Blue Light

by Walter Mosley

  “Die!” Gray Man screeched.

  “Fuck you, nigger!” Winch Fargo spat back.

  Max the dog paced behind Nesta and then sat back on his haunches, letting out a great howl.

  Two policemen came running down the stairs toward the scuffle.

  “Stop!” Nesta cried.

  “All right, that’s enough of that now,” one of the officers said.

  He was a large man with close-cut brown and gray hair that stood straight out from his head. He grabbed Gray Man by the shoulder. Gray Man shot out with his left hand, taking the policeman by his lapel, and yanked down hard, slamming the unsuspecting man into the concrete curb.

  With one hand free Winch Fargo threw Gray Man off him and rose. He was panting, almost exhausted from the incredibly strong hands of Death. Winch Fargo planted one foot behind him and looked around for a weapon while he waited for the second attack.

  Gray Man was on the ground, but he didn’t look tired. He rose smiling at his adversary. But before he could attack again he was struck from behind by a police stick. It was a hard blow that might have laid out a professional boxer. But Gray Man was only stung. He turned on the second policeman, and the woman in the pink sweater yelled louder.

  A crowd had gathered now.

  Gray Man broke the second policeman’s neck, but when he went for Winch Fargo again, he found the now barechested savant armed with a police stick.

  Fargo used his weapon well. He struck again and again, going backward as he did. Men and women were shouting all around them, but no one tried to interfere.

  One man, standing up from the corpse of the first cop, yelled, “Someone get the police!”

  Fargo kept striking with deadly accuracy, turning Gray Man’s head around to his shoulder with each blow. And Gray Man advanced, seemingly stronger for every blow that was struck.

  Fargo backed up the stairs to get better leverage with his swings. Finally Gray Man bent low and caught Fargo by his legs.

  And again Gray Man was trying to get his hands around Winch Fargo’s throat.

  Fargo felt the closeness of blue death for the first time since he’d witnessed Philip Martel’s demise. Only now, the death approaching was his own. The snake in his brain writhed and thrashed against the inside of his skull. His hands were failing. Gray Man was beginning to breathe hard too.

  Unexpectedly Winch pulled Gray Man toward him, butting the black death god with his own tortured skull. Gray Man sat up. He released Fargo and smiled. Before Winch could react, Gray Man grabbed his left arm and stood up. Placing his foot in Winch’s armpit, he wrenched and tugged.

  The arm came out of the socket and ripped away from the shoulder with a sick tearing and sucking sound. Winch cried out and Gray Man laughed. People in the crowd began to run and scream.

  A blur of brown fur went for Gray Man’s throat, knocking the little man down the stairs.

  Nesta pulled off her denim jeans and wrapped them around Fargo’s narrow shoulders to staunch the bleeding. His blood came fast, but not as fast as a normal man’s blood. Then Nesta Vine grabbed the dismembered arm.

  Gray Man had gotten the dog by his front legs, but before he could do any damage he was assailed by the meat-and-bone club.

  Nesta’s image of herself was powerful and strong. She wailed at the weakened personification of death. She clubbed him while Max snarled and snapped.

  Gray Man finally ran away, feeling Redwood attack him from the inside even as Nesta and Max struck from without.

  The frightened mob parted before Gray Man. Max pursued him to the end of the block, then came back to Nesta, who was holding Winch Fargo in her lap.

  “Am I dead?” he asked her, coming to consciousness for a moment.

  “I don’t know yet,” Nesta Vine replied.

  A dozen policemen were pressed into action for the disturbance that had broken out on the state building steps.

  They found two dead cops, a seemingly mortally wounded Winch Fargo, a feral dog, and a blood-spattered black amazon.

  It took six hours for two dozen police detectives to question the witnesses.

  Miles Barber, Briggs, and Bonhomme arrived after the violence was over. When he was told of the battle with Gray Man, Barber suffered a seizure that left him unconscious and hospitalized. His coma was short compared with mine, only fifteen days. And it wasn’t really even a coma, because he remembered a dream. He was still a policeman, with two eyes. He walked out of the state building onto the scene of the murders. There he came upon a pool of blood left by Winch Fargo’s wound.

  “But there was something odd,” the ex-detective said, remembering the dream. “The blood wasn’t drying. It was still wet and had blue veins all through it. I went over to inspect the blood, but it flowed away from me, down the stairs. At first I had this crazy thought that it’s ’cause of gravity that the blood is flowing downward. Can you imagine that? Havin’ a scientific reason in your dream.

  “So I followed the blood down to the curb, but it keeps on going down the street. The faster I chase it, the faster it goes until I’m running after this blue-veined pool of blood that’s rushing down the street.” As it always was with Barber, he began to experience what he was telling. His breath came quickly and there was visible strain in his body and hands. “I was runnin’ so fast that I couldn’t see where I was going. I ran right into him. He stayed on his feet, but I tumbled to the ground. And when I looked up I saw that it was him; all black and big, real big. He was naked and his eyes were red. And then he bent down over me and he was whispering. Everything around me turned black like him, and all I wanted was to hear the words. I concentrated as hard as I could and then, just when the last of the light was gone, except for his red eyes, I heard him say, ‘It’s never over,’ and everything went black. And then I was coming out to see the blood again. It all happened all over again. Everything was the same except that I knew it.

  “When I regained consciousness, they called Bonhomme. He told me that the court had appointed a lawyer for Claudia Zimmerman and she convinced the judge that her client’s rights had been violated. The judge let her go. Mackie Allitar was just down the hall from me, dying from drug abuse, they said. I asked Bonhomme about the black man, the killer.

  “ ‘Oh, him,’ Bonhomme said. ‘They think he’s a judo expert. Add that to the fact that Fargo obviously has some kind of leprosy, and it looks pretty crazy out there. We don’t have anything to do with it anyway. We got Halston and Fargo. They let the warden go. Thanks for your help.’

  “And I lay back, ready to die, Chance. I swear. I was ready. I lay in that bed for two days. Doctors and nurses came in and frowned at my charts. They stuck me with needles and put soft food on my tray, but they knew I was on my way out. But then the music came. It was like all the horns in the world all at once in a thousand tones, but they were all playing the same note. I was up and outta that bed as strong as I had ever been, stronger. That was about two in the morning. I met Allitar in the hall. We looked at each other and grinned like boys who just climbed over the school fence to check out the big world outside.”

  The feral dog escaped from the dog pound the night they caught him. He had been knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, but when they tried to carry him from the cell to the gas chamber, he sprang to life suddenly and made a dash for it. No one could ever remember a dog with the will and intelligence to break through a glass windowpane and dash away.

  They said he was badly cut, though, and was probably dead within minutes.

  Claudia Zimmerman left the Bay Area. No one knew where she went.

  Winch Fargo had escaped from police custody a week after Miles Barber and Mackie Allitar, with the assistance of some unknown friend. The hospital doctors, like the dogcatchers, said that Fargo was probably dead a few hours after he escaped.

  Gray Man crawled back toward his desert hole, bruised and pulsing with pain. He felt his heart thrumming as if he had been frightened, but he wasn’t actually afraid. He felt the blue coyote pup
following him and wondered if he would have been strong enough to fight him off.

  He finally arrived and crawled down into his hole, burying himself once again. But this time his sleep was disturbed by unnamed night terrors; this time his sleep was more alive than it was dead.

  Three

  Twenty

  “I LOVE YOU, CHANCE,” Alacrity said to me.

  We were looking out over a vista of spiky pines and cloud-rifted blue skies. I carried her in the crook of my arm while she nestled her head against my shoulder. I carried her as if she were a small child. She was young. But Alacrity had begun to grow quickly in the woods. She was more than three years younger than Wanita, but already she was a foot and a half taller than her friend. She looked closer to twelve than three.

  She and her mother, Reggie and Wanita, and I were living at the Bear Lodge Country Cabins in northern California. We stayed in California, albeit many miles from the Bay Area, because Addy and I wanted to be near at hand if the remaining Blues somehow made a stand against Gray Man. We were pretty confident that he couldn’t find us easily and that we could escape as long as we were free. Also, Reggie kept saying that he felt the safest place in the world for us was close by. He spent many days scanning the countryside for our refuge, but the direction for some reason eluded him.

  “I know,” I said to the young girl. “I love you too.”

  I did love her, as a child who was frightened and headstrong, who was inquisitive about everything, and who needed a story before she could go to sleep at night. But I also knew that she was the daughter of a strangeling god who had prophesied the beginning of an era heralding the end of mankind.

  “I don’t mean like that,” Alacrity said. “I really love you. When I grow up I’m going to marry you and give you a big house and you can read books all day long and we’ll get a telescope and look at the people in the dark stars. The ones that Wanita said don’t have no bodies except just great big eyes in a cave.”

  I sighed deeply and kept my silence. It was always disturbing for me to hear the child’s dreams for the future. She had inherited some of her father’s ability with words. I had to fight the nagging sense that her desires were my destiny and my marching orders.

  “Reggie an’ Nita comin’,” she said.

  Far up the sloping hill behind us the two other children were coming out of the woods. It seemed as if Reggie was skipping adolescence altogether, going straight for manhood. He’d grown almost as tall as me, and his shoulders were amazingly wide. His sister, Wanita, was still a child, though, round-faced and always serious. She and Alacrity were as different as playmates could be. While Alacrity climbed towering pines, Wanita would curl up by the roots and dream of Alacrity way up there in the wind an’ stuff.

  Adelaide and I never questioned the children’s powers. It all seemed natural. This was not only because of our blood experiences. We had both been lost souls before we drifted into Ordé’s orbit. You’ve already heard my story. I learned of Adelaide’s experiences while we were on the run. It wasn’t a long tale, but it had trailed her for years.

  There are many circumstances and minor characters in Addy’s story, but I don’t have to bother with them. The elements are a white Christian family, a girl becoming a woman, a boy with a black leather jacket and a knife, and a dark night in an alley off Ventura Boulevard where two boys struggled over their hormones and only one survived. Adelaide never told anyone about her knowledge of the killing. She closed up her heart, opening it only to those men who cared so much about their future that they would never be concerned with her past. I was the first person she had ever confided in. But we were on the run from Death, and very little else seemed important or worth questioning.

  The children and their survival had become our purpose; their abilities were our religion. Believing in them, we erased our own suffering.

  “It’s over that way for sure, Chance,” Reggie said, pointing south.

  “You sure, man?”

  “Yeah. It’s over that way.”

  “How far?”

  “I can’t tell exactly, but it’s pretty far. It’s hundreds of miles, but it’s definitely over that way.”

  “And if we get there, you think we’ll be safe for a while?” I asked the young man.

  “We’ll be safer. We’ll be safer, but that don’t mean we’ll be safe.”

  The memory of Gray Man scuttled under my scalp. But lately the kids hadn’t seemed scared at all. All that time in the woods had healed the fear in their hearts. Reggie knew the safest place to be, or at least he thought he could find it; Alacrity just wanted to play with each of us in turn and run wild in the woods; and Wanita dreamed.

  Adelaide and I thought that if Wanita had any powers of godhood like the others, it must have been the power of dreams. She often came to us in the morning with elaborate tales of visions from the night before. I started to get them on a toy tape recorder when I realized that she was somehow reporting on stories that were not of this Earth or maybe not even this galaxy.

  Sometimes the little brown girl would wake up in the morning hardly remembering who we were. Even her brother was as unfamiliar to her as some far-off memory. After she’d come back to us, she’d say that her dream took so long that she’d forgotten who she was for a while.

  That very morning she had stumbled out of her bunk bed bleary-eyed and confused. She sat at our rough-hewn table and ate her hot bowl of Wheatena in silence. Adelaide noticed the sleep in her eyes and bent down with a moist towel to rub the sand away. Wanita looked at the green-eyed redhead with bewilderment. She touched Addy’s hair, put her fingers to her own cheek. Then she began to speak as if she had already been in the middle of an explanation.

  “… they started out really big, like that tower thing on top’s that hill —”

  “Coit Tower,” Reggie said as he ate.

  “— and they get smaller and smaller, but then they come awake and start to sing,” the dreamer said. “It’s like they was purple glass at first with hot stuff inside, but when they get real small, like a little Christmas tree, then they’s pink with little tears runnin’ down they sideses.”

  “Who are they?” Adelaide breathed in the softest possible whisper.

  “Like glass,” Wanita said again. “An’ they sing when they get little. Tinkle-like, humming-like, an’ nobody could hear it but them an’ me. All the animals and bugs that drink the little tears think that the glass sticks is just sticks, but they not. They be singin’ an’ laughin’. An’ you could hear ’em everywhere.”

  “Where?” I asked gently, but I should have been gentler still.

  By the way Wanita looked up, I could tell that she was coming out of the dream.

  “Wanita!” I said sharply.

  “Huh?”

  “Where were the pink sticks made from glass?”

  She shrugged and said nonchalantly, “In a place where the sun is blue and the sky is red. Not anywhere that we could go. Except if you dreamed it.”

  “Can you go there in your dreams, Wanita?” Addy asked.

  “I did last night. Can I have a apple?”

  And so went the way of Wanita’s dreams. She traveled the universe at night while we slept. Her mind was gone for what must have felt like weeks or more overnight. Sometimes we worried that she’d be gone so long that she’d forget who she was completely, or even what she was. But that was the way of godhood, I supposed. All Addy and I could do was feed them and listen to them, groom them with our love and respect. And keep them safe from Death.

  “There’s something out there, almost like it was music,” Reggie said. “But … but it’s something … it’s something else. Like safe. Safe.”

  As soon as Reggie said it, I could hear it. Like a whole orchestra of brass and silver horns so far away that I couldn’t even tell what direction they were in. But when Reggie pointed I believed that sound might be coming from that way.

  The extra senses I’d gained from Ordé had quieted over time. The
stars still sang to me, the bands between the rainbow still revealed new colors, but it had become so normal that I hardly remembered what it had been like to have common senses. And my time around the children had disoriented those perceptions because I could always feel the Blues when they were near. It wasn’t a hard sensation, more like the feeling of a cloud partly blocking the sun.

  Their light had hidden the music from me.

  “Uh-huh.” Adelaide nodded while closing her eyes, holding her face up as if to feel the wind. “Yeah, I do feel something. It’s like sunlight through water.”

  The children and I had gone back to the cabin. I was excited to tell Addy about what I felt. Addy’s senses had been altered by carrying Ordé’s child. She and I had somewhat similar powers, only she couldn’t hear and see things as much. Addy’s ability was more in intuiting what the children were feeling and thinking. They could come to her for advice and she’d interpret what they felt even though the needs of those small blue gods were often things that she had never known.

  “Mr. Needham didn’t feel it,” I said.

  Needham was the camp handyman. He was an older white gentleman who didn’t mind having an interracial family on the grounds. It was late in the fall and we were the only paying customers. Maybe he would have felt differently if it were the height of summer.

  “We can’t hear it either,” Alacrity added. “We just said we could ’cause we were so happy.”

  “Uh-huh,” Reggie said. “It’s like I know it’s there, but I can’t really hear it.”

  “Probably because it wasn’t meant for normal people or the Blues,” Addy responded, opening her eyes. “This is probably meant for people like Chance and me. It’s like a beacon for the half blind. Reggie probably figured it out because he was looking for someplace safe but it just happens to be where that call comes from.”

  “How far away do you think it’s coming from?” I asked.

  Addy closed her eyes and held up her face again. After a few moments she shook her head and frowned.