Blue Light (13 page)

The police labeled the Close Congregation a cult and blamed the episode on drug use. The public dismemberments were called the “culmination of a series of sacrifices,” which, they said, included all the poisonings and the murder of Phyllis Yamauchi.

Arrest warrants were issued for various congregation members, including me. Because of the police I spent much of my time hidden in the back of the used VW van we purchased. Addy did the driving and checked us into cabins and motels.

We moved around a lot, rarely staying more than a week in any one place. Our nomadic routine continued for months. The depression that filled up our days was punctuated now and then by high points of fear. Fear that the police would arrest us and keep us in one place long enough for Death to come.

Nothing happened. We just moved around the woods, sighing and crying, hiding in efficiency cabins and hoping for some kind of sign. Reggie was always on the lookout for the perfect hiding place. There was someplace to hide, he was sure, but its location was always just beyond his perception.

But we weren’t the only part of the story. Gray Man hadn’t stamped out light or life yet. Others were grouping and regrouping on different sides. While I was hiding in backseats or bathrooms, Claudia Heart and Nesta Vine and Juan Thrombone were plotting, gathering, and evoking the words that spoke God. There was the police investigation and the perversions of love. A lot happened before our story continued and so for the sake of the continuity of my
History
I shall tell first about the events that occurred while we hid in the woods.

I learned these stories from newspaper articles and secondhand sources. Every now and then I gleaned my knowledge through blood. And for a while there, I learned while sharing the dreams of the closest friends I ever had.

It doesn’t really matter how I learned what I know, not now anyway. Maybe in some far-flung future, when science is not estranged from the soul, someone may find this text and know how to believe in it.

W
INCH FARGO LAY IN
his cell, eyes closed, arms and legs bloodied, pale and incoherent. Every once in a while he’d mutter, “Cunt,” thinking about Eileen Martel, about how she hadn’t been to see him in months. He lay back with his teeth clenched, trying not to hear the music that played only half the melody, trying not to see the small part of what he could never become. In his dreams he’d see himself stalking a man he hates. The man runs scared and Winch falls on him with a knife, but always he turns into the victim at the moment of his thrust, the knife buried in his own chest. The old woman he sodomizes in this dream becomes him. The food he eats, the ground he stomps on. The shit from his ass.

He is everything but himself. A chicken with no head, a planet with no sun.

He groaned on his prison cot but could not move because his arms and legs were tied. He didn’t care about the cuts and scars along his limbs. He didn’t care about the men who bled him, mixing the blood with powdered milk to drink or inject into their veins.

The blood drug, that’s what the brothers called it. One teaspoon, and the prison fell away for a while. One teaspoon, and there was no pain, no sorrow.

“Shit, I’d kill ten motherfuckers just to come back here and get some’a this shit,” Mackie Allitar once said while squeezing the blood from a slit in Winch’s thumb.

One teaspoon, and an illiterate man could learn to read, a bodybuilder could double his dead lift, a stutterer could recite his family tree without a hitch.

Winch didn’t know it at the time, but they called him the Farm. They had to feed the farm and work it. They had to harvest the farm and keep it alive.

It hadn’t always been like that. Before Eileen Mattel disappeared, Winch discovered the potential of his blood and dispersed it.

But when Eileen had gone, Winch lost his mind again and his customers made him their little acre. They tied him down on a prison cot and got high off his veins.

And all the while Winch stalked himself, ate his flesh, excreted his soul.

He never slept, not really. He felt them cutting him, milking his veins. But the greatest pain was when the iron door to his cell swung open, causing the air to move over his skin like a blanket of white-hot pins.

He yelled from pain, but a hand clamped down over his mouth. His arms and legs were freed from the cot but then were tied together. A gag was shoved into his mouth and then taped over. He was put into a large cloth bag and hoisted over a broad back. The rocking motion of being carried like that calmed Winch somewhat. The snake that lived in his brain was lulled. He couldn’t move or speak. It was as if life had not started yet, as if pain was still far off, only a possibility.

Winch Fargo was soothed in the dark trunk he was loaded into. The hum of the motor and the occasional bump in the road felt womblike. He came halfway to consciousness in there. Half sane. He even wondered where it was they were taking him.

He wondered if Eileen might be there sending off those signals like the good songs on the radio when he was a boy in Missouri.

Before they dumped him from the bag, he felt her. He wasn’t surprised to see the big blond guard Robert Halston. He didn’t care about how skinny he was or how infected his arms and legs had become. All he cared about was the mousy brunette reclining on the couch before him. He wanted to reach for her, but his hands were still tied.

He didn’t care. She was his beacon and he’d never be far from her side again in life.

“Winch Fargo,” the dazzling image said. “I am Claudia Heart and you are the grandfather to my brood.”

The convict stood just behind and to the left of the warden’s guest chair. His black skin was ashen, the whites of his eyes were more bloody than bloodshot. Slight jerking tremors went through his body every few seconds or so.

“Where is he, Allitar?” Warden Reed asked.

“I ’ont know … sir.”

“Mackie, you have to know,” said Peter Mainhart, chief of guards. “They say you had him tied to a cot in Detention Cell Forty-eight. They say that you and Halston and some other cons were selling him as some kind of sex slave down there.”

“I ’ont know nuthin’ about that, sir.”

Mackie twitched and the warden stood up from his desk. He wasn’t a tall man, but every con in Folsom Prison was afraid when he stood to full stature.

“Where are Halston and Fargo?” Reed asked.

“I wisht I knew,” Allitar said, then shuddered so violently that he had to pull the chair back and sit in it.

“What’s wrong, Mackie?” Mainhart asked. “You need a fix?”

Mackie raised his ruined face to the warden, ignoring the senior guard’s question. He tried to say something; maybe he felt that his yowling groan was answer enough.

“Get him out of here, Peter,” the warden said.

“Richards, Weiner!” Mainhart shouted.

Two prison guards dressed in blue came into the room. One was tall and lanky; the other was shaped like two eggs, the smaller one being his head and the larger comprising his body.

“Take him to solitary,” Mainhart told his men.

Mackie Allitar fell to the ground, sobbing. He looked up at the four white men and cried some more. When Mainhart demanded that he get up, Mackie did as he was told. He let the guards lead him from the warden’s office even though he was still big enough and powerful enough to have killed every man in the room. He didn’t think about killing, though. All he thought about was that
bluity
; all he wanted to do was the blood drug.

“There’s something wrong here, Peter,” Warden Reed said when they were alone again.

The warden was a colorful man. His curly brown hair had red highlights and his blue eyes were almost impossible. His skin drank up the sun in the summer until he seemed to belong on the Caribbean Islands, where he and his family took their vacations.

Mainhart was the warden’s opposite in coloring. His white hair had no shine and there was no red under his pale skin. His flat brown eyes were lusterless and could have belonged to a corpse.

“It’s a weird one, I agree,” Mainhart said. “All this homo drug addict stuff … They should line ’em all up at the gas chamber and forget jail altogether.”

“You say they had the drug down in Fargo’s cell?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you bring it?”

Mainhart left the room for a moment and then returned with a plain brown shoe box. He placed it in front of the warden and lifted off the lid.

Inside were a dozen tiny wax paper packets, a few hypodermic needles, a tarnished spoon, and some matches — all on a bed of cotton balls. Warden Reed unwrapped one of the packages, revealing a hard black lump somewhat resembling tar. When the warden squeezed the lump, it turned instantly to dust.

“What is it?” the warden asked.

“Don’t know,” Mainhart replied. “It’s not opium or hash. I don’t know what it is.”

“What about Halston’s family? Has he gotten in touch with them?”

“He moved out four weeks ago,” Mainhart said. “Just told Millie that he was going to stay at a flophouse down in Los Gatos and never came back.”

“You check the hotel?”

“He never even stayed one night. He just paid the owner to say he wasn’t in if somebody called. A couple of the other guards said that he’d met some hippie chick in the Safeway supermarket. He said that she took him out to her van in the parking lot and fucked him right there. Right there in the parking lot, for Christ’s sake. In the middle of the day. He said that he was in love with her, that he couldn’t even be with Millie after that.”

The warden massaged his face with both hands and made a small chirping sound in the back of his throat. “How long now?” he asked.

“Sixteen hours since we realized it. He’s probably been gone for two days, though. Thursday and Friday were Halston’s weekend. He coulda taken Fargo out anytime. Nobody else went to that cell when he was on duty. It was solitary. It was his detail.”

Warden Reed looked at the dark powder. His fingers tingled slightly. He took a paper towel from his bottom drawer and wiped the drug away, but the tingling remained.

“Report the escape,” Reed told Mainhart. “Tell them that we’re not quite sure when it happened. Tell them we just thought that Fargo had been misplaced and sent someone out to Halston’s house. Tell them it wasn’t until then that we realized that it was a break. Tell them …” Reed’s voice trailed off.

“What?” Mainhart asked. “What did you say, chief?”

“Huh?”

“You were saying something.”

“Oh.” Reed looked at the paleness of his chief guard’s features. “Tell them … tell them that I got sick and had to go home.”

“But, sir, don’t you think with the break and all that, you better …”

Gerin Reed stood up from his desk feeling like a titan. He had always been a short man and he was still the same height, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

“You can take care of it, Peter. You can talk to them. Tell them that I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about being sick.”

The puzzle in the head guard’s face tickled the warden.

“Tell me something, Peter.”

“What’s that, Warden?”

“Did you ever run down a beach as fast as you could, laughing the whole way and then, just when you’re going your fastest, want to take off and fly? But you know you can’t fly, and now running doesn’t seem to be as much fun anymore. I mean, if you can imagine flight, if you can feel it in your arms and down your spine, then … how can you go back to running?”

“I think you should see a doctor, Gerry. Maybe that dust can get in through your pores.”

“Nonsense. Nothing like that. I’m just sick, that’s all. Just sick. Just sick.”

Warden Reed walked out of his office and told his secretary that he’d need his car brought to the front of the prison. He waited patiently as the various locked doors were unlocked. He waited for the guards at the front as they searched his backseat and trunk. They were on special alert. The prison horns were sounding, announcing to the world that someone had escaped.

Warden Reed was looking at the foothills on the horizon. He imagined Winch Fargo out there running as hard as he could, wishing for flight.

His Ford’s engine sounded as good as it ever would, and the road was smooth. Every once in a while Warden Reed turned on his blinker and changed lanes for no reason. He let his mind wander as he drove a few miles above the speed limit toward his home in the Loma Linda Hills.

He thought about how when he was a boy he wished he could live in a nice house like the one he and his wife now owned. Their children had toys and comforts that he could never afford when he was a child back in Kentucky. Back then all his toys were sticks and thrown-away things that he imagined had magical powers. His red fire engine was a squared-off piece of kindling from the firewood his father cut into cords and sold. His air force was a squadron of leaves taking off every autumn for the German lines.

And when he looked off into the stars at night and asked his father if there was ever an end to all that way out there, his father would say, “I don’t have time to think about questions like that, Gerry, and neither do you. Now get to bed.”

Lying there in the bed, little Gerin thought about the stars and how they got there and where they came from.

On the day he left work early he was thinking about those stars. The sky was blue now, the stars hidden. Gerin imagined a world that was completely black, no light at all. He was looking out into the imagined blackness, and then slowly a large red rose came into being. Was it there before he saw it? Was it there in the blackness? Gerin didn’t know the answer, but he planned to go home and think about it. He knew that the answer to that question was in him. He knew that he’d been asking that question his whole life. And now, with a great sigh of relief, he could go home and sit back and think on it.

He parked the car in the street because there was another car in his driveway. He went up the concrete path through the lawn with the key out, but the door was unlocked.

He could hear them before he rounded the corner from the entranceway into the sunken living room. The young man’s sports jacket was thrown on the plastic-covered couch, and her dressing gown was on the floor. His pants were down around his ankles and he was on his knees holding one of her legs high enough to give a clear view of his large erection poised at the entrance of her gaping vagina. Karen’s butt was quivering — beautifully, Gerin thought.