Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

I did as she said, going to my knees and crawling into the space.

As soon as I was seated, the chorus ceased. It was as though the vibrations all came together, negating one another, or maybe complementing one another. Then, instead of hearing them, I saw their music as the intricate interlacing of multicolored lights. It was like sitting in the middle of a giant gem, experiencing its formation over the millions of years. The trees were building themselves and the world around them. An exquisite and invisible edifice of possibility arose in the forest, and I was the only witness. It was a conspiracy of the trees. A grand design. I wanted to be a part of that design. I wanted to lay down roots right there in that hollow. I wanted to be a deep note in their ululation.

My human senses closed down inside the tree. Instead, I was a root sensing water, a cell sucking on light. I could feel my body reaching and reforming.

A lazy tendril root caressed my cheek.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said again. “That’s enough. You’re not supposed to stay in there that long. Come on.”

If I had had any strength left, I would have fought her. That tree had more hold on me than Claudia Heart ever did.

Alacrity pulled me to my feet and made me run out of the grove. I could hear the trees calling for me, calling. Once we were among the simple singing firs of Juan Thrombone again, I relaxed. An exhaustion came over me that I had never felt before. Every cell was tired. I took in a deep ragged breath like a man who’d been drowning.

“I’n’it cool?” Alacrity asked, excited by our adventure.

“What happened to me?”

“I don’t know, not really, but the tree wants you. It calls out and then, if you go in, it tries to pull you down with it. It’s so cool.”

Alacrity was very excited by it all. She tore my shirt open, popping all the buttons, and then she pulled my pants down. When she stood up, shucking her own clothes, I watched with only one thing on my mind.

Alacrity, and her breasts, were looking at my erection. I realized that she brought me there because she knew somehow that the song of the redwoods would arouse me.

I brought my hand to my hardon, and Alacrity gasped. When I reached down to pull up my pants, she frowned and I hoped that her new bow was not around.

“Sit down, Alacrity,” I said. “Come sit down here next to me.”

“Why?”

“Just sit down, honey.”

She waited a moment or so and then did as I asked.

I took her hands in mine. She relaxed a little.

“Baby,” I said. I was tired and the deep song of the trees was still playing in my mind. “You’re my little girl. I was your father’s student, and his blood runs in mine. I’m like your uncle or older brother. I’m your family, honey. I can’t be your boyfriend.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I love you. I don’t even think about anybody but you. All the time.”

“That’s just because you’ve grown up so quickly. You love me, and all of a sudden you’ve come to be a woman. It’s confusing, but don’t worry, there’ll be men for you.”

“When?”

“Not that long. But you’ve got to remember that you can’t settle your problems by fighting. You are a fighter, but you should go to war only when nothing else will work.”

“But Reggie was wrong to be spying on us,” Alacrity said.

“Yeah, but, you know, he’s grown up almost as fast as you have. And you’re beautiful, Alacrity. If you covered up some more, he wouldn’t get so excited. You know, if you run around naked, men will follow you — and that’s not good. I mean, most of the time women have trouble when men go after them like that. But in your case I think it’s the men who will have it bad.”

“If he leaves me alone, I won’t bother him,” Alacrity complained.

“I can’t tell you what to do, honey. You’re a woman now — ready or not. But do me a favor, okay?”

“What?”

“Go easy on us poor men. Give us a break.”

I don’t know what it is that I said exactly. I don’t know what she heard, but Alacrity threw her arms around me and hugged so hard that I had to put off breathing during her embrace.

“I love you, Chance,” she whispered in my ear.

I heard in her words the song of the trees. They were still calling for me.

One drizzly day not long after my talk with Alacrity, we all heard a weak scream from somewhere not too far away. Juan was sitting beneath Number One with Alacrity, skinning a deer she had taken down with her bow and arrow. He was the first one to raise his head.

“They’re here,” he said. “They’re here.”

He jumped up and ran for the singing wood, followed by Alacrity and Wanita and, finally, by Reggie the pathfinder. Addy and I walked up to the edge of the cathedral and waited. I strained to listen, but there were no more screams. All I could hear was the patter and hiss of the light rain.

“There they are,” Addy said.

Through the trees, twenty or thirty yards to the left of where they had gone, came the whole crew, including a smallish man with thick eyebrows and a brown woman who was crying and wailing about something.

Addy and I ran out in the rain to see what we could do.

“The bears,” the woman was saying. “The bears are after us.”

I knew then that these were the first new residents of the town of Treaty.

Not many strangers wandered into Treaty. A couple of campers now and then. A park ranger every once in a while. But most would-be intruders were daunted by the thickets of Juan’s special trees or by the bears. Even if someone happened to stumble upon us, it didn’t matter much. Bones would greet them, shake their hand, and look deeply into their eyes. After a while whoever it was that disturbed us just turned around and left, a corridor of trees opening before them and closing in their wake.

“It’s okay now, my dear,” the small man with bushy eyebrows said. “We’re here now and we’ll never have to worry again.”

His name, I learned later that night, was Gerin Reed. Once a warden at Folsom Prison, he was now a sort of nomad, a hippie even, who took pleasure in everything he could see or touch or hear. His girlfriend was a Pakistani woman named Preeta. She had come to America with her parents when she was an infant. But they died and she became a ward of the state. She was also a drifter. She and Gerin had hooked up in Bakersfield only a month earlier. Gerin had heard the call of Bones’s singing trees — not the bellowing sequoias, but the ones that Thrombone had cultivated to mask the god trees’ song.

Gerin moved into Treaty just as if it had been meant for him. He and Preeta stayed with us for a few days and then moved down to the town. They took a room at the back of the hotel. Preeta was doing laundry in the creek before the day was through.

Over the next few months Gerin Reed and Juan Thrombone grew very close. They took long walks in the woods and went fishing together often. Gerin spoke little, but he never seemed to tire of Thrombone’s riddles. Juan called Gerin Pride of Man. It was through seeing their friendship that I understood how wrong I had been about Bones.

Three days after Gerin and Preeta moved into the town of Treaty, I was out walking in the woods. It was a few hours before dark. I was wondering about my mother. Did she think that I had died somewhere? Was she crying over me? I decided to ask Bones if he would walk me to a mailbox somewhere and then show me the way back to Number Twelve. I planned to tear two of the back pages out of my History , one for the letter and the other for the envelope. My writing had become tinier as I kept the account; I still had more than six hundred blank pages left.