It was a truth waiting to come to me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Ever since she bit me I’ve been just about ready to cry. I mean real sad crying too. Like my best friend just died in my arms.”
Ordé touched the wounds on my shoulder. I turned to give him a better view of the injury and found myself looking out the bus window at the large white stones that led down to the ocean. The Pacific was singing a sonorous dirge. It was a great moving beast with flecks of life glimmering within its folds.
It was hard to control my new powers of perception. Everything I saw — grass growing, breezes darting through leafy boughs, maggots swimming in death — everything set my senses to translating. That’s what Ordé called it. Reading the meaning of myself in the world and, therefore, he claimed, changing the world.
Ordé had already explained in one of his sermons that the purpose of light was to combine with the DNA molecule, to unite matter and energy into a perfect state of thought and being. The blue god, who has the only ability to know, was in me. His brilliant eyes and keen ears making and remaking the world in my particular perceptions.
I felt a sharp pain in my neck. I yanked my head around to see my teacher digging his fingernails into the half-healed wounds inflicted by Coyote. There was sympathy in his powerful gaze, sympathy and command. The blood felt as if it were mobilizing in my veins. The cells felt particular, like tiny soldiers marching toward the breech. I was shaking. Ordé touched the reopened wound with his other hand. He then brought the bloody fingers to his lips. Shock registered in his eyes, and the grip on my shoulder and neck eased.
As the pressure lessened, the despair I had felt dissipated. I was exhausted and slumped forward, putting my elbows on my knees. When I sat up I noticed a small black boy sitting across the aisle from me. He was looking fearfully at my wounded neck.
Ordé had his face buried in his hands by then. The forgotten blood on his fingers smeared the top of his forehead.
He cried all the way back to Berkeley, red drying to black across his forehead.
When we returned from Santa Teresa, Ordé went straight home. He locked himself in his house and didn’t come out, as far as I knew, for days.
That was Friday.
On Wednesday he didn’t show up for his sermon to the Close Congregation. The congregation was there, although smaller.
Phyllis Yamauchi was already missing. She hadn’t been seen for more than two weeks, but no one in the Close Congregation was worried. It wasn’t required that Blues report to anyone. Phyllis studied her charts and telescopes and every once in a while came by to let Ordé see what she theorized. Often his prophecy complemented her studies. I had been transcribing their notes into my book.
Claudia Heart had taken more than fifty of Ordé’s followers to her own communal residence, not far from the People’s Warehouse, in Haight-Ashbury. She would take them one by one, men and women, into her van and make love to them just as she had done with me. Most came crawling back, begging to be with her, swearing to do anything for her kiss and company.
I would have gone on my knees to her without the blood ritual. Now I felt no desire for her.
I got a ride from Feldman, Ordé’s bodyguard, and went down to our teacher’s house. He came to the door but didn’t open up.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Chance, teacher.”
“Go away.”
“The congregation is waiting for you.”
“Tell them to go home. Tell them to go home and to say their prayers.”
“What’s wrong, teacher?”
“Go away, Lester.”
Up until that moment, no matter how hard or frustrating life had become, I still had faith in Ordé and his Blues. I believed in the unity, perfection, and grace of the universe. I believed in what Ordé called the grand hierarchy. I was a brick in the cathedral of existence meant to support the feet of gods.
My confidence was bruised when I heard the fear in Ordé’s voice, but I knew my job. I went back up to the congregation and told them that Ordé had been faced with a great mystery. I told them about the coyotes who performed their own kind of blood ritual on me, how our teacher tasted their knowledge in my blood.
I didn’t tell them of my blood ritual with Ordé. I didn’t trust that everyone would understand the purity of his motives.
It was a new experience for me. I had never spoken to a crowd before. But with my new powers of perception, I could read the needs of the assembly.
“You want to know something?” I asked one young acolyte.
“How did you manage to keep from going with Claudia Heart?”
“Ordé sang to me,” I said.
“Will he sing to me?” There were tears in her eyes. Later I found out that her husband had tied her up when she tried to follow Claudia, that he’d drugged her for two weeks until her desire to run had changed to a deep sadness at the loss of love.
“Yes,” I said.
I answered questions and soothed the nervous congregation. They accepted me as Ordé’s substitute, at least for one meeting. I didn’t have his power. I could perceive but could not project. What I had to offer them was passive understanding.
Five
AFTER THE WEDNESDAY MEETING I went back to Ordé’s house, but he wouldn’t even answer the door. His windows were blocked by sheets of tinfoil, and junk mail was already spilling out of the small mailbox.
I went home after that.
Ordé had paid the rent while I was in the sanitarium.
My one-room studio cost seventeen dollars a week, which I usually got in the mail from my mother even though I never answered the letters she enclosed with the checks.
Actually, I never even read those letters.
I was thinking about that on Sunday night. How I cut off my mother, and all the rest of my life. How I blamed her for bearing a black child and rearing him in a white world.
It seemed silly to be worried about race then. I had come just a few steps from something beyond race or species or life, even. Not only would I have met the maker in the coming of blue light, I would have seen myself in his radiance.
But now I was back in the mundane world. My teacher, who had been like a god to me, had become just a frightened man.
I wondered again how long it would be before I killed myself. I plugged in my radio and picked up a blues station on FM. Robert Johnson wailed that the blue light was his blues while the red one was his mind. As I fell asleep, his blues mingled with mine.
I felt a clicking around my ears and imagined that small insects were making last-minute plans before they prepared to climb into my brain. I woke up suddenly, slapping all around my head. The knock came right after that.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Reggie.”
“What do you want, Reggie? It’s late.” The windup alarm clock on the floor next to my mattress said 3:16.
“Open up, Chance, we got a problem.”
I was still a member of the Close Congregation. Reggie was still one of the Blues. Even if he was only thirteen, I had to at least talk to him.
I got to my feet and opened the door. Reggie was short for his age. Five two. He had a flattop haircut and wore jeans and a buttoned-up white dress shirt with the tails out.
We just stood there because I had no chairs.
“You got to come with me, Chance.”
“What’s goin’ on?”
“Just come on, man.”
Even in Berkeley the streets were more or less empty at that time of morning. There were a few hippies around. A few drug deals going down. But on the whole, there was no one. We went down Shattuck to Cedar and over to La Loma; from there we got to Buena Vista, Phyllis’s street. The block was lined with two- and three-story brick houses that had deep lawns and big, dark trees.
We came to one house and Reggie walked up on the lawn. He went to a redwood gate at the side and unhooked a metal latch. When he turned around he saw that I was still at the sidewalk.
“Come on.”
“Come on where?”
“Come on!” Reggie shouted in an intense whisper.
We went through the gate and down the side of the house. The pathway there was yellowish cement that almost glowed in the darkness. A cold breeze met us, and I had to duck my head to make it under the low hanging branches.
At the back of the house there was a door in the ground. It was an ornate portal to the basement that had thick opaque glass panes in it. One of the panes had been broken. Reggie lifted up the door and latched it to the house. Then he stood back.
“What?” I asked the boy.
“You go on. I want you to see what’s down there.”
I didn’t need any special powers of perception to hear the fear in Reggie’s voice.
I descended into the darkness of the basement. I couldn’t see a thing.
“There’s a door right in front of you,” Reggie called down at me. “Open it up. The light’s on the right side on the wall.”
I walked straight ahead until my toes kicked wood, about five steps. Then I fumbled around for the knob. The moment the door was open I smelled it. A sickly sweet odor that was cloying, like a baseball field piled high with rotting lilies.
I snapped on the light and then fell to my knees, vomiting.
Her corpse had been decapitated and then split open from pelvis to throat. Her ribs had been broken outward, and the flesh of her arms and legs had been torn open. The hands looked as if they had been lacerated by claws.
Only the bottoms of her feet were left untouched.
The head had been tossed in the corner. I was drawn to it. She was facing upward, but there was not much of a face. The maniac had destroyed her features and then discarded her.
“It’s Phyllis,” Reggie said.
His unexpected voice gave me such a fright that I jumped away and yelped.
“What’s wrong with you, Reggie?”
Ignoring my shock, he said, “I came looking for her. Nobody’d seen her in a while, and I just thought I’d look for her.”
Reggie’s abilities, though still immature, were finding things and hiding. Ordé wanted to call him Scout, but Reggie liked his own name.
“I came looking for her,” he said again.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the remains of Phyllis Yamauchi. Her organs were spread out around the body on the dirty concrete floor. The dried blood had flowed out more or less evenly and made a kind of dark frame for the horrible sculpture.
The body was a grisly enough sight, but it was the intent behind the murder that hit me so hard. The killer not only hated her, Phyllis, but also hated her flesh and bones and blood. He’d stripped away every vestige of humanity, leaving only a tattered lump of meat.
I looked up at the ceiling, trying to blot the sight from my mind. All along the unpainted beams hung a chorus of pale spiders. Silent, spinning, waiting. They were unconcerned with the tableau on the floor. These spiders I used as beacons of sanity. Death was less to them than a spring breeze, certainly nothing compared to a frothy, juicy moth.
“What should we do?” Reggie asked me.
I had forgotten he was there.
“Can you tell what happened by tasting her blood, like Ordé?”
Reggie looked at me with big, frightened eyes.
“Well, can you?”
“Once Wanita cut her finger and I kissed it,” Reggie said.
“Yeah?”
“And I saw a big ship leaving the harbor. She saw that ship the day before with my mother, but I wasn’t there.”
“So you can read blood,” I concluded.
Reggie looked at the body and shook his head no. I understood. He might have been a god, but he was still only a boy.
I searched the basement until I found a washer and dryer in a small room. I took a sheet from a basket in there and tore it into two cloths — one larger and one smaller. Then I went back to Phyllis’s body. Deep inside her chest cavity was still moist. I soaked up some of the blood in the smaller rag and then wrapped it in the larger one.
A couple of blocks away Reggie asked, “Should we call the cops?”
“Uh-uh, no, I don’t think so, kid. The police would just start looking for some maniac. They’d never believe what Phyllis was. They’d probably blame us. What we should do is go to Ordé and ask him what he thinks happened.”
We walked on a ways. The sun was coming up, and even though I had the blood of a murdered woman in my pocket, I was struck by the dawn’s beauty. The wisps of black clouds made a grid over the orange light. There was an ancient hue to the light, something that had once known greatness. I could feel my heart and mind open up to the scrutiny of light. I felt the connection between the blood in my veins and the furnace above. I looked down after a while, seeing the afterimage of Sol in the sidewalk and passing lawns. I had walked off the sidewalk and into the street. My visions distracted me so much that I almost walked into the path of an oncoming car.
“Why’d you come to me, Reggie?” I asked the boy, partly to get the answer and partly because I wanted to concentrate on the world around me.
“Huh?”
“Why’d you come to me? You could have gone to Eileen or even Ordé.”
“Eileen would have been too scared, and I don’t know where Ordé lives. Anyway, I don’t like Ordé too much. He so weird, always tryin’ to make everything sound so big when it’s all just normal.”
“But you could have found Ordé if you wanted, and you know we’re gonna have to go to him anyway.”
“That’s okay,” Reggie answered. “It’s okay if I go with you.”
We got to Ordé’s place a little bit before six. No one answered the front door, so we went around the back and knocked there. When he didn’t come out I took up the metal lid of a trash can and started banging.
That got his attention.
“I told you to go away, Chance,” he shouted through the closed door. “Take Scout and get as far away as you can. Run.”
“Phyllis Yamauchi was murdered,” I said. “I have some of her blood.”
As I said it, I realized that this was the first death of a Blue other than those that died on the first night that light fell. Reggie’s sister had died and so had Eileen’s husband. Ordé claimed that even they had not truly died. He said that their energy, along with who they had become, had separated from the body to carry their life force into the energy fields of Earth. But that was during the coming of the light. All the Blues that had lived were healthy, never sick, and somehow had the appearance of agelessness. Even Eileen Martel looked as though she could walk all day. Reggie and Wanita had grown some, but they were kids.
While I was thinking about gods and death, the door opened. Ordé stood there in an untied terry cloth bathrobe. He was naked underneath, and Reggie stole glances at the man’s penis like any boy would.
Ordé hadn’t shaved, bathed, or even pushed his hair out of his face.
“Come on,” he said.
His once sparse kitchen was now crowded. There were boxes of powdered milk and dried soup on the counter and a large-caliber rifle and a clip-loading pistol on the table. Under the table were boxes of ammunition.
“You going to war, teacher?” I asked, stunned at my own brazen humor.
Ordé sat at the table and held out his hand.
“Give it to me,” he said.
I took the rags from my pocket and began to unwrap the larger from the smaller. Ordé was impatient, though, and took them from me. He shook the tattered sheet around until the blood packet fell to the floor. He got down on his knees and pushed the whole thing in his mouth.
He hiccupped once and then slumped down into unconsciousness.
Reggie and I tried to wake him, but it couldn’t be done. I pulled the rag from his mouth and made sure that he was breathing. Then the boy and I dragged him to the cot in his bedroom.
He was unconscious for nineteen hours. Reggie went home to his mother and Wanita (they had taken up re
sidence with Eileen Martel in San Francisco), but he came back at about six that evening.
At one the next morning Ordé gasped and scrambled to his feet.
“Oh, my God!” he yelled, maybe with some kind of relief, and then ran to the bathroom.
Reggie was sound asleep on the floor when the prophet awoke, but he was right behind me chasing Ordé to the toilet.
We found our teacher studying his face in the mirror, running his fingertips around his cheeks and eyes. He was crying and laughing.
“What is it, teacher?” I asked.
Ordé turned to me, grabbed me by my shoulders, and asked, “Do you see me?”
I nodded. He looked over at Reggie, and the boy nodded too.
“I made it back. I fought him off. I’m still alive.”
Ordé went to the toilet bowl and urinated with no shame. He turned to us halfway through and said, “We have a lot to do. A lot to do.”
Reggie and I went out to Ordé’s living room. His couch was a long and backless wooden bench, and his chair was a piano stool. I turned on the light and then went to sit next to Reggie on the bench. There was a glistening effect to the light because of the aluminum foil Ordé had used to block out the windows.
He came in after a few more minutes, dressed in jeans with his chest still bare, his long hair at least combed, and with a look of determination and fear in his eyes.
“Thanks, Chance. You too, Scout. I was so scared after Coyote’s warning that I couldn’t do anything. But now I have survived.” Ordé brought his hands together right between his eyes so that his fingers pointed up toward his forehead.
“Coyote’s message? That’s what you got out of my blood?” I asked.
“We are no longer mechanical pieces of flesh, Chance. Not just a heart to pump blood or a brain to translate primitive signals. Our blood and bone and flesh sing out the whole world that might be.”
I wasn’t in the mood for a sermon right then. I wanted answers but I knew that Ordé wasn’t so easily pinned down.
“If I feel something,” he continued, “or perceive something, if I learn something in any way — that knowledge is everywhere in me. I am more than a part of the whole; I am potentially everything. That’s why I can taste what has happened in blood.”
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