Free The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell Page B

stone.
    I could hear mice moving but I couldn’t see them, which was strange when the color of night was so pale. There was a moon, and the desert floor curved away from its sere light, like a moonscape reflected. Dark spines of yucca probed out of the cracks among white rocks. Toward the horizon, a switch of broom grass and the twisted branches of mesquite reaching wraithlike into the sky.
    A scent of the smoke of blood sacrifice, rising between the horns of the altar. Horns of the moon.

    Presently a coyote came, hunting mice—quick and alert as a cat, fixing invisible prey with his eyes and then pouncing. I raised the rifle and found him in the scope. The coyote turned his head toward me. Ears up, poised. All his being focused on the shadow of the rock where surely he must know I was.
    We balanced there, for a long time. I held him in the crosshairs until dawn, and let him go.

The next time I saw O——
     … I mean after our fling to Malibu, which I had never expected to last long. It was like when you pick up a stray cat and play with it a little while and then forget it, let it go. It doesn’t probably occur to you that the little cat could have rabies.
    When I was small Terrell taught me how to catch snakes and keep them—not the poison snakes, of course, but chicken snakes and the black snakes that the summer woods were full of. They’d get used to you after a while and twine around your arms and legs, warming to the temperature of the blood inside your body. We kept them in a basket, till hunger turned them mean again, but often they could go a week before that happened.
    I hadn’t expected more from my escapade with O——. No woman of the People could come up to Eerie. I knew I was there for a distraction and that was fine with me. I think I honestly hoped to make him feel a little better, if only for a time. And with Laurel called away, to D——’s panopticon atop the lodge, what else was I supposed to do?
    I stopped to wonder, what could be D——’s purpose? If down in the dark hollows of the god mask, D—— had known that I would go, or even somehow pointed me in that direction. But I never thought of that for long, because I was still with O—— in Malibu, and it was sweet.
    The house was right there on the beach, like a white block castle, ultramodern with lots of glass and stupendous views. Every morning somebody would bring us fresh-squeezed orange juice and usually we’d go out to swim, shouting and diving after each other in the surf. O—— had to teach me some of that, because I still wasn’t used to the ocean.
    There were plenty of other people around, some of them staying in the house, and I never knew for sure how many or where exactly it was that they slept. Beautiful People. Small packs of groupie women floated in and out, sometimes high-fashion types, sometimes more exotic hippie chicks or genuine foreigners, wreathed in a funk of patchouli and the henna tattoos that curled over their hands and their feet.
    O—— paid no more attention to them than he would to flowers, or not while I was here. I suppose if you get all you want you finally have too many. But fucking, balling O—— was nothing special, despite my skills. Of course I’d known from the beginning he wasn’t really there for me.
    Then there were musicians, good ones all, who came to play with O——, who had a room, a kind of studio, I think, with lots of guitars and amps, a drum set, with a big glass wall overlooking the sea. But I liked best to hear him play and sing alone, in the evenings with the sun going down red and gold across the strand and the surf—O—— would play one of his big honey-colored acoustics and I would (I did this) curl up at his feet. Then the voices in my head would stop and I heard nothing but the vast annealing resonance of O——’s voice.
    The words—I didn’t really hear them. Most of those songs went onto the album Western Wind. They tended to be sad songs in minor