The Blue Hour (40 page)

She sat across the sofa
from Hess and tried to let the smell of the orange grove inhabit her. It
didn't.

She watched him looking at
the TV, saw the way the blue light played on his face, then realized he wasn't
right. His skin was pale from more than just the cathode rays. His eyes were
closed but the lids quivered like he was trying to open them from a dream.

"Hess?"

"Yes."

"What's
happening?"

"Something. It feels
like the world's tilting back and I'm gonna slide off."

In fact he was gripping
the arm of the sofa with one hand, the other was raised off the seat, ready.
Like he was going to have to catch himself. His whole body shook once, then
started to tremble. His face had gone white.

"I think I'm
just tired."

His voice wasn't right,
either, like the cords making the words were freezing up.

"Don't move.
It's more than just tired."

She went over and knelt in
front of him. She could see his eyes moving behind the closed lids and the odd
look of anticipation on his face.

"Open your
eyes," she said.

He did, and Merci could
see the confusion in them. But it only lasted a moment. She watched as he
returned to inhabit them again.

"Breathe deeply.
Slow."

He took a deep
breath. Then another.

"Count
these."

She held up three
fingers and he said three.

"Whoa. Strange,"
he added. His head tilted back, then corrected, like a kid nodding off.

"What do you
feel, right now?"

"Like a big hand held
me back. Kept me from falling. Whoa. There."

"Continue to
breathe. All right, Tim."

Merci realized that she
had her hands open on Hess's legs and she moved them to the couch. But she
stayed on her knees in front of him, studying the details of his face. Not
right, she thought: not yet.

"I have a can of
chicken soup."

"No. I'm just
going to sit a minute. I'm fine."

But the color still wasn't
back in his face. He looked pale and silver, like someone caught by a flash
strobe. He was breathing fast and slumped within the sport coat, both arms
down. She could smell his breath and it didn't smell like cancer or chemo or
rads to her, but like an old man's—human, alive, a little meaty.

"Here," she
said. "Take off that coat."

He leaned forward as if to
take off the coat but neither of his arms moved. So Merci leaned into him and
took a cuff while Hess withdrew one arm, then the other. She felt the heat of
him as she set the coat aside and placed her open hands on his shoulders. He
seemed heavy and hard as wood.

"Sit back,
now."

"Oh, boy."

"Look, Tim—your
color's coming back."

"Tell me about
it."

"First white, then
silver, now kind of peach colored, with pink on the cheeks. No more sweat on
the forehead. And the pupils of your eyes are the right size again. How are you
seeing?"

"Good now. I'm
fine, Merci. Really."

"Be still. I'm
going to loosen your tie some more."

Not being familiar with
the half-Windsor, she succeeded in doing little but yanking Hess's head
forward. Power, she thought:
will.

"One side
slides," he said. "My left. Your right."

"Got it."

She slid the silk down the
silk. Hess fumbled with his top button, but Merci got it open. His big hands
felt leathery as she brushed them out of the way.

She set her hands on
Hess's cheeks and let her fingers rest against his skin.
I want to make you well.
A low but
strong current issued up into her wrists and arms. At first she thought the
energy was coming from him—all his years and experience and strength—but when
she moved her hands off him they were still buzzing and she understood it was
all coming from inside herself.

Power.

"I want to touch
your hair."

She was surprised to hear
herself say it, but once it was out it was okay. God knows, she'd wanted to do
it for long enough.

"Why in the
world?"

"I don't know. I
always thought you had the nicest hair. And I've wanted to touch it."

"My head always feels
hot. I think
it's ...
I don't know
what it is."

"I'll scratch
it."

"Well,
okay."

She set the tips of all
her fingers gently on his forehead and told him to close his eyes. She ran her
hands together along the top of his head, then, rising on her knees and pulling
him just a little closer, continued down the back to where the hair ended at
his strong warm neck.

It was pure contradiction,
as she suspected it would be. Soft but thick. Firm but pliable. Bristly but
smooth. She had never been able to imagine its actual texture.

"Hess, that's
just absolutely wonderful stuff."

"Thanks."

"I'm going to do
it again like that, then start scratching."

So she combed her
fingers back through his brush of hair, then she did it again, pausing to touch
the white wave in front with her index finger.

What a delight.

She realized the wave was
the softest of all his hair, rather than the stiffest, which was what she had
predicted. She realized the color of it actually started on the top of his
head, behind the crest, so to speak, appearing like spots of ocean suds then
condensing gradually toward the peak.

More importantly, she
realized that the white wave, and the rest of Hess's hair, was now reacting
strangely and sticking to her fingers.

But just a few unruly
hairs, she told herself, the kind that might expire when a fellow deputy falls
in the line of duty. So she ran her fingers along his head again just to make
sure everything was okay now. More hairs jumped off.

A lot more.

She couldn't believe it.
She watched Hess's hair abandon his scalp, then climb onto her fingers like it
was being rescued.

"That does feel
good," he said.

So she ran her hands
through again while she wondered what to do and the forest of hair thinned and
clung statically to her fingers and began to sprinkle down on Hess's ears and
shirt front and shoulders and bunch up on the backs of her hands like the
little nests that ended up on her smock at her hairdresser's.

No, she thought.
If I summon my will the hair will
not
fall out.
And Merci summoned her will,
all the deep power of it, all the blinding light of it and she closed her eyes
and focused its beam directly at Hess's head.

"Ummm."

And she pressed her
nails in a little deeper, applied a little more strength. Went a little
faster, because she knew when she opened her eyes the hair would not be falling
out. But it was. And Hess, eyes still closed, was groaning like a dog. Merci
looked at him and smiled, as if her smile might mitigate his disappointment
when he realized what was happening. She rose up and leaned into him a little
more because Hess in his relaxation had melted back into the sofa. She rested
lightly against him, feeling the great weight of failure in her heart beating
against the particular hardness of Lieutenant Timothy Hess. She was too
surprised to move away. She didn't. And a moment later, when her surprise was
gone, she didn't want to.

This, she understood,
was something that her will could not fail. She could take him, all of him, all
his years and his exhaustion and his disease, all his desire and his dreams,
and she could accommodate them. She could absorb and absolve. She could take in
and transform. She could will the death right out, and the life right into him.

Power.

"Merci."

"Keep your eyes
closed."

"It's
falling out, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

She reached over and
turned off the lamp.

"Come on,"
she said. "Follow me."

• • •

At four in the
morning Hess awoke to the sound of cats screeching somewhere out in the grove.
Merci breathed deeply and didn't move.

He lay still and
remembered: fishing with his uncles, his dad making pancakes on Sunday
mornings, the creases on the back of his mother's blouse as she walked,
Barbara's expression as she came down the aisle in the church where they were
married, his first dog, what the world looked like from the tail gunner's
position of a B-29 thirty thousand feet above Korea. He had no idea why he
thought of these particular things. It felt like they were lining themselves up
for his inspection.
This is what we were.

Eight more years, he
thought.
Seventy'five years.

He set a hand on
Merci's back. He thought of standing in front of her bathroom mirror a few
hours ago, looking at his new head. He remembered her hands kneading his scalp
and the hair falling lightly onto his face, and later, the shower they took
together when she shampooed it away by the handful.

It was a strange
moment as he stood there, naked and still wet, newly bald and thoroughly
exhausted, with Merci naked herself under a towel, this large and quite lovely
woman who had just made love to him, dark moles on creamy skin, the strands of
black wet hair on her shoulders, crowded right up close in the steamy little
bathroom to look in the mirror with him. She had actually smiled. He had felt
the heat of her on his skin, through the towel. They had shaved off the remnants.
Eyebrows gone, too. He looked like a giant baby.

Hair or not, it
seemed too good a thing for him to be here now, still alive in the world, still
touching and touched by it all. And he was thankful for it in a way he could
not express.

He got up and walked
through the warm old house, looking through the windows to the dark groves and
the moonless sky littered with stars. The floorboards creaked under his feet
and a clock ticked echoes across the living room at him.

He sat for a while and
wondered how he could use the rest of his life in the best way possible. He had
no specific ideas, but the general concept of using his years to live well was
a good place to start. It was certainly a new concept, that much was for
certain.
Use the years to live well.

He made coffee and took a
cup back to the bedroom. He stood beside the bed and looked down at Merci
Rayborn as she slept. Her hair was tangled with shadows and her face was pale
as cream against the darkness. He saw the rise of her hip under the sheet, the
way her fists came together at her chin. He wondered what might have happened
if he could have met her forty years ago.

In the kitchen he turned on the light over the stove,
got out his blue notepad and pen and wrote Merci a letter about what he was
feeling at four-thirty in the morning in her house in the orange grove. Hess
considered himself a clear but dull writer, and as he composed the letter to
her he read it quietly to himself. It was clear and dull. That was okay, he
thought: the purpose wasn't to entertain or divert. The purpose was just to
tell her how much she meant to him and how she had inspired him enough to write
her about it. It came off sounding like a thank-you card, but he was thankful.
So what?

Dear Merci,

I wish we'd have met when we
were both young. But you weren't born then and I would probably have been too
witless to do you right anyway. I feel happy now and blessed by the years, by
circumstance and by you.

Sincerely, TrnH.

He left it on the kitchen
table with one of the snapshots Hjorth had taken of them together, to use up
his roll of film. The picture caught Hess attentive and Merci scowling at the
camera. A few minutes later he was dressed and looking down at her again. Her
face was lost in hair and pillow and she was snoring lightly, the sheet halfway
down her back.

He locked the door on his way out and
walked across the driveway toward his car. Cats scattered in fractional
starlight. Sunrise was still an hour away and Hess wondered why it always
seemed darkest just before dawn.

Colesceau parked outside the old Santa Ana
Courthouse. You could park two hours for free, and he liked the imposing old
building with its heavy stone architecture because it reminded him of torture
and executions. It was early Wednesday afternoon and the smoggy heat hung over the
county like the mist along the Olt. Thick enough to hide your thoughts in,
Colesceau thought, but not quite thick enough to hide your body.

Too bad about that, he
thought, seeing them from a block away. They were gathered outside the entrance
to the Parole Board building with their cameras and cables and lights and vans.
The pushy, preening reporters. The shooters. The techs. The Grant Majors of the
universe. And more folkish demonstrators with their signs and placards and
candles. Lots of them. Some of them were from his neighborhood, some were new
converts. He looked for Trudy Powers but couldn't find her.