The reverberation of his solemnity nearly slammed me to the ground. I gritted my teeth and leaned against Number Three.
“Coyote has heard the call of the puppy trees, and she has stalked Death at our borders.”
“I thought you made the singing trees block anything from people like them?” I shouted.
Everyone turned to me. They seemed slightly surprised that I was there.
“I opened it up a few weeks ago, Chance,” Bones said. “When I heard him stirring in his desert cave.”
“Gray Man?” Winch Fargo’s eyes narrowed and his one fist rose.
“I’m not afraid of him,” Alacrity said. She was looking into Nesta’s eyes. The two young women had moved close together.
“Maybe he won’t find us,” Reggie said.
“He’s already on his way,” his sister replied.
“Death has clawed his way out of the grave,” Juan Thrombone said. “It is time for you, Chance, to leave.”
“Where?”
“Far away. In three months’ time you can return. Maybe we will be here. At any rate Death will be gone.”
It was an odd council of two madmen, a child, an amazon, and a beautiful egghead. There was the coyote pack too and Reggie, who was so well camouflaged that I almost forgot that he was there. All of them were of one mind.
Juan Thrombone turned from me and communed with the other Blues. There were no words spoken. I’m not sure if there was any sound at all. There might have been some grunting or humming. A coyote might have howled. Or maybe it was just the nature of my small brain trying to decipher their thoughts. Their congress was not painful to me. I didn’t experience the pressure that Bones’s attention usually caused. It was like a choir practicing pieces of songs that gave hints of great meaning only to break off midway.
It was the last moment of pure beauty in my life.
After a while things broke down. Nesta and Alacrity held hands and stared into each other’s eyes. Juan Thrombone took Winch for a walk through the woods. Coyote reclined and Wanita rested her head on the canine mother’s chest. The dog, Max, seemed to remember me from our evening together with Claudia Heart. He stayed near me while watching Coyote. Reggie began sharpening stone arrowheads. Then the rest of the coyotes came around me, playing like they had in my hospital room years before.
After a while I lay down with the beasts and slept.
I dreamed of scents. Sweet water wafting on the air and the musky odor of desert rams, the sharp, stinging smell of the bobcat and the stench of humanity. But those creatures could smell much more than their earthly brethren. They could smell the moon and stars and the spaces between the stars. Their howling song was an intricate equation honoring the placement of gravities they sensed.
A long crying note came into my dream. For a while I thought that it was the baying of my sleepmates. Then came a flat thumping, a deep rumble, and then a song.
I awoke to see Alacrity working a small hand-sized bow along the taut string of her longbow. The sound was a pure distillation of all the possibility of a violin in a varying note. Reggie followed her with a slow beat. And Juan Thrombone gave voice to a wordless song. The coyotes joined in, yipping and howling. Wanita slept on and Winch Fargo, who had gotten into Juan Thrombone’s honey wine, made toast after toast.
The music was too powerful for my halfwit senses, so I made my way out of the cathedral of War knowing that my time among the Blues was short.
“He’s coming close,” Juan Thrombone said to me a week later. “He’s almost here.” He had found me in the abandoned town of Treaty. I had gone there hoping that I’d go unnoticed, that I might be able to stay and help in the stand against Death.
Thrombone was accompanied by Winch Fargo. Fargo had made himself a giant two-bladed ax from a metal plate that had covered a broken generator Reggie had found. It had a rough hemlock haft and was more than three feet in diameter with blades that were perfect crescents as sharp as razors.
“Nigger come up here and he’s gonna lose some head,” the felon said.
I had always tried my best to stay away from Fargo. He was rude and insulting to everyone but Nesta.
“Let me have a little while with Chance,” Bones told the axman. “I have to send him off.”
Fargo hesitated a moment. He hated ever being alone. But he finally moved off.
Before going he said, “You tell that nigger that I’m waitin’ for ’im up here if you see ’im, Chance.”
When Fargo was gone Thrombone turned to me.
“It’s time for you to go,” he said.
“Tomorrow.”
“Now. There is no more time. You have to go.”
“You’re not making Addy leave,” I said.
“She will die if I do.”
“I don’t mind dying,” I said. “People die. They die all the time. But this is my home; it’s where I live.”
“It’s easy for you to die, Last Chance. As easy as the red leaf falls. But you have a job to be doing.”
“What job?”
“I cannot say except that you must leave now.”
The small man’s eyes turned blue. I blinked and found myself alone in the town.
My backpack had been ready for days. I retrieved it from Number Twelve and set out on the path for Eric Beauvais’s cabin in the woods. I didn’t say good-bye to anyone. I was angry and hurt that I had to leave. I blamed them for not running with me. No one had ever explained to me why they had to stay or why I had to go. We could have all run away and made our home elsewhere. Bones could have planted new trees.
I stomped away from our Eden without a friend or a future. All I had was another set of memories of people who were lost to me. I ignored the whispering secrets in the sun and sky. I hated what had been given to me because all it did was accent my loss.
I traveled hard for three days before reaching Eric’s cabin. It was a small fallen-down affair atop a bald hill. The walls were reminiscent of Juan Thrombone’s multifabricated suit, composed of plasterboard and wooden slats, tar paper and thatch. On one side there was an aborted foundation of stone, or maybe the house was built with a broken-down stone fence as one of its sides. The roof was rusted metal, and no smoke came from the black stovepipe at its center.
There was no porch, just a front door that opened to a yard. In that yard lay the wreckage of one man’s life. There was an old Dodge that couldn’t possibly have worked, a broken-down washing machine, an animal pen with no life in it, a half-tilled garden, and a dead goat flung in the path to the door.
I gazed upon the scene for a long time before acting. I tried to think of some reason why a dead goat would be left to rot outside one’s front door.
Eric wasn’t dead. Blinded by Death’s talons, hands and feet crushed by Death’s weight, but he wasn’t dead.
“Who is it?” he cried when I pushed the door open.
“Friend of Alacrity’s,” I said.
He was crouched down in a corner, ruined hands held up in front of his face.
Eric Beauvais was a large blond man in his late forties. He was powerful and handsome except for the red gashes he had for eyes. Gray Man had left him blinded and unable to flee or fight. I was sure that Eric had been a brave man before his encounter with Death. Maybe he had never known fear. But Gray Man left him cringing and broken. I could almost hear the death god’s laughter lingering in the room.
“Help me,” Eric begged.
He had soiled himself. The room smelled strongly of the man. I changed his clothes and washed him off with water from his rain barrel. I wiped the blood from his face and cleaned the wounds. All the while he cried and moaned.
“He just came in and and and and...,” Eric whined.