Hernandez, I seem to recall was her name, and in New Mexico, a blue-eyed Hernandez will not draw a second glimpse; Santa Fé being a melting pot for a half-century whilst Manhattan was an "Indians-only" club. Some thought her folk came out of Hernandez the town down south.
"Indian" is the word I'll use directly here, as I hear folks who are Indians talking that way to each other. Back in the day, there was a Gathering of Nations Powwow down south every year before Captain Trips made the big time. He sure was a one-hit wonder, but he was on everyone's lips...
Harold was terrified of her. That gave untold pleasure to more than one citizen of the Free Zone. Now, she seemed to be fairly meek and forgettable, when in a group. You couldn't get two words out of her for small talk. She seemed impatient sometimes in little groups, and she got the reputation, among the snippy and small-minded, that she was stuck up. But I'm kinda getting ahead of myself, Harold Lauter wasn't shown up yet in the Free Zone.
What Judy was, was whip-smart, the term fey-smart not being around much then. She had a plainness of speech in being straightforward when she knew something; she didn't have to ease it around in conversation when she knew her stuff. And she knew a lot of stuff, especially for a 20-year old girl. And grim as an undertaker, that girl. Never smiled.
Her first Chatauqua she held over at the Library. The next they started holding up on the grounds of the Colorado Chatauqua Society digs just south of 9th and Baseline. They didn't know what to call them, until they found the auditorium, and she read up on the movement, and got a name for those half-formed thoughts about what the Free Zone a'borning needed.
She presented about the history of the West, as she knew it - off the cuff, and with plenty of help from the locals; many of the newcomers being strangers, and even before Mother Abagail came to town.
Harold got started adding on some ornamental facts to what Judy was talking about, I don't recall what exactly, but he came in with some facts that were exactly wrong, and found out so. He made the lethal mistake of proposing that she and he had a difference of opinion. She showed him patiently that his words were empty; he turned tail and ran. After that, he loathed her.
If he saw her. Unlike everyone else in Harold's bailiwick, he seemed to bear her no malice - he seemed like he couldn't quite see her, exactly. It looked like he was snubbing her - but that was a social maneuver a bit above Harold's pay grade. He just couldn't see her clearly, like a wisp of fog or a face in the clouds.
To look back, things can be clear in retrospect, it was the start of one of the fey things that would characterize Eliza Blue, 'Lizablue her name wore down to, her name....after.
For blackhearts like Harold, 'Lizablue bent the lines of evil, much like, as Einstein showed, gravity bends the spacetime continuum. Black holes don't show up as a dot in the sky; their immense mass bends the light around them going in the shape like a wheat kernel or sunflower seed, driving them together downstream, making a gravitational lens. Evil couldn't see 'Lizablue, especially not great evil; what it saw is a shimmer, a bubble in the light, a wavy horizon, something like that.
She had a something to her, let's call it fey, that if it were actual physical thing with mass, would be greater than the planets, the Sun. That fey was part of her; that's all I can tell you. Imagine some great dark unseen mass, more than all the visible universe combined, that only was known by its gravity, bending light here and there, imagine that, although it's crazy talk and falling off into nonsense. But not dark like - the Hard Man, not that sort of bad dark. Just dark.
I'm getting things out of turn, some, but I had to speak of how Judy was even before Mother Abagail's voortrekkers made it to Colorado.
[To be continued]
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