The Color of Night (11 page)

When it was over, nearly over, there was a baby still alive, in the belly of one of the dead women there on the floor of the house in the canyon. I knew because I saw it move. And I remembered Semele, her mortal body immolated in the fire and the light of Zeus. How the god took fetal Dionysus from the charred flesh of his dead lover and sewed him into his own thigh, till the time was ripe for a second bearing.

I wanted to go back to take the baby, have it, release it, bring it to bear. But by then we were leaving, hurrying now—when I turned back the others caught my upper arms and hustled me away.

Mary-Alice was her name and she was a cheerleader, though not the one the sports fans looked at most; she was shorter than the rest, and chunkier, which was revealed when she leaped into the air squealing and shivering her pompoms, and the maroon pleats of her skirt swung out to flash the yellow satin underpants. When not cheerleading she liked to wear white blouses just a little too tight, a dear little roll of pudge at her waistband and the ghost of a sweat stain under her arm, all through those suffocating days of early fall. Her little pink nose turned up like a pig’s, and a small gilt crucifix hung in the hollow of her throat, which, I admit, I sometimes thought of slashing.

The Mom-thing was pleased that Terrell was finally
dating
—pleased and relieved and, when she looked at me, triumphant, it appeared. She cut at me with her smug regard, huffing out smoke from her two nostrils, her whole head a bundle of curlers wrapped in a frizzy polyester kerchief—shooting the look toward me through the smudged cat’s-eye glasses, leashed to her skinny neck with a beaded chain.

So I went out and let the screen door bang, the whine of the spring and the whine of her voice behind me. Through the haze of autumn heat, the window above the garage seemed to shimmer, wrapped in vine like Ouroboros strangling, hatching its egg. What he’d want that she could give him, I couldn’t very well conceive.

He took her to the movies, to the Pullman diner for burgers and shakes. They were making plans to go to the prom, when it was still eight months away, and by God, he even went to church with her family! … though that was only a time or two; he didn’t make it a habit. Then he started taking her parking at night, up into the woods to the dead-end turnarounds of the unfinished subdivision, at the edge of where it was still wild back there.

He left me, then, to my own devices—which he and I had been at pains for me to master.

To be sure, there were others than my brother, beginning with his comrades on the swim team. Somewhat to my own surprise at first, I discovered I had what it took to work my way through a number of these. There was nothing to it, really; nothing in it. Even the ones who liked to play tough, or the ones with some veneer of real meanness—once I punched through the crust there was nothing much but jelly inside.

Unlike my brother, those other boys didn’t know the value of a secret—as if whatever I did with them could have a secret value. So presently girls in the school hallways began to nudge one another and shoot me cutting glances, like the ones I got from the Mom-thing at home.

I didn’t listen to those living whispers. I heard spectral voices, across the aeons, calling me by my name. If anything ever got back to Terrell, he gave me no sign.

I took the rifle into the desert and waited by the rabbit trail, crouched in the shadow of a boulder. No rabbits. No water. In my dry mouth I held a stone.

I could hear mice moving but I couldn’t see them, which was strange when the color of night was so pale. There was a moon, and the desert floor curved away from its sere light, like a moonscape reflected. Dark spines of yucca probed out of the cracks among white rocks. Toward the horizon, a switch of broom grass and the twisted branches of mesquite reaching wraithlike into the sky.

A scent of the smoke of blood sacrifice, rising between the horns of the altar. Horns of the moon.

Presently a coyote came, hunting mice—quick and alert as a cat, fixing invisible prey with his eyes and then pouncing. I raised the rifle and found him in the scope. The coyote turned his head toward me. Ears up, poised. All his being focused on the shadow of the rock where surely he must know I was.

We balanced there, for a long time. I held him in the crosshairs until dawn, and let him go.

The next time I saw O——

 … I mean after our fling to Malibu, which I had never expected to last long. It was like when you pick up a stray cat and play with it a little while and then forget it, let it go. It doesn’t probably occur to you that the little cat could have rabies.

When I was small Terrell taught me how to catch snakes and keep them—not the poison snakes, of course, but chicken snakes and the black snakes that the summer woods were full of. They’d get used to you after a while and twine around your arms and legs, warming to the temperature of the blood inside your body. We kept them in a basket, till hunger turned them mean again, but often they could go a week before that happened.

I hadn’t expected more from my escapade with O——. No woman of the People could come up to Eerie. I knew I was there for a distraction and that was fine with me. I think I honestly hoped to make him feel a little better, if only for a time. And with Laurel called away, to D——’s panopticon atop the lodge, what else was I supposed to do?

I stopped to wonder, what could be D——’s purpose? If down in the dark hollows of the god mask, D—— had known that I would go, or even somehow pointed me in that direction. But I never thought of that for long, because I was still with O—— in Malibu, and it was sweet.

The house was right there on the beach, like a white block castle, ultramodern with lots of glass and stupendous views. Every morning somebody would bring us fresh-squeezed orange juice and usually we’d go out to swim, shouting and diving after each other in the surf. O—— had to teach me some of that, because I still wasn’t used to the ocean.

There were plenty of other people around, some of them staying in the house, and I never knew for sure how many or where exactly it was that they slept. Beautiful People. Small packs of groupie women floated in and out, sometimes high-fashion types, sometimes more exotic hippie chicks or genuine foreigners, wreathed in a funk of patchouli and the henna tattoos that curled over their hands and their feet.

O—— paid no more attention to them than he would to flowers, or not while I was here. I suppose if you get all you want you finally have too many. But fucking,
balling
O—— was nothing special, despite my skills. Of course I’d known from the beginning he wasn’t really there for me.

Then there were musicians, good ones all, who came to play with O——, who had a room, a kind of studio, I think, with lots of guitars and amps, a drum set, with a big glass wall overlooking the sea. But I liked best to hear him play and sing alone, in the evenings with the sun going down red and gold across the strand and the surf—O—— would play one of his big honey-colored acoustics and I would (I did this) curl up at his feet. Then the voices in my head would stop and I heard nothing but the vast annealing resonance of O——’s voice.

The words—I didn’t really hear them. Most of those songs went onto the album
Western Wind.
They tended to be sad songs in minor keys, of love and loss and with a spell to charm the return of the lost lover.

Then one day, O—— didn’t want me in the music room anymore. He was looking over my shoulder when he told me that, to someplace way out in the Pacific, like Hawaii, maybe. That’s when I learned how perfectly soundproof that room really was. Outside on the terrace I watched through the glass, his mouth and his hands silently swimming … Surf sounds in my ears behind me, dark hollow forming again in my head. So I knew that O—— was singing for Eerie, not for me.

I wondered then if he could have found out, if O——
knew
that I knew that Eerie was there when he came looking for her. Maybe, maybe not, but not long after I left Malibu O—— came out to the ranch again, and I knew he wouldn’t be looking for me.

It was night, this time, and the first we heard of it was a shout and scuffle. Laurel and I were in her room, and the racket came from farther down the gangplank—Ned’s voice raised, and a voice not recognizable as O——’s, with that harsh tone of anger. We pulled on our clothes and went to check it out.

As Laurel and I arrived on the scene, O—— pushed Ned in the center of his chest again and Ned faked a fall backward, to a soft landing on his mattress, wings of his black vest flying open and the silver ankh flopping on his breastbone. He didn’t try to get up, but displayed the V sign with both hands.

“Peace, man,
peace
!” Ned panted. “Don’t
freak out,
man.”

O—— glowered down on him from the doorway, and between them Eerie sat quietly crying, her whole head hidden in her hair.

“Like
you
know anything about peace,” O—— said. “Like you care.”

Laurel opened her mouth to say something but I stopped her.
Let it happen,
I thought, or maybe said. It was curious that D——, who had the most sensitive nose for trouble, hadn’t appeared to settle this problem. Maybe he wasn’t on the premises, or maybe he was deliberately sitting it out.

“Listen, man,” Ned started again. “Do you think you own her? It’s a free—”

“Shut the fuck up!” O—— snapped at him. “I’m not talking to you.”

I didn’t think he’d have a lot of luck talking to Eerie. Even with her head clutched in both hands like that I could see the railroad running up her forearms, and I remembered from my days with Louie: when a girl gets that far gone she can hear dope talking but not much more.

O—— didn’t talk to her. He sang. Or he was singing—neither Laurel nor I heard how he began. Somehow too he had produced an instrument and was playing. Were there words? There must have been words. It was as if his fingers strummed upon our viscera. Out of his mouth came a golden orb of light.

Eerie lifted her head and looked at him. She smoothed all her hair toward the back of her head. Her tears were drying on her cheeks. Though her skin had shrunk to the bone of her skull, her beauty was still frightening. I understood that the song of O—— was infusing her with energy—the strength to stand. To move toward him.

No one attended to Ned’s muttering:
lethergothenshe’sfreetogoI’mnotstoppingherifshewantstoleave …

I saw then how O—— and Eerie were embraced in spirit, though their bodies did not touch. When she came near, O—— smiled and turned out through the doorway, still drawing her along, delicately but definitely, at a certain magnetic distance. Laurel and I parted to let them pass. O——’s song still radiated from his lips. He stepped down from the gangplank into the dark, with Eerie following him.

A little shimmer of jealousy rang between me and Laurel, when O—— and Eerie walked between us. Then it passed and we turned our heads together in the direction they had gone.

Behind us, Ned was snickering, louder now.
Don’t look back!

That night was overcast, and pitch-black, so when they stepped off the gangway, they might as well have fallen into outer space. We could see nothing, only the shining of the song of O——, diminishing to a pinpoint in the darkness. He must have parked his car a long way off. I could just make out some other witnesses, those who happened to wear light garments, still as tombstones, pale as shades. So none of us saw if O—— looked back or not.