Blue Light (29 page)

I was about to turn around and go back to the cathedral when I was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground. Two men stood over me. One held my legs while the other sat on my chest. The one on my chest was badly scarred and wore an eyepatch. He hefted a stone about the size of an ostrich egg in his left hand.

“Scream or fight, and I crack your head,” the scarred man said.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

He stood up off my chest then, and the other man released my legs. I stood up to meet my attackers. I wasn’t afraid. I hadn’t known fear since coming to Treaty. Not the fear of being hurt, anyway. I was more curious to know who had come so far into Treaty without being expelled by bear or tree or butterfly.

They were an odd pair. The one who held my legs had the frame for a powerful build but had no meat on his bones. He was of medium height with shriveled black skin. His nose was running, and the whites of his eyes were bright pink. Even though it was cold, he wore only a T-shirt.

His companion was a race of his own. He wore black leather shoes and a long gray trench coat that had once been black. The scars across his face were in a crosshatched pattern almost regular enough to be a grisly design. He had a hard leather cone for an eyepatch over his right eye and a leather strap across his lower lip. There was something familiar about his good eye.

“Chance?” the scarred man asked.

“Who are you?” I replied.

“Miles Barber.”

My skin went cold. The thought that the detective could have traced me all that way, when I didn’t even know where I was, disoriented me. For the first time in my life I considered killing a man. Murder tightened my jaw and clenched my fist. Barber could hardly see, and the man he was with seemed weak and sick. It had taken the two of them to topple me unawares.

The muscle in my right forearm twitched violently.

“Why are you here, Detective?”

“Ex-detective. I was
retired
because of my …” He finished the sentence by gesturing at his face. “But we’re here because we heard somethin’. Mackie and me heard it.”

“You?” I couldn’t hide the shock. “How? You thought that Ordé was an idiot and a criminal. How could you hear anything?”

“I can feel pain,” the ex-detective said. “I feel it every second of every day. I feel it on my skin, in my bones, and in my soul, whatever that is.”

Barber then produced a .38 pistol, ending any lingering thoughts of murder.

“Where is he?” Barber demanded.

“Hey, man. Point that somewhere else.” I looked over to my fellow black man for support, but Mackie’s wasted face held no hope and little interest.

“Don’t play with me, son.” Barber gestured dangerously with his pistol. “I don’t have a shield anymore, and that means you don’t either.”

“Who?”

“No name. Just Gray Man.”

Laughter was the best answer I could give.

I brought Barber and Mackie Allitar to the cathedral. No one there was very surprised to see new citizens for Bones’s town. Wanita even knew their names before she was told.

“Why didn’t you tell me they were coming?” I asked the dreamer.

“You already knew people was gonna come,” she said. “And it’s not polite to tell people’s names. They like to do that themselves.”

“Did you see any bears?” Reggie asked Mackie.

“Huh?” the escaped convict asked. He was looking at Wanita with his nostrils opened wide.

“Did you see any bears?” Alacrity repeated the question.

“Nuh-uh. I mean, we heard some shit like that but we ain’t seen nuthin’.”

“But the bears chase everybody,” Alacrity said. She stood up, which by itself was a threat.

“Don’t be killing him if the man is not your enemy, child,” Juan Thrombone said, appearing from somewhere out past Number Ten. “The bears know the scent of our friends now. They can move unmolested. They come for gardening, not for gutting.”

“But they look bad.” Alacrity always told the truth and had never even heard of manners.

Bones walked up to her and cupped his hands around her face. “And you look like an angel. But we all know to be afraid when you do not smile.”

Alacrity’s blush and grin put us all at ease.

“I am Juan Thrombone,” Bones said to his guests. “And you are Mackie and Miles. I will take you to your lodging. The rooms are ready, and you even have some neighbors.”

Bones looked deeply into the eyes of the ex-detective and smiled.

“One need not look for death, Miles and Miles. He is forever seeking you.”

The policeman shuddered.

“Come,” Juan said. “Let us find your new home.”

I followed the three without being invited. On the way Mackie was silent, Barber was sullen, and Bones was full of incomprehensible puns and jokes. He had good laughs at the expense of pine needles and sunlight and winter winds out of the sea.

Mackie was startled to see Gerin Reed, his old warden, at the doorway of the ramshackle hotel in the makeshift town of Treaty. But he was put at ease when the warden smiled and shook his hand.

“Mackie, isn’t it?” the warden asked.

“They got the blood drug here?” were Mackie’s first words.

“Come on,” Reed said. “Let me show you guys to some rooms. Everything’s going to be okay.”

S
IX WEEKS AFTER THE
ex-detective and the escaped convict came to Treaty, I saw Gerin Reed and Juan Thrombone picking their way through the deep woods. This was not an unusual sight. The onetime warden and the gardener were fast friends from the first day they met. Gerin could listen to Bones for hours without getting tired and without needing any of Bones’s odd phrases or jokes clarified.

Just a few minutes of the little brown man’s words and telepathy left me gasping for silence. But not Gerin Reed. He basked in the power of Juan Thrombone. And I suspect that the little gardener was lonely for someone, a friend, to hear him. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that he brought so many half-lights into his presence.

Full Blues didn’t understand Bones any better than I did. They struggled trying to decipher their nature, procreate, and change the world to fit their image. But they rarely laughed or played. At first I thought it was because they were no longer human, that they had become in some way the Platonic ideals. These ideals, being beyond human idealism, had turned in on themselves, and so you had the philosopher without humanity, the lover who felt no love. Of course, there were Blues like Eileen Martel and Phyllis Yamauchi who were friendly, but even they seemed to be following some complex inner compulsion, some drive that seemed to be more instinctual than it was enlightened.

But Juan Thrombone did laugh and play. He capered and was, it seemed, haphazard about what he believed and said. He was more human than the other Blues. Instead of a mere concept like Love or Death, he had a personality. He loved Addy as any man would a woman.

Bones was a secret beyond the secrets held in blue light. He was the key and that, finally, was why I stayed close to him. I might have stayed anyway — because of Death. I believed Reggie when he said that Treaty was the safest place on Earth. I believed him mainly because of Bones and his great bellowing sequoias.

One day while thinking of those trees, I asked Bones if he had made the great redwood’s seeds into trees because most of the Blues were infertile and he wanted to change that.

He answered, “No, Last Chance. I am not a midwife. I loved the song and I knew that it would end. I was a man who became light and then a light who became man. I don’t like the sting of death, but neither do I need to see the world transformed. A little song and a good laugh, a dream of far away and I am satisfied.”

I could have fallen down on my knees and asked him for the truth for me right then, but I knew that he would only leave me there.

The only way I could learn what I needed to from Bones was to observe him. I decided to follow him and Gerin Reed on the way through the thick brush and woods that day. The smaller Thrombone was moving fast, making it hard for his friend to keep up. Bones wasn’t laughing or joking either. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t saying anything at all.

They covered ground quickly and, after quite some time, entered a part of the forest that was familiar to me. This was unusual because of two things. One, I’m a city boy with no woodlore. Two, my second sight makes everything I see different no matter how many times I see it. I could see a tree a thousand times, and in every encounter, the tree would have something new to say to me.

But that particular grove of white firs was different. As Bones and Gerin Reed made their way, I began to feel dread. It wasn’t until a colorful wing flitted past my face that I realized we were under one of the deadly canopies of Blue-killing butterflies.

Above me were tens of thousands of brightly colored wings. They moved continually, resembling a masterfully created kaleidoscope that never repeats an image. I was captivated by the undulating blanket of their wings. For a moment I was lost in their performance. The wisp of blue in my veins seemed to flutter along with them. If I hadn’t heard the plaintive note of human despair, I might have died there watching the colors.

As it was, I tried to turn to see where the cry had come from and found that I was on my knees. Bones and Gerin were nowhere to be seen. I tried to get up, but my first attempt failed. The second try got me to my feet, but I was unsteady.

A loud moan could be heard through the woods.

I stumbled off in that direction.

Upon reaching the source of the wail, I found Bones and Reed hunkered down over two butterfly-encrusted bodies in a clearing. Juan was picking off the deadly fliers by their wings. He tossed each insect into the air and blew on it. That was enough to make the creature float away.

When I came out from the cover of trees to approach my friends, a woman’s voice called out in wordless surprise. I realized that there was a third person there, a young woman who had also been on her knees and hidden from my view by the two men.

“It’s all right, little one,” Thrombone crooned, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He’s our friend.”

By then I had reached them. The two bodies looked to me like corpses. The man had white skin with straggly long dirty blond hair and only one arm. The woman, the taller of the two, was lean, strong, and very black. Her coarse hair was straw blond. She opened her eyes as I gazed upon her beauty. I don’t know if I was more surprised by the fact that she was alive or that her eyes were the color of blood and gold.

“Nesta!” the hysterical young woman cried. “Nesta!”

“She’s alive, little one. And full of stories, if I’m not mistaken,” Bones assured the skinny girl.

“Nesta knows everything,” the girl I came to know as Trini said. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway whom Nesta had saved from Claudia Heart’s dying commune.

“Everything.” Bones’s eyes lit up in mock surprise. “Then it is good to have her here. You see, I know nothing — at least nothing important. Maybe we can share secrets and seed trees together.”

Trini seemed to enjoy the little madman’s words. She giggled and ducked her head in a conspiratorial gesture. That’s when the one-armed hippie sprang to life. “Whoa ho!” he shouted and sat straight up.

He aimed a fist straight for Gerin’s head. At the time I wouldn’t have believed that that fist could have dented a cardboard box. Later I realized that Winch Fargo’s fist could kill any mortal man. But Bones blocked the blow and pushed Fargo down with what seemed to be a gentle shove.

“You are safe now,” Thrombone said while looking into Winch’s eyes. “No more darkness. No more running in the night. You are home now. You are free to stay and lie around all day long.”

I don’t know what I expected to issue from that wild-eyed and depraved visage, but the tears surprised me. In the months and years to come, I had little love and less concern for Fargo but I never hated him. I didn’t because of his sad and total abandon at Bones’s promise of sanctuary.

“The children will be happy to be among others like them,” Bones said.

“But you are like us?” Nesta’s statement was more a question man anything else.

“No,” the tiny woodsman replied. “Everything you believe I have forgotten. All you’ll see in me is heart and bone on stone in wood. I am free of your destiny.”

The beautiful black woman frowned and then stood straight up as if she were rising from a nap rather than from near death. She wore a blue-checked work shirt over a black T-shirt with cutoff jeans and heavy hiking boots. Fargo was wearing soiled and torn hospital pajamas that were light green. He was barefoot and smelled strongly of himself.

“I released him because he was in pain,” Nesta Vine said to Miles Barber under the shelter of Number One in the cathedral of trees. It was raining, but we were dry under the man-made shingles of leaves and warm from our fire.

Miles had accepted Mackie Allitar, even helped him to escape police custody, but he took an instant dislike to Winch Fargo, challenging the amazon’s right to help such a man.

“He’s a mass murderer. With him here no one will be safe.”

“You better watch it, prick pig,” Fargo said. “Or I’ll put out that other eye.”

“You see,” Miles turned to me for support.

But before I could think of anything to say, Juan Thrombone spoke up.

“You will respect life and limb in my domain,” Bones said to Fargo. “And in return I will show you how to make your own light. But if you harm anyone here, I will put you where you will never know peace again.”

It was the only threat that I ever heard Bones make. Fargo alternately cowered and glared, but Juan wouldn’t look away.

Finally Fargo said, “Okay. All right. I was just jokin’ anyway.” And then, “Can you really help me keep the shakes down on my own?”

“We are all family here,” Thrombone answered. He stood up and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you will receive what you need. You will sleep with the stars and moon and the sun so bright that never again will you cry or need to put out eyes.”

Somehow it seemed that we all came to a solemn agreement to put aside all differences for a time. It was not that we would like or even trust one another but more that we had agreed to become a small nation committed to our little turf.