The Color of Night (4 page)

Not so very long after it started, I began to realize that my brother was hardening me for something. I understood it better later, but even then I had the thought. And maybe even he knew too, or had some inkling. Whenever he’d sink me in another burning pool of pain, he was tempering me for what I’d later have to bear. Preparing me to meet my destiny.

Of course he was a mortal himself, and Thetis wasn’t. But my brother died like a god! He took all his retainers with him—all. Except for me.

I still had all of O——’s old records, though probably most of them were scratched. His pictures on the jackets wrinkled with old spills. In the fold of a double album I found a couple of thirty-year-old pot seeds.

It had all come out on CD, of course, the instant they invented them. You could, I could, download them to your iPod or whatever.

I didn’t try to listen to the records, in part because I didn’t own a turntable anymore. I did slide one of the platters out, to look at the oily black surface. A puff of powdery cigarette ash came out of the sleeve ahead of the disc. A pale curved gash lay across the grooves of the first three tracks.

When I pushed the record back into the jacket, my eye lingered on something it had skimmed a thousand times before. Snaps from the recording session were printed on the cover, laid out in an artificially casual fashion, as if they’d fallen on the floor. There was O—— in the spring of his youth, an acoustic guitar balanced on one knee, looking with smiling, lively interest at something beyond the right edge of the frame.

The thing I hadn’t previously attended to was a foot, down in the lower right-hand corner of the snapshot. A nicely shaped young foot with a high graceful arch, nail polish of such a dark crimson it was almost black, a gold-colored toe ring, and one of those higgledy-piggledy patterns Laurel used to draw on herself with henna back then.

Now there was a woman ahead of her time. I don’t know how I’d never noticed that before.

As for the music of Orpheus, it was balm to everyone’s wound. Your broken bones began to knit together when you heard it. Everyone turned toward it, like grass turns toward the sun.

La Brea Tar Pits. I couldn’t have said exactly how I got there. If I had taken a bus down the coast or possibly come in a private vehicle, in exchange for private services along the way. I sat in half lotus on the concrete rim of the black sinkhole. It seemed jet black at first, deep as empty space, but the longer I looked at it the more I began to find a spectrum in the iridescence of the oily surface, like tendrils of dawn spinning free of the color of night. The tar pool absorbed my vision entirely and for a long time I had no thoughts at all. Nothing else was reaching my senses, although beyond the fence enclosing the pit were dump trucks and jackhammers and cranes, infernal engines clamoring to raise hell higher.

I felt D——’s eyes on me long before I looked up. By then I had a sense for it. I’d had a longish layover in Denver on my way here, and most recently I’d been up in the Tenderloin,
balling
for
bread.
Or being
balled.
For
bread.
Quaint terms they seem now, but then they were exotic, strange—back when Dad stalking the lawnmower around the soggy yard with a dead pipe clamped in his military jaws was supposed to be the very picture of normal.

I could feel D——’s look stroking over me with the tingling rasp of a cat’s tongue. What there was to see. My unwashed hair long enough to pool on the concrete beside my thighs, the natural black of it dulled by dirt. I had on a tie-dyed T-shirt just sufficient to cover my ass when I stood up, and that was it; I had nothing under it, and only a scrap of macramé tied over the hips to reinforce the illusion that the T-shirt was a dress. My bare feet were calloused, grimy, cracked at the heel. I might have had a blown-out pair of high-top sneakers in my string bag, and what else? Half a banana, a jar of wheat germ, who knows. The bayonet I still had certainly, with the blade hidden in a fat roll of newspaper, the grip not looking much at all like an umbrella handle, I realized when D——’s eyes hesitated there.

There was a body on my back-trail, my very first bag of mortal bones. It worried me, because I hadn’t yet figured out that nobody was going to miss that motherfucker, what a completely disposable person he was. D——’s look began to travel again, brushing my nipples under the cotton, grazing the edge of the T-shirt’s hem, which stretched just enough to hide my bare snatch, then circling to number the knobs on my back. And there was something different about it. I didn’t feel like I could just ball this cat and send him on his way, which had become sort of a universal solution in those days, whether I got paid for it or not.
A woman has two purses.
This look was like a doctor’s touch, almost, with a tinge of the therapeutic in it—I had a sick tumbling thought of those do-gooders I’d sometimes met on my way, the ones who wanted to Clean You Up and Send You Home. But it wasn’t quite that either. There was still a thread of desire in the look, and more than that, it was appraisal. By that I mean to say I felt valued, like D—— wanted to know me, to know what was in me, and what might come out.

I found myself looking for his reflection in the tar pit, but of course it didn’t give any reflection—that was the whole point. I couldn’t even see his shadow. Maybe he didn’t cast one.

“That’s where we all come from,” D—— said. “Or is it where we’re all going?”

The tar seemed to swirl in a pattern like paisley. Although D——’s efforts to sing were hopeless, his speaking voice was rich and resonant, and could make almost any bullshit seem wise until you thought about it.

I looked up at him then. D—— was a little small for his clothes, and another curious thing, he was covered up very completely considering that the weather was hot. The cuffs and collar of his Western-yoked shirt were tight with pearly snaps at the wrists and the throat, and his jeans were lashed into the fringed tops of high moccasin boots. He had dark wavy hair that just broke on his shoulders, that he had to keep tossing back all the time, like they all did, unless they went whole hog for the hippie headband. The famous Vandyke on the hungry jaw. His eyes, just a touch too close together, were electric, cobalt blue.

“You look troubled,” he said, and held out his hand. Here’s why I didn’t laugh in his face.
Are you in trouble?
was a standard line to pick up a runaway, but there was something about this variation. Like instead of me being in it, the trouble was in me.

Why not. The hand was small, no bigger than mine, faintly calloused, slightly warm. But it was the eyes, I still admit it, that hit me where I lived. True, I was troubled and in trouble both. But, if D—— had an eye for weakness, he liked it mixed with strength.

At first I thought D——’s eyes were like my brother’s. In time I realized that was wrong. All of it—the wine, the smoke, the trances—gave you back only what had been in you always. D——’s eyes were the reflection of my own.

“Shakespeare said that,” I told Laurel, losing confidence before I got out all three of those words. I could see from the hesitation in her eyes that I was wrong, that I hadn’t got the reference right, and hadn’t really understood it either. I thought then that one was the purse you kept your cash in, while the second lay between your legs …

But Laurel had been to college, and not only that; she knew a number of things I didn’t. All of a sudden she dropped to her knees and began to burrow in a milk crate that had been half covered by a swatch of the batik spread over her mattress. She came up with a book, already reading:

Love is a bear-whelp born: if we o’erlick

Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take,

We err, and of a lump a monster make.

Were not a calf a monster that were grown

Faced like a man, though better than his own?

Perfection is in unity: prefer

One woman first, and then one thing in her.

Her laughter drew mine out of me, as if we were sharing some old secret. Bits of a title I could make out in splintered silver letters on the broken blue spine of the book she was holding, but those printed words meant nothing to me; it was all in the sound of her voice. Then she pulled me into it, catching her free hand around my waist. We propped on our elbows on the mussed covers of her low bed. Her finger traced the lines as she read them to me.

Her swelling lips; to which when we are come,

We anchor there, and think ourselves at home,

For they seem all: there Sirens’ songs, and there

Wise Delphic oracles do fill the ear;

There in a creek where chosen pearls do swell,

The remora, her cleaving tongue doth dwell.

Gilt bells of laughter poured from her; it seemed the laughter as much as her lips that kissed me then, just grazing the corner of my mouth. Innocent as two little girls in Eden, she made it seem, so quick I’d have wondered if it had happened at all if not for the tingle that remained, sank deeper.

“But look—here’s the part you mean.” Laurel caught me by the nape of my neck to show me, saying the words with a husk catching in her throat.

Rich nature hath in women wisely made

Two purses, and their mouths aversely laid;

They then which to the lower tribute owe

That way which that exchequer looks must go …

I understood as much of this as I needed to. Enough to get us on our way. It wasn’t the first time I’d been with a woman, but—

The salt taste of her was extraordinary; I haven’t forgotten it even now. It was like I had some mineral deficiency and couldn’t get enough. Behind my closed eyes was the picture of a red salt block for the cows across the road down home, and once I’d wormed under the fence, as a tiny girl, to get a lick of it for myself. My mother spanked me when I was caught, because it was
unsanitary
(smack!),
filthy
(smack!),
dirty
(smack!) and I almost wished she could see me now with Laurel, about to squirm right out of her skin from all the pleasure I was giving her, with that same red salt taste on my tongue, a scatter of cinnamon umber on her white froth, the ring of her laughter swelling into her transported cry.