to see. Her intensity, I feared, was the future of the world.

The dancing went on for quite a while longer. Finally Addy tired, and Juan followed her back to the fire. Smiling and happy, they sat there next to me. I felt more lonely than ever.

“The trees are not only a wall of wood and root,” Juan was saying later on, after much honey wine, “but they sing a dull song I taught them. That song hides the puppy trees and you and me. They also call for people like you, First Light” — he was referring to Addy, he was holding her hand — “humans half dipped blue. I wanted them to come help me tend the trees and the forest.”

“Why would the trees need tending?” I asked. “It is a forest, isn’t it? The trees can get along on their own.”

“But these are special trees,” the little woodsman replied.

“What kind of special trees?”

Juan Thrombone turned his full attention upon me then. In his eyes I saw a vastness across which, I imagined, a strong wind blew. His smile didn’t seem relevant to the power in those eyes, but he smiled anyway and said, “There are two kinds of trees that are special. One because they can sing and the other because they roar.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard a call, did you not?” he asked.

The storm in his gaze seemed to grow in power.

“That call,” he continued, “was from a thousand trees whose parents were white firs. I grafted them so they could sing so sweet and high. They sing like the wind, only higher. They sing like the sun before dawn.”

“The wind and the sun,” Addy said. “Are those the two kinds?”

“No, First Light,” Juan said gently. “The white firs sing of the sun and wind. And then there are the puppy trees.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“Deep bass ramblers. Children of what you call blue light but, like Alacrity, born here. They are orphans and I tend them. They rumble like bullfrogs and tickle Earth’s soul.”

“And we’re here to tend them?” I asked.

“No,” he said. The tone of his voice would have knocked me down if I wasn’t already seated. “The puppy trees, the deep ramblers, might mistake you for dinner and suck the life from your bones. Stay away from them. You were summoned here to tend the special white firs, the high singers, the maskers of blue. The ones that called you. They called and you came.”

“We did,” I said. “But you didn’t want the children. You wanted Addy, but you wanted her to leave Alacrity behind.”

I wanted Addy to see him for what he was.

“I never expected that those of such power, even so young, would follow those so weak. I didn’t know if I could protect them and the puppy trees too. The thing out there, the one you call Gray Man. He wants only to kill. I thought that all of us together here would make too much noise, would bring him here.”

“And so he could be on the way here right now?” I said, happy that I now had a way to get my friends to leave.

“He might be. He might.” Juan cocked his ear upward. “But I don’t hear him coming. No, I don’t.”

“But he could be coming,” I said. “He could be, and you just don’t hear it yet. He could come on us in our sleep up here. He could kill us in our sleep. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

I looked around at my companions and friends. The children had stopped their dancing to listen. They were all looking to Juan Thrombone. It was he who they turned to for answers now. It was he whom they trusted.

“You can leave if you want to,” Juan said to me. “You are welcome if you care to stay. The Gray Man may not know where we are; he may have changed also. This could well be true.”

“I’m staying,” Reggie said. “It’s nice here. It’s the safest place in the whole world.”

“Me too,” Wanita said.

“Please stay, Chance,” Alacrity whined. “Please stay with us here. Please.”

I looked at Addy. Her fingers were laced with Juan Thrombone’s. She held my eyes a moment and then looked away.

“I’m staying for a while at least, Chance. I’m tired and sick still. And I can’t think of anywhere else to go.”

“And there will be others,” Juan said. “More people will come to us over the weeks and days. The song you heard goes like a ribbon on the wind, blowing here and there. Some will hear it. A few will come. And when they get here, there’s an old town down by the stream. It’s a ghost town now, but soon they will come and we can be happy, Last Chance, for a while more.”

Addy snuggled down and put her head against Juan’s shoulder. That’s what broke my will. He had taken everything that I had left with his funny way of talking and his eyes like forever.

“Okay,” I said. “All right, I’ll stay for a few days more. At least until Addy is better. Then we can talk about it again.”

And with that, something eased in me. A pressure, a weight. I gave in to the spell of Juan Thrombone and his magical wood. Reggie began playing his drum again and we all danced. Somewhere in the early hours of the morning Juan and Addy disappeared. I found them the next day naked and wrapped in each other’s arms under the hanging shingles of Number One. They were together from that day on.

A
T FIRST I STAYED
because of the children. But within the first month I knew that they were safe with Addy and her man. After that I just didn’t know where to go. Juan offered to walk me out of the wood if I wanted to leave. But the truth was, I wanted
him
to leave. Sometimes he’d go away for days at a time. I’d begin to hope that he’d hurt himself or maybe just decided to go elsewhere. I’d try to comfort Addy at those times, telling her that she didn’t have to worry.

I wanted Addy then. It had never crossed my mind before. She was Ordé’s woman to begin with, and later, while we fled the threat of Gray Man, I was too worried even to think about love. But once we were settled in Treaty, I wanted her to choose me over Juan. I wanted her to see that he was unstable but that I was constant.

But she never worried when Juan was gone.

“He’ll be back, Chance,” she’d say with a dreamy look on her face. “He’ll come back to me and he’ll have great stories to tell.”

Not only had her wound healed but her skin had softened, the little red veins in her eyes had cleared. She started singing songs and working with strange leaves, tree needles actually, and barks that Juan brought for her to cook in a huge stone tub that appeared one day next to Number Nine.

“My friends brought it in the night,” he told me when I asked how the big hollow rock got there.

Juan taught Addy how to cook the leaves and wood and how to pound the mixture with a pestle the size of a baseball bat. She worked at it for days until the resulting green paste was thick. Then she spread out the mixture on a big stone that lay in the field separating the cathedral of Treaty from the surrounding woods. The paste dried into an extremely thin and seemingly delicate blue-green material. It was like rice paper, only it wouldn’t tear or decompose. From this cloth Addy made our clothes. She didn’t sew the seams but used wooden buttons with bearhair ties that Juan collected for her.

“There’s what you call blue light in those leafies,” Thrombone said to me when I marveled at the fabric Addy made. “I harvest them from the puppy trees when they’re rumbling content. They have power in them plenty.”

He also made tea from those leaves. He would let them steep over a low flame in a stone pot for weeks at a time. Then he’d pour the liquid into one of his few precious glass bottles and let it cool in a stream. The brew was strong-tasting, sweet and pungent. Whenever I drank that tea I felt a momentary elation followed by an hour of unutterable calm.

One day I awoke to deep drumbeats playing somewhere out in the woods. I remembered something and went looking for Alacrity. She and I were going to look for straight branches from which she could make arrows for the bow Juan and Reggie had made. I couldn’t find her, so I went to Addy, who was naked next to Number One, making pants for either Reggie or me.

“She left with Juan this morning,” Addy said.

“When are they coming back?”

“Not for a few days.”

“A few days? You let your daughter go off into the woods with a man like that overnight? What’s wrong with you, Addy?”

“It’s okay, Chance. He’s going to help her. You know how restless she’s been. He found her hacking away at tree bark, and Reggie had to stop her from tormenting Wanita. Juan said that he’s going to take her on a walk to discover her true nature.”

“How could you just let her go like that?”

Addy looked up at me, putting down her work. Like I said, she was naked. She was a very beautiful woman, and I was especially aware of that when she peered into my eyes.

“Sit down, Chance,” she said.

I did so.

“You have to stop this now. You have to accept Juan and his life out here. I know that you love us and that you want to protect us, but fighting him isn’t going to help. This is his home and we’re his guests. I don’t know what he’s doing with Julia out there, but whatever it is, I know it’s for the best.” Her green eyes held on to the light like dusky quartz.