Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  Outside, the two tourist police were waiting and the man who had driven them to Monte Carmel, standing at something like attention beside his car. Walker and Lu Anne got in the taxi and the policemen into their cruiser.

  “How much did you give her?” Lu Anne asked.

  “Eighty,” Walker told her.

  It had not been a bad buy. They had been able to shower at the posada and children were sent out to buy clothes for them. The tourist police and a state policeman in town had been paid a total of four hundred dollars.

  “Fortunately,” Walker said, “money’s waterproof.”

  They were both barefoot. Walker was wearing a pair of Mexican jeans he could not button and an aloha shirt with red palm trees on it that said MAZATLAN. Lu Anne had a white rayon blouse and a wide print skirt that was too small for her.

  At the airfield, young Benson was pacing beside his plane, drinking a can of Sprite. He managed a warped smile and a silly little wave as they drove up. When they got out, the taxi driver turned at once for town. The police parked beside the runway and stayed there.

  As they took off into the sun, a score of children and teenagers broke from cover and ran out for a closer glimpse of them. The goats that had been grazing beside the strip fled. Not until they were truly airborne did the police car drive away.

  Within minutes they saw the dazzling sea ahead. They were both in the rear seat. The Benson boy pulled his headphones from his ears and turned to speak to them. His expression was one of grave perplexity.

  “Don’t ask questions, son,” Walker said to him. “Fly.”

  One of the Benson drivers took them back to Bahía Honda. When they passed China Beach, just outside the mouth of the bay, Lu Anne said that she wanted to get out and walk.

  “I’m exhausted,” Walker said. “I can’t believe you’re not.”

  “I’m fine,” Lu Anne said. “I walk here all the time at low tide. It’s a much shorter distance at sea level.”

  The driver pulled over and they went to the edge of the bluffs.

  “See how low the tide is?” Lu Anne said to Walker. “And we can be back at my bungalow before dark.”

  Walker looked into his friend’s eyes. It was obvious enough that she was bone weary. Only exhaustion was keeping her devils in check. The easygoing tourist who stood before him contemplating a stroll was an illusion.

  Yet, he thought, it would be horrible to arrive at the hotel’s front door in broad daylight. He decided it would be unthinkable. They could walk slowly, bathing in the surf, watching the sunset colors, and then he would put her to bed.

  “O.K.,” he said to her. “Why not?”

  He helped her down the short thorny path from the highway and they walked across the beach to the edge of the surf.

  China Beach was altogether different from the beaches on the bay. The unbroken Pacific landed there and that afternoon there was a strong west wind, a tame follower of the storm. It gathered great rollers before it to break against the black sand.

  “What a sight you are, Gordon,” she said. “In your sexy trousers and your rip-roaring sport shirt from the sin city of surf. Devil take the hindmost, Gordon Walker. My one true pal.”

  “That’s me,” Walker said.

  “Don’t you love the black sand?”

  “I do,” he said. They walked on the sand at the tide line, beyond the waves’ withdrawing.

  “Black is enough,” Lu Anne said. “Basalt. Obsidian.”

  “I think,” Walker said, “we have got beyond fun.”

  “I don’t know about that, Gordon. It doesn’t sound good.”

  “We’re going to have a sunset,” Walker said. “Can we handle it?”

  “As long as our money holds out,” Lu Anne said.

  “If it costs more than two hundred we can’t have one.”

  “We’ve got to,” Lu Anne said. “Otherwise the fucking thing will just sit there.”

  “I’d like that,” Walker said. “It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it, if the sun just …?”

  She put a hand against his chest to interrupt him. They stopped at the water’s edge.

  “We can’t be apart now,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Of course, we could never be together.”

  “That’s true,” Walker said.

  He started on but she stayed where she was.

  “Oh, I am rather tired now,” she said. “Let’s rest.”

  They lay side by side on the dry black sand. It was cooling beneath them as the disc of the sun declined.

  “Hey, Lu Anne,” Walker said, “can I ask you a question? It’s about your concepts.”

  “You mean my delusional system, do you not?”

  “Yes, of course. You’re insightful.”

  “My insightfulness,” she said, “has been remarked upon.”

  “So—what’s a bone god?”

  She put her hand across his mouth, but after a moment she laughed. The laugh was strange; it seemed not quite her own.

  “Well,” she said, “a bone god is a little old African knuckle deity.”

  “I should have known that when the son of a bitch hit me.”

  “Poor man,” she said. “Poor thing that thinks it’s a man and plainly isn’t.”

  “He’s one of us, really,” Walker said.

  “No, sweetheart,” Lu Anne said. “He’s one of what I am.”

  The sun sank. The sea and sky ran colors unimaginable.

  “How about that,” Walker said. “It went down for free.”

  She was running the black sand through her fingers.

  “It’s still on me,” she said. “My milk. The blood and shit.”

  “I haven’t been thinking,” Walker said. “You need antiseptics.” He yawned. “You need a tetanus shot at the very least.”

  He stood up wearily and offered her his hand. She took it and stood and opened the clasp of her schoolgirl’s skirt to let it fall away. She had a man’s cotton boxer shorts beneath it.

  “I feel dirty, Gordon. I want a dip in the ocean.”

  “Come on, Lu,” Walker said nervously. “I don’t want you to.”

  “Look there, Gordon,” she said, “you can see the hotel’s lights.”

  She had pointed beyond the darkening headlands of Bahía Honda to a wide cove where the hotel stood on its private peninsula. The tiki lights had blazed on and the little covered lights along the walkways. When he turned back to her she had removed her blouse and was kicking the formless boxer shorts aside.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t want you going in. If you go in I have to and I would just hate it. I mean, I’m done for, babe.”

  “It’s my birthday,” she said.

  “No it’s not.”

  In three lovely backward steps, she danced beyond his reach. He advanced toward her, his arms spread as though it were basketball and he was guarding her.

  “Stop it now, Lu!”

  She feinted to the left, reversed and performed her three-step retreat. They were such beautiful moves, Walker thought. Straight-legged steps from the hip. She was in shape and he, to say the least, was not. He had gone in on the feint and lost her. Faked out.

  “See the world, Walker? How it goes?”

  “Stop!”

  Smiling, she shook her head. She pivoted, pointing left and right as though she were working out her blocking. Walker backed toward the ocean, deciding to play deep. He realized at once that it had been a mistake. He would be depending on his speed and she was faster.

  “Cut it out,” he said.

  “Give me my robe,” she said. “Put on my crown. Hey, it’s Shakespeare, Walker.”

  She crouched, hands on her thighs, dodging.

  “Immortal longings,” she said. “Here comes your dog Tray, Gordon, lookit there.”

  If she went, he thought, the water would slow her down. I’ll get her in the water, he thought.

  “Want to marry me, Walker? I see a church.”

  “I beg
you,” he said.

  She clapped her hands. He blinked and stepped back. She feinted left, then right.

  “Give me your answer, do!” she sang. “I’m half crazy, all for the love of you!”

  He shouted and charged. She spun away. He held the incorporeal air. He turned without stopping and saw her hip deep, backing into the surf. The left side of his chest exploded in pain. He stopped open-mouthed, fighting for breath. He could no longer see her face. She was a dark form against the fading sky.

  “This is the last,” she laughed, “of the Gestae Francorum.” He held his chest and stumbled toward her.

  “Come with me, Gordon. This is best.”

  “Yes,” he said. He sought to trick her. By the time he reached the water she was under the tuck of a wave.

  The tide was low and the drop precipitate. He tried to shake the pain off. Step by step he lurched toward her into the water. Each step hurt him and each wave’s surge threatened to throw him off balance.

  “It’s bliss,” he heard her say. She was standing on a bar, her hair wet down. The light gave her an aura of faint rainbows.

  “Come,” she called. “Or else save me.”

  Walker lost his footing. He was swimming free. He saw her ahead of him and to the left, perhaps twenty feet away. A tall wave rose behind her and she was swept away. A second later the same wave hit him at its breaking point; he tried to slide beneath it and hit sand. He was in two feet of water over the bar where she had stood. The wave smacked him down, drove him off the bar into deeper inshore water and held him down in it. When he surfaced he was afraid he had breathed seawater. For a moment he could not draw breath. When he was able to swim, the pain subsided.

  He thought he heard her voice on the wind. Then the rip drew him out, a tiger of a rip that brought him to the edge of panic, and if she called again he never heard her.

  He could only just make out the beach in the darkness, and it seemed farther away each time he looked. In the end he settled into a stroke that kept him parallel to shore, and after what seemed a very long time, he rode the waves in.

  Staggering up on the beach, he stepped squarely on her skirt. It surprised him; he thought he had swum miles along the shoreline. When he lay down he found that she had weighted the skirt down with a stone and his heart rose. It made him certain that she would be back and he had only to wait for her. It was another stunt of hers, another death-defying leap. She was the better swimmer.

  He called her name until his voice was gone. Then he lay down and tried to pray her back and went to sleep. Hours later the tide came in and woke him. He struck out along the dark beach toward the hotel, guiding his steps by the phosphorescent surf. The waves beat him back when he tried to wade around the point of the bay, so he sheltered against the low bluffs to wait for light. When it came he started again and got around the rocky point dry-footed. He walked, staggered, ran in short bursts, stopping when the pain forced him to.

  He was terrified that she was gone. That she might be nowhere at all and her furious loving soul dissolved. He could not bear the thought of it.

  When he saw a runner up the beach, he had a moment’s hope. It was so quickly dispelled that he tried to bring it back for examination. The runner was a man out for a morning jog.

  The moment’s hope had been a grain of mercy. A shred of hope, a ray. There were a thousand little clichés for losers to cling to while they lost. Why should they seem so apt, he wondered, such worn words? Why should they suit the heart so well?

  Watching the runner’s approach, he wondered what mercy might be. What the first mercy might have been. She had asked him if there was one and he had denied it with an oath.

  He should have told her that there was, he thought. Because there was. As surely as there was water hidden in the desert, there was mercy. Her crazy love was mercy. It might have saved her.

  Jack Glenn pulled up and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

  “Shit,” he said breathlessly. He placed his hands palm out over his kidneys and began to walk up and down quickly. “Like … where you been? They’re having kittens, you know. Where’s Lu Anne?”

  “Not back?” Walker asked.

  “She’s vanished,” Glenn said. “Wasn’t she with you?”

  “Yes,” Walker told him.

  “So where is she?”

  “In the water,” Walker told him.

  “Hey, I don’t see her, Gordon.”

  Walker saw another figure running up the beach toward them. It was the stuntman, Bill Bly.

  “Hey, Gordon,” Jack Glenn said, “I don’t see her.” He turned to look Walker up and down. “Your eye looks bad. Where’d you get the weird duds?”

  Walker did not answer him.

  “Oh my God,” Jack said. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Because I’m looking, Gordon, and, you know, I don’t see her. Something is wrong, isn’t it?”

  Walker nodded.

  “Oh my God,” Glenn said. “Oh Jesus Christ, Gordon.”

  Walker looked at the young man’s face. It kept changing before his eyes. Glenn was looking at the water, horror-stricken. For a fraction of a second, Walker thought he might be seeing her there. But when he turned there was nothing.

  “I lost her,” Walker said.

  Around two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon Shelley Pearce, Jack Glenn and a French actor named Celli were at the bar in Joe Allen’s. Because it was a rainy, chilling day and because they had spent the morning at a memorial service, they were drinking brandy and each of them was somewhat drunk.

  They had begun to talk about the drunk-driving laws and about accidents friends of theirs had had when Gordon Walker came in. They watched in startled silence as he came up to join them.

  “Well, hello, Gordon,” Jack said.

  He introduced Walker to Celli. Celli gave Walker a hearty American handshake while the others watched him to see whether he knew who it was that he was meeting.

  “How was it?” Gordon asked Shelley.

  “Oh, it was good, Gordon. Real good as those things go.”

  Walker nodded.

  “I was gonna say you should have been there, but of course you shouldn’t.”

  “I wasn’t asked.”

  He signaled the bartender and ordered a Perrier.

  “I mean,” Shelley said, “what do you mean, ‘How was it?’ It was god-awful. Her kids cried. He looked relieved, which he damn well was. There was press but they didn’t stay.” She took a long sip from her snifter. “The press likes a coffin and we didn’t have one.”

  “It was a long time afterward to have it,” Celli said. “Because in France we do everything right away. The memorial, two months, it seems different.”

  “Well,” Shelley said, “maybe they were waiting for her to …”

  “Right,” Jack Glenn said quickly. “That was another blow. That she wasn’t found.”

  “It wasn’t a blow,” Walker said. “It was better. I thought it was.”

  “Did you, Gord?” Shelley asked. “That’s good. I see you’re drinking Perrier.”

  “I had hepatitis,” he explained. “If I hadn’t had the gamma globulin shot I would have died.” He ran his finger around his glass. “So my drinking days are over.”

  “Isn’t it tough?” she asked him.

  “What have you been up to?” Walker asked her.

  “Isn’t it tough not drinking? How do you manage it?”

  “Oh,” Walker said. “Well, I watch television.” He laughed in embarrassment. “Evenings it’s hard, you get blue. And I drink a lot of tomato juice with Tabasco.” He cleared his throat. “I drink unsalted tomato juice because my blood pressure’s a little high.”

  “That’s neat,” Shelley said. “That’s prudent. Do you jog?”

  “Not yet. They say I might start in a month or so. When my blood pressure’s better. I’m starting to write again.”

  “So you never really had a heart attack?” Jack asked.

  “Apparently not.”


  Shelley ordered another round and another Perrier for Walker.

  “What brings you to the coast?” she asked him. “What’d you do, lurk outside? The mystery mourner?”

  “I hear you opened your own shop,” Walker said to her.

  “That’s right, man. Power to the people.”

  “She says they’ll only represent women,” Jack said. “The truth is, she’s taking two-thirds of Keochakian’s clients. The poor guy’s on the phone twenty-four hours a day begging people to stay.”

  “Did you go with her?” Walker asked Jack Glenn.

  “You bet I did.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re in town,” Shelley said. “You doing deals or what?”

  “We’re moving out,” he said. “We’re relocating East.”

  “We are?” she asked. “Who are we?”

  Walker sipped his Perrier.

  “Connie came back from London when I got sick. So we’re together. We’re relocating. East.”

  “Oh, Gordon,” Shelley said. She put a hand to her chest as though it were her heart that was at risk. “Is that ever neat! Connie came home. For heaven’s sake! How about that, fellas?” she asked her friends. “Isn’t that neat?”

  “Really glad to hear it,” Jack said.

  Gordon thanked him. The Frenchman raised an eyebrow and looked into his glass.

  “I haven’t been reading the trades,” Walker said. “How’s the picture?”

  “It’s on the bottom of the Pacific,” Shelley said. “With the late Lee V.”

  “They’re recutting it,” Jack said. He shrugged. “They shot some scenes with Joy. Lots of luck.”

  “It’s wonderful that Connie came home,” Shelley said. “Hey,” she said delightedly, “how about that for a title? Connie Came Home? But I suppose people would think it was an animal picture.”

  Jack Glenn laughed and bit his lip.

  “I think it’s wonderful, Gordon,” Shelley said. “Plumb wonderful. Really.”

  Walker looked away.

  “When she died, Gordon, did you think of any great quotes from Shakespeare? He can quote Shakespeare from here to Sunday,” Shelley explained to her friends. “He’s a walking concordance. So was she. Come on, Gordo,” she insisted. “You stood on the shore when she went down for number three. What did you say?”