The Color of Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

spread to my outermost edge. I didn’t know the name for it but I knew you kept it in the dark.

In the morning we could hear D—— chunk-chunking an acoustic guitar in the lodge, stopping and starting again, repeating a phrase and trying different words against it. A couple of girls sat cross-legged on the dirt, smudged faces turned up and their mouths open, listening to the sounds that trickled out through the gap in the window. Laurel caught my hand and pulled me away, across the half-closed circle of tent and shack and gutted school bus. Ned was working on a dune buggy engine, with a stringy guy wearing colors of the Pagans motorcycle gang. The biker straightened up to watch us away. I didn’t look back but I could feel his eyes like pinholes on either side of my spine.
    We passed the barn and the corral. One cowboy was brushing down a horse and another trundling a barrow of manure. The place still functioned as a dude ranch, sort of; a few people came to rent horses and ride the dry hills.
    Laurel wrinkled her nose at the bright greenish smell of the manure. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go down to Clive’s house. There’ll be food.”
    The old man Clive, who owned the ranch, sat on a cement stoop outside his cabin, full in the sun, wearing a big Stetson hat and square dark glasses. A blind man’s cane lay between his legs, wrapped with red electrical tape. Creamy squatted on the cement to the left of his seat, with Clive stroking her hair as if she were a cat. She seemed to like it. His hands were wrinkly, liver-spotted, very large. He had a pleasant sort of smile, beneath the black lenses and blind eyes.
    Crunchy was frying eggs with corned beef hash in a black iron skillet in Clive’s kitchen. “Share the love!” Laurel told her, with her delirious smile. “The People share. ” Crunchy shook back her hair and shrugged, gave me a blank look when Laurel told her my name. That look was common enough among D——’s People.
    Crunchy divided the food on paper plates. We ate around the stoop with Clive, not bothering to bring out chairs from inside. Crunchy and Creamy put an amazing amount of ketchup on their food, stirring it into a crimson porridge. They both had sandy, sort of wavy hair, and they dressed like twins, with yarn vests over their blue work-shirts, though they weren’t actually related. Sometimes they were both there together; sometimes they worked it as a relay. D—— had told them they should keep Clive happy, which he seemed to be.
    “Creamy balls him,” Laurel told me, once we’d walked out of earshot of the place. “She says he’s good.”
    If she wanted that to weird me out it didn’t. I’d been there, done it, whatever it took. What was weird was this old-time Western street we all of a sudden seemed to be on. All weather-beaten clapboard buildings, wooden porches with spooled posts. A pharmacy, a saddle shop, a jail, and a saloon …
    “What is this?” I said. “It’s like we’re in some movie.”
    “Well, yeah … ” Laurel flashed her smile at me, pushed open the swinging saloon doors. Through them was nothing, just more chaparral. The street was a set, the flats propped up with two-by-sixes wedged from the backs of them into the ground.
    I started laughing. Laurel was too. Then we were chasing each other in and out of the dummy doors, up and down the pretend street, crouching to take aim and fire at each other with forefinger and cocked thumb. Laurel actually said bang bang when she did this action. Finally we slumped together, breathless and gasping, against the back of the saloon flat.
    “Watch out,” I said. “We’ll knock it over.”
    Laurel couldn’t seem to stop laughing. Then a motor coughed to life and she did stop, turning her head to the sound, alert, for a second, as a fox. They’d got the dune buggy going, I assumed.
    We went swinging out through the saloon doors together, bumping our hips. Then froze, for there was someone at the far end of