“Okay,” I said. “All right.”
The little woodsman was working his head and tongue vigorously against the side of Addy’s face. I watched for a moment and then left with Reggie. Wanita came with us, but Alacrity stayed there next to her mother.
More than a thousand feet away from the main tree was the smallest. A redwood less than twenty feet in diameter. This was to be our home for many years, there under the bark of Number Twelve.
Reggie and I broke out the tent and the cooking utensils. I built a small fire from the kindling Wanita gathered. Every once in a while I’d glance over to see Juan hunched over Addy.
“He’s okay, Chance,” Wanita said. I turned to see her looking up at me. “He’s just crazy, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s all mixed up. Too much blue in him. It’s not even a color no more. Just real bright, like pins in the window when the sun shine on ’em.
“What do you mean, honey? What do you mean he’s crazy?”
“All’a the rest’a us just think one thing, y’know? I mean like Reggie. He like t’get losted but then he finds his way back. He don’t never have dreams. But I do.” Wanita looked into my eyes as if to say, You see?
“So does Juan Thrombone do more than just finding or dreaming?”
“Only me’n Reggie do them.”
“But what —”
“He do a lotta things. But now he don’t think like we do no more because when all them things come together, they stop bein’ blue-like.”
“How do you know this, Wanita? Did he tell you in a dream?”
The little girl shook her head. “Nuh-uh. I can see it. Where it was.”
At that moment Reggie, who had been sitting on the other side of the fire, eating oatmeal, rose quickly.
“Here she is,” Thrombone said at my back.
He was standing there, carrying Addy in his arms. Seeing him in relation to Addy’s long body accented how small the man actually was. He brought Addy next to the fire and laid her down. He rubbed the sleeve of his right arm across his tongue and spit into the fire.
“She was almost dead, you know. You wouldn’t have gotten her down to the cities in time.” With that, the little madman lay next to Addy and fell into a deep slumber.
I moved next to Alacrity’s mother. The wound looked the same, only dimmer. The blood red was now brick red. The white center had turned gray. Addy opened her eyes for a moment and looked up. She smiled and said, “Where’s Julia?”
“I’m here, Mommy,” Alacrity said just as if she were still a small child.
Adelaide smiled and then fell back into unconsciousness.
Juan Thrombone snored loudly.
He slept like that, next to our campfire, burning or dead, for the next two days. Addy was up the next morning and, though weak, was well on the way back to health.
I wanted to leave, but Alacrity and Wanita said that it would be bad manners to leave Mr. Thrombone sleeping after he had saved Addy’s life. Reggie said that he had no intention of leaving the woods anyway, because it was the safest place he could imagine.
“It’s the only place that’s safe from Death right now,” Reggie said. “Anywhere else is like being out in the open where he could see us if he looked hard enough. But there’s cover here. That’s why I was lost, because Juan made it impossible for us to see or hear or feel.”
So we stayed in the deep woods that Juan Thrombone had called Treaty. And as each hour passed, I was more and more lost to the place.
The forest seemed to generate heat. It was cold enough to have to build a fire at night but not too cold. More than enough light filtered down through the leaves. The space was like a great cathedral, a place to worship and give thanks for.
I worried, though, because I didn’t know how we could survive up there.
“Mr. Thrombone live up here okay,” Wanita said.
“But he’s crazy,” I answered.
“Maybe he could show us how to be crazy like him.”
Twenty-four
TWO DAYS LATER JUAN Thrombone awoke from his deep slumber. He rose and stretched, yawning loudly. The girls were out exploring while I tended the fire and watched over Addy. She was still tired, and I feared, in spite of Thrombone’s treatments, that she might relapse into fever.
Reggie was behind Number Seven, masturbating. He’d grown from his early teens into manhood in less than a week. This brought on certain hormonal tensions. He went behind Number Seven nine times, and maybe more, a day to slake their pressures.
I realized what was happening when I saw that Alacrity spent much of her time climbing high into Numbers Five and Six to look down behind Seven. When I asked her what she’d been looking at, she replied, “Reggie’s trying to go to the bathroom but he can’t.”
“It’s a good morning, Last Chance,” Juan Thrombone said. He looked at Addy and added, “First Light.”
“So you’re back among the living,” I said, using exactly the words and the tones of my uncle Oscar, the only black relative I knew coming up.
“Never left you, friend. How do you like it here among your brothers, the trees?”
“It’s okay, I guess,” I said. “But how did you find this place?”
“It was waiting for me just like it was waiting for you. There’s a place for everything, you know.” He brought his hands together in front of his face as if in prayer and rose. “I have to go tend to my forest, friends. I’ll bring you some supper when I get back.”
He moved gaily into the woods across from Number Twelve and was gone.
“He’s funny,” Addy said.
“I don’t trust him.”
“He’s okay. He did save my life.”
“Maybe he did. I don’t know, Addy. I don’t know.” It was the first time we were alone, really alone and talking, in days.
“What’s wrong, Chance?”
“Nothing,” I said, actually saying much more.
Addy nodded and smiled. She reached out her hand and I moved closer to hold it. The fire threw out a brilliant heat, but there was still foggy condensation from our breath. I don’t know that I felt better then, maybe just reconciled to my fate and happy that I didn’t have to face it alone at that moment.
Reggie was coming back from behind Number Seven. I could hear the girls laughing not far away in the woods.
The golden and yellow light from the cover of leaves winked and glittered. I left myself open to the half-told tales of where they came from and where they hoped to be. Each sparkle of light entered my mind, humming a forgotten tune that my heart tried to beat for. A dance took off within me. I was swirling to the fragmentary music of light. I was soaring and stationary like the giant pillars of my new home. I was decaying and dying but still full of life. I was decomposing the lies I had always believed defined me and my skin.
The children came back around the fire to eat and talk to us. Every now and then Reggie would wander off to Number Seven. I may have heard them. I might have even said a few words now and then. But mostly my mind was in the trees, in the light in the trees, swirling and capering to melodies older than life down here. Ordé’s blood moving in mine was a refuge from all the vacant fear that had gathered in my gut, clouded in my skull cavity.
I was dizzy with meaning that I did not understand. I tried to be brave in the face of immensity that dwarfed even my wildest dreams of expanse.
I fell asleep after an hour, maybe less. I was unconscious but aware of the scent of earth and decaying foliage. I listened contentedly to the girls playing and Addy cooing to them. It was a sleep with no dreams, as refreshing and as clear as water from a cold spring after a long long walk in July.
The visions of light had started to subside. I woke up thirsty just as the sun was throwing her last rays on the ground around my body.
“So you’re back among the living,” my uncle Oscar said.
When I looked, I saw that it was Juan Thrombone mimicking my words to him.
The fire had been expanded to three different units, each separated by and surrounded with similar-sized oblong stones. Over each fire was a pan or a pot. There were trout simmering and mushrooms and some kind of forest green too. Everyone was sitting around the fire. The flames seemed to echo the visions of my afternoon nap.
“Time to eat,” Juan said simply. “Eat first and then to tell stories, I think. Stories are good when you live out with the trees and bears and butterflies. Here, sleepy,” he said to me. “Have some sap and water.”
He handed me a carved wooden mug that was tall and thin. Instead of a handle, it had a leafy branch sticking out from one side. The mug was filled with water that smelled of sweet sap. There were bits of branches and leaves floating about in the drink. I tasted it and then couldn’t pull the cup away from my lips. It was the best-tasting water I had ever had. It was water and also the dream of water in a thirsty man’s desert.
The fish were from a nearby stream. The mushrooms were hacked from the sides of trees with homemade wooden knives, and the greens were small leafy plants that grew in the clearing between the forest and our cathedral of trees. Everything was delicious. I felt satisfied from the back of my mind down into my toes.
When the dinner was over, Thrombone came out with honey wine for the grown-ups and honeyed water for the girls. Reggie drank his wine too quickly and got drunk. He pulled himself up and declared that he was going out to find a drum.
“Now is the time for stories, my friends,” Juan Thrombone said in a singsong voice. “Telling the tales keeps them from sneaking up on you when you’re not looking. When you’re not looking.”
The girls laughed. Alacrity held Wanita in her lap. All her heroism and command had faded now that she didn’t need it. She was our charge again, her mother’s little girl.
Thrombone went to a hollow below Number Three and retrieved a dozen homemade beeswax candles. The candles were thick shapeless globs encrusted with gravel. We placed them around our campsite, letting Wanita light them because Addy wouldn’t let her play with the campfire.
We all settled in on one side of the fire, with Thrombone squatting down from us on the other side.
“What will it be, Chance? What do you want me to tell?”
“Why me?” I asked. “I don’t know your stories. You could just make one up.”
“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said. Her head in Addy’s lap, she shoved her feet under the tent of my knees. Wanita leaned on me from the other side. Addy draped a sleeping bag over our shoulders.
Juan Thrombone’s eyes were like two more candles in the night.
I was fearful that he might really answer any question I had. I was tired of knowledge and truth.
“What is the blue light?” I asked finally.
Juan Thrombone laughed and rolled on his back. He rocked on his spine while grabbing his knees and let out a howl.
“Ho-ho, Chance the gamesman. Chance the checkmater. Chance the opponent till the end.”
The children laughed and Addy smiled.
I didn’t find his childishness funny.
Thrombone rolled to a squatting position in an agile move. He looked at me for a long time before speaking again.
“You think to ask me a question you already know the answer to, hombre. You think you know how the light traveled, how it bonded and took. You think that I will just repeat the words of your dead teacher. You do not want to know anything more, but you lost the gambit and so I will tell you more.
“Your question, my friend, should have been another. Because asking about blue light is like asking about blood when you have never seen an animal. How can you know about a man’s blood, its magic, if you have never seen him laughing and you’ve never heard him cry?”
Juan Thrombone settled easily on crossed legs and held out his hands as if to say, Isn’t that true?
“You must, it is clear, ask about life and not light or blood. Because life holds them both like the canvas holds paint.”
I was completely in his spell by then. The words and their rhythm charmed me like the sunlight had that day.
“Blue light or yellow or red, it doesn’t matter. They’re all like blood. Blood that sustains you, blood that builds. But blood in a bottle, or blood on the ground, is not a man, can’t be, but only a promise without an ear to hear.”
Holding up an educating finger, he said, “All the world is music, you see. There is music in atoms and music in suns. That is the range of a scale that you can see and read. There is music in emptiness and silence between. Everything is singing all the time, all the time. Singing and calling for what is missing. Your science calls it gravity, but the gods call it dance. They dance and fornicate; they listen and sing. They call to distant flowers when buds ring out. Because, you see, it is not only atoms and suns that vibrate in tune. Rocks sing, as do water and air. The molecules that build blood and men also build the wasp; these too sing a minor note that travels throughout the stars. Greedy little ditties that repeat and repeat again and again the same silly melodies. They change, but very slowly, chattering, ‘me me me me me me me me me. …’ ” He repeated the word maybe a hundred times, lowering his head to the ground as he did so. He smiled when he was finished and shook his head sadly. The next instant he was on his feet holding his hands out in the question Why?
“So much boring chatter for one so deep. Of course, the iron atom will say only his name. Water too and even granite or glass. Because iron has only one note; water two, maybe three. But you, my friend, make the violin seem simple. You are a song of the gods in the mouth of a fool. You can’t help it. So much promise in one so weak attracts disease.”
Juan Thrombone sat again and smiled. We looked at each other, and even though my head had begun to ache from the words, which seemed to go directly into my mind, I asked, “Are you saying that blue light is a sickness? That one who sees the light is sick?”
“Sick?” Thrombone said, chuckling softly. “No. But weak as kittens in a cave full of stones. They feel mighty, but there is no strength in them. Only ambition and youth. They cannot hunt or mul-ti-ply. Only can they play like the big cat who has left the den carrying their milk in her udders.”
“What do you mean? Alacrity was born from Ordé and Addy.”
“First Light,” Thrombone’s eyes filled with fondness. “Her child is rare but no different from the rest. The next generation is coming, but not yet. Maybe never. Maybe not at all.”
By then I wanted to know everything that the little madman knew.
“So this isn’t what Ordé said?” I asked. “This isn’t the beginning of the change of the world?”
“It might be some kind of start,” he answered. “But this is story-time and not school.”
“But —” I started to say.
“I have answered your question, and now you need to ask another. Not about blue light, though. With that I am through.”
“Why didn’t you want us to come here?” Alacrity asked. “Why’d you send those butterflies to hurt us?”
“Because, little one, I was afraid. I was afraid that Death would sniff at you even here and come to kill the puppy trees as he did their big mama redwood. I was afraid and so I sent my butterflies to sting you with their love.” Juan Thrombone almost lost his benign smile for a moment. “But when you fought so hard and killed so many I” — He held his palm to his lips and sucked suddenly, pulling his hand away from his mouth. This caused the same thumping in the air that had rendered the butterflies, and me, unconscious. This sound, however, wasn’t as violent as the first — “so you wouldn’t kill all of my beautiful friends.”
“What did those butterflies do to the children?” Addy asked.
Thrombone smiled again, holding up the baby finger of his left hand to the point at his left eye.
“You mean to ask,” our odd host lectured, “what are those butterflies that they could do what they did? But the answer
is no story. I made water every day in a clearing of rotten wood. In a year there were wild flowers everywhere. In another year there were butterflies. From butterfly to worm, and then from the worm rose the creatures that suckled on blue.”
Thrombone smiled to himself.
“Maybe it is a story,” he said.
Wanita asked, “Then why did you let us come if you was scared? Ain’t you scared no more?”
Thrombone was looking into Addy’s eyes at that moment. She stared back while running her finger down the healing wound on her face.
“I can hear people’s dreams also, Dreamer. I can hear all living things when they dream. Dogs and trees and fish and bears. I can speak to dreamers. I spoke to all of you. I knew in our talks that you were not bad — at least, not yet. And I was lonely, but that’s not why I let you pass.”
“Why then?” Wanita asked again.
“To sleep with you, Dreamer.”
“Say what?” That was me. “Hey, man, I know you livin’ up here with the bears and shit, but down the hill, in civilization, no matter if you got blue light or Thunderbird wine, men sleeping with little girls is just not happenin’.” I was angry and used street talk like a hapless frog puffing up his throat to bluff his way.
“I’m sorry, my friend,” Juan said. If he was in any way intimidated, he hid it well. “You are right, of course. I’ve been up here so long that I forget how to talk. I don’t mean sex. I like sex. I want sex. But for Wanita, it is only her dreams I wish to share. I can hear dreams, but she — she can travel in them, she can see with them. Her dreams are the most beautiful I have ever seen.”
I was not convinced. I made up my mind right then to tuck Wanita in every night — and to sleep close by.
Bomp bomp bomp resounded in the air. Bomp de bomp. Bomp de bomp.
“It’s Reggie!” Alacrity cried.
The sound came closer and closer. Finally Reggie emerged from the woods with a big hollow log in his arms. He beat the drum with a thick branch.
Blue Light Page 20
