The Color of Night Read Free

into the building had been captured, as if turned to stone. They were prostrate, dumbstruck, leveled by awe. There must have been noise but I didn’t hear it. I spun like a dancer among all those screens, letting the light play over my body. It made me feel pretty, which I seldom do.
    I stayed in the trailer with the blinds drawn, crouched below my television cart, jabbing the pause button till the VCR spindles squealed. In four hours I had sculpted two perfect hours of tape, with no commentators or gabbling or crawls across the bottom of the screen. Then I sat back and watched. The planes bit chunks from the sides of the towers and the gorgeous sheets of orange flame roared up and the mortals flung away from the glittering windows like soap flakes swirling in a snow globe and the tower shuddered, buckled, blossomed and came showering down.
    Raze it. Raze it. Again. Again.
    I took off my clothing and stood naked before the full-length mirror screwed to the back of the bathroom door. My body has suffered few of the ravages the flesh of mortal women is heir to. There are few lines and little sagging. I’ve never had a problem with my weight. The breasts were always mere suggestion, barely rounding the line of the rib cage, still almost as high and firm as they were in my spring. My hair needs some chemical help to stay black. The hair around my vulva is gray, but that doesn’t matter; when I fuck I do it in the dark.
    The trailer rocked in the desert wind. I put on a shirt and some drawstring trousers. Outside it was once more night. I picked up the rifle and went into the desert.

Why I don’t love the desert. Why I don’t. Why I don’t love. Where I grew up was wet and fecund and succulent green. Red clay country, slick with red mud and crawling with vine. Playing Indian, we’d streak our cheekbones umber with the clay. On the road, waiting for the lumbering yellow school bus, we would throw jagged little stones at snakes. Kudzu sprawled over everything, dragging down the trees.
    No snow in winter, but rain, rain. Gullies washed red mud across the yard and the creek overflowed with snapping turtles and the fat, slick salamanders we used to call red dogs. Doors stuck shut and the windows warped and the panes beaded and streaked with rainwater till you felt like you were down in a diving bell. Summertime, the air was so thick that to breathe felt like drowning. We walked shellacked in thick layers of sweat. Every fold of skin stuck together, sucked apart.
    Saturdays Dad or Terrell would push the mower snarling around the yard while indoors fans rattled and paddled the heavy air, and the black-and-white TV chattered in a corner of the living room. Momma cooked green beans all day till they were soft and gummy, with slick rings of white onion, red pepper, and spoons of bacon grease she squirreled up in a can. Out back was an A-frame garage with the white paint cracking and peeling off. Kudzu swarmed out from the woods behind, wrapped over the roof like a giant squid attacking a ship. One tentacle coiled around the attic window, its tip probing under the wooden frame.
    Inside, an old tennis ball swung on a piece of fish-line so Dad could park the car just so, without smacking a bumper into the wooden steps at the back.
    In the attic Terrell had his old Boy Scout sleeping bag spread on a yellowing strip of foam mat, smelling musty with the damp and the funk. In the corner a burned-up aluminum saucepan did what it could to catch the leak. The runner of vine that had forced the window spread suckers over the soggy wallboard. A few rusty nail points poked through the slanted boards of the roof. On other nails Terrell had hung the pellet gun and the old bayonet and the fake shrunken head he claimed was a real one. Hid in a cranny were half a pack of Newports, a deck of naked lady cards, a couple of miniature Jack Daniel’s somebody had got on an airplane once. He had a couple of box turtle shells and a small possum skull that