“The wind swirls around the roof and the rain rolls out and away,” said Juan to me. “You can see the sun and the stars, but no one can see you. Here the war is over, Last Chance. This is Treaty.”
“Do you live here?” I asked.
“I am wherever I am,” he answered.
“But do you have a house, a bed even?”
“My bed is where I lay these bones. My home is what I survey. I stay around here mainly because of the puppy trees. But I have been elsewhere.”
Talking to him tired me. As soon as he started to answer, I wanted to stop listening. It was as though his voice was in my head rather than in my ears. It was hard work to listen.
“Anywhere,” Thrombone said as if giving me a respite from the exhaustion he had induced.
I wondered if I was still dreaming.
“The things you left behind,” our host said, “are under a pile of leaves over that way. You will find your blankets and things there.”
“How’d you do that?” Reggie asked.
“Under blue light things simply are, Pathfinder. Don’t waste our time with mudbound questions.”
“We can’t stay,” I said.
Thrombone looked at me.
“Of course,” he said. “Adelaide.”
“We have to get back down to a hospital. She’s real sick. There’s nothing in our first aid box that could help her.”
Reggie had put our companion down beside the great trunk of the main tree. There she languished between sleep and despair. The crazy-looking man knelt down and bent over her. He moved closer and closer. First he was looking at the wound, then he was smelling it. When he ran his tongue down the length of the laceration, I jumped to pull him off.
I jumped but Reggie grabbed me.
“Let him alone, Chance.”
“Look what he’s doin’.”
“He’s one of us. He knows what he’s doing.”
I watched him. His hands on either side of Addy’s head. Lapping at the cut made him look like a forest creature licking moss from a stone.
“Come on, Chance,” Reggie said. “Let’s go over to the stuff. We can make a fire to keep her warm when he’s through.”
I wasn’t going to be dissuaded by a child. I pushed against Reggie, but he didn’t budge. I was considering a right hook when Wanita grabbed hold of my fingers.
“It’s okay, Chance,” the dreamer said. “Else, she gonna die.”
A high-pitched moan escaped my throat. It was as if a man next to me had finally succumbed to despair. I knew this man’s pain, I felt for it, but I was also removed from his feelings.
“Okay,” I said. “All right.”
The little woodsman was working his head and tongue vigorously against the side of Addy’s face. I watched for a moment and then left with Reggie. Wanita came with us, but Alacrity stayed there next to her mother.
More than a thousand feet away from the main tree was the smallest. A redwood less than twenty feet in diameter. This was to be our home for many years, there under the bark of Number Twelve.
Reggie and I broke out the tent and the cooking utensils. I built a small fire from the kindling Wanita gathered. Every once in a while I’d glance over to see Juan hunched over Addy.
“He’s okay, Chance,” Wanita said. I turned to see her looking up at me. “He’s just crazy, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s all mixed up. Too much blue in him. It’s not even a color no more. Just real bright, like pins in the window when the sun shine on ’em.
“What do you mean, honey? What do you mean he’s crazy?”
“All’a the rest’a us just think one thing, y’know? I mean like Reggie. He like t’get losted but then he finds his way back. He don’t never have dreams. But I do.” Wanita looked into my eyes as if to say, You see?
“So does Juan Thrombone do more than just finding or dreaming?”
“Only me’n Reggie do them.”
“But what—”
“He do a lotta things. But now he don’t think like we do no more because when all them things come together, they stop bein’ blue-like.”
“How do you know this, Wanita? Did he tell you in a dream?”
The little girl shook her head. “Nuh-uh. I can see it. Where it was.”
At that moment Reggie, who had been sitting on the other side of the fire, eating oatmeal, rose quickly.
“Here she is,” Thrombone said at my back.
He was standing there, carrying Addy in his arms. Seeing him in relation to Addy’s long body accented how small the man actually was. He brought Addy next to the fire and laid her down. He rubbed the sleeve of his right arm across his tongue and spit into the fire.
“She was almost dead, you know. You wouldn’t have gotten her down to the cities in time.” With that, the little madman lay next to Addy and fell into a deep slumber.
I moved next to Alacrity’s mother. The wound looked the same, only dimmer. The blood red was now brick red. The white center had turned gray. Addy opened her eyes for a moment and looked up. She smiled and said, “Where’s Julia?”
“I’m here, Mommy,” Alacrity said just as if she were still a small child.
Adelaide smiled and then fell back into unconsciousness.
Juan Thrombone snored loudly.
He slept like that, next to our campfire, burning or dead, for the next two days. Addy was up the next morning and, though weak, was well on the way back to health.
I wanted to leave, but Alacrity and Wanita said that it would be bad manners to leave Mr. Thrombone sleeping after he had saved Addy’s life. Reggie said that he had no intention of leaving the woods anyway, because it was the safest place he could imagine.
“It’s the only place that’s safe from Death right now,” Reggie said. “Anywhere else is like being out in the open where he could see us if he looked hard enough. But there’s cover here. That’s why I was lost, because Juan made it impossible for us to see or hear or feel.”
So we stayed in the deep woods that Juan Thrombone had called Treaty. And as each hour passed, I was more and more lost to the place.
The forest seemed to generate heat. It was cold enough to have to build a fire at night but not too cold. More than enough light filtered down through the leaves. The space was like a great cathedral, a place to worship and give thanks for.
I worried, though, because I didn’t know how we could survive up there.
“Mr. Thrombone live up here okay,” Wanita said.
“But he’s crazy,” I answered.
“Maybe he could show us how to be crazy like him.”
Twenty-four
Two days later Juan Thrombone awoke from his deep slumber. He rose and stretched, yawning loudly. The girls were out exploring while I tended the fire and watched over Addy. She was still tired, and I feared, in spite of Thrombone’s treatments, that she might relapse into fever.
Reggie was behind Number Seven, masturbating. He’d grown from his early teens into manhood in less than a week. This brought on certain hormonal tensions. He went behind Number Seven nine times, and maybe more, a day to slake their pressures.
I realized what was happening when I saw that Alacrity spent much of her time climbing high into Numbers Five and Six to look down behind Seven. When I asked her what she’d been looking at, she replied, “Reggie’s trying to go to the bathroom but he can’t.”
“It’s a good morning, Last Chance,” Juan Thrombone said. He looked at Addy and added, “First Light.”