The Color of Night (7 page)

Terrell pressed the bayonet against my cheek. Sometimes I think I feel it still: the cool triangular impression of the tip into my flesh. A tenderness there, in my still impressionable body, in my brother’s attitude or even somehow in the metal blade itself.

Don’t tell,
he said. His heart beat quick against my ribs. His softest voice, strangely fond, which let us know the value of our secret.
I’ll kill you if you tell.

It wasn’t that D—— wore the mask. D——
was
the mask. The living face of god among us, empty eyeholes boring backward into the dark infinity of the universe beyond.

It wasn’t always just his con and shallow cruelty. When love stood up among the People, he was father, mother to us all. At times there was great gentleness in him, and great joy. I saw him clothed in his divine glory, saying,
I bring not peace, but a sword.

After dark we all piled into the old Ford Fairlane one of the cowboys let us use. I was wearing a white shirt, and Crunchy sent me back to get a dark one.

Stitch was driving, with Crunchy shotgun. Creamy in back with Laurel and me. We went south to the Ventura Highway, then cut over to the coast and rolled down Highway 1, toward Santa Monica. Stitch was a good driver, fast and tight to the curves. We all got high on a couple of joints Crunchy rolled us out of a plastic sandwich bag.

“Zig-Zag Wanderer,” Creamy said as she crumbled the last shreds of roach out the window, and everybody laughed for no good reason, except for Laurel, who curled sideways and put her head in my lap. It was too dark to see the water from the cliffs, although the stars seemed very bright out there, more like flares than pinpoints, though that would have been the grass.

Stitch stopped, finally, in a parking lot overlooking Muscle Beach, but we didn’t get out of the car. A song of O——’s was on the tinny AM radio, one of the slow dark ones. It seemed to stretch out tacky and brown as caramel.

“What are we doing exactly?” I finally said. I had such a case of cotton mouth it was hard to get the words out. D—— had given us a mission of some kind—
Go
slither,
he’d said, but I didn’t know that part of the code and now when stoned I remembered the words they echoed and shivered inside the dark and cavernous mouth-hole of the mask. Stoned, I couldn’t recall if D—— had audibly pronounced those words or if they’d simply surfaced in our minds.

Laurel butted her head into my ribs, like a lamb; she didn’t say anything.

“Waiting for bedtime,” Crunchy said, and she and Stitch both laughed.

Stitch drove us up into the Santa Monica Mountains then. The Fairlane had a spotlight built into the vent window on the driver’s side, and Stitch flashed a couple of oncoming cars with it, until Crunchy told her to stop. “You’ll get the pigs after us,” Crunchy said.

Crunchy rolled another one, and maybe it was out of a different bag, because all of a sudden I was a lot more stoned than before, like it was real trip weed. We went up and down the canyons. It was late now and there weren’t any other cars. Stitch pulled off, tucking the Fairlane behind a mailbox, and cut the engine and lights. The car ticked cool. It filled up with a single thought shared by the five of us, and though I couldn’t have said it I felt like I knew what it was.

Crunchy got out and walked up the driveway. In her dark clothes we couldn’t see her once she’d gone a few yards past the hood. The canyons were shady and the starlight didn’t come through. She disappeared into this jet-black darkness as though injected into an artery. But after a few minutes a dog started barking, and Crunchy came back, just a little faster than she’d gone.

Stitch slipped the car into neutral and let it roll back onto the road before she started the motor. She drove about a quarter mile before she put the lights back on. I didn’t have any idea where we were anymore, but Stitch seemed to know her way around. There was a sort of static charge inside the car; it tingled like the moment before sex. I had an idea what we were looking for now, like maybe a house without a dog.

We stopped again and Crunchy got out, and this time she didn’t come back for a bit. No one said anything, but after a while Stitch reached softly for the door handle and at that moment I felt some kind of pulse inside my head, like a thought from Crunchy had landed there, except I had the strange idea that maybe the thought had really come from D——, way back at the ranch. Like the phantom voice I sometimes barely used to hear was now ventriloquized by him.

Laurel sat up silently, alert and keen. We were all barefoot. The asphalt of the driveway was still just faintly warm from the day.

Fear, excitement, fear, just different words for the same thing. D—— had been rapping a lot lately about what fear could do for you. It was like we were all flying on big hits of fear as we filed in silence around the curve of the drive to the point where Crunchy waited, half hidden by a trellis, watching the stucco wall of the house all spangled ivory color in the starlight.

A cat came out from under the sash of a cracked window. It dropped on all fours to the patio tiles and looked at us indifferently, then padded off around the corner of the house.

Crunchy darted to the house wall, and crouched below the window. My mind caught on the quick electric stops and starts of her movement, light and crisp as a skink. She slithered up the wall and poured herself through the crack in the window the cat had come out of. There wasn’t any word for it but
slither.

In the next instant Creamy had done the same and I felt a pull to go after them, like they were two magnets pulling me along. I could definitely fit into the crack they’d taken, though Laurel, plumper and wider in the hips, might have had more trouble. A thought stopped me. Stitch’s empty hand was on my arm.

A glass door slid open, farther down the wall, though I couldn’t see anyone behind it, just a slash of darkness, colorless. Beside the opening the heavy blackness of the glass seemed to spin whorls of oil-spill radiance in it, though maybe that was because I was stoned. We went crouching toward the gap, we slithered through. The interior was all Danish modern, glass and flat planes and staggered levels. We slithered about, keeping to the shadows and low to the floor. Crunchy and Creamy were the best at it. You couldn’t seem to see them at all till one of their heads came up and froze, like the probing head of a snake.

Fear is a man’s best friend.
I could taste it like blood in the back of my throat. My heart was beating like a kettle drum, like the heart of all the People beat in us and in me. Why couldn’t they hear that? I was wondering, except I didn’t know who
they
might be, until we’d all slithered into the bedroom one by one, following Crunchy and Creamy. Two Beautiful People were sleeping there, in the starlight pouring through another half-open glass door. A sheer white curtain quivered in the breeze. They slept naked in a tangle of expensive-looking sheets. The man’s mouth open, not quite snoring. The woman’s breasts looked marble in the light. She reminded me of Eerie, though she didn’t look like Eerie; it was just the same incredibly high standard of being beautiful.

With the tiniest snick, Crunchy’s Buck knife opened, pricked upright in her boney hand.
Fear.
She’d wake them. Surely they would wake. The shadow of the knife lay on the woman’s navel. Crunchy’s dry tongue flicked in and out like a snake’s.

“Duh,” the woman said, and stirred a little, her closed eyelids fluttering. “Duh … 
Doormat.
” She turned and nuzzled against her lover, gouging deeper into sleep.

Laurel had taken a handful of spoons from the kitchen and now she switched them with some jewelry that was laid out on the vanity. We didn’t actually steal anything, though. Laurel put the jewelry where she’d found the spoons, and Creamy filled a cereal box with dry cat food and Stitch put a picture from the wall on the coffee table and propped a book from the table on the nail where the picture had been.

We slithered out. Halfway across the patio the word
doormat
pulsed into my mind and I went back and turned the doormat around so the
WELCOME
would be upside down.

Stitch let the car roll down the canyon. For a minute it felt like we were falling out of a plane. Then Stitch started the car by popping the clutch even though she had the key in the ignition all along, and all of us started laughing all at once.

“Doormat,” Creamy said, through the giddy laughter. “Doormat—that was a good one, Mae.”

I could begin to feel my head coming back to me then, away from the People, and it was odd how I didn’t really want it to.

“Tell me what that was all about?” I said.

“Higgledy-piggledy,” Laurel said, still laughing, wrinkling her nose as I hugged her, both of us feeling the flush of fear as it changed the name we put on it.

“Just a little.” Laurel giggled. “A little higgledy-piggledy for the pretty piggy people in the morning.”

So it was told by Epitherses, returning from his voyage, the ship on which he was embarked lay opposite the isle of Paxi, becalmed, when out of the dark forest lining the shore a voice called for the Egyptian pilot Thamus, at which the passengers stopped drinking their wine. Thamus heard the call three times before he answered; the voice then boomed out to him:
When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.
Then Thamus was not sure at all if he would do as he was enjoined, but after some reflection thought that he would let chance or destiny decide the question—if the wind was fresh when they came near Palodes, he would sail past while holding his tongue, but in the event they were again becalmed there, the longboat drifting, turning in slack tide; Thamus then with some reluctance raised his voice loud across the dark plane of the water, and when they heard him there was tumult among those gathered on shore, with cries of wonderment and sorrow.

Great Pan is dead.

So too, many oracles have failed, and what had branded immortality in me—

The god that had once lived in D—— had left him long ago. The shell of him still lay in bondage, under D——’s government name. The name of a petty criminal, thief and pimp, a murderer only by proxy. From his own being he had nothing to offer except the cheapest mortal madness.

The first casino where I worked was a round room. Once the door had closed behind you, it was near impossible to get out if you didn’t know your way. A tight interminable circle, all mirrors and buzzers and flashing lights. The promise of money and nothing but money, the vacant tokens of exchange. So you let yourself be lured along, forgetting everything outside the lure.

The worst was it was always Christmas there. They made everyone wear Santa hats, and for the girls, red miniskirts with a trim of fake white fur.

There were rats there too, in the round room, the kind with four paws and snaky tails. I seem to remember one that ran and ran, with the dogged determination of a pit boss making his rounds, only with no purpose, around and around the edge where the circled wall met the carpeted floor. A flashback, maybe. I don’t know. In those days I was coming off a lot of long strange trips. But it is a realistic rat in my memory. It wasn’t washed over in op-art graphics and it didn’t wear a Santa hat or cap and bells; it offered no anthropomorphic detail whatsoever. An ordinary brown rat, the bearer of plague, in a trap large enough to allow it to run. Its eyes black pinholes into nothing; they stared relentlessly forward along the continuous curve.

There’s only one way out of this.

What I mean to say is that no story matters. Not even the tales we have told of the gods. In two billion years the sun will have burnt this world into cinders. What I mean to say is there’s nothing but this. This. Nothing. This.