She sat up and went to the small window. As the gray-red sun rose over the city, she began to think.
Eleven
Hidalgo Quinones drank wine only on Saturday afternoons. He worked six days a week in the gardens of North Berkeley and then he’d stop wherever his last job was, drink a quart of red wine, and take a nap. He always napped in the back of his truck, thinking about his seventeen brothers and sisters, counting how many cousins and nieces and nephews he must have down around Ensenada by now.
“What an Easter festival they must be having,” he said to himself.
He didn’t have any children yet, even though he was already fifty. He did have his little bushes and big trees, his seeded lawns and bright roses. Hildy had a girlfriend named Rosa, but she couldn’t give him children.
But the thought of a hundred relatives fully grown back home made Hildy feel that he didn’t have to make a family too.
“It’s sad for Rosa,” he said to himself. “But it would be even sadder if I left her because she was barren.”
That was when the first shaft of light hit him.
Fertility was on his mind. Fecundity and growth. Huge plants wandering as roots under the ground, then coming forth as giant woody trees headed for the sun — like those astronauts. Cow shit and milling flies, bees and birds and burly clawing bears.
His life was set in fifteen seconds.
And then the second shaft hit.
The landscape so delicately created was blasted from his mind. Trees uprooted from the ground slammed into animals and grafted with them. Volcanoes of blood erupted under the hapless creatures, who immediately caught fire. Hidalgo screamed and clenched his fists.
He dreamed of blood and death under the blue light...
Until the third shaft of light struck.
Some months after the day that blue light struck, dozens of different kinds of birds were gathering in the northernmost reaches of the King Canyon National Park. Stags and wolves, night crawlers and mosquitoes passed that way again and again. They seemed to find comfort on or near the bark of a great sequoia redwood that had grown there for a thousand years.
Along the bark of the tree butterflies of all kinds spread their multicolored wings.
A forest ranger, Esther O’Halloran, was standing next to the great tree, obviously perplexed. She had taken off her brimmed hat to massage her head and ponder. She didn’t know that a bright pair of eyes was watching her wonder.
She tried to frighten a few of the butterflies away, but they barely moved as she waved her gloved hand around their papery wings.
The ranger knelt down to study the ground around the great tree. There were ants milling and caterpillars and walking sticks moving in their long and rigid dance. There were vole holes all along the ground. Spiderwebs were everywhere except on the tree itself. A blurred, furry flash moved quickly across her peripheral vision and she turned, catching sight of the foxtail as it disappeared into the thicket.
She smiled at the fox.
Esther pulled away a few monarchs to place her palm against the bark. She smiled again, tickled by the slight vibrations that sounded out like a kettledrum to the one that watched her.
“You should be more careful out in such a wild place,” the watcher declared.
She turned to see a short man dressed in a one-piece garment that was a patchwork of cloths and furs, metal and wood, and, in places, bone and clay.
“What?” Esther demanded. “What are you doing here?”
The fox darted out of hiding, running straight for the strange man. Arriving at his feet, she started licking his fur boots.
“I was asleep,” the man said. “In the flatbed of a truck. And then I had three dreams, all in a row. The first one was my mother, the second one was my father, and the last one was me.”
The man smiled and walked toward the forest ranger. The fox scuttled along, licking and yipping. The man came to stand before Esther. They were about the same height.
A black-and-gold monarch lit on his red-brown forehead.
“I woke up,” he said to her, the slightest trace of a Mexican accent rising like vapor between his words. “And looked in my pocket. I found a card for driving that had my picture on it and the name Hidalgo Quinones. But that’s not me.”
“Who are you, then?”
“My name,” the man said, watching her eyes, “is Juan Thrombone. Thrombone with an aitch.”
More butterflies landed on Juan’s head and shoulders. He smiled at her.
“What do you mean ‘dangerous’?” Esther asked, taking a step backward.
“Dangerous?”
“That’s what you said.”
“No. I didn’t say dangerous. It is dangerous. Yes, it is. But I didn’t say that, no, I didn’t. I said ‘wild.’ This is a wild place. A place too strong for anyone who cares more about living than they do about what they might find.”
Esther looked closely in the little man’s eyes. Maybe, he thought, she thinks I’m crazy.
A raven flew up, landing on the ground near them.
“You see, this is a strong place,” Juan said. “It’s a very, very strong place, but it is dying. Soon it will be gone. Destroyed. That’s why I’m here.”
The crazy-quilt man reached into a makeshift tarp bag that hung from his shoulder. He opened the bag to show Esther an egg-sized cone that bore the seed of the great tree.
“She wants them to grow, but they will not. Not until the true equations move her. But she called and I came because it is only the forest and I who can live without hunting. But even these seedlings will go off to war one day, I’m afraid,” Juan said. “Until then I will treat them as my children.”
“You can’t take them.”
“Why not?”
“This is government property. I’m a ranger. You can’t take my trees.” While she spoke, Esther watched the Mexican’s eyes. They were black at first but then came to be blue. Bright blue. The kind of bright that glass gets on a sunny windowsill. I have never spoken to her, but I’ve also seen those eyes.
He left her standing there, looking out where he’d been. There were butterflies all over her. White cabbage butterflies on her cheeks and hands. Down her collar. Up under the cuffs of her uniform pants.
Twelve
He never slept more than a few minutes at a time but was rarely tired. He was in constant pain, but that was the least of his discomfort. His lower lip was now a leather flap, and his right eye had a patch instead of a lid. The flesh of his face had been shredded and scarred, but he didn’t spend long enough in the hospital to find out about plastic surgery for his bones and skin.
Miles Barber had gone from detective to freak in an instant, but he didn’t appreciate the change. The last thing Barber remembered was crouching down among the shrubs of Garber Park and hearing a loud scream.
In the hospital the doctors and police told him that he was the victim of a brutal ritual performed in the park by a drug-dealing cult, the Close Congregation. They told him that he’d been butchered and left to die.
Miles Barber didn’t remember getting up that morning, but he knew that there had been no ritual.
“Bullshit,” he said to the doctors.
“Are you crazy?” he asked his old cop friends.
As soon as he was able, ex-Detective Barber checked himself out of the hospital. Family, friends, and physicians tried to stop him. But he didn’t care about health or what people saw when they looked at him. He didn’t care about what they saw, because the images in his mind were so much worse than disfigurement or physical pain.