The Color of Night Read Free Page B

or whatever.
    I didn’t try to listen to the records, in part because I didn’t own a turntable anymore. I did slide one of the platters out, to look at the oily black surface. A puff of powdery cigarette ash came out of the sleeve ahead of the disc. A pale curved gash lay across the grooves of the first three tracks.
    When I pushed the record back into the jacket, my eye lingered on something it had skimmed a thousand times before. Snaps from the recording session were printed on the cover, laid out in an artificially casual fashion, as if they’d fallen on the floor. There was O—— in the spring of his youth, an acoustic guitar balanced on one knee, looking with smiling, lively interest at something beyond the right edge of the frame.
    The thing I hadn’t previously attended to was a foot, down in the lower right-hand corner of the snapshot. A nicely shaped young foot with a high graceful arch, nail polish of such a dark crimson it was almost black, a gold-colored toe ring, and one of those higgledy-piggledy patterns Laurel used to draw on herself with henna back then.
    Now there was a woman ahead of her time. I don’t know how I’d never noticed that before.
    As for the music of Orpheus, it was balm to everyone’s wound. Your broken bones began to knit together when you heard it. Everyone turned toward it, like grass turns toward the sun.

La Brea Tar Pits. I couldn’t have said exactly how I got there. If I had taken a bus down the coast or possibly come in a private vehicle, in exchange for private services along the way. I sat in half lotus on the concrete rim of the black sinkhole. It seemed jet black at first, deep as empty space, but the longer I looked at it the more I began to find a spectrum in the iridescence of the oily surface, like tendrils of dawn spinning free of the color of night. The tar pool absorbed my vision entirely and for a long time I had no thoughts at all. Nothing else was reaching my senses, although beyond the fence enclosing the pit were dump trucks and jackhammers and cranes, infernal engines clamoring to raise hell higher.
    I felt D——’s eyes on me long before I looked up. By then I had a sense for it. I’d had a longish layover in Denver on my way here, and most recently I’d been up in the Tenderloin, balling for bread. Or being balled. For bread. Quaint terms they seem now, but then they were exotic, strange—back when Dad stalking the lawnmower around the soggy yard with a dead pipe clamped in his military jaws was supposed to be the very picture of normal.
    I could feel D——’s look stroking over me with the tingling rasp of a cat’s tongue. What there was to see. My unwashed hair long enough to pool on the concrete beside my thighs, the natural black of it dulled by dirt. I had on a tie-dyed T-shirt just sufficient to cover my ass when I stood up, and that was it; I had nothing under it, and only a scrap of macramé tied over the hips to reinforce the illusion that the T-shirt was a dress. My bare feet were calloused, grimy, cracked at the heel. I might have had a blown-out pair of high-top sneakers in my string bag, and what else? Half a banana, a jar of wheat germ, who knows. The bayonet I still had certainly, with the blade hidden in a fat roll of newspaper, the grip not looking much at all like an umbrella handle, I realized when D——’s eyes hesitated there.
    There was a body on my back-trail, my very first bag of mortal bones. It worried me, because I hadn’t yet figured out that nobody was going to miss that motherfucker, what a completely disposable person he was. D——’s look began to travel again, brushing my nipples under the cotton, grazing the edge of the T-shirt’s hem, which stretched just enough to hide my bare snatch, then circling to number the knobs on my back. And there was something different about it. I didn’t feel like I could just ball this cat and send him on his way, which had become sort of a universal solution in those