Blue Light

Twenty

“I love you, Chance,” Alacrity said to me.

We were looking out over a vista of spiky pines and cloud-rifted blue skies. I carried her in the crook of my arm while she nestled her head against my shoulder. I carried her as if she were a small child. She was young. But Alacrity had begun to grow quickly in the woods. She was more than three years younger than Wanita, but already she was a foot and a half taller than her friend. She looked closer to twelve than three.

She and her mother, Reggie and Wanita, and I were living at the Bear Lodge Country Cabins in northern California. We stayed in California, albeit many miles from the Bay Area, because Addy and I wanted to be near at hand if the remaining Blues somehow made a stand against Gray Man. We were pretty confident that he couldn’t find us easily and that we could escape as long as we were free. Also, Reggie kept saying that he felt the safest place in the world for us was close by. He spent many days scanning the countryside for our refuge, but the direction for some reason eluded him.

“I know,” I said to the young girl. “I love you too.”

I did love her, as a child who was frightened and headstrong, who was inquisitive about everything, and who needed a story before she could go to sleep at night. But I also knew that she was the daughter of a strangeling god who had prophesied the beginning of an era heralding the end of mankind.

“I don’t mean like that,” Alacrity said. “I really love you. When I grow up I’m going to marry you and give you a big house and you can read books all day long and we’ll get a telescope and look at the people in the dark stars. The ones that Wanita said don’t have no bodies except just great big eyes in a cave.”

I sighed deeply and kept my silence. It was always disturbing for me to hear the child’s dreams for the future. She had inherited some of her father’s ability with words. I had to fight the nagging sense that her desires were my destiny and my marching orders.

“Reggie an’ Nita comin’,” she said.

Far up the sloping hill behind us the two other children were coming out of the woods. It seemed as if Reggie was skipping adolescence altogether, going straight for manhood. He’d grown almost as tall as me, and his shoulders were amazingly wide. His sister, Wanita, was still a child, though, round-faced and always serious. She and Alacrity were as different as playmates could be. While Alacrity climbed towering pines, Wanita would curl up by the roots and dream of Alacrity way up there in the wind an’ stuff.

Adelaide and I never questioned the children’s powers. It all seemed natural. This was not only because of our blood experiences. We had both been lost souls before we drifted into Ordé’s orbit. You’ve already heard my story. I learned of Adelaide’s experiences while we were on the run. It wasn’t a long tale, but it had trailed her for years.

There are many circumstances and minor characters in Addy’s story, but I don’t have to bother with them. The elements are a white Christian family, a girl becoming a woman, a boy with a black leather jacket and a knife, and a dark night in an alley off Ventura Boulevard where two boys struggled over their hormones and only one survived. Adelaide never told anyone about her knowledge of the killing. She closed up her heart, opening it only to those men who cared so much about their future that they would never be concerned with her past. I was the first person she had ever confided in. But we were on the run from Death, and very little else seemed important or worth questioning.

The children and their survival had become our purpose; their abilities were our religion. Believing in them, we erased our own suffering.

“It’s over that way for sure, Chance,” Reggie said, pointing south.

“You sure, man?”

“Yeah. It’s over that way.”

“How far?”

“I can’t tell exactly, but it’s pretty far. It’s hundreds of miles, but it’s definitely over that way.”

“And if we get there, you think we’ll be safe for a while?” I asked the young man.

“We’ll be safer. We’ll be safer, but that don’t mean we’ll be safe.”

The memory of Gray Man scuttled under my scalp. But lately the kids hadn’t seemed scared at all. All that time in the woods had healed the fear in their hearts. Reggie knew the safest place to be, or at least he thought he could find it; Alacrity just wanted to play with each of us in turn and run wild in the woods; and Wanita dreamed.

Adelaide and I thought that if Wanita had any powers of godhood like the others, it must have been the power of dreams. She often came to us in the morning with elaborate tales of visions from the night before. I started to get them on a toy tape recorder when I realized that she was somehow reporting on stories that were not of this Earth or maybe not even this galaxy.

Sometimes the little brown girl would wake up in the morning hardly remembering who we were. Even her brother was as unfamiliar to her as some far-off memory. After she’d come back to us, she’d say that her dream took so long that she’d forgotten who she was for a while.

That very morning she had stumbled out of her bunk bed bleary-eyed and confused. She sat at our rough-hewn table and ate her hot bowl of Wheatena in silence. Adelaide noticed the sleep in her eyes and bent down with a moist towel to rub the sand away. Wanita looked at the green-eyed redhead with bewilderment. She touched Addy’s hair, put her fingers to her own cheek. Then she began to speak as if she had already been in the middle of an explanation.

“... they started out really big, like that tower thing on top’s that hill—”

“Coit Tower,” Reggie said as he ate.

“— and they get smaller and smaller, but then they come awake and start to sing,” the dreamer said. “It’s like they was purple glass at first with hot stuff inside, but when they get real small, like a little Christmas tree, then they’s pink with little tears runnin’ down they sideses.”

“Who are they?” Adelaide breathed in the softest possible whisper.

“Like glass,” Wanita said again. “An’ they sing when they get little. Tinkle-like, humming-like, an’ nobody could hear it but them an’ me. All the animals and bugs that drink the little tears think that the glass sticks is just sticks, but they not. They be singin’ an’ laughin’. An’ you could hear ’em everywhere.”

“Where?” I asked gently, but I should have been gentler still.

By the way Wanita looked up, I could tell that she was coming out of the dream.

“Wanita!” I said sharply.

“Huh?”

“Where were the pink sticks made from glass?”

She shrugged and said nonchalantly, “In a place where the sun is blue and the sky is red. Not anywhere that we could go. Except if you dreamed it.”

“Can you go there in your dreams, Wanita?” Addy asked.

“I did last night. Can I have a apple?”

And so went the way of Wanita’s dreams. She traveled the universe at night while we slept. Her mind was gone for what must have felt like weeks or more overnight. Sometimes we worried that she’d be gone so long that she’d forget who she was completely, or even what she was. But that was the way of godhood, I supposed. All Addy and I could do was feed them and listen to them, groom them with our love and respect. And keep them safe from Death.

“There’s something out there, almost like it was music,” Reggie said. “But... but it’s something... it’s something else. Like safe. Safe.”

As soon as Reggie said it, I could hear it. Like a whole orchestra of brass and silver horns so far away that I couldn’t even tell what direction they were in. But when Reggie pointed I believed that sound might be coming from that way.

The extra senses I’d gained from Ordé had quieted over time. The stars still sang to me, the bands between the rainbow still revealed new colors, but it had become so normal that I hardly remembered what it had been like to have common senses. And my time around the children had disoriented those perceptions because I could always feel the Blues when they were near. It wasn’t a hard sensation, more like the feeling of a cloud partly blocking the sun.

Their light had hidden the music from me.

“Uh-huh.” Adelaide nodded while closing her eyes, holding her face up as if to feel the wind. “Yeah, I do feel something. It’s like sunlight through water.”

The children and I had gone back to the cabin. I was excited to tell Addy about what I felt. Addy’s senses had been altered by carrying Ordé’s child. She and I had somewhat similar powers, only she couldn’t hear and see things as much. Addy’s ability was more in intuiting what the children were feeling and thinking. They could come to her for advice and she’d interpret what they felt even though the needs of those small blue gods were often things that she had never known.

“Mr. Needham didn’t feel it,” I said.

Needham was the camp handyman. He was an older white gentleman who didn’t mind having an interracial family on the grounds. It was late in the fall and we were the only paying customers. Maybe he would have felt differently if it were the height of summer.

“We can’t hear it either,” Alacrity added. “We just said we could ’cause we were so happy.”

“Uh-huh,” Reggie said. “It’s like I know it’s there, but I can’t really hear it.”

“Probably because it wasn’t meant for normal people or the Blues,” Addy responded, opening her eyes. “This is probably meant for people like Chance and me. It’s like a beacon for the half blind. Reggie probably figured it out because he was looking for someplace safe but it just happens to be where that call comes from.”

“How far away do you think it’s coming from?” I asked.

Addy closed her eyes and held up her face again. After a few moments she shook her head and frowned.

“We gotta go there,” Reggie said.

“Uh-huh,” Alacrity agreed.

“What do you think, Wanita?” I asked our round-faced dreamer.

“ ’Kay,” she answered, as if I had been trying to force her to go.

“I don’t mean you have to go, honey,” I said.

“But we do,” she said softly while fingering her pink sweater. “Like them fishes.”

“What fish?” asked Alacrity.

“The blue ones,” Wanita replied.

Alacrity nodded, making a rare serious frown.

“Then we better get some more campin’ stuff,” Reggie said. “ ’Cause we gotta go way up in the woods an’ I don’t think the road will go all that far.”

We spent the week buying nylon tents and rugged shoes, powdered packets of food and sleeping bags. We had gloves and bug repellent, a shortwave radio, hard candy and chocolate bars to energize little girls. Ordé’s account felt the drain.

We were all happy at the prospect of refuge. But the morning we were to leave, the signal — brass horns, the liquid air, whatever it was — was gone. Reggie was disoriented and uncertain; Addy and I couldn’t hear a thing. We waited for another week for the sensation to return. It came while we were sleeping on a Tuesday night, late. I got everybody up and hustled them into the van, and we drove without stopping except for gas stations and food stores. Addy and I alternated driving and sleeping. We traveled for eighteen hours on highways and secondary roads going south. Two hundred miles or so past San Francisco we hit dirt roads. For another two days we bumped along back roads.

The last drivable road finally came to an end on Friday afternoon. It didn’t end exactly; there was still a clearing there, but it had fallen into disrepair — recently, as far as I could tell. There were trees fallen across it and great upheavals in the ground. We decided to camouflage our VW van and explore. The feeling that came from that way was neither stronger nor weaker. None of us knew how long the trek would be.

Reggie had almost half our gear on his broad shoulders. The pack he carried was impossibly large. He was straining under the weight, but there was something about him when he got on the trail of an idea or imagined destination — he kept on going no matter what.

He mouthed soft drumlike sounds, pom pom pompom pom, as he went. Now and then he’d make verbal notes about our passage. “Heavy foot on the light turn. Slashing lines on the left.” Sometimes he’d stop and look around like a small child who has temporarily lost sight of his mother in a crowded supermarket.

“You okay, Reggie?” I asked once when he seemed a bit lost.

“Yeah, man,” he replied. “You know what, Chance?”

“What?”

“My sister’s been here?”

“Wanita?”

“No, uh-uh. Luwanda’s been here,” he said.

“You mean you were here with your sister before she died?” I asked.

“I was once, but she been here since then. She been here ’cause this the place where we come together.”

Alacrity carried a pack almost as big as she was. She didn’t seem to mind the weight, though. She moved playfully up and down the path, over fallen trees and down into woods to explore. She wasted more energy than the rest of us used, but she was never tired. Her blond hair knotted on itself, and dried mud clung to her boots and jeans.

As I watched the child of my teacher dart in and out between the trees, I got the first glimpse of her purpose among us.

I had begun to believe that there was purpose to each light that began these creatures. The visionary, the dreamer, the pathfinder, death. Alacrity I could see was simply a hero. She was brave and foolhardy and the best friend anybody could have.

As I watched her move so deftly between pines, I wondered whose hero she would become: mine or theirs?

It was the first time I’d realized that there would one day be sides drawn and a conflict ahead.

Twenty-one

That night we made camp in a clearing of fallen pines. We set up two tents, one for Addy and the girls and one for Reggie and me. The moon was three-quarters full and the air was cold. I could hear Wanita and Alacrity laughing in the other tent while Reggie snored next to me. He was sleeping outside of his down bag, wearing only briefs. I could still feel the heat pouring off him from his exertions leading our journey.

Addy and I could see the change in the boy that day. Somehow the walk in the woods had made him into the man that he was destined to be. All along the walk he would turn to his sister and ask, “Do you remember this, Wanita? Do you remember when we were walking here before? It was the night that the light came, the night Luwanda died.”

The girl said nothing but kept close to her brother, touching him every now and then. When she tired he took her up in his arms and pressed forward with great concentration and force.

Reggie’s face became more angular, and his eyes lost their wandering and distracted air. It was as if he had been born to take this hike in these woods.

I loved those children. They seemed perfect together with Addy and me. Part of me, the part that was active and engaged, was only there for the children. But that night another part came alive. I was a link between natural enemies. I was the flotsam that Ordé preached about, but now I was partly aware, partly alive. I was spineless and mindless like a jellyfish, but still I had an instinct for survival. And survival, I knew, was the possibility of a bridge between these gods and my small race.

Maybe some pink crystal far away was dreaming of me, imagining the dignity of my partial awareness. The dignity of fungus stuck to a rock, depending upon the sun for life. At any moment we might be robbed of our single-note pleasure, procreation; a shadow could rise between us and the sun, could end our whole history. And even if that shadow never appeared, even if we did not meet annihilation, still, mindlessly, we would just multiply one on top of another until we covered the entire planet with our bones.

But now there was a different light, the blue light. It was, I believed, my job to conserve that light and to help my people feel its brilliance.

While Reggie snored and Wanita and Alacrity giggled in the tent next to ours, I found a direction for my life. I had been following the path for some years, since Ordé saved me from suicide, but now I was aware. Now it became my choice. I could feel it in my heart and lungs and liver. I knew that my duty was more powerful even than the visions I was allowed to see. Even the thought of Gray Man could not deter me. I would give everything to make my blood count for something beyond rutting and the piling of bones.

In the morning nothing seemed the same. I was lying next to a full-grown man who had been a child two days before. But as much as Reggie had changed, I had changed more.

The girls made breakfast for the camp with Addy’s help. I ate the baked beans and canned black bread with no taste or hunger. I ate because I needed strength.

The numbness that followed my convictions left my mind unencumbered. Freed as I was, I could remember what we saw without being overwhelmed by the trappings of fear or awe.

The first five or so miles through the woods that morning were not very different. The road had been torn up and blocked by trees, and we hoped that this was why Reggie had deemed the place safe. I couldn’t see how, but maybe the inaccessibility made it partially secure from Gray Man.

By afternoon, however, the changes became more spectacular.

“Look at those leaves up there,” Addy said, pointing to the roof of pine forest. We were in a large clearing. “They’re like a rainbow.”

And big. Some of the blue and yellow and orange leaves were as large as serving platters. They seemed to be blowing in the wind, some floating on currents of air and others falling lazily to earth.

“Them’s butterflies,” Wanita said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, God.” That was me.

The cavernous roof of leaves above us must have held hundreds of thousands of them. Many had wingspans of nearly two feet, some even larger. We were all stunned into silence by the beauty. In that hush we heard the soft fluttering of their wings. The sound was like the thrumming of a fast-pumping vein. It was exciting and a little bit scary.

A giant orange-and-black monarch with iridescent blue eyes etched in its tail sailed down, landing on Reggie’s shoulders and back. Its wingspan was almost a yard. The impossible insect unfurled its tubular tongue, gently lashing the young man’s small Afro.

“It tickles,” he said.

Alacrity giggled, and Addy and I smiled.

“We better run,” Wanita said.

Just then the butterflies overhead formed into a great multicolored blanket that began to descend.

“Let’s go!” I shouted.

Reggie took off, leading us down a corridor through the trees.

The thrumming of butterflies became so loud that it was almost a rattle. They were very fast, coming quickly and intently through the leaves and branches.

We made it through the corridor and into a dense stand of pine. The butterflies kept coming, though. Three ivory-colored ones grabbed on to Wanita. They seemed to want to lift her off the ground. She screamed, but Alacrity killed them with a branch.

The children were beset by butterflies.

We all took up branches, swinging about our heads as fast as we could, smashing the rainbow fliers into the same trees that impeded our escape. Addy and I could more easily kill the creatures because the butterflies didn’t want us. Once in a while one would land on me with feet that felt like grasping Brillo pads. But as soon as that long tongue tasted my skin, it was off after the kids.

The touch of the butterflies’ tongues had the tickle of mild electricity or the beginning of an acid burn.

We kept swinging and trying to run. The butterflies died easily enough. Their wings ripped from the slightest touch and their soft bellies came open, shedding thick green blood.

We were overcome by the crush of butterflies. Choking on the dust that rose from their battered wings. They came on in a flood of color and dust. The girls choked and cried. Reggie fought hard but was covered by tongue-lashing insects. I jumped on top of the boy, using my body to crush the insects as well as to protect him.

The butterflies’ touch seemed to sap the children’s strength.

The thrumming rattle of insect wings overwhelmed our cries. The crush of bugs stopped our advance completely and slowly pushed us downward. The children and Reggie were already on the ground. Addy and I stood above them, on our knees, beating off our attackers with thick branches.

And then came a thump in the air. It was the sensation of a sudden and powerful vacuum. I lost my balance and consciousness at the same moment.

“Chance! Chance, wake up.”

Alacrity was shaking me by the shoulder. Reggie was trying to prop up Addy into a standing position. She was unconscious, or mostly so. The forest floor was littered with the bodies of brightly colored butterflies. They weren’t dead, only stunned like I had been. Their giant fanlike wings waving slowly. A few of them were standing on weak, shivering legs.

“We gotta go, Chance,” Reggie pleaded.

In my stupor I was still amazed by the size and nature of the beautiful predators.

“C’mon, Chance!” Alacrity yelled.

Her voice was strained and commanding. I jumped up and took Adelaide from Reggie. If anyone was going to lead us away, it was him, and his pack was already large enough.

As soon as I hefted the swooning woman over my shoulder, Reggie was off. When I turned to run, Addy’s head slammed into a tree. It was a hard knock, but there was no time to stop.

He took the lead, zigzagging through the trees ahead. The waist strap of his pack had loosened, and the load pounded up and down loudly against his back. Alacrity ran behind Reggie, wielding a long branch like a sword. She turned full around every now and then, still running, looking for danger.

Wanita shadowed Alacrity, moving more like a normal child, slipping and wavering as she went.

We didn’t have the strength to run for very long — no more than ten minutes. I fell to my knees, exhausted. When I laid Addy out on a bed of pine needles, I saw that her head and face were lacerated. She was bleeding pretty hard.

“Come on, Reggie,” Alacrity said, throwing him a branch the size of a cartoon caveman’s club. Then she pointed to where he should stand for defense.

I took the gauze bandage from my first aid box and pressed it hard against the long cut down the side of Addy’s face, cursing myself for being so rough and careless.

“I don’t hear anything coming,” Reggie said.

“Nothing?” asked Alacrity.

I was trying to hold together the flaps of Adelaide’s skin under the bandage. The thought of the butterflies’ coming through the dense woods and the feeling of the blood slipping between my fingers somehow increased my feeling of numbness. The breath in my chest felt like a cold breeze through a deep cave.

For the next hour we sat there: Alacrity and Reggie on the ready for any attack; Wanita hugging on to Reggie’s leg; and me pressing on the big white bandage that I had tied around Addy’s head.

The forest was unnaturally quiet except for an occasional moan from Addy.

“I don’t think they’re gonna come,” Reggie said.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“No, I’m not sure,” he said petulantly. “What do you want me to do?”

Night fell and Addy became delirious. She went out of her head with fever and nightmares. We huddled around her in the tent, trying, I guess, to press her back to health. I dissolved aspirin in water and made her drink, but she was still burning up.

“Why not?” she begged some unseen torturer. “Why can’t we? No. No. We love the children. We love them.”

She begged all night, thrashing and crying.

I stayed up as long as I could, but sometime in the early morning hours I dozed off.

In the dream I met a man who wore a one-piece suit that sheathed him from head to toe; only his red-brown face could be seen under a hood of woven branches and fur that had flowers nestled within. The flowers, asters and small yellow daisies, seemed to be rooted there, growing out of the man’s head. The rest of his costume was no less unusual. It was a loose-fitting patchwork of cloth and skins, metal and wood, ceramic and bone. From the belt looped over his shoulder hung a large wooden knife, a dark quartz crystal, a small hide sack, and a handmade wooden mallet with a tree branch for a handle.

His eyes were small and very dark. His smile was permanent. And he smelled of the forest: strong, acrid, and sweet.

“Chance,” he said. “Is that your name?”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I call myself Juan Thrombone, but don’t ask me why. I don’t have use for names much. They seem like the juggling balls in the circus.”

“What?”

“I throw you the yellow ball that I call Chance and then you throw back the red one — Thrombone.” He grinned and I did too. I had to.

“Like a baby duck,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Like baby ducks,” he said. “All of you here are like baby ducks following their momma up into the woods.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I was nearly in tears at my own stupidity.

“But I’m not your momma, little one,” Juan Thrombone said. “I’m the Big Bad Wolf and you were just dreaming about your mother. You’re lost in the woods, Last Chance. Go back.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I have to save the children.”

“Save them? You can’t even see them. Can’t you see that, little man? Can’t you see?” With that, the many-textured man held his hands over his head.

His gesture compelled me to look up.

Suddenly I was in the center of a dark web. All around me there were large spiders slowly moving closer.

“They aren’t coming for you,” Thrombone, now disembodied, whispered. “Jump, little man. They’ll bite you just to spit out your blood.”

I thought that they’d have to swallow a little bit of that blood. I thought it, but I was too scared to talk. The spiders were big and scaly; they smelled like the foulest infection.

Twenty-two

I awoke to the sun shining brightly on the yellow fabric of our tent. My senses were alive with the world around me. The crystal-clear cold of the morning waited right outside. I was happy, ready to jump up and go exploring.

But when I sat up I saw the girls and Reggie sleeping. In their midst was Addy. She was pale and fragile-looking. I moved as quietly as I could, reaching around the sleeping girls to remove the day-old dressing.

The wound underneath was a spectacle as amazing and terrifying as the butterflies the day before. It was a long and jagged gash, white down the middle, bordered with bright red. The skin around the sides was darkening, not the blue of bruises but the black of deep infection.

“How is she?” Reggie asked. I could hear him stirring behind me.

“We’ve gotta go back, Reggie,” I said. “She’s real bad, man.”

He leaned over to see the deep cut down the side of her face. His eyes, I knew, were looking for some kind of path even down that infected valley. He saw none, though, and nodded.

When he stood up I noticed that he had an erection straining underneath his boxer shorts. He might have been inhabiting a grown man’s body, but he was still a boy who had to pee bad in the morning.

We left everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. The second tent, two sleeping bags, pots, pans, books, and extra clothing. Reggie and I tied Addy’s arms to his shoulders. He carried a leg under each of his arms and hefted her as if she were a living backpack.

Alacrity and Wanita were quiet. Alacrity walked close behind Reggie and stroked her mother’s leg now and then.

“Will my mom be okay, Chance?” she had asked that morning with tears in her eyes.

I said that she would be, that I’d make sure of it. And for the rest of the morning I found myself, now and again, wondering if it was a sin to lie to that child.

“Reggie, are you sure this is the way we came?” I said.

It was about noon and we were descending a fairly steep hill toward a quiet stream. The pine needles were slick under my hiking boots, and I was trying to remember having scaled the side of that particular valley.

“I don’t know,” the boy/man said. He was breathing hard. “I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

Reggie was always sure of where he was going. Ask anything that had to do with a direction or a place, and Reggie knew it. He could walk through the deep woods blindfolded and never hit a tree.

“I mean I’m lost.”

“Lost?”

“Look, Chance,” Reggie said. “I don’t know what’s happening. It’s like I’m not anywhere at all, like there aren’t any rules anymore.”

We stopped at the bottom of the valley. The stream was burbling and sunlight winked down through the branches and needles. We were lost in paradise and Addy was dying.

“Well, you can see by the sun that we’re on the west side of the range,” I said. “So that means if we follow the stream down, we’ll get to the lake sooner or later.”

“What difference does that make?” Alacrity asked.

“At the lake is a road. We can get a ride and get your mom to a doctor.”

It seemed like a good idea. Reggie hunched his shoulders, hitched his living load up a few inches, and groaned. Addy was deadweight; she hadn’t even opened her eyes that day.

We made it about a half a mile before coming across the bear. Big and black, he reared up in the middle of the stream and roared. I moved quickly out in front of the children. I waved my hands and yelled, “Ho! You big ugly bear! Get! Get away!”

As if he were mimicking me, the bear waved his great clawed paws and roared again. Then he charged.

“Run!” I yelled, pushing my arms behind me as if I were performing some underwater swimming maneuver.

Then I was flying. Up in the air and in a small arc until I hit the stream, and the hard stones therein, with a loud splash. The girls were screaming. Reggie had pulled a large stone out of the stream and was ready to throw it like a medicine ball.

“Drop it, Reg!” I shouted. “Run!”

And that’s what we did. Straight up the valley. The bear growled and came from behind but didn’t catch up. He just threatened and kept close enough so we couldn’t consider running up into the woods.

The girls were ahead of Reggie and me, screaming. The bear kept coming on.

Over the next hour our retreat slowed to a fast walk. The bear always behind us.

Finally Reggie fell to his knees.

“Take Addy,” he said. “Take her with you.”

I looked around for a weapon. Alacrity was already armed with a yard-long branch that she held like a baton.

But the bear had stopped too. He held back a few steps and sniffed the air. He let out a great bellowing roar that made Wanita scream and cry.

“Shut up, you ugly bear,” Alacrity said.

Reggie was lying on his side, Addy tied to his shoulders and still unconscious.

I struggled with the double weight of Addy and Reggie, pulling them both up a few feet from the stream. Alacrity stood guard with her stick, shouting at the bear now and then. Wanita stood close by me.

“Alacrity, come on back here to me,” I said in an urgent but muted voice. “Come on. Leave that bear alone.”

“Tell him to leave me alone,” she said, more to the bear than to me.

“Come back here,” I demanded.

Slowly she obeyed. You could see that she hesitated to back down from her attacker. She was ready to go down fighting.

“Come on, now.”

We huddled together on the steep sloping bank of the small mountain stream. The bear watched us closely from the other side. He alternated between sniffing the ground and standing on his back legs, surveying the full area.

“You can go to sleep, Chance,” Alacrity told me. “I’m not tired. I’ll watch him.”

I laughed to myself at the maturity of the child. I would have told her to take a nap herself, but before I knew it I was in a deep sleep.

“Hello, little man,” Juan Thrombone said.

He was sitting on a big stone set alone in a wide desert. The sun was already down, but there was enough light to see the receding field of sand and rock.

“It’s all in our mind, little one,” Thrombone said.

“What?”

“The things you count and calculate. The number of colors, the weight of light on a lawn. It’s all in our mind. I know because I have seen it. I have seen it. And it’s not really there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”

“The smallest one can tell you.” Thrombone’s smile grew large with something he was thinking. “I tried to talk to her, but she drew me away to a place where stone moves within stone, thinking deep rocky thoughts and singing to the stars. I never knew that a stone’s voice could be so high.”

The man of stone and bone, cloth and flowers, stood up. It took a long time for him to attain his full stature. He was a short man seeming to be a giant. He stretched, and this made him laugh. The laugh was a musical tenor with a twang and a whine around the edges.

I thought that I probably couldn’t kill this man; he probably couldn’t die.

“No, little man. No. We can all die — and you” — he looked at me with intent yet benign eyes — “you could kill anyone. That’s what makes you human. You’re the best at it. You’re the cream of the killers.”

I didn’t like his knowing what I was thinking.

“But let’s not worry about that now,” Juan Thrombone said. “You can kill me whenever you want, Chance. But first we should drink something and eat something. First we should sing, little man. My friends will bring you to me.”

“What friends?”

“You’ll know them,” he said. Night was descending on the desert. I strained to glimpse the odd Mexican man, but he faded away.

“Chance.” Wanita was tugging at my arm. “Chance, wake up. Wake up. Look, look.”

I sat up quickly but got dizzy and fell back.

“Chance!”

I sat up again. The green canopy of leaves was spinning around in my head, but I stayed up. Wanita was still pulling, wanting something from me.

We were surrounded by bears. They ranged in color from cinnamon to black. Some were very large, others were less than three feet in length.

We weren’t actually surrounded. There was one path, up away from the stream, to the east, that we could take.

The bears, some of them, were yowling and standing up on their hind legs. The big black bear that chased us at first was already halfway across the stream. He was telling us to move on — there was no doubt about that.

I hefted Wanita in my arms. Reggie groaned and rose. Addy was still tied to his back. Alacrity naturally took up the rear guard even though I told her to go ahead of us. She walked backward behind us, swinging her staff as the bears herded us upward.

They flanked us, big woolly shepherds bringing their flock to a man in a dream. I was sure that these bears were Thrombone’s friends. I was sure that he’d changed his mind and, instead of chasing us away, was calling us on.

I would have dreaded the destination if it wasn’t for those bears. I counted more than sixteen, but I think that there were even more. Smelling strongly of bear musk, roaring and barking. The deep growls sent fear through me, fear for the children and myself. If we slowed down, snapping jaws would urge us forward. And if a bear snapped, Alacrity cracked it with her staff, which sent out a communal bear complaint that was deafening.

They drove us all day long, into the moonlit evening.

Wanita sobbed on and off in my arms. I wanted to check on Addy, but the bears wouldn’t let us slow down. We moved deeper and deeper into the woods until late in the evening.

Reggie, who was the strongest of us, finally gave out again under Addy’s weight. He went to his knees, and the big black straddled him, snarling dangerously.

I put Wanita down and went for the bear. But Wanita grabbed on to my foot and I fell.

Alacrity, however, was surer of foot. She jumped at the big black, yelling. He swung at her but, amazingly, she ducked under his swipe and came up delivering a powerful blow to his snout. The bellow was enough to knock me over, but Alacrity just swung again. The bear backed away from Reggie but then reared. I had my footing and my knife out by then. I was up beside Alacrity, half believing that the girl and I could down a giant bear.

We were surrounded on all sides by pacing, angry bears. Reggie was down. Wanita was holding her brother’s head.

The big bear bellowed again.

“Come on!” Alacrity challenged.

But he didn’t charge. Instead, he leaned backward and walked away until he disappeared into darkness. The rest of the angry bears did the same.

At that moment it started to rain. The moon had been covered over just that quickly, and drizzling rain began to fall. Alacrity and I huddled around Reggie and Addy. We all tried to fit under the plastic tarp I had kept. The girls were crying. Reggie’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t saying anything.

Addy burned under the cold rain.

We were all sneezing and coughing by morning. But with the light Alacrity regained her courage. Wanita didn’t seem afraid either.

“You think they’re still out there?” Reggie asked.

Alacrity lifted the tarp to let us see.

There were bears everywhere. The big black with his bloody snout was foremost, not five feet from us.

“Gimme your knife, Chance,” Alacrity ordered.

I almost obeyed.

“No,” I said. “I think we better keep going.”

“Gimme your knife,” she said with emphasis.

I found it hard to resist her will.

Alacrity raised her staff, and for a moment I was sure that she was going to hit me.

“Nooooo!” yelled Wanita. “No, Alacrity. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

Alacrity lowered her pole, looking deeply into the smaller girl’s eyes.

“It’s okay?” asked the little self-styled captain.

Wanita nodded.

“Okay then, come on, everybody,” Alacrity said. She shooed us up ahead and took her position at the rear. It was yet another change in a moment. Alacrity had proved herself a leader and a general, a hero — and maybe a fool.

The bears drove us hard all morning long. There must have been a hundred of the creatures. You could hear the shuffle of their hides against bark as they went. Fights broke out among them. They roared and broke down small saplings for sport.

I took Addy for a while to give Reggie a break. She was heavy. Not dead, just deadweight. I carried her for only an hour and was already exhausted. I marveled, in my pain, at how Reggie had carried that load for a whole day.

The bears wouldn’t let up. Alacrity was our biggest problem because she had begun to pick fights with our burly shepherds. More than once we heard the thwack of her staff and the roar of ursine rage.

I was getting weak, intent upon walking until I passed out, when we came to a dead end.

It wasn’t really a dead end. It was more a thick wall of woods. The white firs blocked our way as efficiently as a brick wall. The bears hung back, pacing and growling in a low, purring call.

“Maybe they want us to rest here,” I said hopefully.

“Maybe now I can have your knife,” Alacrity said.

“Come,” said a voice off to the left.

The bears were gone just that quickly, and before I turned around I knew that he would be standing there.

Twenty-three

Juan Thrombone stood in a solitary gap in the wall of trees. He stood in a space that had not been there before, surveying our tattered, half-dying group with a smile.

“Come quickly,” he said, gesturing with the fingers of his left hand. Then he was gone, back into the thick woods.

Wanita jumped from my arms and followed Alacrity into the breach. Reggie staggered after them.

I stood for a moment between the vanished army of bears and the impossibly thick woods. I felt Addy’s nose and mouth to be sure that she was still breathing. The only choice that I had, the only choice that was mine, was to stand still. It felt good to be standing still and in control of my fate, if only for just a moment. I wanted a PayDay candy bar and to hear the Chambers Brothers song “Time Has Come Today.”

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.

“She was almost dead, you know. You wouldn’t have gotten her down to the cities in time.” With that, the little madman lay next to Addy and fell into a deep slumber.

I moved next to Alacrity’s mother. The wound looked the same, only dimmer. The blood red was now brick red. The white center had turned gray. Addy opened her eyes for a moment and looked up. She smiled and said, “Where’s Julia?”

“I’m here, Mommy,” Alacrity said just as if she were still a small child.

Adelaide smiled and then fell back into unconsciousness.

Juan Thrombone snored loudly.

He slept like that, next to our campfire, burning or dead, for the next two days. Addy was up the next morning and, though weak, was well on the way back to health.

I wanted to leave, but Alacrity and Wanita said that it would be bad manners to leave Mr. Thrombone sleeping after he had saved Addy’s life. Reggie said that he had no intention of leaving the woods anyway, because it was the safest place he could imagine.

“It’s the only place that’s safe from Death right now,” Reggie said. “Anywhere else is like being out in the open where he could see us if he looked hard enough. But there’s cover here. That’s why I was lost, because Juan made it impossible for us to see or hear or feel.”

So we stayed in the deep woods that Juan Thrombone had called Treaty. And as each hour passed, I was more and more lost to the place.

The forest seemed to generate heat. It was cold enough to have to build a fire at night but not too cold. More than enough light filtered down through the leaves. The space was like a great cathedral, a place to worship and give thanks for.

I worried, though, because I didn’t know how we could survive up there.

“Mr. Thrombone live up here okay,” Wanita said.

“But he’s crazy,” I answered.

“Maybe he could show us how to be crazy like him.”

Twenty-four

Two days later Juan Thrombone awoke from his deep slumber. He rose and stretched, yawning loudly. The girls were out exploring while I tended the fire and watched over Addy. She was still tired, and I feared, in spite of Thrombone’s treatments, that she might relapse into fever.

Reggie was behind Number Seven, masturbating. He’d grown from his early teens into manhood in less than a week. This brought on certain hormonal tensions. He went behind Number Seven nine times, and maybe more, a day to slake their pressures.

I realized what was happening when I saw that Alacrity spent much of her time climbing high into Numbers Five and Six to look down behind Seven. When I asked her what she’d been looking at, she replied, “Reggie’s trying to go to the bathroom but he can’t.”

“It’s a good morning, Last Chance,” Juan Thrombone said. He looked at Addy and added, “First Light.”

“So you’re back among the living,” I said, using exactly the words and the tones of my uncle Oscar, the only black relative I knew coming up.

“Never left you, friend. How do you like it here among your brothers, the trees?”

“It’s okay, I guess,” I said. “But how did you find this place?”

“It was waiting for me just like it was waiting for you. There’s a place for everything, you know.” He brought his hands together in front of his face as if in prayer and rose. “I have to go tend to my forest, friends. I’ll bring you some supper when I get back.”

He moved gaily into the woods across from Number Twelve and was gone.

“He’s funny,” Addy said.

“I don’t trust him.”

“He’s okay. He did save my life.”

“Maybe he did. I don’t know, Addy. I don’t know.” It was the first time we were alone, really alone and talking, in days.

“What’s wrong, Chance?”

“Nothing,” I said, actually saying much more.

Addy nodded and smiled. She reached out her hand and I moved closer to hold it. The fire threw out a brilliant heat, but there was still foggy condensation from our breath. I don’t know that I felt better then, maybe just reconciled to my fate and happy that I didn’t have to face it alone at that moment.

Reggie was coming back from behind Number Seven. I could hear the girls laughing not far away in the woods.

The golden and yellow light from the cover of leaves winked and glittered. I left myself open to the half-told tales of where they came from and where they hoped to be. Each sparkle of light entered my mind, humming a forgotten tune that my heart tried to beat for. A dance took off within me. I was swirling to the fragmentary music of light. I was soaring and stationary like the giant pillars of my new home. I was decaying and dying but still full of life. I was decomposing the lies I had always believed defined me and my skin.

The children came back around the fire to eat and talk to us. Every now and then Reggie would wander off to Number Seven. I may have heard them. I might have even said a few words now and then. But mostly my mind was in the trees, in the light in the trees, swirling and capering to melodies older than life down here. Ordé’s blood moving in mine was a refuge from all the vacant fear that had gathered in my gut, clouded in my skull cavity.

I was dizzy with meaning that I did not understand. I tried to be brave in the face of immensity that dwarfed even my wildest dreams of expanse.

I fell asleep after an hour, maybe less. I was unconscious but aware of the scent of earth and decaying foliage. I listened contentedly to the girls playing and Addy cooing to them. It was a sleep with no dreams, as refreshing and as clear as water from a cold spring after a long long walk in July.

The visions of light had started to subside. I woke up thirsty just as the sun was throwing her last rays on the ground around my body.

“So you’re back among the living,” my uncle Oscar said.

When I looked, I saw that it was Juan Thrombone mimicking my words to him.

“It’s just in time too.” The little man giggled.

The fire had been expanded to three different units, each separated by and surrounded with similar-sized oblong stones. Over each fire was a pan or a pot. There were trout simmering and mushrooms and some kind of forest green too. Everyone was sitting around the fire. The flames seemed to echo the visions of my afternoon nap.

“Time to eat,” Juan said simply. “Eat first and then to tell stories, I think. Stories are good when you live out with the trees and bears and butterflies. Here, sleepy,” he said to me. “Have some sap and water.”

He handed me a carved wooden mug that was tall and thin. Instead of a handle, it had a leafy branch sticking out from one side. The mug was filled with water that smelled of sweet sap. There were bits of branches and leaves floating about in the drink. I tasted it and then couldn’t pull the cup away from my lips. It was the best-tasting water I had ever had. It was water and also the dream of water in a thirsty man’s desert.

The fish were from a nearby stream. The mushrooms were hacked from the sides of trees with homemade wooden knives, and the greens were small leafy plants that grew in the clearing between the forest and our cathedral of trees. Everything was delicious. I felt satisfied from the back of my mind down into my toes.

When the dinner was over, Thrombone came out with honey wine for the grown-ups and honeyed water for the girls. Reggie drank his wine too quickly and got drunk. He pulled himself up and declared that he was going out to find a drum.

“Now is the time for stories, my friends,” Juan Thrombone said in a singsong voice. “Telling the tales keeps them from sneaking up on you when you’re not looking. When you’re not looking.”

The girls laughed. Alacrity held Wanita in her lap. All her heroism and command had faded now that she didn’t need it. She was our charge again, her mother’s little girl.

Thrombone went to a hollow below Number Three and retrieved a dozen homemade beeswax candles. The candles were thick shapeless globs encrusted with gravel. We placed them around our campsite, letting Wanita light them because Addy wouldn’t let her play with the campfire.

We all settled in on one side of the fire, with Thrombone squatting down from us on the other side.

“What will it be, Chance? What do you want me to tell?”

“Why me?” I asked. “I don’t know your stories. You could just make one up.”

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said. Her head in Addy’s lap, she shoved her feet under the tent of my knees. Wanita leaned on me from the other side. Addy draped a sleeping bag over our shoulders.

Juan Thrombone’s eyes were like two more candles in the night.

I was fearful that he might really answer any question I had. I was tired of knowledge and truth.

“What is the blue light?” I asked finally.

Juan Thrombone laughed and rolled on his back. He rocked on his spine while grabbing his knees and let out a howl.

“Ho-ho, Chance the gamesman. Chance the checkmater. Chance the opponent till the end.”

The children laughed and Addy smiled.

I didn’t find his childishness funny.

Thrombone rolled to a squatting position in an agile move. He looked at me for a long time before speaking again.

“You think to ask me a question you already know the answer to, hombre. You think you know how the light traveled, how it bonded and took. You think that I will just repeat the words of your dead teacher. You do not want to know anything more, but you lost the gambit and so I will tell you more.

“Your question, my friend, should have been another. Because asking about blue light is like asking about blood when you have never seen an animal. How can you know about a man’s blood, its magic, if you have never seen him laughing and you’ve never heard him cry?”

Juan Thrombone settled easily on crossed legs and held out his hands as if to say, Isn’t that true?

“You must, it is clear, ask about life and not light or blood. Because life holds them both like the canvas holds paint.”

I was completely in his spell by then. The words and their rhythm charmed me like the sunlight had that day.

“Blue light or yellow or red, it doesn’t matter. They’re all like blood. Blood that sustains you, blood that builds. But blood in a bottle, or blood on the ground, is not a man, can’t be, but only a promise without an ear to hear.”

Holding up an educating finger, he said, “All the world is music, you see. There is music in atoms and music in suns. That is the range of a scale that you can see and read. There is music in emptiness and silence between. Everything is singing all the time, all the time. Singing and calling for what is missing. Your science calls it gravity, but the gods call it dance. They dance and fornicate; they listen and sing. They call to distant flowers when buds ring out. Because, you see, it is not only atoms and suns that vibrate in tune. Rocks sing, as do water and air. The molecules that build blood and men also build the wasp; these too sing a minor note that travels throughout the stars. Greedy little ditties that repeat and repeat again and again the same silly melodies. They change, but very slowly, chattering, ‘me me me me me me me me me...’ ” He repeated the word maybe a hundred times, lowering his head to the ground as he did so. He smiled when he was finished and shook his head sadly. The next instant he was on his feet holding his hands out in the question Why?

“So much boring chatter for one so deep. Of course, the iron atom will say only his name. Water too and even granite or glass. Because iron has only one note; water two, maybe three. But you, my friend, make the violin seem simple. You are a song of the gods in the mouth of a fool. You can’t help it. So much promise in one so weak attracts disease.”

Juan Thrombone sat again and smiled. We looked at each other, and even though my head had begun to ache from the words, which seemed to go directly into my mind, I asked, “Are you saying that blue light is a sickness? That one who sees the light is sick?”

“Sick?” Thrombone said, chuckling softly. “No. But weak as kittens in a cave full of stones. They feel mighty, but there is no strength in them. Only ambition and youth. They cannot hunt or mul-ti-ply. Only can they play like the big cat who has left the den carrying their milk in her udders.”

“What do you mean? Alacrity was born from Ordé and Addy.”

“First Light,” Thrombone’s eyes filled with fondness. “Her child is rare but no different from the rest. The next generation is coming, but not yet. Maybe never. Maybe not at all.”

By then I wanted to know everything that the little madman knew.

“So this isn’t what Ordé said?” I asked. “This isn’t the beginning of the change of the world?”

“It might be some kind of start,” he answered. “But this is story-time and not school.”

“But—” I started to say.

“I have answered your question, and now you need to ask another. Not about blue light, though. With that I am through.”

“Why didn’t you want us to come here?” Alacrity asked. “Why’d you send those butterflies to hurt us?”

“Because, little one, I was afraid. I was afraid that Death would sniff at you even here and come to kill the puppy trees as he did their big mama redwood. I was afraid and so I sent my butterflies to sting you with their love.” Juan Thrombone almost lost his benign smile for a moment. “But when you fought so hard and killed so many I” — He held his palm to his lips and sucked suddenly, pulling his hand away from his mouth. This caused the same thumping in the air that had rendered the butterflies, and me, unconscious. This sound, however, wasn’t as violent as the first — “so you wouldn’t kill all of my beautiful friends.”

“What did those butterflies do to the children?” Addy asked.

Thrombone smiled again, holding up the baby finger of his left hand to the point at his left eye.

“You mean to ask,” our odd host lectured, “what are those butterflies that they could do what they did? But the answer is no story. I made water every day in a clearing of rotten wood. In a year there were wild flowers everywhere. In another year there were butterflies. From butterfly to worm, and then from the worm rose the creatures that suckled on blue.”

Thrombone smiled to himself.

“Maybe it is a story,” he said.

Wanita asked, “Then why did you let us come if you was scared? Ain’t you scared no more?”

Thrombone was looking into Addy’s eyes at that moment. She stared back while running her finger down the healing wound on her face.

“I can hear people’s dreams also, Dreamer. I can hear all living things when they dream. Dogs and trees and fish and bears. I can speak to dreamers. I spoke to all of you. I knew in our talks that you were not bad — at least, not yet. And I was lonely, but that’s not why I let you pass.”

“Why then?” Wanita asked again.

“To sleep with you, Dreamer.”

“Say what?” That was me. “Hey, man, I know you livin’ up here with the bears and shit, but down the hill, in civilization, no matter if you got blue light or Thunderbird wine, men sleeping with little girls is just not happenin’.” I was angry and used street talk like a hapless frog puffing up his throat to bluff his way.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Juan said. If he was in any way intimidated, he hid it well. “You are right, of course. I’ve been up here so long that I forget how to talk. I don’t mean sex. I like sex. I want sex. But for Wanita, it is only her dreams I wish to share. I can hear dreams, but she — she can travel in them, she can see with them. Her dreams are the most beautiful I have ever seen.”

I was not convinced. I made up my mind right then to tuck Wanita in every night — and to sleep close by.

Bomp bomp bomp resounded in the air. Bomp de bomp. Bomp de bomp.

“It’s Reggie!” Alacrity cried.

The sound came closer and closer. Finally Reggie emerged from the woods with a big hollow log in his arms. He beat the drum with a thick branch.

Thrombone leaped up and so did Addy and the girls. They all danced and laughed happily. No one else seemed to feel that the world was falling apart. No one else seemed afraid of what might happen in the days to come.

I fed the fire while my friends and Juan Thrombone danced. Reggie beat his drum with an amazing ear for someone untrained. They were all wild and abandoned, but Alacrity was by far the most primal. Her movements were like nothing except maybe the flames I fed. She leaped and gesticulated, bounced and sang out. Her whiteness was fearful to see. Her intensity, I feared, was the future of the world.

The dancing went on for quite a while longer. Finally Addy tired, and Juan followed her back to the fire. Smiling and happy, they sat there next to me. I felt more lonely than ever.

“The trees are not only a wall of wood and root,” Juan was saying later on, after much honey wine, “but they sing a dull song I taught them. That song hides the puppy trees and you and me. They also call for people like you, First Light” — he was referring to Addy, he was holding her hand — “humans half dipped blue. I wanted them to come help me tend the trees and the forest.”

“Why would the trees need tending?” I asked. “It is a forest, isn’t it? The trees can get along on their own.”

“But these are special trees,” the little woodsman replied.

“What kind of special trees?”

Juan Thrombone turned his full attention upon me then. In his eyes I saw a vastness across which, I imagined, a strong wind blew. His smile didn’t seem relevant to the power in those eyes, but he smiled anyway and said, “There are two kinds of trees that are special. One because they can sing and the other because they roar.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard a call, did you not?” he asked.

The storm in his gaze seemed to grow in power.

“That call,” he continued, “was from a thousand trees whose parents were white firs. I grafted them so they could sing so sweet and high. They sing like the wind, only higher. They sing like the sun before dawn.”

“The wind and the sun,” Addy said. “Are those the two kinds?”

“No, First Light,” Juan said gently. “The white firs sing of the sun and wind. And then there are the puppy trees.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“Deep bass ramblers. Children of what you call blue light but, like Alacrity, born here. They are orphans and I tend them. They rumble like bullfrogs and tickle Earth’s soul.”

“And we’re here to tend them?” I asked.

“No,” he said. The tone of his voice would have knocked me down if I wasn’t already seated. “The puppy trees, the deep ramblers, might mistake you for dinner and suck the life from your bones. Stay away from them. You were summoned here to tend the special white firs, the high singers, the maskers of blue. The ones that called you. They called and you came.”

“We did,” I said. “But you didn’t want the children. You wanted Addy, but you wanted her to leave Alacrity behind.”

I wanted Addy to see him for what he was.

“I never expected that those of such power, even so young, would follow those so weak. I didn’t know if I could protect them and the puppy trees too. The thing out there, the one you call Gray Man. He wants only to kill. I thought that all of us together here would make too much noise, would bring him here.”

“And so he could be on the way here right now?” I said, happy that I now had a way to get my friends to leave.

“He might be. He might.” Juan cocked his ear upward. “But I don’t hear him coming. No, I don’t.”

“But he could be coming,” I said. “He could be, and you just don’t hear it yet. He could come on us in our sleep up here. He could kill us in our sleep. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

I looked around at my companions and friends. The children had stopped their dancing to listen. They were all looking to Juan Thrombone. It was he who they turned to for answers now. It was he whom they trusted.

“You can leave if you want to,” Juan said to me. “You are welcome if you care to stay. The Gray Man may not know where we are; he may have changed also. This could well be true.”

“I’m staying,” Reggie said. “It’s nice here. It’s the safest place in the whole world.”

“Me too,” Wanita said.

“Please stay, Chance,” Alacrity whined. “Please stay with us here. Please.”

I looked at Addy. Her fingers were laced with Juan Thrombone’s. She held my eyes a moment and then looked away.

“I’m staying for a while at least, Chance. I’m tired and sick still. And I can’t think of anywhere else to go.”

“And there will be others,” Juan said. “More people will come to us over the weeks and days. The song you heard goes like a ribbon on the wind, blowing here and there. Some will hear it. A few will come. And when they get here, there’s an old town down by the stream. It’s a ghost town now, but soon they will come and we can be happy, Last Chance, for a while more.”

Addy snuggled down and put her head against Juan’s shoulder. That’s what broke my will. He had taken everything that I had left with his funny way of talking and his eyes like forever.

“Okay,” I said. “All right, I’ll stay for a few days more. At least until Addy is better. Then we can talk about it again.”

And with that, something eased in me. A pressure, a weight. I gave in to the spell of Juan Thrombone and his magical wood. Reggie began playing his drum again and we all danced. Somewhere in the early hours of the morning Juan and Addy disappeared. I found them the next day naked and wrapped in each other’s arms under the hanging shingles of Number One. They were together from that day on.

Twenty-five

At first I stayed because of the children. But within the first month I knew that they were safe with Addy and her man. After that I just didn’t know where to go. Juan offered to walk me out of the wood if I wanted to leave. But the truth was, I wanted him to leave. Sometimes he’d go away for days at a time. I’d begin to hope that he’d hurt himself or maybe just decided to go elsewhere. I’d try to comfort Addy at those times, telling her that she didn’t have to worry.

I wanted Addy then. It had never crossed my mind before. She was Ordé’s woman to begin with, and later, while we fled the threat of Gray Man, I was too worried even to think about love. But once we were settled in Treaty, I wanted her to choose me over Juan. I wanted her to see that he was unstable but that I was constant.

But she never worried when Juan was gone.

“He’ll be back, Chance,” she’d say with a dreamy look on her face. “He’ll come back to me and he’ll have great stories to tell.”

Not only had her wound healed but her skin had softened, the little red veins in her eyes had cleared. She started singing songs and working with strange leaves, tree needles actually, and barks that Juan brought for her to cook in a huge stone tub that appeared one day next to Number Nine.

“My friends brought it in the night,” he told me when I asked how the big hollow rock got there.

Juan taught Addy how to cook the leaves and wood and how to pound the mixture with a pestle the size of a baseball bat. She worked at it for days until the resulting green paste was thick. Then she spread out the mixture on a big stone that lay in the field separating the cathedral of Treaty from the surrounding woods. The paste dried into an extremely thin and seemingly delicate blue-green material. It was like rice paper, only it wouldn’t tear or decompose. From this cloth Addy made our clothes. She didn’t sew the seams but used wooden buttons with bearhair ties that Juan collected for her.

“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.

“Alacrity” issued from my lips.

The next thing I knew, I was running. Addy and Reggie and Wanita were behind me. I was the first to reach her, though. I picked her up and hugged her hard. The squeeze she gave me nearly broke my spine.

She hollered in my ear and threw me around.

“Hi, everybody!” she yelled.

We all cheered and capered, a lost tribe of primitives secreted beyond the reach of sanity.

“Bones made me fight with the bears,” Alacrity said as we sat around the fire that night. Clothed only in her bearskin robe, she sat at my side, holding my arms, lacing her fingers with mine. A dark circle of dried food was etched around her full lips. “First it was just a little one. We wrestled for a hour almost, but then I pulled her ears so hard that she ran away. I wouldn’t have done that, but she clawed me on my jaw and that made me mad.”

Juan Thrombone was snoring under Number One while the rest of us sat around the fire under Twelve.

“But then,” Alacrity continued, “after I would fight, I’d get real tired and have to go to sleep. And all the bears were growling. And when I’d wake up there’d be another bear, only a little bigger, and then I’d fight again. But every time I was stronger and knew how to fight better. Sometimes I’d get a broken leg. Sometimes I’d get cut real bad. But the only scar was from the first time. Bones said it was first blood, and he put special dirt in it while I was asleep so it wouldn’t go away. He said that I should always remember first blood because I was a warrior, and warriors had to remember that they could be hurt too.

“Finally I had to fight Brutus.”

“Who’s that?” Wanita cried.

“Brutus was that big black bear that chased us here. He always hated me because I broke his nose. He’s always been waiting around here to get me, only Bones wouldn’t let him until we had the contest. ’Cause, you see, Bones said that I had to grow in order to feel my power. He said that I was always so restless because I needed to be big to do what I need to do. And so after each time I’d sleep, I got bigger. And when I was all grown up, I had to have a fight to the death with Brutus because that would be my bap... bap...”

“Baptism,” Addy said.

“Yeah,” Alacrity agreed. “Baptism.”

“Uh-huh.” Wanita nodded and looked into her friend’s eyes. “That’s ’cause you gotta be fightin’ an’ stuff. I seen that. I seen it, Alacrity. You were beautiful and real mad.”

“He came at me real fast,” Alacrity said. “But I jumped high and landed on his back. Then I pulled his ears and jumped off when he tried to crush me on a tree. And then I got me a stick and he kept comin’, but I’d keep jumpin’ outta the way and hittin’ ’im on the neck and stuff. One time he caught me and pushed me down with his paws and he cut my chest, but I rolled away when he got offa me for a second. And then I hit him across the face and he couldn’t see nuthin’. And so then I hit him on the head with a rock and he fell down and rolled around ’cause he couldn’t see and his head hurt.” Alacrity stopped for a moment then and looked very serious.

“So you beat ’im,” Wanita cried. “You won.”

“Bones said that I had to kill Brutus if I was the winner,” the warrior said. “He said that I had to be able to kill my enemy, and then we would eat his liver for a feast.”

“Did you kill him?” Wanita asked fearfully.

“I dug my fingers in his neck and tore out his windpipe, uh-huh, yeah.”

I looked closer at the dark circle around her lips. What frightened me was that she hadn’t washed off the grisly trophy.

We were all quiet after that. The only sound that could be heard was Juan Thrombone’s snoring more than a thousand feet away.

Twenty-six

Alacrity’s change had a strong effect on Reggie. He began stalking her from a distance. When she’d go down to the stream to bathe with Wanita, Reggie could always be found somewhere nearby — watching. He brooded in her presence and said almost nothing to her directly. Sometimes he’d say things to Wanita while Alacrity stood there.

“She better wear a shirt if she gonna be climbin’, else it’s gonna be tittie trees,” he said many times, laughing thickly to punctuate his bad joke.

Alacrity was confused by Reggie’s behavior. They’d always been friends. She looked up to him. He showed her about pathfinding and made her little toys and trinkets out of wood.

Of course, Alacrity’s behavior didn’t help things any. She was still a child in many ways, moving around and dancing with no sense of shame. She liked her tree-cloth dresses short so that she could move easily and often went naked, or nearly so, like her mother.

Reggie spent even more time behind Number Seven.

The tension in the air was unsettling, and I found myself leaving the cathedral during the day to go out among the trees.

The special white firs around Treaty gave off a sense of deep calm. Juan had said that he planted many of them and helped them grow quickly, as he’d done with Alacrity.

“I got ’em all over here. They’re kinda like you, Last Chance — half-light and free.”

I learned not to ask about his pronouncements. Whatever he knew about me, he could keep to himself.

“I know about the song trees, the white firs, but where are these puppy trees that you keep talking about?”

“Where they belong, my friend. Where they belong.”

One day I left the camp early to go out among the trees. It was easy to pick out a tree that Juan had brought along because of the slight singing vibration it gave off. Sitting under the boughs of one of those young firs, I had the feeling of motion and peace. It was the opposite of being in a convertible racing down a straight road on a flat plain; even though I was standing still, there was the illusion of moving.

I was sitting in a grove of those special trees, wishing that I had brought my History along, when Alacrity came up. She wore a short dress of tree cloth with wooden buttons down the side. She bent down to lay her bow and arrows against the tree. You could see most of her powerful, long legs, and her breasts seemed to point wherever she happened to be looking.

She turned to me then.

“Hi, Chance,” she said. Then she moved close just like the child she still was.

“Hey, Alacrity. What’s goin’ on?”

“Nuthin’,” she said.

We sat there for a few moments, looking into space.

“When I was out there with Bones,” Alacrity said, “I could hear you calling for me. I could hear you when I was sleeping and I could feel myself gettin’ bigger and stronger. And I could hear you calling for me, and all I wanted was to come back here to you.”

She put her hand on the inside of my thigh.

“I wanted you to do it to me,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

“Uh-huh.” Her hand moved up slightly. I was very aware that the fabric of my tree-cloth pants was no thicker than skin.

“What do you want now?” I asked.

It was a first kiss for her. A first kiss as a woman, that is. She pushed her lips against mine and shivered. I wanted to believe that she was just a young woman coming to a man she thought she could trust.

It was a sweet kiss, and I needed love.

But Alacrity had been like a little niece to me only a few weeks before. I wanted her but had no intention of giving in to that desire. I’d like to say that I pushed her away and told her that there would be other men for her. But other circumstances separated us that day.

“You guys better stop that!” he shouted.

Alacrity was on her feet, nocking her arrow in the direction of the shout. Through the dense tangle of leaves, maybe sixty yards away, I could see a form that I knew had to be Reggie. With the impossible speed of a dream, Alacrity pulled and let her arrow fly.

The body through the trees lunged for cover more quickly than I would have imagined possible, but the shout of pain told me that Alacrity’s speed had been greater.

Reggie was up in a moment, hobbling away.

“I’ll kill you!” Alacrity cried. She had nocked another arrow.

Reggie screamed.

I jumped, grabbing the bow and throwing my body weight against the enraged girl. The bow snapped and I fell. Alacrity started running in the direction that Reggie had fled, but I managed to grab her foot and topple her.

She went down but was up in an instant. I grabbed her again; she turned and threw me up against a tree. With one hand against my chest, Alacrity hefted a large wooden knife in the other. The killing rage that shook her dampened any possibility for love. I could see that this was the passion sex brought up in her.

I was used to wildflowers and red wine, not arrows and knives.

“Fuck!” Alacrity shouted in my face.

She turned away from me and stalked off into the woods. I wasn’t worried about Reggie anymore. It looked as though the arrow had only caught him in the thigh, and I knew Alacrity wouldn’t be able to find him once he got out of sight.

The surrounding white firs hummed a sweet counterpoint to my panic. But the music was no balm for my pain. I was flesh in the face of iron blades; I was a Christian at the mercy of lions. I was at the center of history and paying the price. I shivered when I thought of how quickly Alacrity had decided to kill her friend. I tried to think of something to do about it, but nothing came to mind. The aftermath of my fright left me drowsy. I closed my eyes, and sleep followed me into the dark.

When I returned to the camp that night, Reggie had been there but was gone again. Addy said that he claimed his wound had come from a fall. She hadn’t believed him, but he was gone before Juan or I had returned.

Alacrity was back late. She was sullen and went to sleep soon.

We didn’t see Reggie again for days. He made his presence known, though, through missing food and the disappearance of his sleeping bag.

Silence prevailed over those days. Wanita was quiet, not even talking about her dreams. Addy sat for hours with her daughter, cooking and working with tree cloth. Only Juan Thrombone seemed unaffected by the mood. He spent most of his time preparing for the new citizens of Treaty.

He kept saying that people like me and Addy — half-light and free — would soon be coming.

Bones was always returning from or going to the abandoned town about five miles away. It had been a mining town, just three broken-down buildings on one side of a creek that must have once been a road. There was a hotel, a church, and what might have been a barn or a dance hall. Juan was working on them, filling in cracks, bringing bear pelts and big granite pots.

I once saw him moving a great pot by using bears as beasts of burden. He led them with simple reins made from various animal hairs and deer leather. The ropes he used were also from hair and of thickly braided tree cloth. It was quite a sight, seeing a team of six huge bears working in unison pulling the four-foot-high oblong stone bowl.

That particular morning I had been out looking for Reggie. I hadn’t seen him since the day in the singing grove. I heard sounds pretty far away and followed them. When I got there, I saw the team of bears pulling the stone bowl down a gully of small trees. Juan Thrombone sat atop the bowl, driving the grunting bears. All around them were butterflies. Thousands of butterflies. Some were big like the ones that attacked us, but many were small and normal-looking. They seemed to be urging the bears and Thrombone on.

“Hurry up, bears!” Juan Thrombone barked. “The sooner we get there the sooner you get your honey!”

I followed them for the rest of the morning. There was nothing else to do. They pulled and yanked, growled and roared for more than three hours until coming to the town of Treaty deep in a cedar grove.

When they got the big bowl out in front of the barnlike structure, Juan laid out six big wooden bowls, filling each with honey from a large deerskin pouch. The bears went at the sweet liquid and were instantly carpeted with butterflies.

“Pretty, huh?”

The voice startled me. I gasped just like a frightened starlet in a bad western.

“Hey,” Alacrity said.

“Hey,” I whispered back.

We watched for a while, and then she jerked her head to indicate that we should leave. I followed her down a path that I hadn’t noticed before. She was wearing a pair of her mother’s jeans and one of my plaid shirts.

We walked for a long time, saying absolutely nothing. For more than an hour we made a gradual climb but then began to descend. The terrain was pretty rough, and through most of it there was no path. Every footfall was a different motion, a new gesture. Following Alacrity through that rough terrain was like going through the motions of some primeval prayer and dance.

After maybe two hours more she stopped.

“It’s just up there,” she said.

“What?” I was breathing hard and didn’t want to take another step.

“You got to get ready now, Chance,” she said instead of answering my question.

“Ready for what?”

“Just try to keep calm now; it’s just up here. Right after we go between these trees.”

We were in a grove of Juan Thrombone’s singing firs. They formed a blockade and a doorway. Alacrity pushed her way through the sapling trunks. Actually, the trees themselves seemed to move apart for her. We went up through into a large space, a grove of young sequoias. Young, but what trees they were.

There were two dozen forty-foot sequoias spaced out around the clearing. Each one was magnificent in its own birthright, but what dazzled me was something else. Where the singing trees of Juan Thrombone chanted in high-pitched tones like castrati, these great trees hummed out a psalm so deep that I was forced to my knees. They were, I was sure, the choir of Earth. Their deep rumbling melody told me everything. They were the hymn of unbroken history back so far that they predated the light that illuminated them.

I was there on my knees outside of the circle of trees. I named them instantly — the Bellowing Trees of Earth.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said to me. “I wanna show you the throne.”

“No,” I croaked.

“Why not?”

“I can’t.” I swallowed the words. I didn’t think she understood me. “I can’t,” I said again.

“But it’s a throne. You’ll really like it.”

I sobbed but couldn’t say any more. Alacrity knelt beside me and put her arms around me. Instinctively she brought my head to her breast. Her strength and warmth, the powerful beating of her heart, revived me some. I held on tight and her embrace tightened too.

As sad and suicidal as I had been in San Francisco, I never even once thought that there could have been too much beauty. But there with those trees, in that beautiful warrior woman’s arms, I felt too small to enjoy the pleasure offered me.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said again. “Come with me.”

She pulled me to my feet, and we walked through the chorus of gods. The music that emanated was less sound and more a bone-shaking vibration. A deep longing for friction was satisfied somewhere that I hadn’t known existed. My balance was shaky, the ground seemed to shift now and then. The trees didn’t appear to be limited by space at all. They were everywhere at once.

Alacrity walked with her arm around my waist. She led me to the largest tree toward the other side of the grove. There was an opening shaped like a frozen black flame in its bark. The slit was large enough for a man to go into, but not far.

“Sit in it,” Alacrity told me. “Sit down in it.”

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.

Twenty-seven

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.

I was about to turn around and go back to the cathedral when I was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground. Two men stood over me. One held my legs while the other sat on my chest. The one on my chest was badly scarred and wore an eyepatch. He hefted a stone about the size of an ostrich egg in his left hand.

“Scream or fight, and I crack your head,” the scarred man said.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

He stood up off my chest then, and the other man released my legs. I stood up to meet my attackers. I wasn’t afraid. I hadn’t known fear since coming to Treaty. Not the fear of being hurt, anyway. I was more curious to know who had come so far into Treaty without being expelled by bear or tree or butterfly.

They were an odd pair. The one who held my legs had the frame for a powerful build but had no meat on his bones. He was of medium height with shriveled black skin. His nose was running, and the whites of his eyes were bright pink. Even though it was cold, he wore only a T-shirt.

His companion was a race of his own. He wore black leather shoes and a long gray trench coat that had once been black. The scars across his face were in a crosshatched pattern almost regular enough to be a grisly design. He had a hard leather cone for an eyepatch over his right eye and a leather strap across his lower lip. There was something familiar about his good eye.

“Chance?” the scarred man asked.

“Who are you?” I replied.

“Miles Barber.”

My skin went cold. The thought that the detective could have traced me all that way, when I didn’t even know where I was, disoriented me. For the first time in my life I considered killing a man. Murder tightened my jaw and clenched my fist. Barber could hardly see, and the man he was with seemed weak and sick. It had taken the two of them to topple me unawares.

The muscle in my right forearm twitched violently.

“Why are you here, Detective?”

“Ex-detective. I was retired because of my...” He finished the sentence by gesturing at his face. “But we’re here because we heard somethin’. Mackie and me heard it.”

“You?” I couldn’t hide the shock. “How? You thought that Ordé was an idiot and a criminal. How could you hear anything?”

“I can feel pain,” the ex-detective said. “I feel it every second of every day. I feel it on my skin, in my bones, and in my soul, whatever that is.”

Barber then produced a.38 pistol, ending any lingering thoughts of murder.

“Where is he?” Barber demanded.

“Hey, man. Point that somewhere else.” I looked over to my fellow black man for support, but Mackie’s wasted face held no hope and little interest.

“Don’t play with me, son.” Barber gestured dangerously with his pistol. “I don’t have a shield anymore, and that means you don’t either.”

“Who?”

“No name. Just Gray Man.”

Laughter was the best answer I could give.

I brought Barber and Mackie Allitar to the cathedral. No one there was very surprised to see new citizens for Bones’s town. Wanita even knew their names before she was told.

“Why didn’t you tell me they were coming?” I asked the dreamer.

“You already knew people was gonna come,” she said. “And it’s not polite to tell people’s names. They like to do that themselves.”

“Did you see any bears?” Reggie asked Mackie.

“Huh?” the escaped convict asked. He was looking at Wanita with his nostrils opened wide.

“Did you see any bears?” Alacrity repeated the question.

“Nuh-uh. I mean, we heard some shit like that but we ain’t seen nuthin’.”

“But the bears chase everybody,” Alacrity said. She stood up, which by itself was a threat.

“Don’t be killing him if the man is not your enemy, child,” Juan Thrombone said, appearing from somewhere out past Number Ten. “The bears know the scent of our friends now. They can move unmolested. They come for gardening, not for gutting.”

“But they look bad.” Alacrity always told the truth and had never even heard of manners.

Bones walked up to her and cupped his hands around her face. “And you look like an angel. But we all know to be afraid when you do not smile.”

Alacrity’s blush and grin put us all at ease.

“I am Juan Thrombone,” Bones said to his guests. “And you are Mackie and Miles. I will take you to your lodging. The rooms are ready, and you even have some neighbors.”

Bones looked deeply into the eyes of the ex-detective and smiled.

“One need not look for death, Miles and Miles. He is forever seeking you.”

The policeman shuddered.

“Come,” Juan said. “Let us find your new home.”

I followed the three without being invited. On the way Mackie was silent, Barber was sullen, and Bones was full of incomprehensible puns and jokes. He had good laughs at the expense of pine needles and sunlight and winter winds out of the sea.

Mackie was startled to see Gerin Reed, his old warden, at the doorway of the ramshackle hotel in the makeshift town of Treaty. But he was put at ease when the warden smiled and shook his hand.

“Mackie, isn’t it?” the warden asked.

“They got the blood drug here?” were Mackie’s first words.

“Come on,” Reed said. “Let me show you guys to some rooms. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Twenty-eight

Six weeks after the ex-detective and the escaped convict came to Treaty, I saw Gerin Reed and Juan Thrombone picking their way through the deep woods. This was not an unusual sight. The onetime warden and the gardener were fast friends from the first day they met. Gerin could listen to Bones for hours without getting tired and without needing any of Bones’s odd phrases or jokes clarified.

Just a few minutes of the little brown man’s words and telepathy left me gasping for silence. But not Gerin Reed. He basked in the power of Juan Thrombone. And I suspect that the little gardener was lonely for someone, a friend, to hear him. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that he brought so many half-lights into his presence.

Full Blues didn’t understand Bones any better than I did. They struggled trying to decipher their nature, procreate, and change the world to fit their image. But they rarely laughed or played. At first I thought it was because they were no longer human, that they had become in some way the Platonic ideals. These ideals, being beyond human idealism, had turned in on themselves, and so you had the philosopher without humanity, the lover who felt no love. Of course, there were Blues like Eileen Martel and Phyllis Yamauchi who were friendly, but even they seemed to be following some complex inner compulsion, some drive that seemed to be more instinctual than it was enlightened.

But Juan Thrombone did laugh and play. He capered and was, it seemed, haphazard about what he believed and said. He was more human than the other Blues. Instead of a mere concept like Love or Death, he had a personality. He loved Addy as any man would a woman.

Bones was a secret beyond the secrets held in blue light. He was the key and that, finally, was why I stayed close to him. I might have stayed anyway — because of Death. I believed Reggie when he said that Treaty was the safest place on Earth. I believed him mainly because of Bones and his great bellowing sequoias.

One day while thinking of those trees, I asked Bones if he had made the great redwood’s seeds into trees because most of the Blues were infertile and he wanted to change that.

He answered, “No, Last Chance. I am not a midwife. I loved the song and I knew that it would end. I was a man who became light and then a light who became man. I don’t like the sting of death, but neither do I need to see the world transformed. A little song and a good laugh, a dream of far away and I am satisfied.”

I could have fallen down on my knees and asked him for the truth for me right then, but I knew that he would only leave me there.

The only way I could learn what I needed to from Bones was to observe him. I decided to follow him and Gerin Reed on the way through the thick brush and woods that day. The smaller Thrombone was moving fast, making it hard for his friend to keep up. Bones wasn’t laughing or joking either. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t saying anything at all.

They covered ground quickly and, after quite some time, entered a part of the forest that was familiar to me. This was unusual because of two things. One, I’m a city boy with no woodlore. Two, my second sight makes everything I see different no matter how many times I see it. I could see a tree a thousand times, and in every encounter, the tree would have something new to say to me.

But that particular grove of white firs was different. As Bones and Gerin Reed made their way, I began to feel dread. It wasn’t until a colorful wing flitted past my face that I realized we were under one of the deadly canopies of Blue-killing butterflies.

Above me were tens of thousands of brightly colored wings. They moved continually, resembling a masterfully created kaleidoscope that never repeats an image. I was captivated by the undulating blanket of their wings. For a moment I was lost in their performance. The wisp of blue in my veins seemed to flutter along with them. If I hadn’t heard the plaintive note of human despair, I might have died there watching the colors.

As it was, I tried to turn to see where the cry had come from and found that I was on my knees. Bones and Gerin were nowhere to be seen. I tried to get up, but my first attempt failed. The second try got me to my feet, but I was unsteady.

A loud moan could be heard through the woods.

I stumbled off in that direction.

Upon reaching the source of the wail, I found Bones and Reed hunkered down over two butterfly-encrusted bodies in a clearing. Juan was picking off the deadly fliers by their wings. He tossed each insect into the air and blew on it. That was enough to make the creature float away.

When I came out from the cover of trees to approach my friends, a woman’s voice called out in wordless surprise. I realized that there was a third person there, a young woman who had also been on her knees and hidden from my view by the two men.

“It’s all right, little one,” Thrombone crooned, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He’s our friend.”

By then I had reached them. The two bodies looked to me like corpses. The man had white skin with straggly long dirty blond hair and only one arm. The woman, the taller of the two, was lean, strong, and very black. Her coarse hair was straw blond. She opened her eyes as I gazed upon her beauty. I don’t know if I was more surprised by the fact that she was alive or that her eyes were the color of blood and gold.

“Nesta!” the hysterical young woman cried. “Nesta!”

“She’s alive, little one. And full of stories, if I’m not mistaken,” Bones assured the skinny girl.

“Nesta knows everything,” the girl I came to know as Trini said. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway whom Nesta had saved from Claudia Heart’s dying commune.

“Everything.” Bones’s eyes lit up in mock surprise. “Then it is good to have her here. You see, I know nothing — at least nothing important. Maybe we can share secrets and seed trees together.”

Trini seemed to enjoy the little madman’s words. She giggled and ducked her head in a conspiratorial gesture. That’s when the one-armed hippie sprang to life. “Whoa ho!” he shouted and sat straight up.

He aimed a fist straight for Gerin’s head. At the time I wouldn’t have believed that that fist could have dented a cardboard box. Later I realized that Winch Fargo’s fist could kill any mortal man. But Bones blocked the blow and pushed Fargo down with what seemed to be a gentle shove.

“You are safe now,” Thrombone said while looking into Winch’s eyes. “No more darkness. No more running in the night. You are home now. You are free to stay and lie around all day long.”

I don’t know what I expected to issue from that wild-eyed and depraved visage, but the tears surprised me. In the months and years to come, I had little love and less concern for Fargo but I never hated him. I didn’t because of his sad and total abandon at Bones’s promise of sanctuary.

“The children will be happy to be among others like them,” Bones said.

“But you are like us?” Nesta’s statement was more a question man anything else.

“No,” the tiny woodsman replied. “Everything you believe I have forgotten. All you’ll see in me is heart and bone on stone in wood. I am free of your destiny.”

The beautiful black woman frowned and then stood straight up as if she were rising from a nap rather than from near death. She wore a blue-checked work shirt over a black T-shirt with cutoff jeans and heavy hiking boots. Fargo was wearing soiled and torn hospital pajamas that were light green. He was barefoot and smelled strongly of himself.

“I released him because he was in pain,” Nesta Vine said to Miles Barber under the shelter of Number One in the cathedral of trees. It was raining, but we were dry under the man-made shingles of leaves and warm from our fire.

Miles had accepted Mackie Allitar, even helped him to escape police custody, but he took an instant dislike to Winch Fargo, challenging the amazon’s right to help such a man.

“He’s a mass murderer. With him here no one will be safe.”

“You better watch it, prick pig,” Fargo said. “Or I’ll put out that other eye.”

“You see,” Miles turned to me for support.

But before I could think of anything to say, Juan Thrombone spoke up.

“You will respect life and limb in my domain,” Bones said to Fargo. “And in return I will show you how to make your own light. But if you harm anyone here, I will put you where you will never know peace again.”

It was the only threat that I ever heard Bones make. Fargo alternately cowered and glared, but Juan wouldn’t look away.

Finally Fargo said, “Okay. All right. I was just jokin’ anyway.” And then, “Can you really help me keep the shakes down on my own?”

“We are all family here,” Thrombone answered. He stood up and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you will receive what you need. You will sleep with the stars and moon and the sun so bright that never again will you cry or need to put out eyes.”

Somehow it seemed that we all came to a solemn agreement to put aside all differences for a time. It was not that we would like or even trust one another but more that we had agreed to become a small nation committed to our little turf.

Twenty-nine

For a long time no one new came to the town of Treaty or to the cathedral of trees. Preeta and GR (that’s what everybody but Bones called Gerin Reed) pretty much stayed to themselves, but they were friendly.

Reggie was over the moon for Trini. She was hungry for a young man to love her. He no longer had to go behind Number Seven. They spent long hours in the woods running naked and making love. Reggie adored her. He even learned how to make clothes and jewelry to give her.

Trini wasn’t a loud kind of person. She didn’t want to lead and never complained unless something was really wrong. She knew that Nesta and Winch had brought her to a magical place with powers as great as Claudia Heart’s. And so Trini was more deeply moved by Reggie’s protestations of love. She told me that every morning she had to find our Pathfinder and look at him a long time to believe that it wasn’t all just a dream.

Nesta wanted to educate them and the rest of the “children.” She insisted, with varying degrees of success, that they all spend three days a week learning how to read. Reggie and Wanita, Trini, and Alacrity all had to go.

“The written word is where we can all come together,” Nesta said before each class. “Words are thoughts, and thoughts are dreams, and dreams are the dawn of change.”

I asked Bones how two more Blues had gotten to hear his special call.

“Winch Fargo is more like you, Last Chance. A crooked light, a dim light. A creature between here and not. He heard my call and came running like a dog on Teacher’s leash.” Teacher is what he called Nesta Vine. “But now I have changed the call. Now all that the singing trees hide is the blue spoor of the puppy trees and the ones you call Blues.”

“So, no more will come?”

“No. Not so many, I think.”

“So now that we’re here, what do we do?”

“Eat and sleep,” the little brown man said. “Drink and dream, tell stories and kiss. Tend the gardens that we need.”

“What gardens?”

“The puppy trees are growing now. They dream of devouring the sun and tickling the tonsils of Earth. They’re not yet grown-up, but they’ll be loud enough to hear unless we can grow a whole chorus of singing firs to drown out the sounds of hunger.”

“How many trees do we need?”

“Hundreds and then thousands should do.”

“All that? We can’t do all that.”

“Then we’ll do what we can and hope for the rest. I can make you stronger, make you work longer. I have ways to make you a tree farmer.” Bones smiled at me but didn’t share his secret plans. And I didn’t mind waiting to see what he meant.

While I waited, a society had begun to form among the citizens of Treaty. Alacrity fell in love with Nesta Vine. She followed the black amazon around, hanging on her every word and gesture. They ran in the forest together, executing great and small projects, like building a raft or making exotic clothes from the wings of the killer butterflies. They’d often disappear for days at a time. Whether they were lovers in the physical sense I never knew. But next to the looks they had for each other, any passion I’d ever felt was pale and insignificant.

I was a little jealous of that love, but not in the way you might think. I was happy for Alacrity, happy that she had a close friend. But that meant I could rarely see Nesta alone. And being alone with Nesta was what I dreamed about every night.

A few days after she’d arrived in Treaty, Nesta and I took a long walk in the woods together. She was full of stories about places she’d been and times she’d read about. And she was accomplished in dozens of disciplines, arts, and sciences. One was the Chinese medicine called acupuncture. She said that the Chinese needle-and-flame doctors could cure many symptoms that the drug-and-knife doctors of the West couldn’t begin to treat.

“You mean these guys could treat with a pin one of the headaches I get listening to Bones?”

“Give me your left arm” was her answer.

She took me by the upper half of my left arm and applied pressure to two nerve points. It started off by tingling like flesh receiving blood after the circulation had been cut off for a while. I wasn’t even aware of my erection until I looked down and noticed the bulge in my pants.

Nesta smiled while keeping the tingly pressure constant.

“You like that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, really trying to answer her question. “It’s like I don’t really feel it.”

Nesta then released the pressure from one point, touching me lightly with her free hand somewhere on the right side of my neck.

“Do you want to feel it?”

When I nodded she pinched a nerve on my neck, which caused a great deal of pain. I thought that I was going to scream when the ejaculation started. She didn’t keep the pressure on my neck constant. After a painful pinch she’d release for a second or so, then pinch again. And every time, I tensed and ejaculated more.

After the seventh or eighth time I stammered, half laughing, “S-stop. I can’t—”

She gave my neck one more hard nip and then released me with both hands. This left me quivering on the ground at her feet.

Nesta got down on her knees next to me and put her lips near my ear. “Those are pressure points doctors give to women who have not conceived or whose husbands are impotent. It drains the man. Do you feel drained, Chance?”

I nodded, grinning like a fool.

“Then come by and see me night after next and I’ll show you some points that you can pinch on me.”

I spent as many evenings as I could under the tutelage of Nesta Vine. There was never what I’d call love between us, not like the love between either of us and Alacrity. We were more symbiotic in an intellectual and physical way. To be blunt, I needed sex and I needed her knowledge to write my History.

Nesta wanted children and she loved to talk and tell stories. I wasn’t much help, but it wasn’t from a lack of trying. She was childless in the years we were acquainted, and I learned more about blue light from her than from any other source.

“In one sense,” she once told me, “the light is the motivation while blood is the machine. Like gasoline and a car engine. That’s one way to look at it. Bones says that light is more like the chemical reaction needed to motivate a seed, which is the blood. At this point you and I are the root jutting down from the seed.”

“But Bones also told me that blue light is like disease,” I said.

“Or maybe it’s just magic,” Nesta replied; then she kissed me.

I liked her kisses very much. The kisses and pinches. It was a sorrow to me that we never conceived a child. I also lamented the days on end that she and Alacrity would go off together. Sometimes I would catch glimpses of them running naked in the woods or sitting on opposite sides of a small stream from each other speaking in low tones and gazing into each other’s eyes across the distance.

I wasn’t the only one who was disturbed by the friendship between the two young women. Wanita had been Alacrity’s closest friend before Nesta showed up. They had been girls together. When Alacrity had been miraculously transformed into a woman, she still shared her deepest secrets with the Dreamer. But after Nesta showed up, Alacrity either ignored Wanita or treated her as an adult would a child.

Often when I’d be looking after Nesta and Alacrity, I’d see Wanita watching them too. I found myself searching her out sometimes just to say hi to someone who shared my bruised feelings.

This self-pitying concern for Wanita is what made me aware of the threat to Treaty’s only child.

Often when I’d find Wanita I’d also see Mackie Allitar somewhere in the vicinity. I began to worry about her safety and so made it my business to always be aware of the whereabouts of either Mackie or Wanita.

But whenever I stalked Mackie I found Bones there too. Once when I was watching Mackie watch Wanita playing down by the stream, I looked up and saw Bones high in the branches of a tree.

It comforted me to know that Bones was guarding her, but I was afraid that one day he’d be off with his bears or stone pots, that one day I’d wake up late and Mackie Allitar would have raped and murdered my last charge.

I was sure that Mackie wanted to kill Wanita. We all knew that he’d been a convict under ex-Warden Reed.

I followed him all day long. Reluctantly Addy promised to keep Wanita with them at night. She didn’t think there was any threat. I guess she figured that keeping Wanita with her would help my sleep.

Mackie looked old and withered, but I saw him as a threat as great as Gray Man.

No one would listen to me. Reggie and Trini couldn’t see past their own love for each other, and Addy trusted in Bones. Miles Barber was morose and sad most of the time, and when he wasn’t he was in terrible pain that was both physical and in his soul.

“If he breaks the law, I’ll take him in,” the ex-detective told me once. “But until then it’s a free country.”

Nesta sympathized, even worried a little, but she wasn’t a woman of action, at least not the offensive action I thought it would take to save Wanita.

I finally decided to tell Alacrity my fears. I knew that if she thought her little friend was in trouble, she’d kill the offender. There was no law in Treaty. Juan Thrombone for the most part made no judgments over our moral behavior. And even if he did, I didn’t think he would have wanted to go up against Alacrity.

By that time she was an amazon. More than six feet tall and as strong as the bears she ran with. Alacrity practiced with weapons and in hand-to-claw combat continually. She was an excellent archer, and her ability at throwing the wooden knives she made was frightening.

I was sure that Alacrity was the greatest warrior in the history of the world. She was bold and kindhearted, savage and ruthless. The killing stroke was her caress, but her smile could break your heart.

Alacrity had become a hero — no heroine she — and I found myself thinking of her as the solution to the problem I faced. But then I thought that I should be looking out for her, not the other way around. So I hesitated for a few days more, following Allitar while he shadowed Wanita. Juan Thrombone was always somewhere nearby.

One morning Wanita was sitting under a big rock, watching water cascade into a stream. It was a glittering bright day and warm, almost hot. Mackie sat in the shadows, watching her. I sat in deeper shadow, watching them both.

We stayed that way for hours.

The day grew hotter and I started to nod. I worried that I’d wake up to find Wanita’s small body floating in the stream, so I got up and strolled down to where the child sat.

“Hey, Wanita,” I said.

“Hi, Chance.”

“What you doin’?”

“Watchin’ the water.”

“You see anything I don’t see?”

“I don’t know. I guess. I mean, we all do, I guess.”

“You mean, you and Alacrity and Reg and them?” I asked. I was thinking that my being there must have upset Mackie.

“I mean everybody see sumpin’ different,” the child answered. “People an’ bears an’ everybody.”

I sat down next to her. She tossed a pebble into the stream.

The water was very clear and full of the sun. I could feel my second sight, my blood vision, kicking in. There were trails of light beginning to arch and explode in the center of the water. The water itself began to expand. I could feel the beginning of a tale. I let go of the images I beheld, open to the real story, or at least the part of that story I could comprehend.

“You been followin’ me, huh, Chance?”

“Huh?” I realized that there was a big fish taking up the whole inside of my skull cavity. There was a flop in my head, and the fish seemed to swim out through my eyes.

“You been followin’ me,” Wanita said.

“Did you see me?”

Wanita nodded. “In my dream. In my dream I saw you. I saw you followin’ Mackie a’cause he was followin’ me. An’ I seen Bones studyin’ you.”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh. He was studyin’ you ’cause you gotta go to school.”

“But you saw Mackie following you, right?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Then why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“Why should I?”

“Weren’t you scared of him?”

“Uh-uh. I wasn’t scared.”

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause I could see that nuthin’ was gonna happen t’me. He wasn’t gonna hurt me. He just wants my blood, but he’s too scared to take it.”

“He’s scared’a you?” I asked.

“Uh-uh. He’s scared’a my blood. He want it, but he scared’a it too. He used to take Mr. Fargo’s blood, but now Mr. Fargo’s too strong an’ mean. An’ everybody else is too big. He’s more scared’a all’a them, so all he could do is look at me.”

Whenever Wanita talked about her dreams, there was a certainty to her, a truth that was undeniable. If she said that Mackie would not bother her, I knew that it had to be true.

The fish came back into my head. My brain was the water in which he swam. I was the stream and then the sea. I was experiencing the wild ecstasy of evaporation when a thought came into my head, displacing the water that I had become.

“Wanita?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Can you see the future?”

“Uh-huh. Some I can.”

“And you can travel to other places in your dreams?”

“Mostly them places come to me. I mean, they happened a long time ago but they still there.”

“All you have to do is look at them?”

“No,” she said a little impatiently. “It’s not lookin’. You got to close your eyes. It’s more like music that you feel through your skin. It’s like music that you feel.”

“But the things you dream were a long time ago?”

“Yeah, yeah, but they right now too. I mean, nothin’ ever goes away. They just move but they always there.”

And so we sat there while the clipped music of the stream played almost unheard. We were watching the water, and Mackie was somewhere watching us. I was being watched. The whole universe was on automatic replay and no one could hear it but a small black child who wasn’t worried about a thing.

Thirty

Early one morning, not many days after my talk with Wanita, I was approached by Juan Thrombone beneath the shingles of Number Twelve. Wanita was out hunting with Nesta, Alacrity, and Reggie. The tension between Alacrity and Reggie had disappeared since Reggie had taken up with Trini.

“Last Chance,” Bones said. It sounded more like a warning than a greeting that morning.

“Bones.”

“You remember that job I told you about?”

“About growing more singing trees?” I asked, trying to stave off the pressure in my mind, the pressure I always felt when Bones’s attention was on me alone. “I was wondering when you’d get around to that. I mean, sometimes I think I hear the bellowing sequoias in my dreams. And if I can hear them, maybe someone else can.”

He smiled and nodded. “Up high in the mountains. Near a stream in a clearing. There’s a place to make woody songs about just plain old trees. Just cell and seed and decay.”

I winced. “And you want me to go there with you?”

“You,” said Thrombone, “and one or two others. Those who need magic that makes things, magic that you can see.”

“Are we gonna have to talk a lot?” I asked the little woodsmaster. “ ’Cause, I swear, if you talk to me much longer, every blood vessel in my head’s gonna pop.”

Bones brought his finger to his lips, winked, and turned to walk away — I followed.

It was a pleasant summer’s day. Down out of the mountains it would have been hot. But where we were was just perfect. White clouds, blue sky, and the dappled shadows of the sun winked around us as we made it down the tree-covered path that had been blazed by bear and deer and Juan Thrombone. My second sight never worked well in Bones’s presence, but my human senses were good enough on that day.

After a while we came to a small hollow. Therein we found Gerin Reed, Mackie Allitar, and Miles Barber. I thought at the time that it must have been an important moment. A gathering of men with no law but themselves. Each one of us had been exposed indirectly to blue light. Each one of us was crazy in his own way. Here and there in the surrounding woods were singing trees, the trees designed by Juan Thrombone to hide the blue music that emanated from the great bellowing sequoias and the human Blues who lived in our forest hideaway.

Mackie was pacing back and forth across the rough circle of the clearing. Gerin was crouched down, examining a line of large black ants as they followed their tiny destinies. The ex-detective was the only one of the three seated. He was applying pressure with a small twig to various points on his neck and face that Nesta had shown him to ease his constant pain.

When Juan and I entered the circle, they turned their attention to us. Juan raised his hands, and we all came together around him in a tight arc. It was a kind of attention and proximity that I hadn’t felt since my days with the Close Congregation.

“You are more than you think, and we are less,” said Juan Thrombone, a bit more earnest than usual for him — maybe that’s why he stopped and giggled. “We can tote and drop, burn and build, laugh and even war — together. You will all find what you are missing and give what you have taken and save the precious seconds that you throw away on pain.

“Not you, Slender Reed,” he said to Gerin. “All I need from you is what help you can give. But for the man who hurts and the man who cries and the one who guards the doorway but has never seen the throne room. From all of you I want help, and I will give you in return space and time.”

I had no idea what he meant or which of us suffered which affliction, but I was convinced that he wanted to help me, and I wanted that help.

Bones turned abruptly and began a quick march through the thick woods. We all followed. Nobody talked. After a half an hour or so I had a pretty good idea of our destination. I didn’t know many places in the woods of Treaty, but the path to the Bellowing Trees of Earth was burned into my memory.

Sometimes at night I would lie awake listening for the rumble of the throne tree in the ground. I’d promise myself that once I heard it, I would go back to the throne and plunge my body into its depths. It would be my “Thanatopsis,” my becoming a part of the earth and sky, root and bark. And the rumble would come, but only in my sleep. When I awoke, ready to heed the bass call, there would be nothing but clicks of night insects and the rustle of the breeze through the shingles above my head.

We marched for another couple of hours before entering a grove of singing trees. Their vibrations were like laughter, like the tittering of small children just beyond sight in the woods.

“No longer the siren’s call,” Juan Thrombone said to Gerin Reed, just ahead of me.

“Now they’re laughing at Papa Shortribs,” Gerin replied. He loved making fun of Bones only slightly more than Juan liked being made fun of.

The white firs seemed to gather around us. Behind us the wall of trees was impassable while ahead was always open and even beckoning.

And then we were in the open grove of the young sequoias. The first deep note of the Bellowing Trees sounded. All of us half-lights, even Gerin Reed, were struck still. Bones smiled and indicated with his hands that we should sit.

No one complained. We’d been walking for a long time, and that deep note had taken what little energy we had left. Bones passed around a water bag that was made from deerskin and filled with a tea brewed from the leaves of the singing trees. It was the best thing I had ever tasted, clear, sweet, and somehow dense. Juan’s teas always brought vigor and a sense of well-being.

“Today is the day that your lives begin,” Juan Thrombone intoned.

These words combined with the power of his thoughts and the high-pitched laughter of the white firs behind us. Then came the reverberations in the damp and grassy earth. It was far beyond any lecture Ordé preached. Those were ideas held in a voice that captivated and elated. But Bones’s talk was a symphony that by turns amazed and frightened us. No one of his audience of four could sit still. We couldn’t stop fidgeting there on the ground; every now and then one of us would grunt or laugh.

He retold the story of blue light, saying that it was “no more than a seed in the history of a forest.” He told the story of the great redwood and her death. About how he saved her seedlings so that the world would still have music.

“And now we must begin the work of the world,” Bones said in a hushed tone. Everything else went quiet too: the trees, the earth, even the low continual chatter of my senses and the history of my life inside my mind. All that was left was me hearing his words.

“In Dreamer’s dreaming the world falls apart,” he said. “But of faith and future there is no clear sign, only the blunt clubs of death and love, of fire and freezing, and the highest and lowest animal — man.”

A low moan issued from my chest. My three companions also sang.

He had stopped talking, but I listened still. His words washed over me again and again. The words turned to images. Fires and men who walked like dogs, slithered like snakes, who killed for death and not survival. I saw an army of trees holding back the tides of killing man-animals. And I heard the music of death in the ears of Grey Redstar, and I almost laughed his laugh and felt his glee.

“Rise” came a voice.

Whether it was Bones or one of his puppy trees, whether it was word or thought, I was not sure. But I stood along with the murderer, the one-eyed ex-detective, and the cuckold. We walked together into the presence of the greatest creatures the world has ever known.

They welcomed us with deep bass notes that trailed off into one another. A different color was set off in my mind with each note, and the ground, which was flat, seemed to undulate beneath my feet. We were all staggering and squinting at Bones, who led us.

I realized then that these trees of Juan Thrombone’s were a company of gods. They were only whispering right then so as not to demolish our small group. Bones was one of them. I had become so familiar with his laughter and jokes that I’d half forgotten his true nature.

The journey between the trunks of those trees was like walking through an earthquake. Halfway through I was sure that I wouldn’t make it, that I would fall and be consumed by the roots I could feel reaching up and tickling the soles of my boots.

Then we were on the other side, and it was over.

Out of the presence of divinity and onto a grassy field about a hundred yards in diameter. A plateau looking out over a panorama of California forest. The sky was completely covered in high clouds, and a breeze was the only sound.

My heart was thumping and sweat poured down my face.

We were all silent and scared.

“Damn!” Mackie said at last. “What was that?”

“The heart,” said Juan Thrombone. He held up both hands, clenching them into fists and releasing again and again in way of instruction. “The throbbing heart of life. Where the blood of our souls goes for cleansing before the day begins.”

“Why did you bring us?” I asked.

“I’ve already told you.”

“But there aren’t any trees here to tend.”

Instead of answering, the little man walked to the right, all the way to the edge of the field. We followed.

Down the slope there was another clearing that was at the base of a small waterfall. The fall was no more than a trickle, its water slapping down dark mossy rocks into a large stone cistern.

“It’s like a big bucket,” Gerin Reed said.

“What’s it for?” asked Miles Barber in a rare show of curiosity.

A herd of white-tailed deer wandered around the field beneath the stone water tower. A few were licking the water spilling down the sides.

“Gather your buckets,” Bones said to us. He pointed to a small patch of bushes a few feet away.

I was the closest. Nestled under the bushes were four rough-hewn wooden buckets fitted with covers made from a thicker version of the fabric Addy made for our clothes and with handles made from the same material. There was also a long pole, maybe eight feet long, that had a flat wooden disk attached to one end with wooden dowels.

“Come on, come on,” Bones urged.

We each grabbed a heavy bucket and followed Bones down the steep slope toward the deer and water tower.

One or two were startled to see us approaching, but they didn’t bolt. When Bones stepped down among them they took turns nuzzling him with their snouts in greeting. He scratched ears and thumped on their sides. He crooned to them and they seemed pleased.

When the greeting was over, Bones rummaged around behind the water tower and came out with a ladder made from tree-fabric rope and thick branches. He set it up against the side of the stone container.

“Ho, Last Chance,” he cried. “Climb up there and make yourself useful.”

As I scaled the rickety ladder, the deer became agitated. They ran back and forth with excitement. Some even reared on their hind legs with anticipation.

Upon reaching the last rung, I could see down into the big container. It was at least nine feet deep. The sides were blackened, but the water was crystal-clear.

“Pass up the first bucket, Miles and Miles,” Thrombone said.

The deer were running back and forth across the small clearing, stopping at the end of each circuit at the cistern before dashing away again.

The heavy bucket was passed up, and I removed the thick green fabric cover. It had certainly been used as a chamber pot, but it also contained tree needles, bark, and fist-sized globs of thick golden tree sap.

“Pour it in,” Bones said. “Pour it all in.”

I emptied the contents as well as I could into the water and then I submerged the bucket, washing out whatever was stuck to the sides.

“Now hand it back down! Come on! We don’t have all year!”

I was passed up all four buckets in succession. After they were all emptied, I was given the long pole and told to agitate the water as though churning butter. I’d never used a churn before, but I’d seen it done on TV.

We each took a turn mixing the concoction, and then we each took another turn.

I was afraid that the deer would lick the foul substance from the sides of the cistern, but they did not. They kept up their running, though more slowly after a while.

After a couple hours of churning, Juan climbed up the ladder to examine our work. He nodded and told us to pass up the buckets one at a time. He filled each one and passed them back down to us.

We carried the buckets to the upper clearing, spilling a good deal along the way. Juan led us to a spot near the edge of the plateau. He took from his pouch a tiny seed and a small twig, maybe eight inches long. He poked a hole in the soft earth and dropped in the seed. Then he stuck the twig in the ground to mark the planting.

“Keep pouring until I tell you to stop.”

It was hard work carrying buckets of water from the lower to the upper clearing. While we did, Bones planted more seeds and marked them. Each seed was planted about fifteen feet from its nearest neighbor. After about two hours we’d poured twelve buckets of water on each seed.

“Aren’t we going to drown them?” Gerin Reed asked.

“Can you drown a mackerel with the sea?” Thrombone replied.

A half-moon crowned the night by the time we were through. Bones had made a fire that was hot and bright from some tarlike substance that I didn’t recognize. We were all glad to sit after our exertions of the day.

“I have your salaries, gentlemen,” Bones announced.

During that whole day of work not one real discussion occurred between us. There was no feeling between us. Just separate bodies and solitary minds going through the motions of our lives. No one knew what we were doing there, or anywhere.

Then Juan Thrombone produced four small tree-cloth pouches from his larger one. He handed us each a pouch.

Inside mine I found a small dark stone that was cold and slightly moist to the touch. An orange lichen or fungus of some sort was growing along one side.

“A drop or two of water each week and keep it in the pouch. When the moss covers the whole of the stone, scrape it into a bottle of water and let it sit for at least a year.” He pulled out his canteen made from hide and continued, “And then this strong brew have you.”

He passed the bottle around, admonishing us to take only a mouthful. He needn’t have bothered with the warning, though. It had to be at least 150 proof. It was so potent that I had a hard time keeping it down.

The evening had been cool before that sip. But the warmth of the liquor along with the heat of the tar flame warmed me from the inside out. The moon itself seemed to be a source of heat. I loved that moon and I loved the men I’d worked with that day.

I smiled at Mackie Allitar and he saluted the gesture.

My vision began to play tricks on me. The woods around us, lit by the flickering fire, were as bright as day, but the shadows were impenetrable black. In and out of this absolute dark and light moved deer and bear and Juan Thrombone. I had the urge to join them, but when I tried to rise I ended up flat on my belly — laughing.

For a while I struggled with gravity. I was about as coordinated as an infant. I called out and my friends did too. I remember looking up at the moon. I saw the silhouette of a hand reaching for the orb but couldn’t tell then whether it was my hand or not. And then I was asleep.

The dreams were not mine — not completely, at any rate.

I was the poor boy from Kentucky coming in on his cheating wife, offering her a rose. I was a cop branded by the pain of death, sitting in the dark with a man whose name was an alias. Mackie was sitting next to me in an otherwise all-white classroom. He scared the kids so much that they left us alone.

We moved thus back and forth between one another’s memories and desires until we were the best of friends, brothers beyond blood.

I cried when I felt the jangled pain in Miles Barber’s face.

Gerin sat with me as I bled on the floor of the People’s Warehouse.

We climbed mountains together and cried over our greatest losses. We shared our inner fears and lusts. We weren’t alone for the first time that any one of us could remember.

When I felt the light of morning on my face, it was with disappointment. Never had I felt the intimacy of that night of dreams. I didn’t want it to end.

I was covered with a thick tree-cloth blanket, as were the rest of my friends. Juan Thrombone was gone.

I sat up. I could see that my friends were rousing also. Beyond them was the beginning of a new forest. Fifteen young firs had grown at least eighteen inches in the night.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Get up! Get up!”

“How could this be?” Miles Barber wondered out loud.

Gerin Reed was shaking his head.

We were all chattering and amazed when Juan Thrombone appeared among us. I guess he just came out of the woods, but none of us noticed because we were too busy sharing our new friendship and our surprise.

“No more talk, chatty boys,” Thrombone said. “Man your buckets, water your trees. You’ll have no breakfast until their roots are satisfied. It is the future of civilization you hold in your silly dreams.”

Gerin Reed taught us a coal miner’s song that he’d learned from his grandfather. We alternated singing and talking about our dreams.

We doused the saplings, and they grew just that fast. By the end of the day they were five feet apiece. By the end of four days they were twenty feet high.

While we worked, Bones fueled us with venison stews full of wild mushrooms and greens from the woods. Each night we drank stone liquor and passed out and into one another’s dreams.

On the fourth morning we went back through the grove of god trees. It wasn’t nearly so hard, because we held hands and sang.

Everything changed in those few days. Ex-Detective Barber’s pain subsided and his scars, though still there, lost their red rawness. Mackie Allitar gained at least forty pounds, and every ounce seemed to be muscle. Gerin Reed’s eyes became clear and focused, and his perpetual melancholy lessened until it finally disappeared.

I was different on the inside also. I was happy. For the first time I had real friendships. For the next week or so the four half-light men of Treaty were always visiting and talking, playing catch or just taking walks in the woods. Gerin taught Mackie how to fish, and Miles Barber showed me how to write in shorthand.

After ten days we returned to our tree farm. The plateau was empty again. The trees had disappeared, leaving no trace that they had ever been there. And so we replanted. This became our ritual in all seasons and all weathers. We dressed in the blue-green material that Addy and her friends made and grew sentient singing trees and dreamed.

That was the beginning of the groupings among the citizens of Treaty. The primary separation was between half-lights and Blues. But there were more divisions than that among us, among the half-lights especially.

To begin with, each of the half-lights had found what little ability he or she had in very different ways. I had imbibed the whole living blood of Ordé, whereas Mackie had burned out much of his humanity with the crazy and deficient blood of Winch Fargo. Gerin had only tasted the same tainted blood. Addy, on the other hand, had actually shared the living blue blood of her daughter. Of the half-lights only Miles Barber had been transformed by the arcane emanations of Gray Man. No blood had been exchanged, but somehow Gray Man’s dark blue soul had been impressed upon Barber’s mind. Trini had been kissed by Claudia Heart, and Nesta assured us that even a kiss from one of the Blues, under the right circumstances, could afford change. Preeta and later Woolly (the child Gerin and Preeta would have) gained whatever toehold they achieved through the teas and waters, potions, and brews of Juan Thrombone. Bones was a sort of alchemist. He made tars from tree sap and spit that kept insects from biting. No wound could fester under his leaf poultices. He enlightened bears, trained deer, enchanted butterflies, and orchestrated the singing forest.

The whole of our woods, five miles in any direction from Treaty, was deeply touched by Thrombone’s hand. He was the tri-light, as different from his brethren as Gray Man or Winch Fargo.

“I am the forest warden,” he once said. “I tend to the trees and sleep next to First Light.”

Among the half-lights men and women were divided. The four men spent four days out of every fortnight planting trees, drinking stone liquor, and having one another’s dreams. The women worked together also, making tree cloth and cooking, following the recipes given them by Juan Thrombone. About twice a year Addy, Preeta, and Trini would go off with Nesta to perform some ritual in the woods. I don’t know what they did or where they went.

In the hierarchy of the Blues, Bones came first. He was the most powerful (with the possible exception of Gray Man) and knew the most. Not that Juan saw himself as a leader or king.

Everyone loved Juan. He was our patron and protector. After that we looked to Nesta, who seemed to know anything worth knowing. Nesta was concerned and cautious, and her effect on Alacrity calmed many a situation that might have otherwise led to bloodshed.

Winch Fargo, as I said before, had deficient awareness, having seen only the last second of the divine message. Alacrity had not seen the light but had been born of a witness’s blood. And even those that witnessed a single shaft of blue were as different from one another as anyone else in the world. Wanita lived in dreams, Nesta in ideas, and Reggie looked for signs and portents of things that are hidden.

No one actually liked Winch Fargo. He was profane and obnoxious. His nickname for me was Big Nigger with the Woodbook. He called Trini and Preeta Cunt Number 1 and Cunt Number 2. He didn’t have a name for Addy because his respect for Bones was actually fear.

The Blues didn’t like Fargo but did pity him. For them his deformity was not the loss of an arm but a deficiency of light. They allowed his company because of his pain.

But they were all Blues, even Winch Fargo. They convened from time to time to discuss their nature or the nature of the universe or Grey Redstar and the ultimate clash of life and death. I tried to eavesdrop on those meetings but I could never take it for very long. The Blues communed with words and also the power of their minds or souls. I could listen for a few minutes, but soon my head would start to ache. If I weathered the pain, a buzz would start in my ears and then my vision would begin to blur. Finally I’d be forced to run from their presence. After that I’d sleep sometimes for a whole day.

Such was Treaty. A congress of outcasts sitting on the precipice of infinity, under the threat of death and living each day more primitively and more magically than the last.

Thirty-one

The years passed like so many moments. Nothing changed much among us. Preeta was the only woman to bear a child — they called him Woolly because he had thick hair like his father. Every seven days Gerin Reed would give a talk on whatever it was that he’d been looking at that week. His sermons covered ants and rocks, the rhythm of the singing white firs, or the bellowing of the puppy sequoias. We’d meet in the clearing, outside of Number Twelve, in the early morning as the sun rose. Warden Reed’s wisdom grew in the forest. Bones said that Reed heard the songs of the trees more clearly than even the Blues did because they took the music for granted but Gerin listened with all his heart. Bones was almost always present at these talks, but other than that, you never knew when he’d be around. He was off minding his forest most of the time. Sometimes he was gone for days.

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 all 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 loved 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.

The afternoon of the arrival of the coyotes and Max, Claudia Heart’s blue dog, Juan Thrombone called a council under the trees of War. Everyone left in our woods, except for Addy, came. It wasn’t a meeting for humans, but I was intent on attending and recording for the ages what might have been the last council of the gods.

I got my skin of stone liquor from under Number Twelve and took two deep drafts. I hoped that the strong drink would brace me against the symptoms I usually experienced when trying to eavesdrop on the Blues.

The meeting came together slowly. Nesta Vine appeared with Alacrity. They were hand in hand. Winch Fargo skulked in behind them. Alacrity was naked except for a quiver of arrows and a long bow slung crisscross over her shoulders. Reggie came wearing tree cloth with a mesh of leaves over it for camouflage. Wanita seemed to have wandered in playing with Coyote and her pups. Max and the coyotes huddled on the ground with the twenty-six-year-old who still had the appearance of a child less than ten years of age.

Juan Thrombone was seated on a high stump, watching as the clan settled in.

Nesta sat near the animals and child. Reggie’s eyes were searching the perimeter. He caught a glimpse of me but said nothing.

“It is time,” Juan Thrombone said in an uncharacteristic somber tone.

The reverberation of his solemnity nearly slammed me to the ground. I gritted my teeth and leaned against Number Three.

“Coyote has heard the call of the puppy trees, and she has stalked Death at our borders.”

“I thought you made the singing trees block anything from people like them?” I shouted.

Everyone turned to me. They seemed slightly surprised that I was there.

“I opened it up a few weeks ago, Chance,” Bones said. “When I heard him stirring in his desert cave.”

“Gray Man?” Winch Fargo’s eyes narrowed and his one fist rose.

“I’m not afraid of him,” Alacrity said. She was looking into Nesta’s eyes. The two young women had moved close together.

“Maybe he won’t find us,” Reggie said.

“He’s already on his way,” his sister replied.

“Death has clawed his way out of the grave,” Juan Thrombone said. “It is time for you, Chance, to leave.”

“Where?”

“Far away. In three months’ time you can return. Maybe we will be here. At any rate Death will be gone.”

It was an odd council of two madmen, a child, an amazon, and a beautiful egghead. There was the coyote pack too and Reggie, who was so well camouflaged that I almost forgot that he was there. All of them were of one mind.

Juan Thrombone turned from me and communed with the other Blues. There were no words spoken. I’m not sure if there was any sound at all. There might have been some grunting or humming. A coyote might have howled. Or maybe it was just the nature of my small brain trying to decipher their thoughts. Their congress was not painful to me. I didn’t experience the pressure that Bones’s attention usually caused. It was like a choir practicing pieces of songs that gave hints of great meaning only to break off midway.

It was the last moment of pure beauty in my life.

After a while things broke down. Nesta and Alacrity held hands and stared into each other’s eyes. Juan Thrombone took Winch for a walk through the woods. Coyote reclined and Wanita rested her head on the canine mother’s chest. The dog, Max, seemed to remember me from our evening together with Claudia Heart. He stayed near me while watching Coyote. Reggie began sharpening stone arrowheads. Then the rest of the coyotes came around me, playing like they had in my hospital room years before.

After a while I lay down with the beasts and slept.

I dreamed of scents. Sweet water wafting on the air and the musky odor of desert rams, the sharp, stinging smell of the bobcat and the stench of humanity. But those creatures could smell much more than their earthly brethren. They could smell the moon and stars and the spaces between the stars. Their howling song was an intricate equation honoring the placement of gravities they sensed.

A long crying note came into my dream. For a while I thought that it was the baying of my sleepmates. Then came a flat thumping, a deep rumble, and then a song.

I awoke to see Alacrity working a small hand-sized bow along the taut string of her longbow. The sound was a pure distillation of all the possibility of a violin in a varying note. Reggie followed her with a slow beat. And Juan Thrombone gave voice to a wordless song. The coyotes joined in, yipping and howling. Wanita slept on and Winch Fargo, who had gotten into Juan Thrombone’s honey wine, made toast after toast.

The music was too powerful for my halfwit senses, so I made my way out of the cathedral of War knowing that my time among the Blues was short.

“He’s coming close,” Juan Thrombone said to me a week later. “He’s almost here.” He had found me in the abandoned town of Treaty. I had gone there hoping that I’d go unnoticed, that I might be able to stay and help in the stand against Death.

Thrombone was accompanied by Winch Fargo. Fargo had made himself a giant two-bladed ax from a metal plate that had covered a broken generator Reggie had found. It had a rough hemlock haft and was more than three feet in diameter with blades that were perfect crescents as sharp as razors.

“Nigger come up here and he’s gonna lose some head,” the felon said.

I had always tried my best to stay away from Fargo. He was rude and insulting to everyone but Nesta.

“Let me have a little while with Chance,” Bones told the axman. “I have to send him off.”

Fargo hesitated a moment. He hated ever being alone. But he finally moved off.

Before going he said, “You tell that nigger that I’m waitin’ for ’im up here if you see ’im, Chance.”

When Fargo was gone Thrombone turned to me.

“It’s time for you to go,” he said.

“Tomorrow.”

“Now. There is no more time. You have to go.”

“You’re not making Addy leave,” I said.

“She will die if I do.”

“I don’t mind dying,” I said. “People die. They die all the time. But this is my home; it’s where I live.”

“It’s easy for you to die, Last Chance. As easy as the red leaf falls. But you have a job to be doing.”

“What job?”

“I cannot say except that you must leave now.”

The small man’s eyes turned blue. I blinked and found myself alone in the town.

My backpack had been ready for days. I retrieved it from Number Twelve and set out on the path for Eric Beauvais’s cabin in the woods. I didn’t say good-bye to anyone. I was angry and hurt that I had to leave. I blamed them for not running with me. No one had ever explained to me why they had to stay or why I had to go. We could have all run away and made our home elsewhere. Bones could have planted new trees.

I stomped away from our Eden without a friend or a future. All I had was another set of memories of people who were lost to me. I ignored the whispering secrets in the sun and sky. I hated what had been given to me because all it did was accent my loss.

I traveled hard for three days before reaching Eric’s cabin. It was a small fallen-down affair atop a bald hill. The walls were reminiscent of Juan Thrombone’s multifabricated suit, composed of plasterboard and wooden slats, tar paper and thatch. On one side there was an aborted foundation of stone, or maybe the house was built with a broken-down stone fence as one of its sides. The roof was rusted metal, and no smoke came from the black stovepipe at its center.

There was no porch, just a front door that opened to a yard. In that yard lay the wreckage of one man’s life. There was an old Dodge that couldn’t possibly have worked, a broken-down washing machine, an animal pen with no life in it, a half-tilled garden, and a dead goat flung in the path to the door.

I gazed upon the scene for a long time before acting. I tried to think of some reason why a dead goat would be left to rot outside one’s front door.

Eric wasn’t dead. Blinded by Death’s talons, hands and feet crushed by Death’s weight, but he wasn’t dead.

“Who is it?” he cried when I pushed the door open.

“Friend of Alacrity’s,” I said.

He was crouched down in a corner, ruined hands held up in front of his face.

Eric Beauvais was a large blond man in his late forties. He was powerful and handsome except for the red gashes he had for eyes. Gray Man had left him blinded and unable to flee or fight. I was sure that Eric had been a brave man before his encounter with Death. Maybe he had never known fear. But Gray Man left him cringing and broken. I could almost hear the death god’s laughter lingering in the room.

“Help me,” Eric begged.

He had soiled himself. The room smelled strongly of the man. I changed his clothes and washed him off with water from his rain barrel. I wiped the blood from his face and cleaned the wounds. All the while he cried and moaned.

“He just came in and and and and...,” Eric whined.

“Was it a black man?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I never did a thing. He was little and I wasn’t scared at first, but he was so strong.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He said that it was a surprise. He said that it was a present for a friend. Why did he do this to me?” While Eric cried, I held him in my arms.

I got him into the bed and set his hands and feet as best as I could. Then I opened some canned beans and put them on a chair next to his bed. I put water there and set up the door so that he could push it open to go outside to piss and shit.

While he slept, I searched the cabin. I found a.22-caliber target pistol, a good-sized hunting knife, and a box of Hershey candy bars. These I took for myself.

Gray Man had passed Eric’s way a day before, maybe a few hours more than that. He must have passed me on his way toward Treaty. Either he didn’t see me or, more likely, he felt that I was beneath his notice. I was intent on making that his big mistake.

“Eric,” I said, shaking the ruined man.

“What?” He started awake, thrusting his hands out in fear. When the hands touched me, though, he recoiled in pain.

“I’ve got to go for a while,” I said. “You have food right here and I jammed the lock on the door for you to go outside if you’ve got to go.”

“How’m I gonna get back in?” he cried.

“There’s a big crack at the bottom,” I said. “It’ll hurt but you can get your foot under there and pull it open like that.”

“Don’t leave. Please.”

“I have to, Eric. Alacrity’s back there.”

“She has friends there. You said she did. Please take me with you.”

“The man who did this to you will be there. You don’t wanna get near him again, believe me.”

“Please,” he begged. “Don’t leave me.”

“I’ll be back.”

“He’ll kill you and then I’ll die here.” Eric tried to grab me, but his hands were useless.

I left him crying there on his bed. He was calling out to me like a lost child. I knew he was right, that I might not return and that he might die, but I had to go back to War.

Thirty-three

I thanked Juan Thrombone for all the years he had me working on his tree farm. Toward the later years we’d sometimes work through the night, pushing the growth rate of the trees until they were almost completely mature by the fourth day. The extra-large buckets we fashioned held fifty pounds of water at least. We carried a bucket in each hand, trotting from the lower field to the upper without a stop, for eighteen hours and longer. It was the tea we drank that gave us such strength, that’s what Juan told us.

“Brewed from the dead leaves of the blue sequoias. It is just weak enough not to hurt your delicate natures.”

I jogged for ten hours straight before having to rest. It was deep night and the moon was exactly half full. The candy bars were all gone, so all I could do was sleep. The sun was far into morning by the time I woke up.

My feet hurt as I went, but I kept thinking of Eric and his ruined and bloody feet.

By midday I could hear the trees screaming. It was the singing trees, not the bellowing ones. They were keening a solitary note of fear.

I ran harder. The pistol in my pocket had five shells in it. I kept thinking about stars going nova and stones breathing life. I hoped that I could create miracles with what little I had.

The woods went suddenly quiet when I was no more than a mile from the cathedral of War. It was an abrupt silence in my mind that came on so quickly, it disoriented me. I fell to the ground feeling the deep exhaustion of my day-and-a-half run. I lay there on the damp earth thinking about standing but nowhere near the act. Every muscle and cell in my body screamed for water, for oxygen, and for rest. My lungs couldn’t take a deep enough breath. My fingers and toes were numb. And even though I was thinking about rising, my head was hanging down. It came to me that I was dying, that the exertion of my supermarathon, coupled with the sudden extinction of the singing trees, had depleted me. My eyes were open but the midday light faded still.

Then came the rumbling. The Bellowing Trees in great anguish began their bass song. It wasn’t fear but disgust and anger. It was the outrage of the earth against the abomination of Gray Man. I saw him in my mind, and strength flowed back into me. I was called back to life by the trees.

It was not only me but bear and butterfly, bird and gnat. The life of the forest around the cathedral, which had been so silent, surged. A large copper-colored bear lumbered past me. I stood up under a current of broad-winged black-and-white and red monarchs.

We all raced for the grove of Bellowing Trees. Along the way I saw the corpses of two of the coyote brood. Bloody and broken, they lay like Eric Beauvais’s hands and feet.

When we came into the grove of singing trees, it was as if we had come into a wood after years of blight. Black fungus hung from their limbs, the once green needles were brown and fallen. As quickly as they had grown, Juan Thrombone’s trees died. Sickly and brittle, the whole grove was dead. Not one note of life or calling was left.

Death had taken their souls with him into the valley of the Bellowing Trees.

I took the lead in the headlong race toward Death. My longtime flirtation with suicide was now a reality. I had no illusions that anyone could stand up to Grey Redstar. But I would not let him frighten me; I would not let my friends die without help.

Before I noticed that the bears and butterflies had stopped, I was almost on top of him. Gray Man. The rush and chatter of animals around me, coupled with the rumbling of the blue sequoias, had masked his presence. I suppose that was a stroke of luck. I say this because the recognition and anticipation of Death’s approach is enough to shatter the bravest man or woman’s resolve. But to sense Death and approach it is contrary to the very notion of life. I do not know that I would have had the courage to go on if I had sensed Gray Man.

He was leaning over Coyote, bearing down on her throat as she clawed at his groin and chest. Max was on Death’s back, tearing viciously at his neck and head.

Blue light emanated from all three. A vibrant yellowish light came from Coyote. Max’s dull blue aura was almost erased by the indigo coming from Gray Man.

I moved deliberately from the wood and held Eric’s pistol to Gray Man’s head. I pulled the trigger many more times than there were bullets to fire. Every shot entered the dead man’s brain.

He stood from the now inert form of Coyote. He slapped Max from his back, sending the poor dog flying.

“Pity,” he said. Then he reached out, brushing my forehead with his fingertips.

I fell to the ground, nothing but mindless weight. From my side I could see Gray Man moving toward the grove of Bellowing Trees. He was naked and skinny, hunched over and stalking.

I took aim with the pistol and pulled the trigger. The chamber was empty but I would have missed anyway. The thought of my lying on my side, shooting at a man who was already dead made me laugh. My weakness, combined with impotent courage, seemed to be the funniest joke anyone could tell. And once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard that I convulsed and writhed, tittering like Horace LaFontaine and choking on my tongue. I rolled up on my knees, trying to get away from that black humor. I lurched to my feet, no longer dying, coughing on the ridiculous nature of my mind.

My second encounter with death in ten minutes and I was moving again. I was stalking him now, looking for a mistake, an opening, a chance to end him.

He stopped at the edge of the grove of Bellowing Trees, leaping suddenly behind the ruined trunk of a ruined singing tree. He appeared again with Addy in tow. She buried the blade of a large wooden knife in the side of his neck, but he was unaffected.

He went into the grove then, dragging Addy in his wake.

I followed him to the very edge of the grove, but then I could go no farther. The deep tones coming from the Bellowing Trees hit me like ten-foot waves at the shore. I couldn’t penetrate their power. Even Gray Man was struggling against their incredible strength. Addy was knocked senseless, but Death pulled her on.

It was all I could do to hold my ground.

Toward the center of the grove stood Juan Thrombone and the rest of the Blues. Alacrity was naked again, her bow drawn and notched. Reggie wore his camouflage, and Fargo wielded his ax.

“To your trees!” Bones commanded loudly.

“I wanna fight!” Alacrity cried out.

I could feel their struggle in the center of my brain. It was wisdom versus rage.

Gray Man laughed.

Alacrity was still young, and the derision of Death unnerved her.

“To your trees!” Thrombone cried.

Five trees surrounded the great throne tree. Each one was attended by one of the Blues. As soon as each one stood next to a tree, white tendril roots crawled out of the ground to fasten them to the trunk. Alacrity and Winch struggled a bit, but Reggie, Wanita, and Nesta were resigned to the ritual.

“I am too strong now,” Grey Redstar said. “I can kill you and your whole forest with the strength released from the old redwood. No alliance you can achieve is more powerful than death.”

His words were confident, but he did not press forward.

“Join me, Three Lights,” Gray Man said in a tone that approximated friendship. “You can see that this desire, this plan to sire, is foolish and wasteful and weak. Join me. Tell your trees to drain their lives, and I will leave you to your forest. You can even have this woman.”

For a long moment Juan Thrombone stared into the face of Death. Maybe for an instant he considered the promise of life for his trees and his First Light.

“Never,” Bones whispered at last.

“Then watch her die, abomination within an abomination,” Gray Man said. “Watch her die.”

“Come, Death,” Thrombone replied. “Come to my embrace.” He held out his arms. “Take me to your cold heart.”

No sooner had Bones spoken these words than the waves of energy from the trees ceased. Gray Man lurched forward and so did I.

Next to the helpless Winch Fargo, on the ground, was his big metal ax. I hoped that it would be more deadly than the small pistol. I hefted the ax and ran, yelling like a fool, at Gray Man’s back. I swung, aiming for his head, but he was faster than me.

He reached back with his free hand, grabbing the haft: and pulling me off balance. I fell between him and Juan Thrombone.

Gray Man looked down on me and smiled. He bent forward to take me by the shoulder. It was the strongest grip I had ever felt, but it was colder than it was strong. For the third time that day I felt the life draining out of me. Gray Man was leaning toward me, smiling.

“Come,” he said, almost kindly, the anticipation of my death somehow bringing out what little love his evil heart housed.

“Got ya now,” Juan Thrombone said. He leaped and grabbed Gray Man by the arm, dragging him back to the throne. Gray Man released Addy and me to struggle with his attacker.

There they stood before the throne tree, a black man and a brown one, though they had both given up the human race long ago, flexing muscles that could have easily felled one of the god trees that were now all humming a deep and frightening note. My friends were all unconscious or dead. Addy was as cold as stone.

Gray Man and Juan Thrombone fell into the hollow of the throne tree. Gray Man cried out and pushed Bones down. The roots of the big tree flailed helplessly at Death while he closed his icy fingers around Thrombone’s throat.

My left side was numb, but I rose up and threw myself on Death’s back. The three of us fell deeply into the hollow. It seemed much deeper than it could have possibly been. I put a headlock on Death and pulled with all my might. From behind I was aided by someone. I dared a glance and saw a man who was the image of Gray Man but I knew by the fear in his eyes was really Horace LaFontaine. I didn’t understand, but there was no time to think anyway. The roots surrounded us, and suddenly Gray Man yelled with frustration. I saw a root of the great tree press into one of his eyes.

“You can’t kill me!” he shouted.

Juan Thrombone laughed. Then, suddenly, my headlock was on Thrombone, though not from behind. Our embrace was like an adolescent attempt at a first kiss. I released my hold, and Thrombone pushed me clear of the hollow.

“Last Chance,” Thrombone said and then winked. “Not yet.”

He threw himself back on Gray Man, who was struggling with the roots. They were pushing into his sides and chest, but he was breaking them off faster than they took hold. Horace LaFontaine was in there trying to wrestle Gray Man down. Juan Thrombone jumped in and grabbed Gray Man’s hands. The roots ate into Bones and Horace then. They seemed to be rejuvenated by what they found in those men’s blood. The attack against Gray Man was redoubled, and they all were lost in a tangle of writhing roots.

A screaming shout that started at the edge of the grove of god trees made me turn. It was Miles Barber, running and holding something above his head, something that was burning. Miles shouldered me aside and threw his burning missile into the tree. Flames jumped high into the air, and a concussion threw the ex-detective backward. He flew into me, knocking me down and nearly unconscious.

Over the years I’ve wondered about Miles Barber and that last desperate act. In our time together as friends, sharing a whole dimension of mingled dreams, I never perceived this plan. It is true that he once carried a container of gasoline that he intended to use to incinerate Gray Man, but that had been a long time before. All I can figure is that the approach of Death rekindled the hatred that dwelled in Barber’s heart. He didn’t want us to keep him from his vengeance; that’s why he hid from us the moment this dark desire returned.

When I came to my senses all the Bellowing Trees were burning. Wanita and the rest had been freed from their bonds. The whole company of gods lay unconscious under the burning woods, them, Addy, and Miles Barber. I got myself to stand and dragged them, one after another, out of the fire.

Wanita was first and Winch Fargo was last, but I saved them all. The whole wood was blazing by the time I pulled out Fargo. The heat on my skin spoke to me and for once I understood, but I have since forgotten the truths revealed at that time. They’re hidden from me in a charred and smoky place in my soul. I lost consciousness then. The last thing I remember was rolling downward.

When I came to, I found myself beneath a mass of prickly vines. I was burned pretty badly along my left side. Everyone was gone. Bear and butterfly, friend and foe. The Bellowing Trees were burned black. I made it to the throne tree, walking over hot embers and ash. There was a sticky mass of hot tarlike stuff in the hollow. That was all that was left of Gray Man and Juan Thrombone.

I stumbled out through the silent woods. Every once in a while I’d come upon the blackened remnants of a singing tree. Gray Man’s fingers sought out and destroyed every one of Bones’s beautiful trees. I feared that maybe the other Blues had suffered the same fate. I looked everywhere for a sign of their survival or demise but found nothing.

I was badly hurt but I treated the burns with poultices and salves that Bones had given me. If I had rested a day or two, the burns would have probably healed, but I had made a promise to look after Alacrity’s boyfriend and intended to keep that promise.

The forced march brought me to his cabin door in two days’ time. But the cabin was empty. The clothes from his closet were gone, along with the trunk that sat at the foot of his bed.

I don’t remember much of what happened after I got to the cabin. Distraught over the disappearance of my friends, I rushed out, hoping that they had only recently been there. I don’t remember how far I got. The infection from the burns must have overwhelmed me. In the hospital I was told that I was found by hikers. I guess with all that had happened, I went a little out of my head. The doctors had me in a straitjacket and had been injecting me with powerful tranquilizers every six hours.

The next few months are only spotty in my memory. I remember a man, Dr. Lionel, who told me that I was under arrest for setting fires in a national forest. But because of my burns and irrational behavior, I was remanded to the hospital for recuperation and observation.

That conversation was just a small island of clarity. Other times I was in Treaty making love to Addy or fishing with Gerin Reed. Sometimes I was in darkness and Alacrity was calling to me. I wanted to go to her, but my arms were tied and I couldn’t get to my feet.

At one moment I faded into consciousness, finding myself dressed in an ill-fitted tan suit and talking to a middle-aged woman, a judge I believe, about Treaty and blue light and Grey Redstar, who kept Horace LaFontaine in an Attica cell behind his eyes. When I finished the sentence, I could see that the henna-haired woman thought I was crazy. I yelled and leaped at her, but strong men grabbed me by my arms and legs. I was strong enough to throw them off, but before I could get my balance, someone injected me with the tranq. The last thing I saw were the judge’s frightened eyes.

I’ve been at the state mental hospital at Camarillo since then. I came in diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but they changed that diagnosis to borderline psychotic with a new administration in 1988. I explained to the doctors that I was proof of my own story because I looked like I was twenty but my driver’s license said I was forty-three. After a week or so of that tack, a kindly orderly allowed me to see my reflection in a handheld mirror. My hair had gone completely white and the left side of my face was roughened by small scars left by the fire.

That’s when they started to brainwash me. I don’t mean on purpose like they did to those POWs in North Vietnam. They thought that they were helping me. They just could not believe in blue light.

It was impossible for light to contain consciousness, they said. I looked my age and should be thankful that I was in such good physical health. They threw away my lichen stone while I was out of my head, so I couldn’t prove my claims with the stone liquor.

At least they let me keep my History. When I sit down and read these words, I know that it all must have happened. No one could make up all of that.

After a year I found out that my mother died in 1976. I think that hurt me worst of all. I never got to see her and apologize for all the years that I ignored her letters.

It’s been more than seven years now, and I’m learning how not to use my second sight. All the drugs they give me help dampen the visions. They keep me sedated and in isolation because I’m so strong and I want to get away.

But they let me use a computer, and I have mail privileges to take out materials from state and local libraries. I guess they know that as long as I can work on my book, I won’t get too violent or wild.

My hope now is that they’ll release me, that they’ll find me sane and let me go, so I can go looking for my friends. I am sane but I know more than the fools who keep me here. I know too much. That’s why I’m trying to close my eyes to the history of light and matter. Because if I stop seeing things the way the Blues do, I’ll become less like them and more like regular people.

I’ve almost done it. I’ve almost stopped seeing. The only problem I have now is at dusk, when I’m drawn to the high window of my cell and I search the twilight skies for colored lights that I know to be the teardrops of God.