The Color of Night (19 page)

Across the way from where Laurel lived there was another little park, filling a triangle of otherwise useless space where a street flowed into an avenue. A chest-high fence of iron spears surrounded it. The surface of the ground was sandy and there were other trees, bigger than ginkgos, but without their leaves I didn’t know them.

I sat there, waiting in the dark.

I had bought a duffel bag for the rifle and my other gear, thinking it would be at least a little less conspicuous than the long hard case the rifle had come in. In fact I could open the bag at one end just enough to brace the tip of the barrel on an iron fence rail, and at the other focus the Starlite scope across the avenue and down the street to the doorway with the ivy-wreathed lion’s head above it.

From somewhere I heard Christmas music. From a car—the sound dwindled as it passed. A pair of cops strolled by and didn’t see me. Perhaps they saw a nondescript middle-aged woman with a shapeless bag. Laurel had set our drinks date fairly late. I found her briefly in the scope as she came down her doorstep, the green fluorescent image swimming toward me in the glass. She was, I think, a little distracted, for she passed the park without seeing me, and went into the bar on the other side. I zipped up the duffel bag and followed her in.

“Oh,” said Laurel, dimpling. “You’re here.”

She unwound her scarf and shrugged out of her winter coat. Beneath, to my surprise, she wore only a sleeveless red shell. She gave the sort of dramatic shiver that would make somebody want to put an arm around her, but we were sitting across a small square table from each other.

“Aren’t you cold,” Laurel said.

I shrugged.

“They have great burgers here,” Laurel advised me.

She went to the bar and brought back a glass of neat bourbon for me, single malt Scotch for herself. When she sat down I looked at her bare upper arm for a sign of a scar. There might have been a couple of fine white lines; in the dim light it was hard to tell. Laurel’s flesh had slackened a little, but in this kind of lighting she still looked good.

“They have a great jukebox,” Laurel said, tossing back her glossy irradiated hair as she turned her head to look at it. “All the good old stuff.”

The room warmed as we drank our whiskey, and as more people began to come in. A younger crowd mostly but some near our age. To one of those good old songs on the jukebox there was a flicker of hesitant dancing.

We talked, somewhat haltingly. Laurel was stoned on her pain drugs, I realized; though she covered it reasonably well, it muffled her in a deep layer, below the warmth of the Scotch. She talked, somewhat wanderingly, of her days here before and after the planes hit the towers. How she happened to be nearby when they fell (some banal, coincidental reason). The shock, horror, grief, and dismay, gradually fading into simple inconvenience. One lived with it awkwardly, a dry, diminished thing.

In return I told her a few casino stories. A couple of them made her smile. Sometimes her hand seemed to tremble a bit as she raised her glass to her lips. Once without thinking I reached out with a tissue and blotted a droplet of Scotch from her chin. Our faces came very near, not touching.

And although nothing had been said we arranged another meeting, to say it again. Coffee, next morning. The coffee shop was two doors from the bar. It occurred to me that Laurel had contrived to pass most of her days in a space even smaller than the wretched provincial town I grew up in. We were only a couple of blocks from her school.

When she opened her wallet to pay our tab, a card fell out, without her noticing. I ducked under the table to retrieve it. A laminated photo, slightly smaller than a playing card. I hid it in the cup of my palm. Ariadne was younger in this one, in her early twenties, perhaps. Somebody had put one of O——’s old songs on the jukebox, but I didn’t really need that cue—the resemblance was plain enough without it.

When, I was wondering. It couldn’t have been her detour to Malibu, because there was too much time in between. She would have been showing and she wasn’t. So it must have been the very last time we were all together.

I snapped the picture down on the black shellacked surface of the table. Laurel picked it up, with a faintly wistful expression, and filed it back into a slot of her wallet.

“I never loved him, you know,” she said, with that same swimming, distant look. And she shook her head, or its own weight wagged it. “Nobody loved Orpheus—it was only the music. I loved you.”

We came upon O—— wandering in the wilderness, strumming and singing sad songs of Eurydice, whom he had brought back from the realm of death, but who had returned to abide there forever … Or to be more exact it was we who were wandering, while Orpheus sat upon a stone, cross-legged with his honey-colored guitar in his lap, and snakes and horned toads and coyotes came out to hear him sing those mourning songs. Laurel and I joined the audience of beasts, looking like wild animals ourselves, no doubt, after days of hitchhiking and walking through the brush—and mostly we’d been afraid to hitchhike either, after the raid on the ranch.

O—— gave us some tabs of blotter acid, or it was we who gave it to him—I’m sure we were already tripping when we found him. Yes, Laurel had a whole sheet in her sandalwood box, decorated by an artist who’d laced all the tabs together with loops of vine and psychedelic blossoms, and in the center of each square the brooding yellow eye of an owl …

We didn’t know the cops hadn’t come about the murders. The raid was over some beef about stolen cars in the beginning, but nobody knew that when it started, and Laurel and I didn’t find out until after the whole scene with O—— had gone down.

At the first sound of a siren, Laurel, quick as a cat, snatched up her box, dove out of the room and squirmed up under the ramshackle building. I couldn’t process what had set off her alarm, but I snatched a string bag and followed her without thinking. D—— was the only other one of his People who had the time or thought of hiding. He folded himself up completely into a two-by-three cabinet under a sink in the lodge basement; a single strand of his hair hanging out gave him away. But we only learned that part from the news later.

City police and sheriffs had come together—a joint operation with dozens of badges. They were herding all the People out of the buildings and into a big anxious quarrelsome gaggle in the yard in front of the lodge. Huddled together under the floor, we could hear, could almost feel the jump boots thumping on the splintery boards above us.

Then a couple of fat flashlight beams began probing underneath. Down at the school-bus end and too far off to find us yet. It had gone quiet overhead. I elbowed Laurel and wriggled out, belly flat to the cooling sand. By luck it was a moonless night. We moved through it sheathed in that hot clinging darkness. When we reached the cover of some scrub we both sprang up and ran.

We went scuttling along, a few dozen yards from the highway shoulder, taking cover whenever a set of headlights appeared. Presently the whole caravan of police and sheriff’s cars and paddy wagons came out of the ranch and motored past us, in the direction of downtown LA. An hour or so later we had reached a crossroads where there was a gas station and a little store. We straightened up, sighed, picked burrs from our hair.

“Shit,” Laurel said, breaking her stride toward the lighted doorway and clawing at all her jeans pockets at once. She’d forgotten her wallet with the detour fund. Of course I never had any money. I looked in the bag I’d snatched as we ran: my two knives wrapped in a tie-dye T-shirt and that was all.

O—— had a room at the Joshua Tree Inn. Laurel and I got in the tub together. We were both so filthy the water turned gray and we had to drain it and start over again. We had left the door open, and once we were clean I began to sense Laurel’s pique at O——’s lack of interest. He only kept singing the sad eerie songs.

She looped a towel around her hips and walked into the bedroom with her heavy breasts swaying. O—— did not appear to notice her. His music went on. There was a bottle of tequila on the dresser. Laurel picked it up and swigged.

Then, I think, we all took another tab of acid.

 … and Laurel reached between his legs and brought his member to life with her hands, with her mouth, and yet he remained indifferent to her, even as she bestrode him, rocked into him—the singing continued. I’d taken a rawhide lace from his boot, but when I moved toward his throat from behind, Laurel shook her head and plucked it from my fingers. She reached for the small of my back and soon had arranged the three of us in a combination as dexterous as any D—— could have devised. Thus for some time we all moved together, our voices, mine and Laurel’s, keening higher and higher into a crescendo of O——’s song, and yet O—— never seemed to know we were there—I don’t think I’d have known I myself was there, if I hadn’t caught sight of myself in the cracked mirror behind the bottle on the dresser, hips pumping mechanically, my face a black hole …

 … then afterward, Laurel roused herself from a daze—she had slipped down the coverlet to slump on the floor. On the edge of the bed, O—— had taken up his guitar again, and not for an instant had he ever stopped singing. Now that mirror captured his face too.

I saw her open the sandalwood box.

She stood, writhing her hips like Salome, the kris flickering in her hand, and spun on her heels, like a top, her limbs braiding and flowing together like water, as her blade opened a fine red line on her upper arm—and I was dancing myself by then, with Laurel, around O——, bayonet in hand, she and I laying soft cuts on each other and then upon O—— as his song went on—giving him deeper and deeper cuts, as he never seemed to feel any of them.

 … tripping, the light from the bare bulb overhead seemed so beautiful, and all our movement was a poem. Laurel’s blade struck into O—— like a snake and then as she twirled into her own center stroked another cut on her upper arm—a shallow one, though it wept ruby beads of blood. Laurel always knew how not to hurt herself too much.

 … and I used the bayonet to break bone, but the stone knife lifted the beating heart from his ribs and we shared it between us, like a bowl. I never saw either of those knives after that, as if they had served their ultimate purpose, and of course I couldn’t safely have gone back for them …

It finished elsewhere, deep in the desert, and yet there seemed to be a broad rushing river, streaming iridescent colors, like a peacock’s tail. Above there swung a sickle moon, and we had hung his harp upon a willow, and we had torn him limb from limb, and I swear—I swear!—as it went down in the flood, his head still sang.