Blue Light

by Walter Mosley

  Then the knife-sharpening rod cracked his skull open.

  Horace tried to stop thinking about it. He actually got out of prison and collected $2,500 from Beldin Starr. Starr said that he had used the rest for the lawyer.

  Horace didn’t argue about the money. He couldn’t sleep for weeks without thinking about the sound when he cracked open Prescott’s head. He just wanted to spend a few moments with a whore without thinking about Prescott’s last orgasm.

  Finally he just wanted his fix. A little brown powder, and he was all right. He was just fine.

  “Mr. Redstar,” Joclyn whispered. “Mr. Redstar.”

  Horace opened his eyes to see the dark young woman. It was morning, and Horace was happy that he’d awakened in his own body.

  “Mr. Redstar, are you okay?”

  “My name ain’t Redstar,” the dead man uttered. “Not Redstar. LaFontaine. Horace LaFontaine.”

  “That was old Miss Elza’s maiden name,” Joclyn said. “LaFontaine.”

  “You knew Elza?”

  “She used to own this house and she rented out rooms. She rented to my uncle, but she was already real sad because her husband died and her brother disappeared. My uncle took care’a her and when she died, she left the buildin’ to him.” Joclyn reached out to touch Horace’s tear. “Were you related to her? You know Miss Brown across the street says that you look a lot like Miss Elza’s brother, but she knows that that couldn’t be because he had bad cancer and even though he disappeared, he’d have to be dead by now.”

  “I am her brother, Joclyn. But I’m somebody else too.”

  “Huh?”

  Horace felt stronger in the morning. But the task of telling his story seemed impossible.

  “Do you believe in the devil, Joclyn?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I do. I mean there sure is a lotta evil, and I cain’t see where it makes no real sense.”

  “The devil is in me, girl. He’s in me.” Horace lifted his right hand and tapped the fingertips against his chest. “Right in here.”

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded but still looked unconvinced.

  “Did you hear about what happened in the park in Berkeley yesterday?” he asked.

  “You mean the killin’s?”

  “Look in the bottom drawer, honey,” Horace said. “Look in the bottom drawer down there.”

  Joclyn went to the dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer. She took out the bundle of clothes. Horace turned his head to watch as she unfurled the trench coat. She gasped when she saw the bloody jacket and pants, the shoes covered in dried gore. Then she looked up at him and slowly rerolled the parcel. She stood up with the armful and left without saying another word.

  “Mr. Redstar. Are you awake?”

  It was night again and Horace felt almost strong enough to sit up. Joclyn was sitting on the bed beside him.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  All day he had been dozing, coming awake at every sound, expecting the police to come. Horace thought that it would hurt Gray Man’s pride so much to be jailed that he might die, or kill himself, from the humiliation. But they hadn’t come.

  “What happened?” he asked the girl.

  “I burnt your clothes in the backyard. You don’t have to worry.”

  “You what? Why?”

  “You were just sick, Mr. Redstar. That’s all. But now you’re okay. I’ll take care of you. You don’t have to be scared. They said on the radio about them killin’s, but nobody knows what really happened. All I know is that you couldn’t have done it. You ain’t even strong enough to pick me up. You just got confused, Mr. Redstar. You just thought you did bad ’cause you was there an’ saw all that blood.” She had taken his hand in both of hers. She had dry hands, working hands.

  Horace forgot about Gray Man for the first time since his resurrection. He was thinking that no one had ever loved him outside his mother and sister. He felt a tear run down to his nose. Joclyn, smiling, brushed it off with her hard fingertip.

  “I ain’t gonna give you up, Mr. Redstar.”

  At that moment Gray Man came awake deep down in Horace’s mind. He rose quickly to the surface, pushing Horace aside.

  “Mr. Redstar?” Joclyn asked, seeing a change in his face.

  Gray Man sat up and reached out for the girl.

  Watch your little toy die, Horace, Gray Man thought. He put his hand on Joclyn’s neck and smiled.

  No.

  Gray Man’s smile turned to puzzlement.

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Redstar?” Joclyn asked.

  No.

  Gray Man tried to increase his pressure but could not. Horace tried to make him put down his hand, but that too failed.

  “Are you okay?” Joclyn wanted to know.

  Let her be, devil, Horace cried.

  Do you think you can order me?

  I think that Joclyn’s a friend and I’ll fuck you up if you thinkin’ ’bout messin’ around. Horace felt his mind inhabiting the same body as Gray Man. He knew that the devil was still weak, still recovering from his fight with the old lady. He was risking his own life by trying to kill the girl.

  “I have to go,” Gray Man said to Joclyn.

  “But you’re sick.”

  “I have to go away for a while. I have to go but I’ll come back soon.” He took his hand away from her throat and smiled. “Go on now, let me get dressed.”

  When she had gone Horace let out a shout of life in the chambers of the death master’s mind.

  Fourteen

  NESTA VINE RETURNED TO the Bay Area four days after the massacre in the park. She went back to her grandparents’ house and was met at the front door by a familiar-looking black woman, somewhere in her forties.

  “Yes?” the small woman asked of the girl.

  “Who are you?” Nesta asked.

  “Renee Ferris.”

  Renee Ferris, of course, Nesta thought. Renee was from a group of her mother’s cousins who lived down near La Jolla. She hadn’t seen Renee since she was a child. And Renee would never recognize her, because Nesta had become the image in the mirror. Taller and jet black with bigger feet. Her hair had taken on a coarse straw color and her eyes were bright amber. Her face, which was once round and sad, had lengthened and thinned.

  “What are you doing here?” Nesta asked Renee.

  “Say what, child? Who are you?”

  “Oh,” Nesta said, remembering herself. “I’m sorry, ma’am. My name is Ebony, Nesta’s friend from Back East.”

  “Oh. Oh.” Mrs. Ferris looked down the stairs and then up the street. “Is Nesta here?”

  “No, ma’am. The last I heard from her she was in Korea. But she said that if I ever came to Oakland, I should look up her grandma and granddad,” the tall woman said.

  Renee Ferris looked unaware into her cousin’s face and said, “My auntie, Mrs. Charm, died six months ago.”

  Nesta couldn’t keep the tears out of her eyes. “What happened?”

  “She was just old, child,” the cousin said. She put out her hand and touched the dark-skinned girl’s forearm. “Why don’t you come in for a while and rest.”

  The house seemed smaller but smelled the same. Nesta walked in past the staircase, into the living room, where her grandfather sat in his pitted chrome wheelchair. He was looking out the window at the hummingbird feeder on the back porch.

  Nesta saw the pair of green hummingbirds taking turns at the honey water spout. She knew their approximate weight in milligrams and the rate of speed at which their wings fluttered. But all she cared about was her grandfather’s eyes on them.

  “Uncle,” Renee Ferris said. “This here is one of Nesta’s friends — Ebony.”

  Lythe Charm had been an old man as far back as Nesta could remember. But his face was always like a child’s, inquisitive and ready to laugh. Now even his eyes were old and sad. Nesta thought of a senior citizens home she worked in for a few weeks outside of Boulder, Colorado. She worked there while attending a series of lectures on
Shakespeare that were being given at the university.

  The lectures were nothing compared to watching, hearing, and smelling the ever encroaching specter of death among the aged.

  She’d sat one evening with an old woman dying from collapsing veins. Nesta was telling her a story that she’d heard in Selma, Alabama. A story about an Indian down there who, centuries before, had first brought snakes to the territory. It was a wild tale of stealth and intrigue, but in the end everything worked out all right. The snake found his hole near a cultivated field, and all the deer and rabbits steered clear from then on.

  Somewhere during the story the old woman died. Nesta felt it like a sudden vacuum in the room. Somewhere things felt empty, and Nesta realized how much space the human soul inhabited.

  She could feel the sadness in her grandfather’s soul.

  “Hello, Mr. Charm,” Nesta said.

  “You know my baby?” he asked, looking hard at the tall and beautiful woman.

  “We traveled together around a whole lot of the world,” Nesta said. “I got to know her pretty well.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “In Korea,” Nesta lied, and then sat down on the corner of the sofa nearest her grandfather. “She told me a lot about you.”

  “Oh?” The old man smiled. “What she say?”

  “She talked about how much you liked blackberry tea —”

  “I sure do.”

  “— and about how when you were younger you drove two hundred and forty-six cattle across Texas on horseback and how you didn’t lose one of them.”

  “She remembered that, huh?”

  “She told me all about you, Mr. Charm. She told me a story to tell you when we saw each other. A story that she heard in Alabama.”

  Lythe Charm smiled with broad anticipation, “And what story was that?”

  “Excuse me, Ebony,” Renee said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is that little bag your suitcase?” She was referring to the beat-up leather bag, the size of a school satchel, that the young woman carried with her.

  “Yes, ma’am. I just got into town. I was going to find a Y to stay at, but I wanted to drop by here and say hello first.”

  “Well, you take that bag upstairs and put it in the third room on the right. That’s Nesta’s room. You put it down up there and clean up, and I’ll make us all some supper.”

  “But I wanna hear Nesta’s story she sent me,” Lythe Charm complained.

  “Don’t worry, Uncle,” said the dutiful and dour Renee Ferris. “Ebony’ll spend the night and tell us everything about your girl.”

  “Was it a planet?” Lythe Charm asked the young woman who called herself Ebony.

  “No, no, that’s not what they called it,” she answered. “It was more like a giant stone that was once alive but then became the home to its own children.”

  “Like a shell,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  The black woman’s smile was brilliant and white. She had been telling Lythe Charm a story that she said she’d learned from his granddaughter who had, in turn, learned it from a little-known tribe of American Indians called the ArShoni. The story Nesta was telling was a fragment of the creation story that she had inherited from the blue light that infused her with knowledge and power.

  “… for more years than man can count,” Nesta continued, “bright forms of life that were like animals and flowers and insects and fish all in one grew out of the ground and bathed in the light of a rainbow-colored star —”

  “Were they on a planet then or was that on the big rock?” Lythe Charm asked, hungry for the words of his long-gone granddaughter.

  “That was on the planet, before things changed,” Nesta said. “The life-forms grew and intermingled and multiplied and changed. Because on this planet the fish and beasts could speak and mate; all life there was equal and respectful.”

  “What did they eat?” the old man asked slyly. “If they all respected each other, even the flowers and the trees, then what could they eat?”

  “They lived on the light from the rainbow star,” the young woman said. “The radiant energy of the star fed them. And for eons they grew and multiplied and changed. After many millions of years they began to fly and grow higher and higher until some had completely left the planet and flew closer and closer to the sun, looking for more and more energy because the great joy among these far-off folk was to bathe in the light of the sun and to grow.

  “These great flying beasts had within them chambers of quartz that stored light in patterns that held all of the wisdom of all the life-forms that were once planet-bound. Then they began to multiply by placing the seed of their physical being on lifeless chunks of matter in space and then bathing those seeds with the light from within their deep quartz caverns.”

  “And why was that?” Lythe Charm asked. He was feeling younger and stronger just talking to the strange-looking woman. There was something about her that was familiar, but Lythe couldn’t seem to put his finger on it. “Why would they have to shine light on their own seeds if there was a sun still shining?”

  “Because their light contained memories and instructions on how to grow. The seeds had the power of life, but in the light was their souls’ purpose.”

  “Kinda like Sunday school in a flashlight, huh?” Lythe asked.

  “A little bit. But as time went by, the space creatures got larger and larger. Soon they were as big as moons and there were millions of them. They absorbed all the energy of the star and then floated out toward new stars. By then they were as large as planets. Their hard external shells covered mighty engines that they had for both their heart and brain. Millions of years passed, and the planets of life spread out across the universe. And as they moved, now and again, they would deposit their seed on likely-looking planets. Emanating —”

  “Say what?” Lythe Charm, whose eyes were looking younger, asked.

  “Emanating. That means ‘coming out from.’ ”

  “Oh, yeah. Uh-huh, I see.”

  “Anyway, emanating from the seed was a soft music, and if another of their celestial brethren would pass by, they would hear it and shine their light where the seed had fallen. That way, information and life could pass between the stars and new life could evolve.”

  “But what if the seed was dropped, but nobody heard the signal and no light came?” Lythe asked. She could tell that he didn’t believe a word of the story but loved hearing it. It was just as if Nesta had never gone, as if she were still there telling him about what she had learned in her late-night reading.

  “We are the seeds, Mr. Charm,” Nesta/Ebony said. “Just seeds waiting for water in order to grow.”

  “You mean, we aren’t the top ones in the animal world?” the old man asked. He seemed a little sad.

  “No, Gramp,” she said softly. “We’re just empty husks, like, waiting for the light of life to enter us.”

  “You are my little girl, aren’t you?”

  “I love you,” she said. Then she bit hard into her bottom lip and kissed her mother’s father in a way that he had not been kissed in many years.

  Fifteen

  THE VIEW FROM THE mountaintop was all that Gerin Reed ever wanted. Whenever his eyes chanced upon the deep blue Pacific or down the steep valley of pines, he stopped whatever he was doing, forgot where he was going to, and stared — sometimes for up to an hour. Many things distracted him. His children making up games based on how fast they could run or how well they could remember, the bottle of urine rotting and congealing on the back porch, the static between stations on the radio.

  Karen had gone down with the children to Jason and Bridgette Sandler’s place. The Sandlers were their closest neighbors, two miles distant. Jason worked for a lumber company, and Bridgette took care of their kids. Gerin had seen his wife and Jason in the woods together. He knew that he couldn’t satisfy her needs and didn’t mind too much. All he wanted from her was her company and her laughter with the children. Sometime
s he would wake up in the night and watch her sleeping. He once counted 3,700 of her breaths.

  Aspiration, he thought while she slept, maybe dreaming of her lover down the hill.

  Gerin had a slender paperback book in his pocket, The Prince by Machiavelli. The ideas didn’t mean much to him, but the words being read out loud made a kind of music that Gerin liked to set free in the forest.

  He sang out in the woods, hoping for an echo. He wanted to hear something. Something that vibrated in his own heart and mind. He felt like a child in those woods, sure that there were other children laughing and playing there too. But they were hiding from him. It was a cruel game of hide-and-seek but Gerin never lost his hopeful heart. He knew that they would come out for him someday.

  He could hear a car coming up the dirt road. Gerin worried that it might be Bridgette. Sometimes she came up to seduce him while Jason and Karen took care of the kids. She liked to go skinny-dipping, pretended that it was innocent enough, that she and her husband did it with people all the time. Gerin did what she asked but was continually distracted by cloud patterns wrapped in the ripples of the pond. He liked to look at Bridgette’s round belly and swirling pubic hair, but he was never aroused.

  Karen never excited him either. It wasn’t that he didn’t want sex. He sometimes woke up having powerful orgasms, dreaming of a woman who, while they were in the act of lovemaking, would talk to him about her shopping that day, the smell of tomato leaves and the thunk of ripe melons.

  The car came into sight. It wasn’t the Sandlers’ Jeep. It was a tan-colored Chevrolet. Three men in hats sat inside.

  The sedan came right up to the front door of the log cabin that Gerin had bought with his life savings.

  “Warden Reed?” the gaunt pipe smoker asked.

  “Yes?”

  The driver was shorter than the pipe smoker but looked bigger owing to his swollen muscles and big gut. The third man wore a wide-brimmed hat that hung down a little like a Mexican sombrero. But Gerin could still make out the red scars on the stranger’s face.

  “I’m Inspector Bonhomme from the State Investigations Bureau, sir,” the pipe smoker said. “This is Sergeant Lonnie Briggs and Miles Barber, uh, our assistant.”