Blue Light (28 page)

I was used to wildflowers and red wine, not arrows and knives.

“Fuck!” Alacrity shouted in my face.

She turned away from me and stalked off into the woods. I wasn’t worried about Reggie anymore. It looked as though the arrow had only caught him in the thigh, and I knew Alacrity wouldn’t be able to find him once he got out of sight.

The surrounding white firs hummed a sweet counterpoint to my panic. But the music was no balm for my pain. I was flesh in the face of iron blades; I was a Christian at the mercy of lions. I was at the center of history and paying the price. I shivered when I thought of how quickly Alacrity had decided to kill her friend. I tried to think of something to do about it, but nothing came to mind. The aftermath of my fright left me drowsy. I closed my eyes, and sleep followed me into the dark.

When I returned to the camp that night, Reggie had been there but was gone again. Addy said that he claimed his wound had come from a fall. She hadn’t believed him, but he was gone before Juan or I had returned.

Alacrity was back late. She was sullen and went to sleep soon.

We didn’t see Reggie again for days. He made his presence known, though, through missing food and the disappearance of his sleeping bag.

Silence prevailed over those days. Wanita was quiet, not even talking about her dreams. Addy sat for hours with her daughter, cooking and working with tree cloth. Only Juan Thrombone seemed unaffected by the mood. He spent most of his time preparing for the new citizens of Treaty.

He kept saying that people like me and Addy — half-light and free — would soon be coming.

Bones was always returning from or going to the abandoned town about five miles away. It had been a mining town, just three broken-down buildings on one side of a creek that must have once been a road. There was a hotel, a church, and what might have been a barn or a dance hall. Juan was working on them, filling in cracks, bringing bear pelts and big granite pots.

I once saw him moving a great pot by using bears as beasts of burden. He led them with simple reins made from various animal hairs and deer leather. The ropes he used were also from hair and of thickly braided tree cloth. It was quite a sight, seeing a team of six huge bears working in unison pulling the four-foot-high oblong stone bowl.

That particular morning I had been out looking for Reggie. I hadn’t seen him since the day in the singing grove. I heard sounds pretty far away and followed them. When I got there, I saw the team of bears pulling the stone bowl down a gully of small trees. Juan Thrombone sat atop the bowl, driving the grunting bears. All around them were butterflies. Thousands of butterflies. Some were big like the ones that attacked us, but many were small and normal-looking. They seemed to be urging the bears and Thrombone on.

“Hurry up, bears!” Juan Thrombone barked. “The sooner we get there the sooner you get your honey!”

I followed them for the rest of the morning. There was nothing else to do. They pulled and yanked, growled and roared for more than three hours until coming to the town of Treaty deep in a cedar grove.

When they got the big bowl out in front of the barnlike structure, Juan laid out six big wooden bowls, filling each with honey from a large deerskin pouch. The bears went at the sweet liquid and were instantly carpeted with butterflies.

“Pretty, huh?”

The voice startled me. I gasped just like a frightened starlet in a bad western.

“Hey,” Alacrity said.

“Hey,” I whispered back.

We watched for a while, and then she jerked her head to indicate that we should leave. I followed her down a path that I hadn’t noticed before. She was wearing a pair of her mother’s jeans and one of my plaid shirts.

We walked for a long time, saying absolutely nothing. For more than an hour we made a gradual climb but then began to descend. The terrain was pretty rough, and through most of it there was no path. Every footfall was a different motion, a new gesture. Following Alacrity through that rough terrain was like going through the motions of some primeval prayer and dance.

After maybe two hours more she stopped.

“It’s just up there,” she said.

“What?” I was breathing hard and didn’t want to take another step.

“You got to get ready now, Chance,” she said instead of answering my question.

“Ready for what?”

“Just try to keep calm now; it’s just up here. Right after we go between these trees.”

We were in a grove of Juan Thrombone’s singing firs. They formed a blockade and a doorway. Alacrity pushed her way through the sapling trunks. Actually, the trees themselves seemed to move apart for her. We went up through into a large space, a grove of young sequoias. Young, but what trees they were.

There were two dozen forty-foot sequoias spaced out around the clearing. Each one was magnificent in its own birthright, but what dazzled me was something else. Where the singing trees of Juan Thrombone chanted in high-pitched tones like castrati, these great trees hummed out a psalm so deep that I was forced to my knees. They were, I was sure, the choir of Earth. Their deep rumbling melody told me everything. They were the hymn of unbroken history back so far that they predated the light that illuminated them.

I was there on my knees outside of the circle of trees. I named them instantly — the Bellowing Trees of Earth.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said to me. “I wanna show you the throne.”

“No,” I croaked.

“Why not?”

“I can’t.” I swallowed the words. I didn’t think she understood me. “I can’t,” I said again.

“But it’s a throne. You’ll really like it.”

I sobbed but couldn’t say any more. Alacrity knelt beside me and put her arms around me. Instinctively she brought my head to her breast. Her strength and warmth, the powerful beating of her heart, revived me some. I held on tight and her embrace tightened too.

As sad and suicidal as I had been in San Francisco, I never even once thought that there could have been too much beauty. But there with those trees, in that beautiful warrior woman’s arms, I felt too small to enjoy the pleasure offered me.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said again. “Come with me.”

She pulled me to my feet, and we walked through the chorus of gods. The music that emanated was less sound and more a bone-shaking vibration. A deep longing for friction was satisfied somewhere that I hadn’t known existed. My balance was shaky, the ground seemed to shift now and then. The trees didn’t appear to be limited by space at all. They were everywhere at once.

Alacrity walked with her arm around my waist. She led me to the largest tree toward the other side of the grove. There was an opening shaped like a frozen black flame in its bark. The slit was large enough for a man to go into, but not far.

“Sit in it,” Alacrity told me. “Sit down in it.”

I did as she said, going to my knees and crawling into the space.

As soon as I was seated, the chorus ceased. It was as though the vibrations all came together, negating one another, or maybe complementing one another. Then, instead of hearing them, I saw their music as the intricate interlacing of multicolored lights. It was like sitting in the middle of a giant gem, experiencing its formation over the millions of years. The trees were building themselves and the world around them. An exquisite and invisible edifice of possibility arose in the forest, and I was the only witness. It was a conspiracy of the trees. A grand design. I wanted to be a part of that design. I wanted to lay down roots right there in that hollow. I wanted to be a deep note in their ululation.

My human senses closed down inside the tree. Instead, I was a root sensing water, a cell sucking on light. I could feel my body reaching and reforming.

A lazy tendril root caressed my cheek.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said again. “That’s enough. You’re not supposed to stay in there that long. Come on.”

If I had had any strength left, I would have fought her. That tree had more hold on me than Claudia Heart ever did.

Alacrity pulled me to my feet and made me run out of the grove. I could hear the trees calling for me, calling. Once we were among the simple singing firs of Juan Thrombone again, I relaxed. An exhaustion came over me that I had never felt before. Every cell was tired. I took in a deep ragged breath like a man who’d been drowning.

“I’n’it cool?” Alacrity asked, excited by our adventure.

“What happened to me?”

“I don’t know, not really, but the tree wants you. It calls out and then, if you go in, it tries to pull you down with it. It’s so cool.”

Alacrity was very excited by it all. She tore my shirt open, popping all the buttons, and then she pulled my pants down. When she stood up, shucking her own clothes, I watched with only one thing on my mind.

Alacrity, and her breasts, were looking at my erection. I realized that she brought me there because she knew somehow that the song of the redwoods would arouse me.

I brought my hand to my hardon, and Alacrity gasped. When I reached down to pull up my pants, she frowned and I hoped that her new bow was not around.

“Sit down, Alacrity,” I said. “Come sit down here next to me.”

“Why?”

“Just sit down, honey.”

She waited a moment or so and then did as I asked.

I took her hands in mine. She relaxed a little.

“Baby,” I said. I was tired and the deep song of the trees was still playing in my mind. “You’re my little girl. I was your father’s student, and his blood runs in mine. I’m like your uncle or older brother. I’m your family, honey. I can’t be your boyfriend.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I love you. I don’t even think about anybody but you. All the time.”

“That’s just because you’ve grown up so quickly. You love me, and all of a sudden you’ve come to be a woman. It’s confusing, but don’t worry, there’ll be men for you.”

“When?”

“Not that long. But you’ve got to remember that you can’t settle your problems by fighting. You are a fighter, but you should go to war only when nothing else will work.”

“But Reggie was wrong to be spying on us,” Alacrity said.

“Yeah, but, you know, he’s grown up almost as fast as you have. And you’re beautiful, Alacrity. If you covered up some more, he wouldn’t get so excited. You know, if you run around naked, men will follow you — and that’s not good. I mean, most of the time women have trouble when men go after them like that. But in your case I think it’s the men who will have it bad.”

“If he leaves me alone, I won’t bother him,” Alacrity complained.

“I can’t tell you what to do, honey. You’re a woman now — ready or not. But do me a favor, okay?”

“What?”

“Go easy on us poor men. Give us a break.”

I don’t know what it is that I said exactly. I don’t know what she heard, but Alacrity threw her arms around me and hugged so hard that I had to put off breathing during her embrace.

“I love you, Chance,” she whispered in my ear.

I heard in her words the song of the trees. They were still calling for me.

O
NE DRIZZLY DAY NOT
long after my talk with Alacrity, we all heard a weak scream from somewhere not too far away. Juan was sitting beneath Number One with Alacrity, skinning a deer she had taken down with her bow and arrow. He was the first one to raise his head.

“They’re here,” he said. “They’re here.”

He jumped up and ran for the singing wood, followed by Alacrity and Wanita and, finally, by Reggie the pathfinder. Addy and I walked up to the edge of the cathedral and waited. I strained to listen, but there were no more screams. All I could hear was the patter and hiss of the light rain.

“There they are,” Addy said.

Through the trees, twenty or thirty yards to the left of where they had gone, came the whole crew, including a smallish man with thick eyebrows and a brown woman who was crying and wailing about something.

Addy and I ran out in the rain to see what we could do.

“The bears,” the woman was saying. “The bears are after us.”

I knew then that these were the first new residents of the town of Treaty.

Not many strangers wandered into Treaty. A couple of campers now and then. A park ranger every once in a while. But most would-be intruders were daunted by the thickets of Juan’s special trees or by the bears. Even if someone happened to stumble upon us, it didn’t matter much. Bones would greet them, shake their hand, and look deeply into their eyes. After a while whoever it was that disturbed us just turned around and left, a corridor of trees opening before them and closing in their wake.

“It’s okay now, my dear,” the small man with bushy eyebrows said. “We’re here now and we’ll never have to worry again.”

His name, I learned later that night, was Gerin Reed. Once a warden at Folsom Prison, he was now a sort of nomad, a hippie even, who took pleasure in everything he could see or touch or hear. His girlfriend was a Pakistani woman named Preeta. She had come to America with her parents when she was an infant. But they died and she became a ward of the state. She was also a drifter. She and Gerin had hooked up in Bakersfield only a month earlier. Gerin had heard the call of Bones’s singing trees — not the bellowing sequoias, but the ones that Thrombone had cultivated to mask the god trees’ song.

Gerin moved into Treaty just as if it had been meant for him. He and Preeta stayed with us for a few days and then moved down to the town. They took a room at the back of the hotel. Preeta was doing laundry in the creek before the day was through.

Over the next few months Gerin Reed and Juan Thrombone grew very close. They took long walks in the woods and went fishing together often. Gerin spoke little, but he never seemed to tire of Thrombone’s riddles. Juan called Gerin Pride of Man. It was through seeing their friendship that I understood how wrong I had been about Bones.

Three days after Gerin and Preeta moved into the town of Treaty, I was out walking in the woods. It was a few hours before dark. I was wondering about my mother. Did she think that I had died somewhere? Was she crying over me? I decided to ask Bones if he would walk me to a mailbox somewhere and then show me the way back to Number Twelve. I planned to tear two of the back pages out of my
History
, one for the letter and the other for the envelope. My writing had become tinier as I kept the account; I still had more than six hundred blank pages left.