Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

“There’s what you call blue light in those leafies,” Thrombone said to me when I marveled at the fabric Addy made. “I harvest them from the puppy trees when they’re rumbling content. They have power in them plenty.”

He also made tea from those leaves. He would let them steep over a low flame in a stone pot for weeks at a time. Then he’d pour the liquid into one of his few precious glass bottles and let it cool in a stream. The brew was strong-tasting, sweet and pungent. Whenever I drank that tea I felt a momentary elation followed by an hour of unutterable calm.

One day I awoke to deep drumbeats playing somewhere out in the woods. I remembered something and went looking for Alacrity. She and I were going to look for straight branches from which she could make arrows for the bow Juan and Reggie had made. I couldn’t find her, so I went to Addy, who was naked next to Number One, making pants for either Reggie or me.

“She left with Juan this morning,” Addy said.

“When are they coming back?”

“Not for a few days.”

“A few days? You let your daughter go off into the woods with a man like that overnight? What’s wrong with you, Addy?”

“It’s okay, Chance. He’s going to help her. You know how restless she’s been. He found her hacking away at tree bark, and Reggie had to stop her from tormenting Wanita. Juan said that he’s going to take her on a walk to discover her true nature.”

“How could you just let her go like that?”

Addy looked up at me, putting down her work. Like I said, she was naked. She was a very beautiful woman, and I was especially aware of that when she peered into my eyes.

“Sit down, Chance,” she said.

I did so.

“You have to stop this now. You have to accept Juan and his life out here. I know that you love us and that you want to protect us, but fighting him isn’t going to help. This is his home and we’re his guests. I don’t know what he’s doing with Julia out there, but whatever it is, I know it’s for the best.” Her green eyes held on to the light like dusky quartz.

“But how can you say that?” I said. “You don’t know him. You just met him. He can get in your head. Maybe he’s hypnotized you.”

The way she shook her head crushed any hope I had left.

She brought her hands to either side of my head and kissed me, softly at first.

I wanted to give her the best loving that she had ever had. I wanted to make her sing out my name and forget all about Juan Thrombone. But I hadn’t made love to a woman in many months, so it was the most I could do to call out her name once before I came.

She gave out a loud oh and then wrapped her arms and legs around me, to comfort my distress. She cooed in my ear, “It’s all right, Chance. It’s okay.”

I sat up and away from her.

“What’s your boyfriend gonna think about that, huh?” I asked.

“Juan doesn’t love me for that,” she said. “He’d know that I was just sharing the love around us with one of our friends.”

“Like he’s doing right now with your little girl?”

Addy rose and walked away. I made to go after her, but instead I went another way, the direction from which the drumming was coming.

I followed the deep vibrations until I came upon Reggie, who now called himself Pathfinder, and Wanita in a small hollow. He was beating his big log with hardened hands while Wanita lay down before him absorbing the music with her bones.

“Reggie.”

“Yeah, Chance?” he answered, still rolling the rhythm out from his drum.

“I need you to help me find Alacrity. There’s something wrong, and I need to go find her.”

“What’s wrong? Somethin’ wrong with you, Chance?” the boy who had become a man asked.

“No, with Alacrity. She’s disappeared and I want to find her.”

“She’s wit’ Bones,” Wanita said. Bones is what she called Juan Thrombone.

“But I’ve got to find her.”

“She’ll come back, Chance,” Reggie said. “We don’t have to go looking for her if she’s comin’ back.”

“But I need to find her,” I said again.

“For what?”

“All you need to do is help me and not ask all these stupid questions.” I was mad and hoping that my anger could still overwhelm the child that lingered in the man.

“I’m stayin’ here,” Reggie said. “I’ma play drums out here and that’s all.”

I left them in the clearing and went out to find Alacrity and Thrombone myself. I wandered in the woods around Treaty and then I went farther away. I started calling for her after midday. That evening, when my voice finally gave out, I returned to camp. Reggie and Wanita were already asleep. Addy was sitting by a fire under Number One, but I didn’t feel like talking to her.

The next morning I went out again. For the next six mornings I searched and called. But I couldn’t find her.

In among the regular trees (firs, incense cedars, yellow pine, even a hemlock here and there) were the special white firs of Juan Thrombone. These trees had a different kind of life to them. They were trees like any others in most ways, but they also gave off a low-level emission — a sound that you couldn’t quite hear, a song. And though I had never actually seen one move, I was often disoriented by parts of the woods that were sometimes crowded by white firs but at other times were sparse or even bare.

During that week I am sure that the firs conspired to stymie my attempts to find Alacrity. Sometimes, when I thought I heard a child’s strained voice, I’d rush to get there, but the firs were too dense and I couldn’t make it through. Sometimes the path I followed went in circles leading me away from my destination.

Addy refused to talk to me about it. Reggie thought I was crazy, and Wanita kept telling me stories about dreams she’d had. I think she hoped I would forget about Alacrity while listening to her tales.

I was young and stupid then. I don’t remember most of the dreams. I was too worried about Alacrity, or more accurately, I was jealous. Alacrity treated me like her father and her best friend. I knew that Juan wasn’t abusing her. But he was taking her from me. Just like he’d taken Addy.

The one dream of Wanita’s that I remember was about the Tusk Men. Big men with hairy bodies and lower jaws that jutted out sporting long saberlike teeth. They carried clubs and wandered up and down the streets of a bombed-out city. They were meat-eaters. They ate people. People, Wanita said. Whatever place her dreams took her that time, there were people there, not pink crystals or rolling sentient fogs.

The Tusk Men knew that Wanita was there. They looked for her but she ran. She ran across the sky to a big stone fort where people gathered to fight off their enemies. These enemies were Tusk Men and wolf women, crawling worm people and fat bottoms who weighed almost nothing, floating on poisonous gases like flatulent balloons.

The dream had frightened Wanita, that’s why I remember it. I put her on my lap and hugged her and told her that all of that was far away and she was safe now in Treaty.

“Why don’t you like it here?” Wanita asked, rubbing her tears off on my shoulder.

“I like it, honey. It’s just all so different.”

“Different from what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You and Reggie, Alacrity and Bones. I can’t keep up with it all. Sometimes I just want to go home.”

“Don’t leave us, Chance,” the little girl said.

“Chance,” someone else called from a distance away.

I looked up because it was not a voice that I knew. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite tell from where or when.

“Chance,” she called again.

Across from Number Twelve, out of the trees, came Juan Thrombone accompanied by a tall woman. She had short-cropped blond hair and fair skin. As they approached, I could see that she had a nasty-looking scar down her jawline. She wore only a fur cape that didn’t cover all of her body at once. She was calling my name and waving at me.