The Blue Hour

Thirty-Five

Back inside she turned on the TV and went to make new drinks. Standing against the yellow tile of the kitchen counter Merci got hit hard again by Jerry Kirby. Then the word six. She couldn’t stop the thoughts. Her pants were in the hamper in the bedroom, drenched in his blood. She could smell it and feel it warm on her forearms. She tried to think of something humorous or diverting but all she could think was if you’re so goddamned powerful why couldn’t you make him live? The kitchen clock said midnight and she felt worse. She snuck a gulp of the Scotch and forced it down. Bad stuff — it made your feelings big and blurry, with ledges in them you didn’t see. Easy to fall off one.

She sat across the sofa from Hess and tried to let the smell of the orange grove inhabit her. It didn’t.

She watched him looking at the TV, saw the way the blue light played on his face, then realized he wasn’t right. His skin was pale from more than just the cathode rays. His eyes were closed but the lids quivered like he was trying to open them from a dream.

“Hess?”

“Yes.”

“What’s happening?”

“Something. It feels like the world’s tilting back and I’m gonna slide off.”

In fact he was gripping the arm of the sofa with one hand, the other was raised off the seat, ready. Like he was going to have to catch himself. His whole body shook once, then started to tremble. His face had gone white.

“I think I’m just tired.”

His voice wasn’t right, either, like the cords making the words were freezing up.

“Don’t move. It’s more than just tired.”

She went over and knelt in front of him. She could see his eyes moving behind the closed lids and the odd look of anticipation on his face.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

He did, and Merci could see the confusion in them. But it only lasted a moment. She watched as he returned to inhabit them again.

“Breathe deeply. Slow.”

He took a deep breath. Then another.

“Count these.”

She held up three fingers and he said three.

“Whoa. Strange,” he added. His head tilted back, then corrected, like a kid nodding off.

“What do you feel, right now?”

“Like a big hand held me back. Kept me from falling. Whoa. There.”

“Continue to breathe. All right, Tim.”

Merci realized that she had her hands open on Hess’s legs and she moved them to the couch. But she stayed on her knees in front of him, studying the details of his face. Not right, she thought: not yet.

“I have a can of chicken soup.”

“No. I’m just going to sit a minute. I’m fine.”

But the color still wasn’t back in his face. He looked pale and silver, like someone caught by a flash strobe. He was breathing fast and slumped within the sport coat, both arms down. She could smell his breath and it didn’t smell like cancer or chemo or rads to her, but like an old man’s — human, alive, a little meaty.

“Here,” she said. “Take off that coat.”

He leaned forward as if to take off the coat but neither of his arms moved. So Merci leaned into him and took a cuff while Hess withdrew one arm, then the other. She felt the heat of him as she set the coat aside and placed her open hands on his shoulders. He seemed heavy and hard as wood.

“Sit back, now.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Look, Tim — your color’s coming back.”

“Tell me about it.”

“First white, then silver, now kind of peach colored, with pink on the cheeks. No more sweat on the forehead. And the pupils of your eyes are the right size again. How are you seeing?”

“Good now. I’m fine, Merci. Really.”

“Be still. I’m going to loosen your tie some more.”

Not being familiar with the half-Windsor, she succeeded in doing little but yanking Hess’s head forward. Power, she thought: will.

“One side slides,” he said. “My left. Your right.”

“Got it.”

She slid the silk down the silk. Hess fumbled with his top button, but Merci got it open. His big hands felt leathery as she brushed them out of the way.

She set her hands on Hess’s cheeks and let her fingers rest against his skin. I want to make you well. A low but strong current issued up into her wrists and arms. At first she thought the energy was coming from him — all his years and experience and strength — but when she moved her hands off him they were still buzzing and she understood it was all coming from inside herself.

Power.

“I want to touch your hair.”

She was surprised to hear herself say it, but once it was out it was okay. God knows, she’d wanted to do it for long enough.

“Why in the world?”

“I don’t know. I always thought you had the nicest hair. And I’ve wanted to touch it.”

“My head always feels hot. I think it’s... I don’t know what it is.”

“I’ll scratch it.”

“Well, okay.”

She set the tips of all her fingers gently on his forehead and told him to close his eyes. She ran her hands together along the top of his head, then, rising on her knees and pulling him just a little closer, continued down the back to where the hair ended at his strong warm neck.

It was pure contradiction, as she suspected it would be. Soft but thick. Firm but pliable. Bristly but smooth. She had never been able to imagine its actual texture.

“Hess, that’s just absolutely wonderful stuff.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to do it again like that, then start scratching.”

So she combed her fingers back through his brush of hair, then she did it again, pausing to touch the white wave in front with her index finger.

What a delight.

She realized the wave was the softest of all his hair, rather than the stiffest, which was what she had predicted. She realized the color of it actually started on the top of his head, behind the crest, so to speak, appearing like spots of ocean suds then condensing gradually toward the peak.

More importantly, she realized that the white wave, and the rest of Hess’s hair, was now reacting strangely and sticking to her fingers.

But just a few unruly hairs, she told herself, the kind that might expire when a fellow deputy falls in the line of duty. So she ran her fingers along his head again just to make sure everything was okay now. More hairs jumped off.

A lot more.

She couldn’t believe it. She watched Hess’s hair abandon his scalp, then climb onto her fingers like it was being rescued.

“That does feel good,” he said.

So she ran her hands through again while she wondered what to do and the forest of hair thinned and clung statically to her fingers and began to sprinkle down on Hess’s ears and shirt front and shoulders and bunch up on the backs of her hands like the little nests that ended up on her smock at her hairdresser’s.

No, she thought. If I summon my will the hair will not fall out. And Merci summoned her will, all the deep power of it, all the blinding light of it and she closed her eyes and focused its beam directly at Hess’s head.

“Ummm.”

And she pressed her nails in a little deeper, applied a little more strength. Went a little faster, because she knew when she opened her eyes the hair would not be falling out. But it was. And Hess, eyes still closed, was groaning like a dog. Merci looked at him and smiled, as if her smile might mitigate his disappointment when he realized what was happening. She rose up and leaned into him a little more because Hess in his relaxation had melted back into the sofa. She rested lightly against him, feeling the great weight of failure in her heart beating against the particular hardness of Lieutenant Timothy Hess. She was too surprised to move away. She didn’t. And a moment later, when her surprise was gone, she didn’t want to.

This, she understood, was something that her will could not fail. She could take him, all of him, all his years and his exhaustion and his disease, all his desire and his dreams, and she could accommodate them. She could absorb and absolve. She could take in and transform. She could will the death right out, and the life right into him.

Power.

“Merci.”

“Keep your eyes closed.”

“It’s falling out, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

She reached over and turned off the lamp.

“Come on,” she said. “Follow me.”

At four in the morning Hess awoke to the sound of cats screeching somewhere out in the grove. Merci breathed deeply and didn’t move.

He lay still and remembered: fishing with his uncles, his dad making pancakes on Sunday mornings, the creases on the back of his mother’s blouse as she walked, Barbara’s expression as she came down the aisle in the church where they were married, his first dog, what the world looked like from the tail gunner’s position of a B-29 thirty thousand feet above Korea. He had no idea why he thought of these particular things. It felt like they were lining themselves up for his inspection. This is what we were.

Eight more years, he thought. Seventy-five years.

He set a hand on Merci’s back. He thought of standing in front of her bathroom mirror a few hours ago, looking at his new head. He remembered her hands kneading his scalp and the hair falling lightly onto his face, and later, the shower they took together when she shampooed it away by the handful.

It was a strange moment as he stood there, naked and still wet, newly bald and thoroughly exhausted, with Merci naked herself under a towel, this large and quite lovely woman who had just made love to him, dark moles on creamy skin, the strands of black wet hair on her shoulders, crowded right up close in the steamy little bathroom to look in the mirror with him. She had actually smiled. He had felt the heat of her on his skin, through the towel. They had shaved off the remnants. Eyebrows gone, too. He looked like a giant baby.

Hair or not, it seemed too good a thing for him to be here now, still alive in the world, still touching and touched by it all. And he was thankful for it in a way he could not express.

He got up and walked through the warm old house, looking through the windows to the dark groves and the moonless sky littered with stars. The floorboards creaked under his feet and a clock ticked echoes across the living room at him.

He sat for a while and wondered how he could use the rest of his life in the best way possible. He had no specific ideas, but the general concept of using his years to live well was a good place to start. It was certainly a new concept, that much was for certain. Use the years to live well.

He made coffee and took a cup back to the bedroom. He stood beside the bed and looked down at Merci Rayborn as she slept. Her hair was tangled with shadows and her face was pale as cream against the darkness. He saw the rise of her hip under the sheet, the way her fists came together at her chin. He wondered what might have happened if he could have met her forty years ago.

In the kitchen he turned on the light over the stove, got out his blue notepad and pen and wrote Merci a letter about what he was feeling at four-thirty in the morning in her house in the orange grove. Hess considered himself a clear but dull writer, and as he composed the letter to her he read it quietly to himself. It was clear and dull. That was okay, he thought: the purpose wasn’t to entertain or divert. The purpose was just to tell her how much she meant to him and how she had inspired him enough to write her about it. It came off sounding like a thank-you card, but he was thankful. So what?

He left it on the kitchen table with one of the snapshots Hjorth had taken of them together, to use up his roll of film. The picture caught Hess attentive and Merci scowling at the camera. A few minutes later he was dressed and looking down at her again. Her face was lost in hair and pillow and she was snoring lightly, the sheet halfway down her back.

He locked the door on his way out and walked across the driveway toward his car. Cats scattered in fractional starlight. Sunrise was still an hour away and Hess wondered why it always seemed darkest just before dawn.