Read The Color of Night for Free Online Page B

wet squid and I plunged to raise her pearl on the tip of my tongue—
    Afterward, I seemed to hear a voice explaining to me why the knives had helped, how they solved the frustration I often felt at the sheer painlessness of doing it with Laurel …
    She stretched a languid arm to the floor and came up with the folded Buck again.
    “Take it,” she said. “D—— wants you to have it.”
    So I did.

Terrell pressed the bayonet against my cheek. Sometimes I think I feel it still: the cool triangular impression of the tip into my flesh. A tenderness there, in my still impressionable body, in my brother’s attitude or even somehow in the metal blade itself.
    Don’t tell, he said. His heart beat quick against my ribs. His softest voice, strangely fond, which let us know the value of our secret. I’ll kill you if you tell.

It wasn’t that D—— wore the mask. D—— was the mask. The living face of god among us, empty eyeholes boring backward into the dark infinity of the universe beyond.
    It wasn’t always just his con and shallow cruelty. When love stood up among the People, he was father, mother to us all. At times there was great gentleness in him, and great joy. I saw him clothed in his divine glory, saying, I bring not peace, but a sword.

    After dark we all piled into the old Ford Fairlane one of the cowboys let us use. I was wearing a white shirt, and Crunchy sent me back to get a dark one.
    Stitch was driving, with Crunchy shotgun. Creamy in back with Laurel and me. We went south to the Ventura Highway, then cut over to the coast and rolled down Highway 1, toward Santa Monica. Stitch was a good driver, fast and tight to the curves. We all got high on a couple of joints Crunchy rolled us out of a plastic sandwich bag.
    “Zig-Zag Wanderer,” Creamy said as she crumbled the last shreds of roach out the window, and everybody laughed for no good reason, except for Laurel, who curled sideways and put her head in my lap. It was too dark to see the water from the cliffs, although the stars seemed very bright out there, more like flares than pinpoints, though that would have been the grass.
    Stitch stopped, finally, in a parking lot overlooking Muscle Beach, but we didn’t get out of the car. A song of O——’s was on the tinny AM radio, one of the slow dark ones. It seemed to stretch out tacky and brown as caramel.
    “What are we doing exactly?” I finally said. I had such a case of cotton mouth it was hard to get the words out. D—— had given us a mission of some kind— Go slither, he’d said, but I didn’t know that part of the code and now when stoned I remembered the words they echoed and shivered inside the dark and cavernous mouth-hole of the mask. Stoned, I couldn’t recall if D—— had audibly pronounced those words or if they’d simply surfaced in our minds.
    Laurel butted her head into my ribs, like a lamb; she didn’t say anything.
    “Waiting for bedtime,” Crunchy said, and she and Stitch both laughed.
    Stitch drove us up into the Santa Monica Mountains then. The Fairlane had a spotlight built into the vent window on the driver’s side, and Stitch flashed a couple of oncoming cars with it, until Crunchy told her to stop. “You’ll get the pigs after us,” Crunchy said.
    Crunchy rolled another one, and maybe it was out of a different bag, because all of a sudden I was a lot more stoned than before, like it was real trip weed. We went up and down the canyons. It was late now and there weren’t any other cars. Stitch pulled off, tucking the Fairlane behind a mailbox, and cut the engine and lights. The car ticked cool. It filled up with a single thought shared by the five of us, and though I couldn’t have said it I felt like I knew what it was.
    Crunchy got out and walked up the driveway. In her dark clothes we couldn’t see her once she’d gone a few yards past the hood. The canyons were shady and the starlight didn’t come through. She disappeared into this jet-black darkness