Blue Light (27 page)

“But how can you say that?” I said. “You don’t know him. You just met him. He can get in your head. Maybe he’s hypnotized you.”

The way she shook her head crushed any hope I had left.

She brought her hands to either side of my head and kissed me, softly at first.

I wanted to give her the best loving that she had ever had. I wanted to make her sing out my name and forget all about Juan Thrombone. But I hadn’t made love to a woman in many months, so it was the most I could do to call out her name once before I came.

She gave out a loud
oh
and then wrapped her arms and legs around me, to comfort my distress. She cooed in my ear, “It’s all right, Chance. It’s okay.”

I sat up and away from her.

“What’s your boyfriend gonna think about that, huh?” I asked.

“Juan doesn’t love me for that,” she said. “He’d know that I was just sharing the love around us with one of our friends.”

“Like he’s doing right now with your little girl?”

Addy rose and walked away. I made to go after her, but instead I went another way, the direction from which the drumming was coming.

I followed the deep vibrations until I came upon Reggie, who now called himself Pathfinder, and Wanita in a small hollow. He was beating his big log with hardened hands while Wanita lay down before him absorbing the music with her bones.

“Reggie.”

“Yeah, Chance?” he answered, still rolling the rhythm out from his drum.

“I need you to help me find Alacrity. There’s something wrong, and I need to go find her.”

“What’s wrong? Somethin’ wrong with you, Chance?” the boy who had become a man asked.

“No, with Alacrity. She’s disappeared and I want to find her.”

“She’s wit’ Bones,” Wanita said. Bones is what she called Juan Thrombone.

“But I’ve got to find her.”

“She’ll come back, Chance,” Reggie said. “We don’t have to go looking for her if she’s comin’ back.”

“But I need to find her,” I said again.

“For what?”

“All you need to do is help me and not ask all these stupid questions.” I was mad and hoping that my anger could still overwhelm the child that lingered in the man.

“I’m stayin’ here,” Reggie said. “I’ma play drums out here and that’s all.”

I left them in the clearing and went out to find Alacrity and Thrombone myself. I wandered in the woods around Treaty and then I went farther away. I started calling for her after midday. That evening, when my voice finally gave out, I returned to camp. Reggie and Wanita were already asleep. Addy was sitting by a fire under Number One, but I didn’t feel like talking to her.

The next morning I went out again. For the next six mornings I searched and called. But I couldn’t find her.

In among the regular trees (firs, incense cedars, yellow pine, even a hemlock here and there) were the special white firs of Juan Thrombone. These trees had a different kind of life to them. They were trees like any others in most ways, but they also gave off a low-level emission — a sound that you couldn’t quite hear, a song. And though I had never actually seen one move, I was often disoriented by parts of the woods that were sometimes crowded by white firs but at other times were sparse or even bare.

During that week I am sure that the firs conspired to stymie my attempts to find Alacrity. Sometimes, when I thought I heard a child’s strained voice, I’d rush to get there, but the firs were too dense and I couldn’t make it through. Sometimes the path I followed went in circles leading me away from my destination.

Addy refused to talk to me about it. Reggie thought I was crazy, and Wanita kept telling me stories about dreams she’d had. I think she hoped I would forget about Alacrity while listening to her tales.

I was young and stupid then. I don’t remember most of the dreams. I was too worried about Alacrity, or more accurately, I was jealous. Alacrity treated me like her father and her best friend. I knew that Juan wasn’t abusing her. But he was taking her from me. Just like he’d taken Addy.

The one dream of Wanita’s that I remember was about the Tusk Men. Big men with hairy bodies and lower jaws that jutted out sporting long saberlike teeth. They carried clubs and wandered up and down the streets of a bombed-out city. They were meat-eaters. They ate people. People, Wanita said. Whatever place her dreams took her that time, there were people there, not pink crystals or rolling sentient fogs.

The Tusk Men knew that Wanita was there. They looked for her but she ran. She ran across the sky to a big stone fort where people gathered to fight off their enemies. These enemies were Tusk Men and wolf women, crawling worm people and fat bottoms who weighed almost nothing, floating on poisonous gases like flatulent balloons.

The dream had frightened Wanita, that’s why I remember it. I put her on my lap and hugged her and told her that all of that was far away and she was safe now in Treaty.

“Why don’t you like it here?” Wanita asked, rubbing her tears off on my shoulder.

“I like it, honey. It’s just all so different.”

“Different from what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You and Reggie, Alacrity and Bones. I can’t keep up with it all. Sometimes I just want to go home.”

“Don’t leave us, Chance,” the little girl said.

“Chance,” someone else called from a distance away.

I looked up because it was not a voice that I knew. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite tell from where or when.

“Chance,” she called again.

Across from Number Twelve, out of the trees, came Juan Thrombone accompanied by a tall woman. She had short-cropped blond hair and fair skin. As they approached, I could see that she had a nasty-looking scar down her jawline. She wore only a fur cape that didn’t cover all of her body at once. She was calling my name and waving at me.

“Alacrity” issued from my lips.

The next thing I knew, I was running. Addy and Reggie and Wanita were behind me. I was the first to reach her, though. I picked her up and hugged her hard. The squeeze she gave me nearly broke my spine.

She hollered in my ear and threw me around.

“Hi, everybody!” she yelled.

We all cheered and capered, a lost tribe of primitives secreted beyond the reach of sanity.

“Bones made me fight with the bears,” Alacrity said as we sat around the fire that night. Clothed only in her bearskin robe, she sat at my side, holding my arms, lacing her fingers with mine. A dark circle of dried food was etched around her full lips. “First it was just a little one. We wrestled for a hour almost, but then I pulled her ears so hard that she ran away. I wouldn’t have done that, but she clawed me on my jaw and that made me mad.”

Juan Thrombone was snoring under Number One while the rest of us sat around the fire under Twelve.

“But then,” Alacrity continued, “after I would fight, I’d get real tired and have to go to sleep. And all the bears were growling. And when I’d wake up there’d be another bear, only a little bigger, and then I’d fight again. But every time I was stronger and knew how to fight better. Sometimes I’d get a broken leg. Sometimes I’d get cut real bad. But the only scar was from the first time. Bones said it was first blood, and he put special dirt in it while I was asleep so it wouldn’t go away. He said that I should always remember first blood because I was a warrior, and warriors had to remember that they could be hurt too.

“Finally I had to fight Brutus.”

“Who’s that?” Wanita cried.

“Brutus was that big black bear that chased us here. He always hated me because I broke his nose. He’s always been waiting around here to get me, only Bones wouldn’t let him until we had the contest. ’Cause, you see, Bones said that I had to grow in order to feel my power. He said that I was always so restless because I needed to be big to do what I need to do. And so after each time I’d sleep, I got bigger. And when I was all grown up, I had to have a fight to the death with Brutus because that would be my bap … bap …”

“Baptism,” Addy said.

“Yeah,” Alacrity agreed. “Baptism.”

“Uh-huh.” Wanita nodded and looked into her friend’s eyes. “That’s ’cause you gotta be fightin’ an’ stuff. I seen that. I seen it, Alacrity. You were beautiful and real mad.”

“He came at me real fast,” Alacrity said. “But I jumped high and landed on his back. Then I pulled his ears and jumped off when he tried to crush me on a tree. And then I got me a stick and he kept comin’, but I’d keep jumpin’ outta the way and hittin’ ’im on the neck and stuff. One time he caught me and pushed me down with his paws and he cut my chest, but I rolled away when he got offa me for a second. And then I hit him across the face and he couldn’t see nuthin’. And so then I hit him on the head with a rock and he fell down and rolled around ’cause he couldn’t see and his head hurt.” Alacrity stopped for a moment then and looked very serious.

“So you beat ’im,” Wanita cried. “You won.”

“Bones said that I had to kill Brutus if I was the winner,” the warrior said. “He said that I had to be able to kill my enemy, and then we would eat his liver for a feast.”

“Did you kill him?” Wanita asked fearfully.

“I dug my fingers in his neck and tore out his windpipe, uh-huh, yeah.”

I looked closer at the dark circle around her lips. What frightened me was that she hadn’t washed off the grisly trophy.

We were all quiet after that. The only sound that could be heard was Juan Thrombone’s snoring more than a thousand feet away.

A
LACRITY’S CHANGE HAD A
strong effect on Reggie. He began stalking her from a distance. When she’d go down to the stream to bathe with Wanita, Reggie could always be found somewhere nearby — watching. He brooded in her presence and said almost nothing to her directly. Sometimes he’d say things to Wanita while Alacrity stood there.

“She better wear a shirt if she gonna be climbin’, else it’s gonna be tittie trees,” he said many times, laughing thickly to punctuate his bad joke.

Alacrity was confused by Reggie’s behavior. They’d always been friends. She looked up to him. He showed her about pathfinding and made her little toys and trinkets out of wood.

Of course, Alacrity’s behavior didn’t help things any. She was still a child in many ways, moving around and dancing with no sense of shame. She liked her tree-cloth dresses short so that she could move easily and often went naked, or nearly so, like her mother.

Reggie spent even more time behind Number Seven.

The tension in the air was unsettling, and I found myself leaving the cathedral during the day to go out among the trees.

The special white firs around Treaty gave off a sense of deep calm. Juan had said that he planted many of them and helped them grow quickly, as he’d done with Alacrity.

“I got ’em all over here. They’re kinda like you, Last Chance — half-light and free.”

I learned not to ask about his pronouncements. Whatever he knew about me, he could keep to himself.

“I know about the song trees, the white firs, but where are these puppy trees that you keep talking about?”

“Where they belong, my friend. Where they belong.”

One day I left the camp early to go out among the trees. It was easy to pick out a tree that Juan had brought along because of the slight
singing
vibration it gave off. Sitting under the boughs of one of those young firs, I had the feeling of motion and peace. It was the opposite of being in a convertible racing down a straight road on a flat plain; even though I was standing still, there was the illusion of moving.

I was sitting in a grove of those special trees, wishing that I had brought my
History
along, when Alacrity came up. She wore a short dress of tree cloth with wooden buttons down the side. She bent down to lay her bow and arrows against the tree. You could see most of her powerful, long legs, and her breasts seemed to point wherever she happened to be looking.

She turned to me then.

“Hi, Chance,” she said. Then she moved close just like the child she still was.

“Hey, Alacrity. What’s goin’ on?”

“Nuthin’,” she said.

We sat there for a few moments, looking into space.

“When I was out there with Bones,” Alacrity said, “I could hear you calling for me. I could hear you when I was sleeping and I could feel myself gettin’ bigger and stronger. And I could hear you calling for me, and all I wanted was to come back here to you.”

She put her hand on the inside of my thigh.

“I wanted you to do it to me,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

“Uh-huh.” Her hand moved up slightly. I was very aware that the fabric of my tree-cloth pants was no thicker than skin.

“What do you want now?” I asked.

It was a first kiss for her. A first kiss as a woman, that is. She pushed her lips against mine and shivered. I wanted to believe that she was just a young woman coming to a man she thought she could trust.

It was a sweet kiss, and I needed love.

But Alacrity had been like a little niece to me only a few weeks before. I wanted her but had no intention of giving in to that desire. I’d like to say that I pushed her away and told her that there would be other men for her. But other circumstances separated us that day.

“You guys better stop that!” he shouted.

Alacrity was on her feet, nocking her arrow in the direction of the shout. Through the dense tangle of leaves, maybe sixty yards away, I could see a form that I knew had to be Reggie. With the impossible speed of a dream, Alacrity pulled and let her arrow fly.

The body through the trees lunged for cover more quickly than I would have imagined possible, but the shout of pain told me that Alacrity’s speed had been greater.

Reggie was up in a moment, hobbling away.

“I’ll kill you!” Alacrity cried. She had nocked another arrow.

Reggie screamed.

I jumped, grabbing the bow and throwing my body weight against the enraged girl. The bow snapped and I fell. Alacrity started running in the direction that Reggie had fled, but I managed to grab her foot and topple her.

She went down but was up in an instant. I grabbed her again; she turned and threw me up against a tree. With one hand against my chest, Alacrity hefted a large wooden knife in the other. The killing rage that shook her dampened any possibility for love. I could see that this was the passion sex brought up in her.