Read Online The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell - Free Book Online

That was what I thought I wanted to say. But my lips were sealed, as if copper had been laid upon them, and my eyes were heavy under metal weight.

    I didn’t come to for a long time after, finally waking to scorched daylight, phone in my limp hand again, the robot voice advising me if you would like to make a call to hang it up.

I woke to the rattle of the bead curtain over Laurel’s door. A dry wind from the desert shivered the strings. It died away and the beads fell still. I watched the light illuminating the colors of the glass. Early, but the heat was rising. Sweat glued the inside of my arm to Laurel’s belly; I watched it rise and fall with the rhythm of her sleeping breath.
    When I looked at her face again her eyes were open, though still blurred with sleep. She sat up suddenly, threw her hair back. Lifting the beads aside with the back of her wrist, she stood naked in the doorframe for a moment, looking out across the plain. Then she came in and fished out some clothes from the pile on the floor.
    “Hot,” Laurel said. I nodded.
    I dressed myself, while Laurel packed her little metal hash pipe. We each took a hit and Laurel capped the pipe and kissed me, just on the edge of my lips; both of us had cotton mouth. She dug the water bottle out from a stale swirl of sheet, and held it to the light to show it empty.
    We went to the lodge to get more water. D—— was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he had gone to town, but none of the vehicles seemed to be missing. Two men leaned into the guts of one, holding a screwdriver and a wrench.
    The sun, though scarcely risen, seemed to screw down on both of us like a clamp. A bad idea, maybe, to toke up so early in the morning. I’d drunk as much water as I could hold and still my mouth felt parched.
    “Come on.” Laurel smiled at me, with her chapped lips, and caught my hand. Her secret, knowing smile. “I know where we can go,” she said.
    I followed her down past Clive’s cabin, through the collapsing Western set. A horned toad squatted on the steps of the saloon. Laurel made a feint at it, to make it hop, but the toad only blinked at her and inflated its slack gullet.
    On the rise beyond the set, a trail wound past the big round rock, where D—— would sometimes assemble the People, to tell us his End Time stories. A crow perched there now, at the top of the boulder where D—— would sit cross-legged like a shaman or, when he became excited, caper in tight loops and brandish his fists. I had never been past that point, but Laurel seemed to know where she was going. A trail of sorts climbed through the piñon, over a fall of rocks. It was steep, and the tread of my sneakers was worn out, so sometimes I had to crouch and use my hands to get over the stones.
    Laurel had pulled a pair of green flip-flops out of the communal clothes heap in the lodge. One of the thongs tore loose as she climbed; she held it up with a disgusted look, then flung it away. It hung on a branch of a stunted pine, and Laurel went on barefoot, carrying the whole flip-flop in one hand.
    Ahead of her I could see the bushy tops of oasis palms, springing up from a cleft in the ridge. I stopped a minute, and turned my face to the moist breeze that came from that direction. It was cooler now. When I looked back I could see stick figures moving around the lodge, way down below. The distant racket of a motor that had finally caught was like the whirring of an insect. The whole scene rippled in my sight, from a mixture of heat shimmer and hash.
    When I caught up with Laurel, she had dropped the other flip-flop and was standing with her bare toes wrapped over the lip of a cliff. Twenty feet below, a blue pool was boiling with the water that rushed into it from three waterfalls, climbing in stair steps, right to left, up the face of the higher cliff on the other side. Here was where those palm trees grew, the fronds of them trembling, high above us. There was such a wealth of water that the froth of the