“Hey, Wanita,” I said.
“Hi, Chance.”
“What you doin’?”
“Watchin’ the water.”
“You see anything I don’t see?”
“I don’t know. I guess. I mean, we all do, I guess.”
“You mean, you and Alacrity and Reg and them?” I asked. I was thinking that my being there must have upset Mackie.
“I mean everybody see sumpin’ different,” the child answered. “People an’ bears an’ everybody.”
I sat down next to her. She tossed a pebble into the stream.
The water was very clear and full of the sun. I could feel my second sight, my blood vision, kicking in. There were trails of light beginning to arch and explode in the center of the water. The water itself began to expand. I could feel the beginning of a tale. I let go of the images I beheld, open to the real story, or at least the part of that story I could comprehend.
“You been followin’ me, huh, Chance?”
“Huh?” I realized that there was a big fish taking up the whole inside of my skull cavity. There was a flop in my head, and the fish seemed to swim out through my eyes.
“You been followin’ me,” Wanita said.
“Did you see me?”
Wanita nodded. “In my dream. In my dream I saw you. I saw you followin’ Mackie a’cause he was followin’ me. An’ I seen Bones studyin’ you.”
“Me?”
“Uh-huh. He was studyin’ you ’cause you gotta go to school.”
“But you saw Mackie following you, right?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Then why didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Why should I?”
“Weren’t you scared of him?”
“Uh-uh. I wasn’t scared.”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause I could see that nuthin’ was gonna happen t’me. He wasn’t gonna hurt me. He just wants my blood, but he’s too scared to take it.”
“He’s scared’a you?” I asked.
“Uh-uh. He’s scared’a my blood. He want it, but he scared’a it too. He used to take Mr. Fargo’s blood, but now Mr. Fargo’s too strong an’ mean. An’ everybody else is too big. He’s more scared’a all’a them, so all he could do is look at me.”
Whenever Wanita talked about her dreams, there was a certainty to her, a truth that was undeniable. If she said that Mackie would not bother her, I knew that it had to be true.
The fish came back into my head. My brain was the water in which he swam. I was the stream and then the sea. I was experiencing the wild ecstasy of evaporation when a thought came into my head, displacing the water that I had become.
“Wanita?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Can you see the future?”
“Uh-huh. Some I can.”
“And you can travel to other places in your dreams?”
“Mostly them places come to me. I mean, they happened a long time ago but they still there.”
“All you have to do is look at them?”
“No,” she said a little impatiently. “It’s not lookin’. You got to close your eyes. It’s more like music that you feel through your skin. It’s like music that you feel.”
“But the things you dream were a long time ago?”
“Yeah, yeah, but they right now too. I mean, nothin’ ever goes away. They just move but they always there.”
And so we sat there while the clipped music of the stream played almost unheard. We were watching the water, and Mackie was somewhere watching us. I was being watched. The whole universe was on automatic replay and no one could hear it but a small black child who wasn’t worried about a thing.
Thirty
Early one morning, not many days after my talk with Wanita, I was approached by Juan Thrombone beneath the shingles of Number Twelve. Wanita was out hunting with Nesta, Alacrity, and Reggie. The tension between Alacrity and Reggie had disappeared since Reggie had taken up with Trini.
“Last Chance,” Bones said. It sounded more like a warning than a greeting that morning.
“Bones.”
“You remember that job I told you about?”
“About growing more singing trees?” I asked, trying to stave off the pressure in my mind, the pressure I always felt when Bones’s attention was on me alone. “I was wondering when you’d get around to that. I mean, sometimes I think I hear the bellowing sequoias in my dreams. And if I can hear them, maybe someone else can.”
He smiled and nodded. “Up high in the mountains. Near a stream in a clearing. There’s a place to make woody songs about just plain old trees. Just cell and seed and decay.”
I winced. “And you want me to go there with you?”
“You,” said Thrombone, “and one or two others. Those who need magic that makes things, magic that you can see.”
“Are we gonna have to talk a lot?” I asked the little woodsmaster. “ ’Cause, I swear, if you talk to me much longer, every blood vessel in my head’s gonna pop.”
Bones brought his finger to his lips, winked, and turned to walk away — I followed.
It was a pleasant summer’s day. Down out of the mountains it would have been hot. But where we were was just perfect. White clouds, blue sky, and the dappled shadows of the sun winked around us as we made it down the tree-covered path that had been blazed by bear and deer and Juan Thrombone. My second sight never worked well in Bones’s presence, but my human senses were good enough on that day.
After a while we came to a small hollow. Therein we found Gerin Reed, Mackie Allitar, and Miles Barber. I thought at the time that it must have been an important moment. A gathering of men with no law but themselves. Each one of us had been exposed indirectly to blue light. Each one of us was crazy in his own way. Here and there in the surrounding woods were singing trees, the trees designed by Juan Thrombone to hide the blue music that emanated from the great bellowing sequoias and the human Blues who lived in our forest hideaway.
Mackie was pacing back and forth across the rough circle of the clearing. Gerin was crouched down, examining a line of large black ants as they followed their tiny destinies. The ex-detective was the only one of the three seated. He was applying pressure with a small twig to various points on his neck and face that Nesta had shown him to ease his constant pain.
When Juan and I entered the circle, they turned their attention to us. Juan raised his hands, and we all came together around him in a tight arc. It was a kind of attention and proximity that I hadn’t felt since my days with the Close Congregation.
“You are more than you think, and we are less,” said Juan Thrombone, a bit more earnest than usual for him — maybe that’s why he stopped and giggled. “We can tote and drop, burn and build, laugh and even war — together. You will all find what you are missing and give what you have taken and save the precious seconds that you throw away on pain.
“Not you, Slender Reed,” he said to Gerin. “All I need from you is what help you can give. But for the man who hurts and the man who cries and the one who guards the doorway but has never seen the throne room. From all of you I want help, and I will give you in return space and time.”
I had no idea what he meant or which of us suffered which affliction, but I was convinced that he wanted to help me, and I wanted that help.
Bones turned abruptly and began a quick march through the thick woods. We all followed. Nobody talked. After a half an hour or so I had a pretty good idea of our destination. I didn’t know many places in the woods of Treaty, but the path to the Bellowing Trees of Earth was burned into my memory.
Sometimes at night I would lie awake listening for the rumble of the throne tree in the ground. I’d promise myself that once I heard it, I would go back to the throne and plunge my body into its depths. It would be my “Thanatopsis,” my becoming a part of the earth and sky, root and bark. And the rumble would come, but only in my sleep. When I awoke, ready to heed the bass call, there would be nothing but clicks of night insects and the rustle of the breeze through the shingles above my head.