“The written word is where we can all come together,” Nesta said before each class. “Words are thoughts, and thoughts are dreams, and dreams are the dawn of change.”
I asked Bones how two more Blues had gotten to hear his special call.
“Winch Fargo is more like you, Last Chance. A crooked light, a dim light. A creature between here and not. He heard my call and came running like a dog on Teacher’s leash.” Teacher is what he called Nesta Vine. “But now I have changed the call. Now all that the singing trees hide is the blue spoor of the puppy trees and the ones you call Blues.”
“So, no more will come?”
“No. Not so many, I think.”
“So now that we’re here, what do we do?”
“Eat and sleep,” the little brown man said. “Drink and dream, tell stories and kiss. Tend the gardens that we need.”
“What gardens?”
“The puppy trees are growing now. They dream of devouring the sun and tickling the tonsils of Earth. They’re not yet grown-up, but they’ll be loud enough to hear unless we can grow a whole chorus of singing firs to drown out the sounds of hunger.”
“How many trees do we need?”
“Hundreds and then thousands should do.”
“All that? We can’t do all that.”
“Then we’ll do what we can and hope for the rest. I can make you stronger, make you work longer. I have ways to make you a tree farmer.” Bones smiled at me but didn’t share his secret plans. And I didn’t mind waiting to see what he meant.
While I waited, a society had begun to form among the citizens of Treaty. Alacrity fell in love with Nesta Vine. She followed the black amazon around, hanging on her every word and gesture. They ran in the forest together, executing great and small projects, like building a raft or making exotic clothes from the wings of the killer butterflies. They’d often disappear for days at a time. Whether they were lovers in the physical sense I never knew. But next to the looks they had for each other, any passion I’d ever felt was pale and insignificant.
I was a little jealous of that love, but not in the way you might think. I was happy for Alacrity, happy that she had a close friend. But that meant I could rarely see Nesta alone. And being alone with Nesta was what I dreamed about every night.
A few days after she’d arrived in Treaty, Nesta and I took a long walk in the woods together. She was full of stories about places she’d been and times she’d read about. And she was accomplished in dozens of disciplines, arts, and sciences. One was the Chinese medicine called acupuncture. She said that the Chinese needle-and-flame doctors could cure many symptoms that the drug-and-knife doctors of the West couldn’t begin to treat.
“You mean these guys could treat with a pin one of the headaches I get listening to Bones?”
“Give me your left arm” was her answer.
She took me by the upper half of my left arm and applied pressure to two nerve points. It started off by tingling like flesh receiving blood after the circulation had been cut off for a while. I wasn’t even aware of my erection until I looked down and noticed the bulge in my pants.
Nesta smiled while keeping the tingly pressure constant.
“You like that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, really trying to answer her question. “It’s like I don’t really feel it.”
Nesta then released the pressure from one point, touching me lightly with her free hand somewhere on the right side of my neck.
“Do you want to feel it?”
When I nodded she pinched a nerve on my neck, which caused a great deal of pain. I thought that I was going to scream when the ejaculation started. She didn’t keep the pressure on my neck constant. After a painful pinch she’d release for a second or so, then pinch again. And every time, I tensed and ejaculated more.
After the seventh or eighth time I stammered, half laughing, “S-stop. I can’t —”
She gave my neck one more hard nip and then released me with both hands. This left me quivering on the ground at her feet.
Nesta got down on her knees next to me and put her lips near my ear. “Those are pressure points doctors give to women who have not conceived or whose husbands are impotent. It drains the man. Do you feel drained, Chance?”
I nodded, grinning like a fool.
“Then come by and see me night after next and I’ll show you some points that you can pinch on me.”
I spent as many evenings as I could under the tutelage of Nesta Vine. There was never what I’d call love between us, not like the love between either of us and Alacrity. We were more symbiotic in an intellectual and physical way. To be blunt, I needed sex and I needed her knowledge to write my History.
Nesta wanted children and she loved to talk and tell stories. I wasn’t much help, but it wasn’t from a lack of trying. She was childless in the years we were acquainted, and I learned more about blue light from her than from any other source.
“In one sense,” she once told me, “the light is the motivation while blood is the machine. Like gasoline and a car engine. That’s one way to look at it. Bones says that light is more like the chemical reaction needed to motivate a seed, which is the blood. At this point you and I are the root jutting down from the seed.”
“But Bones also told me that blue light is like disease,” I said.
“Or maybe it’s just magic,” Nesta replied; then she kissed me.
I liked her kisses very much. The kisses and pinches. It was a sorrow to me that we never conceived a child. I also lamented the days on end that she and Alacrity would go off together. Sometimes I would catch glimpses of them running naked in the woods or sitting on opposite sides of a small stream from each other speaking in low tones and gazing into each other’s eyes across the distance.
I wasn’t the only one who was disturbed by the friendship between the two young women. Wanita had been Alacrity’s closest friend before Nesta showed up. They had been girls together. When Alacrity had been miraculously transformed into a woman, she still shared her deepest secrets with the Dreamer. But after Nesta showed up, Alacrity either ignored Wanita or treated her as an adult would a child.
Often when I’d be looking after Nesta and Alacrity, I’d see Wanita watching them too. I found myself searching her out sometimes just to say hi to someone who shared my bruised feelings.
This self-pitying concern for Wanita is what made me aware of the threat to Treaty’s only child.
Often when I’d find Wanita I’d also see Mackie Allitar somewhere in the vicinity. I began to worry about her safety and so made it my business to always be aware of the whereabouts of either Mackie or Wanita.
But whenever I stalked Mackie I found Bones there too. Once when I was watching Mackie watch Wanita playing down by the stream, I looked up and saw Bones high in the branches of a tree.
It comforted me to know that Bones was guarding her, but I was afraid that one day he’d be off with his bears or stone pots, that one day I’d wake up late and Mackie Allitar would have raped and murdered my last charge.
I was sure that Mackie wanted to kill Wanita. We all knew that he’d been a convict under ex-Warden Reed.
I followed him all day long. Reluctantly Addy promised to keep Wanita with them at night. She didn’t think there was any threat. I guess she figured that keeping Wanita with her would help my sleep.
Mackie looked old and withered, but I saw him as a threat as great as Gray Man.
No one would listen to me. Reggie and Trini couldn’t see past their own love for each other, and Addy trusted in Bones. Miles Barber was morose and sad most of the time, and when he wasn’t he was in terrible pain that was both physical and in his soul.
“If he breaks the law, I’ll take him in,” the ex-detective told me once. “But until then it’s a free country.”
Nesta sympathized, even worried a little, but she wasn’t a woman of action, at least not the offensive action I thought it would take to save Wanita.
I fina
lly decided to tell Alacrity my fears. I knew that if she thought her little friend was in trouble, she’d kill the offender. There was no law in Treaty. Juan Thrombone for the most part made no judgments over our moral behavior. And even if he did, I didn’t think he would have wanted to go up against Alacrity.
By that time she was an amazon. More than six feet tall and as strong as the bears she ran with. Alacrity practiced with weapons and in hand-to-claw combat continually. She was an excellent archer, and her ability at throwing the wooden knives she made was frightening.
I was sure that Alacrity was the greatest warrior in the history of the world. She was bold and kindhearted, savage and ruthless. The killing stroke was her caress, but her smile could break your heart.
Alacrity had become a hero — no heroine she — and I found myself thinking of her as the solution to the problem I faced. But then I thought that I should be looking out for her, not the other way around. So I hesitated for a few days more, following Allitar while he shadowed Wanita. Juan Thrombone was always somewhere nearby.
One morning Wanita was sitting under a big rock, watching water cascade into a stream. It was a glittering bright day and warm, almost hot. Mackie sat in the shadows, watching her. I sat in deeper shadow, watching them both.
We stayed that way for hours.
The day grew hotter and I started to nod. I worried that I’d wake up to find Wanita’s small body floating in the stream, so I got up and strolled down to where the child sat.
“Hey, Wanita,” I said.
“Hi, Chance.”
“What you doin’?”
“Watchin’ the water.”
“You see anything I don’t see?”
“I don’t know. I guess. I mean, we all do, I guess.”
“You mean, you and Alacrity and Reg and them?” I asked. I was thinking that my being there must have upset Mackie.
“I mean everybody see sumpin’ different,” the child answered. “People an’ bears an’ everybody.”
I sat down next to her. She tossed a pebble into the stream.
The water was very clear and full of the sun. I could feel my second sight, my blood vision, kicking in. There were trails of light beginning to arch and explode in the center of the water. The water itself began to expand. I could feel the beginning of a tale. I let go of the images I beheld, open to the real story, or at least the part of that story I could comprehend.
“You been followin’ me, huh, Chance?”
“Huh?” I realized that there was a big fish taking up the whole inside of my skull cavity. There was a flop in my head, and the fish seemed to swim out through my eyes.
“You been followin’ me,” Wanita said.
“Did you see me?”
Wanita nodded. “In my dream. In my dream I saw you. I saw you followin’ Mackie a’cause he was followin’ me. An’ I seen Bones studyin’ you.”
“Me?”
“Uh-huh. He was studyin’ you ’cause you gotta go to school.”
“But you saw Mackie following you, right?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Then why didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Why should I?”
“Weren’t you scared of him?”
“Uh-uh. I wasn’t scared.”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause I could see that nuthin’ was gonna happen t’me. He wasn’t gonna hurt me. He just wants my blood, but he’s too scared to take it.”
“He’s scared’a you?” I asked.
“Uh-uh. He’s scared’a my blood. He want it, but he scared’a it too. He used to take Mr. Fargo’s blood, but now Mr. Fargo’s too strong an’ mean. An’ everybody else is too big. He’s more scared’a all’a them, so all he could do is look at me.”
Whenever Wanita talked about her dreams, there was a certainty to her, a truth that was undeniable. If she said that Mackie would not bother her, I knew that it had to be true.
The fish came back into my head. My brain was the water in which he swam. I was the stream and then the sea. I was experiencing the wild ecstasy of evaporation when a thought came into my head, displacing the water that I had become.
“Wanita?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Can you see the future?”
“Uh-huh. Some I can.”
“And you can travel to other places in your dreams?”
“Mostly them places come to me. I mean, they happened a long time ago but they still there.”
“All you have to do is look at them?”
“No,” she said a little impatiently. “It’s not lookin’. You got to close your eyes. It’s more like music that you feel through your skin. It’s like music that you feel.”
“But the things you dream were a long time ago?”
“Yeah, yeah, but they right now too. I mean, nothin’ ever goes away. They just move but they always there.”
And so we sat there while the clipped music of the stream played almost unheard. We were watching the water, and Mackie was somewhere watching us. I was being watched. The whole universe was on automatic replay and no one could hear it but a small black child who wasn’t worried about a thing.
Thirty
EARLY ONE MORNING, NOT many days after my talk with Wanita, I was approached by Juan Thrombone beneath the shingles of Number Twelve. Wanita was out hunting with Nesta, Alacrity, and Reggie. The tension between Alacrity and Reggie had disappeared since Reggie had taken up with Trini.
“Last Chance,” Bones said. It sounded more like a warning than a greeting that morning.
“Bones.”
“You remember that job I told you about?”
“About growing more singing trees?” I asked, trying to stave off the pressure in my mind, the pressure I always felt when Bones’s attention was on me alone. “I was wondering when you’d get around to that. I mean, sometimes I think I hear the bellowing sequoias in my dreams. And if I can hear them, maybe someone else can.”
He smiled and nodded. “Up high in the mountains. Near a stream in a clearing. There’s a place to make woody songs about just plain old trees. Just cell and seed and decay.”
I winced. “And you want me to go there with you?”
“You,” said Thrombone, “and one or two others. Those who need magic that makes things, magic that you can see.”
“Are we gonna have to talk a lot?” I asked the little woodsmaster. “ ’Cause, I swear, if you talk to me much longer, every blood vessel in my head’s gonna pop.”
Bones brought his finger to his lips, winked, and turned to walk away — I followed.
It was a pleasant summer’s day. Down out of the mountains it would have been hot. But where we were was just perfect. White clouds, blue sky, and the dappled shadows of the sun winked around us as we made it down the tree-covered path that had been blazed by bear and deer and Juan Thrombone. My second sight never worked well in Bones’s presence, but my human senses were good enough on that day.
After a while we came to a small hollow. Therein we found Gerin Reed, Mackie Allitar, and Miles Barber. I thought at the time that it must have been an important moment. A gathering of men with no law but themselves. Each one of us had been exposed indirectly to blue light. Each one of us was crazy in his own way. Here and there in the surrounding woods were singing trees, the trees designed by Juan Thrombone to hide the blue music that emanated from the great bellowing sequoias and the human Blues who lived in our forest hideaway.
Mackie was pacing back and forth across the rough circle of the clearing. Gerin was crouched down, examining a line of large black ants as they followed their tiny destinies. The ex-detective was the only one of the three seated. He was applying pressure with a small twig to various points on his neck and face that Nesta had shown him to ease his constant pain.
When Juan and I entered the circle, they turned their attention to us. Juan raised his hands, and we all came together around him in a tight arc. It was a kind of attention and proximity that I hadn’t felt
since my days with the Close Congregation.
“You are more than you think, and we are less,” said Juan Thrombone, a bit more earnest than usual for him — maybe that’s why he stopped and giggled. “We can tote and drop, burn and build, laugh and even war — together. You will all find what you are missing and give what you have taken and save the precious seconds that you throw away on pain.
“Not you, Slender Reed,” he said to Gerin. “All I need from you is what help you can give. But for the man who hurts and the man who cries and the one who guards the doorway but has never seen the throne room. From all of you I want help, and I will give you in return space and time.”
I had no idea what he meant or which of us suffered which affliction, but I was convinced that he wanted to help me, and I wanted that help.
Bones turned abruptly and began a quick march through the thick woods. We all followed. Nobody talked. After a half an hour or so I had a pretty good idea of our destination. I didn’t know many places in the woods of Treaty, but the path to the Bellowing Trees of Earth was burned into my memory.
Sometimes at night I would lie awake listening for the rumble of the throne tree in the ground. I’d promise myself that once I heard it, I would go back to the throne and plunge my body into its depths. It would be my “Thanatopsis,” my becoming a part of the earth and sky, root and bark. And the rumble would come, but only in my sleep. When I awoke, ready to heed the bass call, there would be nothing but clicks of night insects and the rustle of the breeze through the shingles above my head.
We marched for another couple of hours before entering a grove of singing trees. Their vibrations were like laughter, like the tittering of small children just beyond sight in the woods.
“No longer the siren’s call,” Juan Thrombone said to Gerin Reed, just ahead of me.
“Now they’re laughing at Papa Shortribs,” Gerin replied. He loved making fun of Bones only slightly more than Juan liked being made fun of.
The white firs seemed to gather around us. Behind us the wall of trees was impassable while ahead was always open and even beckoning.
And then we were in the open grove of the young sequoias. The first deep note of the Bellowing Trees sounded. All of us half-lights, even Gerin Reed, were struck still. Bones smiled and indicated with his hands that we should sit.
Blue Light Page 24
