When Ordé caught sight of me, he nodded and started his speech.
“Death comes among us, my friends,” he said softly. “Death and life.”
He looked over to his left, and I saw Addy standing there, looking haggard, with Julia in her arms. Julia smiled when our eyes met.
“This is my daughter,” Ordé said. “Alacrity.”
There were ahhs and nods among the crowd. I thought that the name fit her well, and I understood why she said that Julia was not her name.
“She has come to bring us joy while Death nips at our souls,” Ordé said. “An abomination of blue light has come among us. A man who should be dead but who is not. A Gray Man. A man who died but who came back among us. He wants to kill all the Blues. He has already killed Phyllis Yamauchi. He wants to and plans to kill us all. He has great powers and has no debt to the body of life. He only wants death, silence, nothingness.”
Everyone listened. Most of them, I believe, thought that Ordé was speaking in metaphors, images, symbols. They didn’t believe in a Gray Man. Who would?
“This is the last day of our meeting,” Ordé said. “It’s time to get on with life. We must spread out to the larger world and disperse the music as best we can. We must sing and we must survive because the future of everything depends on this struggle. Death cannot take us if we move beyond his knowledge. The world is wide and he is but one man, not even a man, just half a man. His will is indominate, but we are like air.”
“You don’t really mean that we can’t meet again, do you?” Alice Rodgers asked. She was one of the Close Congregation, a citizen, a human.
“Not you, Elan,” Ordé responded, using his name for her. “You can keep on meeting. You should. Only the Blues have to go. But we’ll send a messenger to you later on. Someone who will lead you on the journey.”
“No!” a man shouted.
And then another.
Soon almost all of the Close Congregation were chanting no. Meanwhile, the Blues, hearing the word death and fearing it, had gathered up around Ordé’s rock. The crowd seemed almost hostile, almost as if they were going to attack Ordé and his brethren.
Over the heads of the angry crowd I could see Alacrity begging me with her eyes.
And then the simple, almost silent word “yessssssss” hissed in everyone’s ears. It was a word and it was spoken, but it was as if it had been whispered to each one of us.
He was right behind me, the torturer of Horace LaFontaine. His suit was black and his shirt red. I moved out around the crowd and made my way toward my teacher’s side. The rest of the Close Congregation turned to the soft-spoken refutation of their demands.
“I am Grey Redstar,” he said. “It is time for death.”
The first man he reached was Ordé’s bodyguard Jason Feldman. Jason reached out to stop the skinny black man. We all heard his arm snapping. No one believed it when Jason’s body went flying over the mob at Ordé.
The teacher ducked, and Gray Man plowed into the innocent mortals, breaking bones and rending skin.
“Halt!” Miles Barber shouted. He had jumped out of some hiding place in the trees and approached the zombie. He wore a straw-colored suit with green, red, and black lines sewn crazily through it. He held a large pistol with both hands.
As Gray Man broke the neck of Ordé’s second bodyguard, Alexander, Miles Barber fired. Gray Man turned. All I could see was his back, but the fear that blossomed in the policeman’s face told the story.
Ordé shouted, “No!” and ran toward Gray Man. He was fast, but not quick enough to save Barber’s face from becoming pulp.
Ordé jumped upon Gray Man, followed by Gijon and Zero.
My teacher was torn in two. I saw his back as he fell upon Gray Man and then I saw him come apart, giving off a shower of blood and dying blue sparks.
The Close Congregation scattered, shouts following them down from Ordé’s rock. I looked around for Addy and her daughter. They had moved back toward the trees. By the time I turned to see about Gijon and Zero, they were both dead, just bloody pieces on the ground.
I considered whether I should try to stop Gray Man or help Ordé’s widow and child.
Then I realized that Gray Man was closing in on Wanita, Reggie’s little sister whom Ordé had nicknamed Dreamer. She had her hands out in front of her like claws. Gray Man smiled and prepared to destroy her, but just then Eileen Martel stood before him. She grabbed him by both wrists and stood her ground.
With my vision I witnessed the towering blue flame above her. The darker blues of Gray Man rose also. The lights burned no longer than ten seconds. People were still shouting and running. Paula McDunn, an unemployed RN from San Francisco, ran past me, her face covered with blood.
Suddenly the lights vanished and Eileen fell to her knees. I yelled to bolster my own confidence and ran at Gray Man. I was more than forty yards from them. I knew that Eileen would be dead before I got there, but I ran anyway.
I leaped over Eileen and grabbed Gray Man. He fell to the ground and I froze. It was when he screamed that I realized that our enemy had fled.
“Lemme up!” Horace LaFontaine, Gray Man’s dead host shouted, “lemme up!”
He scrambled out from under me and ran, fell, and tumbled away from the scene.
Most of the Close Congregation had also fled. Myrtle Forché and Claudia Heart were gone. Reggie and Addy came up to Eileen, Wanita, and me. Wanita was crying over Eileen, who had fallen on her side. Her face was the color of ash. I could see that she was trying to rise, but it was as if her body weighed a ton and she just couldn’t lift it.
She opened her mouth, which, along with her eyes, was flooded with blue light. Then everything was dimmed.
“We gotta go!” little Alacrity said.
And we did.
Two
Interlude
AFTER ORDÉ’S DEATH, AND the deaths of so many others I’d loved, I took Adelaide and the children and ran. We found our way to the forests north of San Francisco, living off the checkbook I’d kept for Ordé. We were running for our lives, but sadness, not fear, was our common companion.
Whole days were spent when Addy and I never said a word. We were horrified and numb. The children played or watched TV, when the motel we stayed in that week had a TV, but they cried before going to sleep every night. Wanita had nightmares about losing an eye or a limb. Reggie ran in his sleep, jittering in his bed like a dog, remembering some fright from the day before.
Alacrity called out for the father she’d known only a few hours. The only way she’d go to sleep was for me to sit next to her and stroke her shoulders.
I read the newspapers every day looking for news about Gray Man or Horace LaFontaine. But there was no news about the massacre after the first couple of weeks. Miles Barber had survived Gray Man’s attack, though he was badly disfigured and severely injured. One account that described his condition said that he had to be held in restraints to keep him from tearing the flesh from his face. He was in constant pain and ranted continually about the devil roaming the world.
The police labeled the Close Congregation a cult and blamed the episode on drug use. The public dismemberments were called the “culmination of a series of sacrifices,” which, they said, included all the poisonings and the murder of Phyllis Yamauchi.
Arrest warrants were issued for various congregation members, including me. Because of the police I spent much of my time hidden in the back of the used VW van we purchased. Addy did the driving and checked us into cabins and motels.
We moved around a lot, rarely staying more than a week in any one place. Our nomadic routine continued for months. The depression that filled up our days was punctuated now and then by high points of fear. Fear that the police would arrest us and keep us in one place long enough for Death to come.
Nothing happened. We just moved around the woods, sighing and crying, hiding in efficiency cabins and hoping for some kind of sign. Reggie was always on the lookout for the perfect hiding place. There
was someplace to hide, he was sure, but its location was always just beyond his perception.
But we weren’t the only part of the story. Gray Man hadn’t stamped out light or life yet. Others were grouping and regrouping on different sides. While I was hiding in backseats or bathrooms, Claudia Heart and Nesta Vine and Juan Thrombone were plotting, gathering, and evoking the words that spoke God. There was the police investigation and the perversions of love. A lot happened before our story continued and so for the sake of the continuity of my History I shall tell first about the events that occurred while we hid in the woods.
I learned these stories from newspaper articles and secondhand sources. Every now and then I gleaned my knowledge through blood. And for a while there, I learned while sharing the dreams of the closest friends I ever had.
It doesn’t really matter how I learned what I know, not now anyway. Maybe in some far-flung future, when science is not estranged from the soul, someone may find this text and know how to believe in it.
Nine
WINCH FARGO LAY IN his cell, eyes closed, arms and legs bloodied, pale and incoherent. Every once in a while he’d mutter, “Cunt,” thinking about Eileen Martel, about how she hadn’t been to see him in months. He lay back with his teeth clenched, trying not to hear the music that played only half the melody, trying not to see the small part of what he could never become. In his dreams he’d see himself stalking a man he hates. The man runs scared and Winch falls on him with a knife, but always he turns into the victim at the moment of his thrust, the knife buried in his own chest. The old woman he sodomizes in this dream becomes him. The food he eats, the ground he stomps on. The shit from his ass.
He is everything but himself. A chicken with no head, a planet with no sun.
He groaned on his prison cot but could not move because his arms and legs were tied. He didn’t care about the cuts and scars along his limbs. He didn’t care about the men who bled him, mixing the blood with powdered milk to drink or inject into their veins.
The blood drug, that’s what the brothers called it. One teaspoon, and the prison fell away for a while. One teaspoon, and there was no pain, no sorrow.
“Shit, I’d kill ten motherfuckers just to come back here and get some’a this shit,” Mackie Allitar once said while squeezing the blood from a slit in Winch’s thumb.
One teaspoon, and an illiterate man could learn to read, a bodybuilder could double his dead lift, a stutterer could recite his family tree without a hitch.
Winch didn’t know it at the time, but they called him the Farm. They had to feed the farm and work it. They had to harvest the farm and keep it alive.
It hadn’t always been like that. Before Eileen Mattel disappeared, Winch discovered the potential of his blood and dispersed it.
But when Eileen had gone, Winch lost his mind again and his customers made him their little acre. They tied him down on a prison cot and got high off his veins.
And all the while Winch stalked himself, ate his flesh, excreted his soul.
He never slept, not really. He felt them cutting him, milking his veins. But the greatest pain was when the iron door to his cell swung open, causing the air to move over his skin like a blanket of white-hot pins.
He yelled from pain, but a hand clamped down over his mouth. His arms and legs were freed from the cot but then were tied together. A gag was shoved into his mouth and then taped over. He was put into a large cloth bag and hoisted over a broad back. The rocking motion of being carried like that calmed Winch somewhat. The snake that lived in his brain was lulled. He couldn’t move or speak. It was as if life had not started yet, as if pain was still far off, only a possibility.
Winch Fargo was soothed in the dark trunk he was loaded into. The hum of the motor and the occasional bump in the road felt womblike. He came halfway to consciousness in there. Half sane. He even wondered where it was they were taking him.
He wondered if Eileen might be there sending off those signals like the good songs on the radio when he was a boy in Missouri.
Before they dumped him from the bag, he felt her. He wasn’t surprised to see the big blond guard Robert Halston. He didn’t care about how skinny he was or how infected his arms and legs had become. All he cared about was the mousy brunette reclining on the couch before him. He wanted to reach for her, but his hands were still tied.
He didn’t care. She was his beacon and he’d never be far from her side again in life.
“Winch Fargo,” the dazzling image said. “I am Claudia Heart and you are the grandfather to my brood.”
The convict stood just behind and to the left of the warden’s guest chair. His black skin was ashen, the whites of his eyes were more bloody than bloodshot. Slight jerking tremors went through his body every few seconds or so.
“Where is he, Allitar?” Warden Reed asked.
“I ’ont know … sir.”
“Mackie, you have to know,” said Peter Mainhart, chief of guards. “They say you had him tied to a cot in Detention Cell Forty-eight. They say that you and Halston and some other cons were selling him as some kind of sex slave down there.”
“I ’ont know nuthin’ about that, sir.”
Mackie twitched and the warden stood up from his desk. He wasn’t a tall man, but every con in Folsom Prison was afraid when he stood to full stature.
“Where are Halston and Fargo?” Reed asked.
“I wisht I knew,” Allitar said, then shuddered so violently that he had to pull the chair back and sit in it.
“What’s wrong, Mackie?” Mainhart asked. “You need a fix?”
Mackie raised his ruined face to the warden, ignoring the senior guard’s question. He tried to say something; maybe he felt that his yowling groan was answer enough.
“Get him out of here, Peter,” the warden said.
“Richards, Weiner!” Mainhart shouted.
Two prison guards dressed in blue came into the room. One was tall and lanky; the other was shaped like two eggs, the smaller one being his head and the larger comprising his body.
“Take him to solitary,” Mainhart told his men.
Mackie Allitar fell to the ground, sobbing. He looked up at the four white men and cried some more. When Mainhart demanded that he get up, Mackie did as he was told. He let the guards lead him from the warden’s office even though he was still big enough and powerful enough to have killed every man in the room. He didn’t think about killing, though. All he thought about was that bluity; all he wanted to do was the blood drug.
“There’s something wrong here, Peter,” Warden Reed said when they were alone again.
The warden was a colorful man. His curly brown hair had red highlights and his blue eyes were almost impossible. His skin drank up the sun in the summer until he seemed to belong on the Caribbean Islands, where he and his family took their vacations.
Mainhart was the warden’s opposite in coloring. His white hair had no shine and there was no red under his pale skin. His flat brown eyes were lusterless and could have belonged to a corpse.
“It’s a weird one, I agree,” Mainhart said. “All this homo drug addict stuff … They should line ’em all up at the gas chamber and forget jail altogether.”
“You say they had the drug down in Fargo’s cell?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you bring it?”
Mainhart left the room for a moment and then returned with a plain brown shoe box. He placed it in front of the warden and lifted off the lid.
Inside were a dozen tiny wax paper packets, a few hypodermic needles, a tarnished spoon, and some matches — all on a bed of cotton balls. Warden Reed unwrapped one of the packages, revealing a hard black lump somewhat resembling tar. When the warden squeezed the lump, it turned instantly to dust.
“What is it?” the warden asked.
“Don’t know,” Mainhart replied. “It’s not opium or hash. I don’t know what it is.”
“What about Halston’s family? Has he gotten in touch with them?”
“He moved out four weeks ago,” Mainhart said. “Just told Millie that he was going to stay at a flophouse down in Los Gatos and never came back.”
“You check the hotel?”
“He never even stayed one night. He just paid the owner to say he wasn’t in if somebody called. A couple of the other guards said that he’d met some hippie chick in the Safeway supermarket. He said that she took him out to her van in the parking lot and fucked him right there. Right there in the parking lot, for Christ’s sake. In the middle of the day. He said that he was in love with her, that he couldn’t even be with Millie after that.”
The warden massaged his face with both hands and made a small chirping sound in the back of his throat. “How long now?” he asked.
“Sixteen hours since we realized it. He’s probably been gone for two days, though. Thursday and Friday were Halston’s weekend. He coulda taken Fargo out anytime. Nobody else went to that cell when he was on duty. It was solitary. It was his detail.”
Warden Reed looked at the dark powder. His fingers tingled slightly. He took a paper towel from his bottom drawer and wiped the drug away, but the tingling remained.
“Report the escape,” Reed told Mainhart. “Tell them that we’re not quite sure when it happened. Tell them we just thought that Fargo had been misplaced and sent someone out to Halston’s house. Tell them it wasn’t until then that we realized that it was a break. Tell them …” Reed’s voice trailed off.
“What?” Mainhart asked. “What did you say, chief?”
“Huh?”
“You were saying something.”
“Oh.” Reed looked at the paleness of his chief guard’s features. “Tell them … tell them that I got sick and had to go home.”
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