Blue Light (15 page)

“You should be more careful out in such a wild place,” the watcher declared.

She turned to see a short man dressed in a one-piece garment that was a patchwork of cloths and furs, metal and wood, and, in places, bone and clay.

“What?” Esther demanded. “What are you doing here?”

The fox darted out of hiding, running straight for the strange man. Arriving at his feet, she started licking his fur boots.

“I was asleep,” the man said. “In the flatbed of a truck. And then I had three dreams, all in a row. The first one was my mother, the second one was my father, and the last one was me.”

The man smiled and walked toward the forest ranger. The fox scuttled along, licking and yipping. The man came to stand before Esther. They were about the same height.

A black-and-gold monarch lit on his red-brown forehead.

“I woke up,” he said to her, the slightest trace of a Mexican accent rising like vapor between his words. “And looked in my pocket. I found a card for driving that had my picture on it and the name Hidalgo Quinones. But that’s not me.”

“Who are you, then?”

“My name,” the man said, watching her eyes, “is Juan Thrombone. Thrombone with an aitch.”

More butterflies landed on Juan’s head and shoulders. He smiled at her.

“What do you mean ‘dangerous’?” Esther asked, taking a step backward.

“Dangerous?”

“That’s what you said.”

“No. I didn’t say dangerous. It is dangerous. Yes, it is. But I didn’t say that, no, I didn’t. I said ‘wild.’ This is a wild place. A place too strong for anyone who cares more about living than they do about what they might find.”

Esther looked closely in the little man’s eyes.
Maybe
, he thought,
she thinks I’m crazy
.

A raven flew up, landing on the ground near them.

“You see, this is a strong place,” Juan said. “It’s a very, very strong place, but it is dying. Soon it will be gone. Destroyed. That’s why I’m here.”

The crazy-quilt man reached into a makeshift tarp bag that hung from his shoulder. He opened the bag to show Esther an egg-sized cone that bore the seed of the great tree.

“She wants them to grow, but they will not. Not until the true equations move her. But she called and I came because it is only the forest and I who can live without hunting. But even these seedlings will go off to war one day, I’m afraid,” Juan said. “Until then I will treat them as my children.”

“You can’t take them.”

“Why not?”

“This is government property. I’m a ranger. You can’t take my trees.” While she spoke, Esther watched the Mexican’s eyes. They were black at first but then came to be blue. Bright blue. The kind of bright that glass gets on a sunny windowsill. I have never spoken to her, but I’ve also seen those eyes.

He left her standing there, looking out where he’d been. There were butterflies all over her. White cabbage butterflies on her cheeks and hands. Down her collar. Up under the cuffs of her uniform pants.

H
E NEVER SLEPT MORE
than a few minutes at a time but was rarely tired. He was in constant pain, but that was the least of his discomfort. His lower lip was now a leather flap, and his right eye had a patch instead of a lid. The flesh of his face had been shredded and scarred, but he didn’t spend long enough in the hospital to find out about plastic surgery for his bones and skin.

Miles Barber had gone from detective to freak in an instant, but he didn’t appreciate the change. The last thing Barber remembered was crouching down among the shrubs of Garber Park and hearing a loud scream.

In the hospital the doctors and police told him that he was the victim of a brutal ritual performed in the park by a drug-dealing cult, the Close Congregation. They told him that he’d been butchered and left to die.

Miles Barber didn’t remember getting up that morning, but he knew that there had been no ritual.

“Bullshit,” he said to the doctors.

“Are you crazy?” he asked his old cop friends.

As soon as he was able, ex-Detective Barber checked himself out of the hospital. Family, friends, and physicians tried to stop him. But he didn’t care about health or what people saw when they looked at him. He didn’t care about what they saw, because the images in his mind were so much worse than disfigurement or physical pain.

Gray Man had laid the imprint of death, in the darkest blue imaginable, upon Miles Barber’s soul. I had felt the same thing when Death jostled me, but I had Ordé’s blood to buffer the pain. Barber had nothing but innocence.

He rarely slept, but whenever he let his mind drift he fell into a cold gray swampland of entropy and despair. If he wasn’t careful, he’d drift all the way into a coma. This happened twice while he was in the hospital, and he had to be revived with powerful amphetamines.

But Miles Barber didn’t spend much time daydreaming after leaving the hospital. He tracked down the Close Congregationalists and interviewed every survivor, hoping to find out the devil’s name and address. Because Barber was on a hunt for the evil that destroyed all the hope and heart in him. He had taken it as his mission to kill the man who had touched his soul.

During the months that he shadowed the congregation looking for Mack the Flask, he never paid much attention to our philosophies or beliefs. “Blue light, white elephant, or Christ on a fuckin’ cross,” he once said to me. “It’s all the same nonsense.” But now he understood that what we believed had drawn Gray Man.

While I was hiding in the northern woods, he was gathering almost as much information as I had on blue light, its chosen, its acolytes, and its meaning.

He had taped accounts of most of Ordé’s speeches from these interviews. He had gotten nearly all of the Blues’ names. He wanted to interview one of the chosen, but they had all died or disappeared.

Neither could ex-Detective Barber find another person who had been touched by Death. All the rest who Gray Man had touched, on the day he murdered Ordé, had died in their sleep within the first week of the slaughter. The newspapers called it a virus that drug users got from sharing needles.

When Barber was through with his interviews he had four primary names on his list. There was me because of my close relationship to Ordé and my ramblings about death on the day they took me to jail. There was Claudia Heart (née Aaronfeld, married name, Zimmerman), who had started a commune out in the desert somewhere. There was a man whom no one had ever seen named Winch Fargo. Roberta Garcia remembered Eileen Martel mentioning him, about going to see him in jail. And there was also Gray Man, the devastator. Gray Man was the ultimate goal, the blood clot, the inoperable tumor. Gray Man was a reason to murder. The reason for a man who lived by the law to break that law finally and forever.

Miles Barber was a good detective when he was with the Berkeley Police Department. He was better as a civilian, no longer needing proof or facts or reasonable cause. He carried with him a small thermos full of gasoline and a box of wooden matches. This was because in his interviews he’d learned that he had shot Gray Man, at point-blank range, to no effect. The moment he caught sight of the deceptively diminutive black man with the two fleshy bumps on his face, there would be no need for handcuffs or jail cells, civil rights or judges.

But as good as he was, Miles Barber was grasping at air.

Claudia Heart had repaired to her desert hideaway, taking with her everyone who knew its location. The rest of the Blues, along with me, had vanished completely.

The only lead was a jailbreak. Winch Fargo had escaped from Folsom, with the help of a prison guard. A day or two later the warden, their suspected accomplice, disappeared with his wife and children — leaving no trace.

Ex-Detective Barber went to Folsom but was not admitted even to present his questions. He had to satisfy himself by buying drinks for off-duty prison guards at the Top Tank bar in downtown Represa.

He spent three months and a good deal of his life savings in a flophouse next door to the bar. Over the ensuing weeks he told the prison guards his story — or at least a part of it.

“Yeah,” he’d say with a bitter sigh. “Up there tryin’ to keep the city safe while you got hippies burnin’ their draft cards. They did this to me and nobody even went to jail for it. I’m discharged on disability, but I haven’t even seen the first check yet.”

No one wondered, or at least they didn’t ask, why Barber moved to the town of Represa. The off-duty prison guards accepted the free drinks and humored the freak. He gained their confidence, bided his time. He knew many of the inmates they guarded and told the guards what he knew. They laughed about how stupid some thieves had been and whistled their respect on the magnitude of some unsolved crimes.

It went like that for many weeks before Miles got to buy drinks for the acting warden, Peter Mainhart. Mainhart was just a guard at heart and would never be the permanent warden. That’s why he still stopped by the Top Tank now and again. Because he missed the company of real workingmen. Barber learned this after the second round of drinks. By the fourth rye they were talking about blood and bluity. By the time they had come to the bottom of the bottle, Mainhart confided that the whole case had been turned over to the SIB, the State Investigations Bureau, in Sacramento.

“Goddamned state,” Mainhart said, a little south of sober. “Chief Inspector Bonhomme goes right in there and takes all the records and asks questions up your ass. What the hell does he think it’s like up here? It’s hell, I tell ya, Milo. It’s hell.”

That was twelve minutes past midnight. Ex-Detective Barber was on the 2:42 bus that would make connections to get him into Sacramento by 8:23 the next morning.

“I don’t understand,” Inspector Christian Bonhomme of the SIB said to Miles Barber at 10:44. “You were fired from the Berkeley Police Department?”

“No,” Barber said for the fourth time. “I received a disability discharge after they did this to my face.”

“Who did it?” Lonnie Briggs, Bonhomme’s partner, sergeant, and friend, asked.

The sergeant had a bald head with no eyebrows. Whereas the inspector was tall and gaunt, Briggs was wide and powerfully built.

“The members of the Close Congregation,” Miles said. “You musta read about it. Four people were killed in the park that day.”

The sergeant and the inspector glanced at each other across the desk, but Barber kept cool.

“Yes,” Bonhomme remembered. “The massacre. You were there?”

“I was.”

“Then why weren’t those cult members put on trial? I mean, an eyewitness account from a homicide detective should at least put somebody in front of a judge.”

“I was there but I don’t remember. …”

Lonnie Briggs rolled his eyes and sighed.

“I don’t remember, because of this.” Barber pointed at his ruined face. Then he lifted the eye patch, showing the lidless socket that I saw many months later. Just a naked eyeball permanently bloodshot, hardly human, and dazed by the light. Miles lowered the patch and then took out a squeeze bottle of a sanitized solution to put a few drops in an opening at the top of the patch.

“There was trauma to my head,” he told the SIB men. “I was behind some bushes, I heard a scream, and then I woke up in the hospital. But since then I’ve been investigating on my own. I’ve talked to everyone who was there and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what happened and who was responsible.”

“Who?” Bonhomme asked as he brought a cherry pipe to his lips.

Bonhomme struck a match over the small bowl, and Barber stalled. Instead of answering immediately, he rubbed the excess moisture away from the bottom of the hard leather eye patch with his finger.

Finally the ex-detective said, “They knew what he looked like, but nobody knew his name.”

It was a hot day in Sacramento. The window behind Bonhomme was open, and a large black fly floated noisily into the room. That fly struck fear into Miles Barber. He felt the sweat on his head begin to trickle down behind his ear as he watched the insect hover and then bang its body violently in a vain attempt to escape through the upper panes.

“Where are you staying, Mr. Barber?” Bonhomme asked.

“I just got into town … from Represa.”

The name of the prison town grabbed the attention of both the inspector and his sergeant. But Barber barely noticed because he was watching that woolly fly.

“You were up at the prison?” Briggs asked.

Miles jumped up and slapped the fly right out of the air. The stunned creature bounced against the gray-green wall and fell on Bonhomme’s blotter. Before the fly could recover, Barber smashed it with a powerful open-hand blow.

When he lifted his hand all that was left was a mess of fly fragments and blood.

“I hate flies,” Barber said lamely.

“What were you doing in Represa?”

“Winch Fargo,” Barber replied. “Could you close that window?”

Briggs moved to slide the window shut. “What about Fargo?” Bonhomme asked.

“The woman who died in the massacre, Eileen Martel. She visited Fargo every week up until she was killed. This Fargo had murdered her husband.”

Briggs nodded at Bonhomme.

“What about her?” the inspector asked.

“As far as I can tell,” Barber explained, “she was smuggling in some kind of drug. The cult members told me that there was something wrong with this Fargo, like some kinda nervous disorder, and their leader, William Portman, also known as Ordé, gave Eileen something to give Fargo to keep him calm.”

“Did they say what it was she gave him?” Briggs wanted to know.

“Everything with them is blue light. The Blues, blue light, blue gods. If she brought him anything, it would have been called blue somethin’.”

“Did they ever talk about blood?” Bonhomme asked softly.

Ex-Detective Barber knew, at that moment, that he was back on the inside. All he had to do was choose his words carefully, omit some of the truths as he knew them, and he would have what he wanted.

“Yeah,” Barber said. “That fella Portman was always talkin’ about blood and blue light. He was always talkin’ about how the chosen ones, the Blues, kinda like priests, had different blood. We found four of his followers poisoned with some kind of toxic mixture, which had been combined with blood, in their stomachs.”