Blue Light

by Walter Mosley

  Alacrity also took to leaving Treaty for long stints. She had a boyfriend; she said his name was Eric Beauvais. Eric lived in a cabin sixty or seventy miles distant. She’d found him with a broken leg in the deep winter and nursed him back to health. They became lovers, and so she went to him every spring, when the sap began to flow.

  Wanita remained a child, but that didn’t keep her from becoming our counsel and guide in most things. She interpreted dreams and told of important events. She settled disputes on the strength of her wisdom. Even Juan Thrombone came to Wanita for advice now and then.

  I divided my time between the four days it took us to cultivate a crop of fifteen singing trees and ten days of solitude. The hard days of working and imbibing the stone liquor made me strong, stronger than any normal man. And the friendships I forged with my fellow half-light workers were worth all the pain and loneliness of my childhood. But I still craved the peace and privacy of the deep woods. Walking the hills and valleys around Treaty, I was in a daze most of the time, high on the vision granted me by the blood of my teacher. We all had different abilities. Mine was like a drug. Over the years my hallucinations became more vivid. The visions that came to me I could not describe in words. I did not understand their purpose or origin. Some days the sunlight would speak in colors and sound. The texture of trees and earth had their own tales, meandering and unfocused.

  Whenever I could, I slept with Nesta. She made time for me when she wasn’t teaching or off with Alacrity. We spent a lot of time together in the spring when Alacrity was off with her woodsman lover. Sometimes after a whole evening of passionate lovemaking I’d realize that Nesta and I hadn’t said five full sentences to each other.

  But I wasn’t sad. I caught fish and slept in the shadow of Number Twelve. I hummed the song of the singing trees and plotted out the day that I would end my life by sitting in the hollow of the great tree that grew in the bellowing grove.

  How can I explain to you what it felt like over the months and years? Looking back on it now from my cell, there seems to be very little to say. We cultivated more than eleven thousand firs to protect, with their songs, and the twenty-four bellowing sequoias that were also gods. We grew the saplings and they moved away. I never recognized a tree after it had gone from our gardening place.

  Nothing happened in the way that events of a life usually occur in the modern world. No heartbreaks, job promotions, goals met. Only one child was born.

  There’s no way for me to impress upon you the passage of time in the ordinary sense. It was just one long day and one long night passed in the presence, if not the concern, of God. Not the God of organized religion, but the amazing vitality of existence.

  It was like sitting before a simple granite boulder every day, seeing in that plain surface more variation than is possible to comprehend. Every night is spent dreaming of that stone, wondering what amazing differences lay beneath the small surface that you have failed to perceive.

  Now and then, while contemplating that boulder, comes a magic moment when you catch a glimpse of an image or phrase that increases the smallest possible increment of not only your knowledge but also the sum total of possibility in the universe.

  Looking back on it now, I am unutterably sad with the loss.

  The years passed. Woolly, who aged at a normal rate as far as I could tell, was about fifteen.

  And then one night I had a dream:

  Gray Man was sleeping fitfully in a dark cave blocked by a huge boulder. He groaned and there was the smell of redwood in his nostrils. In my dream he dreamed that he was in a wide wood dressed formally and swinging an ax against the greatest, tallest sequoia that I had ever seen. I knew that this towering giant was the parent of the Bellowing Trees. I understood then why Bones had called them puppies.

  Gray Man was swinging his ax to great effect. Large chips of the giant tree were flying off. But she was wide. Thirty feet or more in diameter. Gray Man was more than halfway through the thick trunk. He was standing inside the wound, hacking away. Hacking, hacking.

  Somehow I realized that when the tree fell, Gray Man would be freed from his cave.

  Near where I stood a man was crying. A black man. The spitting image of Death. He was different, though; he was the man I’d seen in my room before Gray Man came out of him. Horace LaFontaine.

  “Who’re you?” he asked.

  “I’m Chance.”

  “What you doin’ here?”

  “I think I must be inside your head,” I said.

  “I ain’t got no head, man. I’m dead. It’s his head. I was gone up till a couple minutes ago. That tree there done blowed up an’ I was dead. I thought he was dead too; that Grey Redstar, that Gray Man.”

  All the while the hacking continued. And as it went, I became more anxious and afraid.

  “You have to be alive, Horace,” I said.

  “How you know my name?”

  “I know it from Phyllis Yamauchi’s blood.”

  Horace’s frightened visage became sad.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I remember her. But you know I couldn’t do nuthin’ t’stop him. He’s the devil an’ they ain’t no God.”

  The chopping had stopped.

  “How is she?” hissed a voice from behind.

  I turned and Gray Man stood there, the ax hanging from his right hand. I didn’t respond, so he asked the question again.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The little girl. The one who escaped me by jumping out the window. Alacrity.”

  “Why’re you cuttin’ down that tree?” I asked to mask my fear for Alacrity.

  Gray Man smiled. “So I can get at you, little man. So I can kill your perverted friends. So I can shed that one standing there with you and leave this place.”

  Horace tittered in fear. I can’t say that I blamed him.

  “Now tell me what I want to know,” Gray Man said.

  He swung his ax before I could react, and my left arm was severed at the shoulder. Blood spurted from the wound, and I went down on my knees. Horace screamed and ran away.

  “Chance!”

  “Where is the girl?” Gray Man shouted.

  “Chance!”

  Gray Man raised the ax high over his head, poised for the killing stroke.

  “Chance!” Wanita shouted.

  I jumped. I was pulled. The ax blow fell. I found myself being yanked by the arm that had been severed. I was in my tree-cloth sleeping bag, and Wanita was there in my tent — saving me.

  “Chance, wake up!” she shouted.

  “Wanita,” I said. “What happened to me?”

  “You had my dream,” she told me. “You had my dream and you almost died because he didn’t want to let you wake up.”

  “Gray Man?”

  “I came an’ slept next to you because I knew you had to have my dream. I saw you dreamin’ but I wasn’t there. You had it ’cause I was sleepin’ next to you. You was my dream, but you almost died.”

  I called a meeting. I told them about Gray Man and how he wanted to kill everybody.

  “But he doesn’t know where we are,” Reggie said. “He told you that.”

  “He gonna know, though,” Wanita told her brother.

  “I don’t care if he comes,” Alacrity said. “I’m not afraid of him no more.”

  “Yeah,” Winch Fargo chimed in. “Let the nigger come and get it.”

  Wanita stayed silent. Addy sat hushed next to Juan Thrombone.

  “Can we kill him?” I asked Bones.

  “Can you bring a stone to life?” Juan asked in return. “Can you set a star on fire?”

  Nesta took in a sharp breath as if the words jarred some deep memory. Maybe it was a phrase from some prayer that the Blues knew before they had bodies.

  We sat for a while pondering his questions. I wondered if they were riddles that actually had answers.

  “What should we do?” Gerin asked Juan Thrombone.

  “I am staying here, my friend,” Bones said. “But you and a
ll of the half-lights should go.” He looked at Addy then, but she turned away.

  “But you and the rest are going to stay?”

  “Together maybe we can fight him off,” Juan said. He didn’t seem worried. “But divided, he would kill the children. Divided, he would kill me or Nesta or Winch. And if you were here with us, we would have to worry about you. He would use you and make us weak.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Trini said. She laced her fingers with Reggie’s.

  Mackie hunched over on his tree-stump seat and covered his face with his hands.

  “The half-lights have learned how best to use what they have,” Juan Thrombone said. “You can see if shown, you can run if chased. There are glimmerings in you, and that may well be enough even if the rest of us die here.”

  Enough for what? That was the question in my mind, but I did not ask it. That might have been my greatest mistake.

  Juan shed his unique overalls. He was naked except for the thick mane of hair and beard. His body was thin, but I knew the strength that lived in those limbs.

  “It is over,” he said. “Now Treaty has become War.”

  “Are we gonna fight?” Woolly asked. He was short like his father but had inherited the golden skin of his mother.

  “No, Woolly,” Gerin said. “We’re going to go now.”

  “Go where, Dad?”

  We all knew that Bones would drive us from War if he had to.

  All of us but Adelaide.

  Addy told Juan that she was staying, that she would kill herself if she had to leave her daughter or her man. She promised that she would kill herself if her life threatened the war against Gray Man. But she would not leave.

  Juan Thrombone did not argue with her.

  Gerin and Preeta left with Woolly within the week. They were headed for his mother’s house in San Diego.

  The morning of the day they left, the sky was cloudless and pale. Everyone from Treaty, now War, gathered in the clearing beyond Number Twelve. Gerin was waiting when I got there with Reggie. Preeta and Woolly were the last to arrive.

  Gerin Reed was the only one standing. The rest of us squatted or sat in a half lotus. A solemnity hung over us, making the talk seem more like a eulogy than a good-bye.

  “I guess this is my last talk,” Gerin Reed began. “At least, the last talk here. It’s been a long time, and I was thinking just last night that I’m going to miss this place and you. Bones and Wanita and Chance and everybody. I’m going to miss drinking and dreaming with my friends. I’m going to miss the trees’ voices and, I guess for a while, I’ll miss death. Or Death will miss me. Or will he? That’s what I was thinking this morning. I can hardly remember the last time I missed anyone in particular. All I’ve done for years has been to think and speculate. I got some blood on my fingers and I stopped caring, because when I cared I also hated. I hated black men and rich men too. I never even touched my wife, couldn’t stand the smell of her sweat or breath. I hated going to work and hated coming back home. I even hated the grass growing because all I had was a push mower and I couldn’t stand the work.

  “I was angry when I had feelings of love because it only reminded me of how much I was going to be hurt and disappointed. And so when I touched that blood drug, I forgot all of that. I didn’t love my children but loved the idea of children. I didn’t care about the men in my prison, so I left.

  “But last night I realized that I care about you guys. All of you. I love you. You’re my family. And it’s not blue light or anything like that that moves me because I love Woolly and Preeta too and I’m happy that they’re coming with me. I’m worried about them and I’m thinking about all of you even when the rain is falling, even when the bright orange termites swarm out of a dead log. Even when the air is frozen and the wood duck breaks the silence that the trees make.” Gerin stopped speaking for a moment. His rapt expression took all of us in.

  I was completely caught up with his words. Not in the way that the Blues could charm me, but with my mind.

  “And then I knew,” Gerin Reed said with a show of wonder on his face, “that not only can we see but we can also change. We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.”

  It was the only time I ever saw Bones with tears in his eyes. He stood up and hugged his good friend, kissed him on the lips.

  That night, after Preeta and Gerin and Woolly had gone, was my loneliest night in years.

  Mackie and Trini wanted me to join them. They were going to Miami as soon as they could raise enough cash in the Bay Area. By late spring they were ready to leave.

  The night before they left, Trini came to me. She was scared and heartbroken at the prospect of leaving Reggie. Mackie had promised the Pathfinder that he would take care of his childless bride until the war was over.

  I tried to console her. I told her that everything was going to be fine, that Gray Man would have trouble with either Nesta or Alacrity or Bones alone.

  “He certainly can’t beat all three,” I told her.

  “Come with me and Mackie,” she pleaded. “Come stay with us.”

  I looked at her, noticing, maybe for the first time, that she still looked like a very young woman; twenty but no older. None of us half-lights had aged, except for Woolly. Mackie and Gerin, Addy and I actually appeared younger than when we’d arrived. Juan Thrombone with his green elixirs had given us a fountain of youth, and we barely knew it.

  “I can’t, Trini. I gotta stay until the last minute.”

  Reggie kissed Trini good-bye the next morning. Bones gave Mackie a small mask carved from the wood of one of the Bellowing Trees.

  Ex-Detective Barber just wasn’t there one day. He didn’t speak or even tend to the trees for the last meeting. He was simply gone.

  “You have to go soon too, Last Chance,” Juan Thrombone said to me that night under the hanging shingles of Number Twelve.

  “I know, Bones,” I said. “I know. But I can wait until he’s coming, can’t I?”

  “You should get on with your life,” Juan said. His tenderness touched me.

  “I don’t have any life outside of here. The only friends I have ever had are in Treaty, and now you tell me that Treaty is gone. What can I do now that all I had is gone?”

  For a moment Juan’s permanent smile faded. “I don’t know, my friend. But you have to find something.”

  A week later I was walking down the fishing stream toward the again-abandoned town of Treaty. I came upon Alacrity. She was naked, standing in the middle of the stream, bathing, I suppose.

  “Hi, Chance,” she said.

  There was never any shame in the child or woman. Her body was the perfection of any human standard. I remember being surprised that her nipples were enlarged. The pleasure must have shown in my eyes because she smiled and looked down at her body before returning her eyes to me.

  “I been wanting to talk to you,” she said.

  “ ’Bout what?”

  “I want you to do something for me.” She walked to my side of the stream and up onto the bank. A few feet from the water she had set up a pallet of woven grasses. She sat down there and I sat beside her.

  “What can I do for you, little girl?” I asked.

  “Not so little,” she said.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “I want you to go down to my boyfriend, Eric, when you go away. I want you to tell him what’s happening here and that I’ll be down to see him when we finish this.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Reggie can make you a map. He knows where it is.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that for you.”

  “Will you do something else?” she asked.

  Making love to a warrior like her was a muscular thing. It was hugging and kissing on the friendliest terms I have ever had with anyone. Her smile and sweet breath were like hands holding me up.

  When she asked me, later, if I lov
ed her, I broke down in tears.

  We stayed by the stream all night, keeping each other warm. I told her everything that I had ever felt about anything that was important to me. She kissed me and rubbed me and told me over and over again that I was the only man that she had ever loved or ever would love. I held on to Alacrity for her warmth and her strength. There was nothing else I wanted from her, nothing else I needed.

  The next day we went to Reggie, and he made me a map with charcoal and tree cloth. Then he and Alacrity went out hunting.

  I was alone in the cathedral when Juan Thrombone came upon me.

  “Ho there, Last Chance,” he said in his unusual but formal way.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He scrutinized and smiled more broadly.

  “I have to go do something,” he said at last. “You would honor me with your company.”

  I stood without thinking and followed him into the forest.

  Thirty-two

  WE WENT QUITE A ways into the woods. Every now and then a bear would pass us. The bears were set like sentries around the cathedral of War.

  “They will warn me,” Bones said. “Warn me when he gets near.”

  We went at a good pace, finally coming to a slope of granite that went a far way down to a stream that was rushing in the melting snows of spring.

  Far down at the base of the slope came a pack of what looked like six dogs. Not dogs, but coyotes. Well, there were five coyotes and one smaller dog that kept pace with the leader of the pack — the one-eyed mother.

  The largest of the canines raised her nose and sniffed at the high ground where Juan and I stood. She yipped and gave out a small howl.

  I had another friend in the grove of Juan Thrombone.

  “Did you feel their approach?” I asked Bones.

  “With them our strength is almost doubled,” he said instead of answering my question.