The Color of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

grinding down a mountain. Building, razing, it never stopped. My clothes and my skin were coated with a fine stone grit. The dial tone droned from the wireless handset I held cupped in both hands, clasped into my navel. Laurel hadn’t said another word.

She told me she’d once seen D—— bring a dead bird back to life. In my mind, I didn’t believe it. Laurel had been tripping, maybe, or simply misunderstood what she saw.
    Back home a redbird flew into our picture window and knocked itself out. The four of us sitting just inside, eating Sunday pancakes. The Mom-thing had her fork arrested halfway to her mouth. Across the table I could see her gullet trembling.
    So Terrell went out and picked up the bird from the damp cold ground. It was early spring, it seems to me; the trees were in bud and the air getting fresher. At first light there’d be a lingering chill but after sunrise the warmth strengthened. I’d seen Terrell with dead animals before but this redbird wasn’t dead. And he did have that gentleness in him somewhere, sometimes—it was not often it surprised me. He cradled the bird in his hands and teased its crest back into place with a fingertip. We watched him. Them. After a minute or so the bird came completely unstunned and flew off.

    I too with my own eyes have seen it, when D—— struck the desert floor with his staff and brought everything all at once into bloom. In one stroke the desert was writhing with green and when we crushed the grapes into our mouths they had already turned to wine.
    I am your love, D—— used to say. He had that gentleness in him too. Surprising. Though when he shared the love with you, he made it hurt enough that you knew he was there.
    So I didn’t really believe Laurel’s story, but somehow I did see it through her eyes. I can’t say what I mean to say. It was more like she kissed the dry surface of my brain and made it fertile. In the green crystal of her vision I saw D—— stoop to lift the dead bird from the sand. Brown and inert as if it had never lived at all, hard as a clod or any old piece of shale from the desert. D——’s hair blew clean and silky into his eyes and he shook it back unconsciously and lowered his head again over his cupped hands to breathe on the bird, warming it with his breath till it took on all the colors of the spectrum. It lived, and perched on D——’s raised finger. He raised his arms like an apostle. In that instant I could see the hot red heart of the bird, fluttering inside like moth wings. Then it took the air and flew, away into the arid slopes of the Santa Susana Mountains to the north.
    Then I knew the same fire burned in Laurel’s head as burned in mine.

From the campsite, Terrell took me out to hunt stuff. We’d gone floating on the river; two canoes and two tents. The Mom-thing didn’t like it much, but she’d go along with Dad for a day or so. Terrell liked it. I don’t remember exactly how I felt. Terrell had been a Boy Scout and dropped out after six months because he thought it was dumb, he said, and also I think he had managed to get into some kind of trouble at the church where they had their dumb meetings in the basement. But he was still wearing some rags and tags of Scout uniform on that river trip. It made him look sort of like a soldier drummed out of his regiment (there was something like that on TV at the time), and I think we both found this appearance somehow bold and a little romantic.
    Terrell was good at finding things. He had sharp eyes and spent a lot of time in the woods. He found skulls and snake skins and live snakes in season and all that he found he would carry home. He found dead animals surprisingly often. They might not all have been dead when he first found them.
    But I don’t see how he could have killed the longhorn cow … way back in the woods on the ridge behind our house and lot, sloughed down in a red clay gulley, with tendrils of kudzu already wrapping over the rotting