The Color of Night (3 page)

The town where I now lived had been made for the people who built Hoover Dam, and for a long time there was no gambling there, because the workers didn’t want it, or because the powers that then were didn’t want them to have it. The nearest casino was to be found in a slash through the mountains just to the north, first cut for the railroad to go through. It always looked calm from the outside, at evening especially, a great sand-colored rectangle, nothing but functional, but with clean square lines that gave it, sometimes, the aspect of a temple. A wide range of stone steps spilled down from the entrance, a recession of squares outlined in tubes of red and blue neon. The lights around the doorway didn’t flash. On September 12, I entered at dusk.

Business as usual. My table was three-quarters full for most of the night. A few regulars, and a few strays, as usual. It’s possible they talked more among themselves than they normally did, exchanging horror stories and conspiracy theories. I don’t know; I never listened to what the mortals said to one another. It meant less than birdsong to me.

There was one I had never seen before, an Indian, or he looked like one. He was big and broad, with blunt features softening with age, with alcohol too, more than likely. The whites of his eyes were caramel colored, but black in the center, distant and deep. He wore a perfectly round black hat with a band of silver and turquoise medallions, and several heavy bracelets in the same style on both arms. He played without looking at his cards, it seemed. He was looking at me the whole time, or through me, without appetite or desire or any form of interest I could understand. It made me wonder what he was thinking, not something I usually do.

Around midnight he had lost all he had, about eight hundred dollars, I think. He heaved himself up from his chair and left. In an hour or so he had returned, without his hat or the bracelets or the belt with the big silver-and-turquoise buckle. I don’t think he’d had a watch to begin with. He started with a hundred fresh dollars in chips and by two in the morning he had won more than a thousand. He shoved eighty dollars’ worth toward me for a tip, and carried the rest to the cage to cash out. Something changed in his look when he pushed out of his chair the second time, nothing measurable in his expression, but still some difference was being expressed. A bear might look at you that way if it wasn’t hungry. A couple of hours later I saw him again across the floor. He was wearing the hat and all the rest he’d had when he first came in. He might have looked my way for a second, but his face was invisible under the hat’s wide brim, the dark eyes blotted away in shadow.

I signed myself out and went to the restaurant: a sort of faux diner with Pullman décor, lots of chrome and red leatherette stools. In the town where I grew up there’d been a real one like that, made out of an actual railroad car, where my brother would buy me milk shakes sometimes. The casino’s version had a slot machine wherever there was space for one, of course, and under the countertop in front of each stool was a video poker screen. I sat drinking straight whiskey out of a water glass, as I usually did at the end of my shift, watching the computer spool out endless hands of five-card draw beneath the smeary glass.

There are no televisions in a casino, lest any signal from the outside world should leak in—for the same reason that there are no clocks and no windows. But in the phony diner there were two, perched high in the corners at either end of the counter. The sound was almost always turned off, and I had scarcely looked at them before; perhaps I hadn’t even known they were there. But that night, that morning, whenever it was, they were playing the fall of the towers, over and over, in rapturous silence. That image of Laurel swam across the screen again, flung to her knees, her back arched in a bow and her mouth a black hole, as if the Furies were lashing her breast with the scorpion whip. As if she were a Fury herself.

I was hungry then, so I ordered prime rib, so rare it was served in a pool of warm blood. Tammy frowned as she covered the poker screen with my plate, tucking a strand of her washed-out red hair behind an ear.

“I don’t see how you can eat that,” she said, or maybe,
I don’t see how you can eat.

I stopped at Wal-Mart on the way home, to buy some videocassettes. Another windowless, timeless box, a big casino. They have everything that money can buy. Something beautiful happened that I hadn’t expected. To find the tapes I had to go where the televisions were. Hundreds of them, from tiny portables to panoramic home-theater screens, and all of them playing that same cascade of images. Before that spectacle all the mortals who had wandered into the building had been captured, as if turned to stone. They were prostrate, dumbstruck, leveled by awe. There must have been noise but I didn’t hear it. I spun like a dancer among all those screens, letting the light play over my body. It made me feel pretty, which I seldom do.

I stayed in the trailer with the blinds drawn, crouched below my television cart, jabbing the pause button till the VCR spindles squealed. In four hours I had sculpted two perfect hours of tape, with no commentators or gabbling or crawls across the bottom of the screen. Then I sat back and watched. The planes bit chunks from the sides of the towers and the gorgeous sheets of orange flame roared up and the mortals flung away from the glittering windows like soap flakes swirling in a snow globe and the tower shuddered, buckled, blossomed and came showering down.

Raze it. Raze it. Again. Again.

I took off my clothing and stood naked before the full-length mirror screwed to the back of the bathroom door. My body has suffered few of the ravages the flesh of mortal women is heir to. There are few lines and little sagging. I’ve never had a problem with my weight. The breasts were always mere suggestion, barely rounding the line of the rib cage, still almost as high and firm as they were in my spring. My hair needs some chemical help to stay black. The hair around my vulva is gray, but that doesn’t matter; when I fuck I do it in the dark.

The trailer rocked in the desert wind. I put on a shirt and some drawstring trousers. Outside it was once more night. I picked up the rifle and went into the desert.

Why I don’t love the desert. Why I don’t. Why I don’t love. Where I grew up was wet and fecund and succulent green. Red clay country, slick with red mud and crawling with vine. Playing Indian, we’d streak our cheekbones umber with the clay. On the road, waiting for the lumbering yellow school bus, we would throw jagged little stones at snakes. Kudzu sprawled over everything, dragging down the trees.

No snow in winter, but rain, rain. Gullies washed red mud across the yard and the creek overflowed with snapping turtles and the fat, slick salamanders we used to call red dogs. Doors stuck shut and the windows warped and the panes beaded and streaked with rainwater till you felt like you were down in a diving bell. Summertime, the air was so thick that to breathe felt like drowning. We walked shellacked in thick layers of sweat. Every fold of skin stuck together, sucked apart.

Saturdays Dad or Terrell would push the mower snarling around the yard while indoors fans rattled and paddled the heavy air, and the black-and-white TV chattered in a corner of the living room. Momma cooked green beans all day till they were soft and gummy, with slick rings of white onion, red pepper, and spoons of bacon grease she squirreled up in a can. Out back was an A-frame garage with the white paint cracking and peeling off. Kudzu swarmed out from the woods behind, wrapped over the roof like a giant squid attacking a ship. One tentacle coiled around the attic window, its tip probing under the wooden frame.

Inside, an old tennis ball swung on a piece of fish-line so Dad could park the car just so, without smacking a bumper into the wooden steps at the back.

In the attic Terrell had his old Boy Scout sleeping bag spread on a yellowing strip of foam mat, smelling musty with the damp and the funk. In the corner a burned-up aluminum saucepan did what it could to catch the leak. The runner of vine that had forced the window spread suckers over the soggy wallboard. A few rusty nail points poked through the slanted boards of the roof. On other nails Terrell had hung the pellet gun and the old bayonet and the fake shrunken head he claimed was a real one. Hid in a cranny were half a pack of Newports, a deck of naked lady cards, a couple of miniature Jack Daniel’s somebody had got on an airplane once. He had a couple of box turtle shells and a small possum skull that still smelled of rot. Snake skins he’d found were tacked to the rafters, shivering slightly, if there was a draft.
Come up here, Mae,
my brother said.
I want to show you something.

I got my rifle from a friend … more of an acquaintance, really. Fuck buddy, the kids call it nowadays. I could call him Pauley. We met when I was dealing at the Showboat, which was quite a long time ago.

Pauley lives in Vegas, as much as he lives anywhere. He spends a lot of time hopping back and forth to both coasts. He finds people; that’s his gig. Apparently he’s really good at finding people who don’t want to be found, and often it’s the last time that they ever do get found. Or the next to last time, in a lot of cases. Then some cases aren’t so serious, I think, but I don’t really know. I don’t talk to Pauley much about his work.

The rifle was a used one, then. I knew that, and I knew that Pauley had taken a bit of a risk in letting me have it. It touched me that he trusted my discretion.

It was all over guns where I lived as a kid and by the time I was twelve I could knock a beer can off a fence post with Daddy’s Smith & Wesson .38, do it any time I tried. Terrell and I would sneak out with the pistol, but I was a better shot than Terrell, come to think. That old .38 was just an average throw-down but Pauley’s rifle, the one he gave me, was perfect all over, beautifully balanced and sighted to the last micron. We went out in the desert one night on the theory he was going to show me how to use this gun. I set an eight-ounce water bottle on his head and shot it off at thirty yards. It seemed risky to go for fifty yards by moonlight, even though the moon was full.

I’ll hand it to Pauley, he didn’t balk at this idea. I think we both had done some coke beforehand. Afterward, we went back to my trailer and fucked like panthers. In the dark, as I have said.

The water bottle lay on the pale sand with the water bleeding out through the hole I’d drilled through it. It was summer, and the sand was still hot even though it was nighttime, and in less than a minute the water stain around the bottle had leached away and the bottle itself was dry as a bone.

The clip of Laurel on her knees was 22.4 seconds long and after I had spent about a hundred hours watching it I thought once, thought twice, and called up Pauley. I told him as much as I could about Laurel without telling him the one thing that would have stopped even his heart. That was a tricky procedure, in fact. Pauley had his sentimental side, which maybe wasn’t so surprising, and he seemed to think it was sweet that I wanted to look up a long-lost friend I’d seen on a 9/11 video. There was a certain amount of that kind of thing going on at the time, along with all the women suddenly falling in love with firemen.

It must have been a novelty for Pauley too, to be sent out to find somebody he wasn’t expected to frighten or harm. And he was good, extremely good, at finding.

It turned out that Laurel was living under what used to be O——’s government name. I had to wonder what she was thinking, when she came up with that one.