Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  Freitag gasped.

  “All right, fucker,” Axelrod said. He tried to take hold of Lowndes but the writer got by him.

  “You have found me out,” Lu Anne screamed. “The shit between my toes has stood up to address me.”

  Lowndes had bulled his way past Axelrod and was headed for Freitag and Lu Anne. He had lost his glasses and he staggered as though blinded by Lu Anne’s light.

  Her teeth clenched, Lu Anne made a swipe at Lowndes’s face.

  “He’s all filth inside,” she said. “Look at his eyes.”

  Lowndes raised his hands to protect himself. Walker stepped in and gently pulled her back.

  Lowndes had backed up against an adjoining table. He had lowered his head into something like a boxer’s stance and his fists, only half clenched, were raised before his face. His pale brown myopic eyes, tearful and angry like a child’s, darted from side to side, trying to focus on the enemy center.

  It was enraging to see the man in such a posture, Walker thought. His insides churned with anger, and with pity and loathing.

  “Get away from me, you crazy bitch,” Lowndes shouted at Lu Anne.

  Walker was uncertain whether Lowndes had tried to strike her or not. He hesitated for a moment, decided the loose fists were provocation enough and decided to go, coke-confident. He felt drunk and sick and ashamed of himself; Lowndes would pay for it. He heard Axelrod shout something about the picture and Charlie Freitag cry that enough was enough. Walker had lived through some dozen bar fights. He was not an innocent and Lowndes was offensive and, he imagined, easy. He was making fierce faces, his right hand floating somewhere back of beyond in the ever-receding future, when Lowndes decked him with a bone-ended ham fist all the way from Escambia County. There was a brief interval during which he was unable to determine whether he was still or in motion.

  “You pack of Jew bastards,” Lowndes was screaming. “You bloodsuckers. I’ll kill every one of you.”

  Walker felt for the side of his head. After a moment he concluded that he had not been mortally wounded, but he was bleeding and there was not much vision in his left eye. He struggled to stand and after an effort succeeded. No one helped him. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief; his hand came out glistening with coke crystals. He licked them off.

  When he stood up he saw that Bill Bly had Lowndes by an arm and was forcing him to his knees. Bly’s free hand was outstretched to keep Axelrod from closing on the fallen man. Charlie Freitag, his face frozen in an icy bitter smile, had placed himself between the struggle and Lu Anne.

  She had kicked off her sandals; Walker saw her eyes go wrong. In the next instant she turned and bolted for the pathway that led toward the beach bungalows. For just a moment, Bly hesitated in his subduing of Lowndes and made a motion toward her. On impulse Walker raced down the path after her, slowing to keep his balance on the turns, his heart throbbing. He ran desperately and mindlessly, pursuing. He could hear the padding of her bare feet on the stucco surfacing of the shadowy walkway but she kept one turn ahead of him all the way down.

  The sand slowed him as he ran along the beach. He heard her door slam and when he arrived before her bungalow a light was on inside. He rapped on the door and called her name. After a few moments he went around to the rear patio and found its door unlocked. There was no one in the house when he went inside. Her bedroom was sandy and disordered.

  He had started wearily for his own quarters when he saw headlights on the turnoff that led from the hotel’s highway gate to its front door. In one desperate rally he raced through the deserted lobby and burst out the front door just as one of the company limousines started away. Running after it, he pounded on the rear door. Lu Anne was in the back seat.

  “Wait,” Walker said. He was too out of breath to speak. “Lu. Wait.”

  She stared straight ahead, one hand clasped to her mouth.

  “No va sin mío,” Walker panted to the driver. “Lu, no va. Sin mío.”

  She nodded. The driver pulled over to the side of the driveway. Running back to his room, Walker heard Bill Bly calling her.

  He took his cocaine stash, his roll of bills and a green windbreaker that was on the bathroom door. Securing this much, he ran full tilt back out to the limousine and climbed in beside Lu Anne.

  “Go,” she said to the driver, “please.”

  As they drove to the gate, she leaned against him, trembling with his trembling. He fought for breath.

  “I have to get away, Gordon,” she said quietly. “I need a day or two. I need a quiet hour.”

  He nodded, unable to speak.

  “I wanted you to come,” she told him. “I think I did. I wasn’t running from you, was I?”

  He tried and failed to answer. He shook his head, his chest heaving.

  At the highway they stopped while the driver opened a locked gate, drove over a cattle grid and locked the gate behind them. Peering through the rear window, Walker saw no pursuing lights.

  “Where are you going, Lu Anne?” he asked her as the car sped south along the highway. “I mean, where are we going?”

  Lu Anne smiled wearily.

  “They’ll think you made off with me,” she said.

  “Yes,” Walker said, “they will.”

  “What pictures were they talking about, Gordon? Some pictures that … some picture he had?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it of me? It was, wasn’t it? It was of us.”

  “Maybe he had a picture. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter now. He’s fucked.”

  Walker watched the dry brush race past in the car’s headlights. After a while he patted his pocket to be sure his drug was there. There was a box of Dr. Siriwai’s pills in the same pocket. He sighed.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “Morning,” she said soberly. “We’re going to where it’s morning.”

  “Will there be something to drink?”

  She had taken Lowndes’s bottle of scotch and she handed it to him. He drank it gratefully.

  “Bats or Birdies?” Lu Anne asked.

  “It’s your party, kid. You tell me.”

  “We’ll know when we get there,” she told him.

  Ten miles to the south, the road on which they drove turned inland, crossed the mountains on the spine of Baja, and ran for thirty miles within sight of the Sea of Cortez. At the final curve of its eastward loop, a dirt track led from the highway toward the shore, ending at a well-appointed fishing resort called Benson’s Marina. At Benson’s there was a large comfortable ranch house in the Sonoran style, a few fast powerboats rigged for big-game fishing and a small airstrip. Benson ran a pair of light aircraft for long-distance transportation and fish spotting.

  Early on during production, Lu Anne had been told about Benson’s by Frank Carnahan; she and Lionel had hired Benson’s son to fly them to San Lucas for a long weekend. The flight had produced much corporate anxiety after the fact because the film’s insurance coverage did not apply to impromptu charter flights in unauthorized carriers. Charlie Freitag had been cross and Axelrod had been upbraided.

  In the early hours of the morning, their car turned into Benson’s and pulled up beside his dock. Walker had slept; a light cokey sleep, full of theatrical nightmares that had his sons in them.

  Lu Anne walked straight to the lighted pier and stood next to the fuel pumps, looking out across the gulf. Walker climbed from the car and asked the driver to park it out of the way. In the shadow of the boathouse, he had some more cocaine. The drug made him feel jittery and cold in the stiff ocean wind.

  After a few minutes, Benson’s son Enrique came out looking sleepy and suspicious. He was a Eurasian, the son of a Texas promoter who had realized his dreams and a Mexican-born Chinese woman. When he recognized Lu Anne he smiled.

  “You two want to go to Cabo again?” he asked. He shook hands with both of them and Walker watched him realize that it was not the same man who had been with her on the last flight.

/>   “No,” Lu Anne said. “We want to go to Villa Carmel.”

  He was looking down at the ground in embarrassment, an unworldly young man.

  “I don’t know, ma’am. There’s a chubasco over the mountains. I have to get the weather.”

  “Of course,” Lu Anne said.

  The youth stood with them for a minute or so and then went back inside the main house.

  “We should go back,” Walker said.

  She shook her head.

  “You’re screwing them up,” Walker told her, taking a slug from the bottle of scotch. “You should be back at work tomorrow. I should be gone.”

  Lu Anne kept looking out to sea.

  “I don’t think I want to go back to work tomorrow. And I don’t want you to go.”

  “It’s senseless,” Walker said.

  “Then why did you come?”

  He thought of the bird trilling in the Hollywood hills.

  “Where’s he gone?” Lu Anne asked. She meant young Benson.

  “I guess he’s gone to find out the weather.”

  “Pig’ll come after us,” she said. “He’ll figure out where we’ve gone to.”

  “Who will?”

  “Billy,” she said. “Bly.”

  “I don’t know why you want to go to Villa Carmel. What’s there?”

  She smiled at him quickly, surprised him.

  “Wait until you see.”

  “Weren’t we near there once?” Walker asked. “You were shooting somewhere in the Sierra. A long time ago.”

  “We were miles away. We were shooting a Mexican setting of Death Harvest in Constancia.”

  “Was it Constancia?” Walker asked. “Or was it Benjamin Hill?”

  “It was way the other side of Monte Carmel. Villa Carmel is on this side. The Pacific side.”

  “Why do you want to go there?”

  “The reason …” she began, and paused. “The reason is a pretty reason. You’ll have to trust me.” She took hold of his hand. “Do you?”

  “Well,” Walker said, “we’re out here together in this storm of stuff. What have I got to lose?”

  “We’ll see,” Lu Anne said.

  Young Benson came back with his map case and climbed to the small room above the boathouse that was his operations shack. He was sporting the leather jacket and white silk scarf it pleased him to wear aloft. When he turned on the lights, an English-language weather report crackled over the transmitter. Walker and Lu Anne on the pier below could not make it out.

  She looked through her tote bag and came up with a white bank envelope filled with bills and handed it to Walker.

  “What’s this?”

  “To pay him.”

  He started to protest. She turned away. “My party,” she said.

  Climbing the wooden stairs to Benson’s office, he put the envelope beside his wallet, still stuffed with his winnings from Santa Anita. Both of them had so much money, he thought. It was so convenient.

  “How’s the weather?” he asked young Benson when he was in the office.

  “Garay!” young Benson said, looking wide-eyed at him. “Man, what a shiner you got!”

  Walker put a hand to his swollen face.

  “Is it real?” the young pilot asked. Walker looked at him in blank incomprehension.

  “I thought it might not be real,” the youth explained. “I thought maybe it was fake.”

  “Ah,” Walker said. “It’s real. An accident. A misstep.”

  “Yeah,” Benson said. “Well, let’s see. Reckon I can get you all over there. We might have a problem coming back. When you need to be back?”

  “I don’t know. Can you wait for us?”

  “That’s expensive,” the young man said uncertainly. “If the chubasco settles in we might get stuck.”

  “When can we leave?”

  “When it’s light,” Benson said.

  Walker took five hundred-dollar bills out of the envelope.

  “Take us over for the day. If we’re not back by sunset tomorrow we’ll throw in a few hundred more.”

  “Three hundred for the day, if I wait. Five hundred if I have to wait overnight.”

  “Good,” Walker said. He gave the youth five hundred. “Hold it on deposit.”

  She was waiting for him at the foot of the steps.

  “Will he take us?”

  “He’ll take us at first light. He says the weather might keep us over there. Is there a hotel in Villa Carmel?”

  She did not answer him. He looked at the sky; it was clear and lightening faintly. The moon was down. The autumn constellations showed. Venus was in Taurus, the morning star.

  He asked her if she knew what it meant because it was the sort of thing she knew. Again she failed to answer him.

  After a while she pointed to their driver, who was asleep behind the wheel of his parked limousine.

  “Pay him,” she said. “Pay him and send him back.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Gordon, I’m going to Monte Carmel. Do you want to be with me or not?”

  He went over and woke up the driver and paid him and watched the car’s taillights bounce over the road between Benson’s and the highway.

  “Why there?” he asked her.

  He thought, to his annoyance, that she would ignore his question again.

  “Because there’s a shrine there,” she said. “And I require its blessedness.”

  “That’ll be lost on me,” Walker said.

  She looked at him with a knowing, kindly condescension.

  There was light above the Gulf of California, gray-white at first, then turning to crimson. It spread with all the breathtaking alacrity of tropical mornings. Walker found its freshening power wearisome. He was a little afraid of it.

  Morn be sudden, he thought. Eve be soon.

  Benson came out of his office and clattered down the steps to the dock, sweeping his scarf dashingly behind him in the wind.

  “Let’s go, folks.”

  “Is it a Christian shrine?” Walker asked. “I mean,” he suggested, “they don’t sacrifice virgins there?”

  “Never virgins,” Lu Anne said. “They sacrifice cocksmen there. And ritual whores.”

  “If you could give me a hand with the aircraft, mister,” young Benson said over his shoulder as they fell in behind him, “I would appreciate it a whole lot.”

  Benson hauled open the hangar’s sliding door and moved the wheel blocks aside. Then he and Walker guided the aircraft out of the hangar and into position. By the time they were ready to board, the morning was in full possession. The disc of the sun was still below the gulf, but the morning kites were up against layers of blue and the lizard cries of unseen desert birds sounded in the brush until the engine’s roar shut them out of hearing.

  “She’s a real sparkler,” Benson said when they were airborne. Walker, who had been sniffing cocaine from his hand, looked at the youth blankly again. Was he referring to Lu Anne, buckled into the seat behind him?

  Benson never took his eyes from the cockpit windshield.

  “I mean the day is,” he explained. “I mean you wouldn’t know there was bad weather so close.”

  “Yes,” Walker said. “I mean no. I mean we’ll never get enough of it.”

  A few minutes out, they could see the peaks of the coast on the eastern shore of the gulf and the sun rising over them. The whole sea spread out beneath them, glowing in its red rock confines, a desert ocean, a sea for signs and miracles.

  He turned to look at Lu Anne and saw her crying happily. The sight encouraged him to a referential joke.

  “Was there ever misery loftier than ours?” he shouted over the engine.

  She shook her head, denying it.

  “Everybody O.K.?” Benson asked.

  “Everybody will have to do,” Walker told him.

  Within the hour they were landed on a basic grass airstrip in the heart of a narrow valley rimmed with verdant mountains. The air was damp and windless. A kno
t of round-faced, round-shouldered Indian children watched them walk to the corrugated-iron hangar that served the field. A herd of goats were nibbling away at the borders of a strip. Through a distant stand of ramon trees, Walker could make out the whitewashed buildings of town—the dome and bell tower of a church, rooftops with bright laundry, a cement structure with Art Deco curves surmounted with antennas. Villa Carmel.

  While Benson did his paperwork, a middle-aged Indian with a seraphic smile approached Walker to inquire whether a taxi was desired. Lu Anne was out in the sun, shielding her eyes, squinting up at the ridgeline of the green mountains to the east.

  Walker directed the man who had approached him to telephone for a car and within ten minutes it arrived, a well-maintained Volkswagen minibus with three rows of seats crowded into it. He bought a bottle of mineral water at the hangar stand and they climbed aboard.

  They drove into the center of Villa Carmel with two other passengers—Benson and an American in a straw sombrero who had been lounging about the hangar and who never glanced at them. In the course of the brief ride, Walker underwent a peculiar experience. He was examining what he took to be his own face in the rearview mirror, when he realized that the roseate, self-indulgent features he had been ruefully studying were not his own but those of the man in the seat in front of him. His own, when he brought them into his line of sight, looked like a damaged shoulder of beef. The odd sense of having mistaken his own face remained with him for some time thereafter.

  When they pulled into the little ceiba-shaded square of Villa Carmel, Benson and the American got out and the driver looked questioningly toward Lu Anne and Walker.

  “Tell him the shrine,” Lu Anne said.

  Walker tried the words he knew for shrine—la capilla, el templo. The elderly driver shrugged and smiled. His smile was that of the man at the airport, a part of the local Indian language.

  “Monte Carmel,” Lu Anne said firmly. “Queremos ir ahí.”

  Without another word, the driver shifted gears and then circled the square, heading back the way they had come.

  They drove again past the airstrip and followed the indifferently surfaced road into the mountains. As they gained distance they were able to turn and see that the town of Villa Carmel itself stood on the top of a wooded mesa. The higher their minibus climbed along the escarpment, the deeper the green valleys were that fell away beside the road. They passed a waterfall that descended sheerly from a piñon grove to a sunless pool below. Vultures on outstretched motionless wings glided up from the depths of the barrancas, riding updrafts as the sun warmed the mountain air.