Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

It was mostly shaded there before Juan Thrombone’s terrain. A single shaft of light fell not three feet from where I stood.

I took a deep breath of freedom and then carried my friend, heavy as a sack of sand, into the dark doorway of a land I came to know as Treaty.

The path between the trees was large enough for three to walk abreast. A glowing, golden light filtered down from above. The trees stood so close together that they seemed to be the logs in a western stockade’s wall, or at least a great thicket of bamboo.

Juan Thrombone led the way crazily, skipping and dancing like a child. He sang to the trees and ran and climbed. He even did cartwheels and flips now and again. Alacrity tried to keep up with him, but he was too fast and changeable even for her.

No one asked him who he was, because all of us had met the man in our dreams.

After an hour or so I passed Addy over to Reggie again. We were all stronger following that golden path. Our sniffles were gone. Addy groaned and complained when we secured her arms around Reggie’s neck. It was the first sign of life that she’d shown in more than a day and a half.

“Come quickly,” Juan Thrombone said again.

We kept coming for hours.

The brown needles and leaves on the path glowed under the softly broken sunlight. The air was warm and comfortable. A breeze blew from the direction in which we were headed. It whispered slightly in my ears. It was the call. There was something so wonderful in the whispering tones that I had to consciously slow down, to keep from wearing myself out cutting capers like our host.

I realized that I was no longer headed for the music but that I was in the center of it. Many of the trees that surrounded us were singing like musical instruments that were almost human.

“This is what I was looking for,” Reggie said to me.

“What?” I asked, irritated that he had distracted me from the melody.

“This road,” he said. “This is the road I was looking for. But it’s not really here.”

“What are you talking about? Here we are on it.”

“But if you went backward,” he said, “it would be gone.”

“Why are you men wasting the air with words?” Juan Thrombone said.

He was standing there next to us, hands akimbo and eyes alight. Wanita and Alacrity were going on up ahead.

“Plenty of time to talk and chatter. Plenty of time to drink and drool later on when we get there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“To our destination, little man, tender fool, Last Chance.”

“What destination is that, Skin and Bones?” My retort made Thrombone smile wider.

“Treaty,” he said. “Treaty.”

He ran backward toward the girls, leaving me to wonder if he was jokingly asking for a truce or informing me of the name of our destination.

Treaty. We came to it by way of a rise in the path. At the very top we looked across a field of grasses and brush into a great forest chamber. A place like none I had ever seen before. Twelve giant sequoias stood like pillars. The largest of these trees was the exact center of the great space. From it, and from the surrounding trees, hung large man-made netting that held shingles of leaves that angled down; they made a loose roof for the spaces right under the trees, making houses without walls under each giant redwood.

“The wind swirls around the roof and the rain rolls out and away,” said Juan to me. “You can see the sun and the stars, but no one can see you. Here the war is over, Last Chance. This is Treaty.”

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“I am wherever I am,” he answered.

“But do you have a house, a bed even?”

“My bed is where I lay these bones. My home is what I survey. I stay around here mainly because of the puppy trees. But I have been elsewhere.”

Talking to him tired me. As soon as he started to answer, I wanted to stop listening. It was as though his voice was in my head rather than in my ears. It was hard work to listen.

“Anywhere,” Thrombone said as if giving me a respite from the exhaustion he had induced.

I wondered if I was still dreaming.

“The things you left behind,” our host said, “are under a pile of leaves over that way. You will find your blankets and things there.”

“How’d you do that?” Reggie asked.

“Under blue light things simply are, Pathfinder. Don’t waste our time with mudbound questions.”

“We can’t stay,” I said.

Thrombone looked at me.

“Of course,” he said. “Adelaide.”

“We have to get back down to a hospital. She’s real sick. There’s nothing in our first aid box that could help her.”

Reggie had put our companion down beside the great trunk of the main tree. There she languished between sleep and despair. The crazy-looking man knelt down and bent over her. He moved closer and closer. First he was looking at the wound, then he was smelling it. When he ran his tongue down the length of the laceration, I jumped to pull him off.

I jumped but Reggie grabbed me.

“Let him alone, Chance.”

“Look what he’s doin’.”

“He’s one of us. He knows what he’s doing.”

I watched him. His hands on either side of Addy’s head. Lapping at the cut made him look like a forest creature licking moss from a stone.

“Come on, Chance,” Reggie said. “Let’s go over to the stuff. We can make a fire to keep her warm when he’s through.”

I wasn’t going to be dissuaded by a child. I pushed against Reggie, but he didn’t budge. I was considering a right hook when Wanita grabbed hold of my fingers.

“It’s okay, Chance,” the dreamer said. “Else, she gonna die.”

A high-pitched moan escaped my throat. It was as if a man next to me had finally succumbed to despair. I knew this man’s pain, I felt for it, but I was also removed from his feelings.

“Okay,” I said. “All right.”

The little woodsman was working his head and tongue vigorously against the side of Addy’s face. I watched for a moment and then left with Reggie. Wanita came with us, but Alacrity stayed there next to her mother.

More than a thousand feet away from the main tree was the smallest. A redwood less than twenty feet in diameter. This was to be our home for many years, there under the bark of Number Twelve.

Reggie and I broke out the tent and the cooking utensils. I built a small fire from the kindling Wanita gathered. Every once in a while I’d glance over to see Juan hunched over Addy.

“He’s okay, Chance,” Wanita said. I turned to see her looking up at me. “He’s just crazy, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s all mixed up. Too much blue in him. It’s not even a color no more. Just real bright, like pins in the window when the sun shine on ’em.

“What do you mean, honey? What do you mean he’s crazy?”

“All’a the rest’a us just think one thing, y’know? I mean like Reggie. He like t’get losted but then he finds his way back. He don’t never have dreams. But I do.” Wanita looked into my eyes as if to say, You see?

“So does Juan Thrombone do more than just finding or dreaming?”

“Only me’n Reggie do them.”

“But what—”

“He do a lotta things. But now he don’t think like we do no more because when all them things come together, they stop bein’ blue-like.”

“How do you know this, Wanita? Did he tell you in a dream?”

The little girl shook her head. “Nuh-uh. I can see it. Where it was.”

At that moment Reggie, who had been sitting on the other side of the fire, eating oatmeal, rose quickly.

“Here she is,” Thrombone said at my back.

He was standing there, carrying Addy in his arms. Seeing him in relation to Addy’s long body accented how small the man actually was. He brought Addy next to the fire and laid her down. He rubbed the sleeve of his right arm across his tongue and spit into the fire.