Robert Stone - Children of Light

“Hi, Joy,” Lu Anne called. “Hi, Joe Gates.”

“I’m Judy Garland,” Joy said happily. She leaned forward from the bar, balancing on the edge of the trolley, waved and displayed the eagerest and most brightly toothed of Judy Garland smiles. “When you have a costume, you can be Judy Garland too.”

Joe Gates half turned in his buckboard and tugged on the bell cord beside him.

“Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings,” he sang to them, in flatted hipster tones.

“Joe Gates was actually in Meet Me in St. Louis ,” Joy said. “Right, Joe?”

“Naw,” Joe Gates said. “That was another man.”

Camera crew were struggling to mount the Panaflex aboard the trolley and keep it fixed in place. Joe Gates climbed down from his perch and one of the Mexican grips took up the team’s bridle. Lu Anne turned and saw young Walter Drogue approaching.

Lowndes, standing next to her, was holding her copy of the script. She took it from him quickly but not before Drogue saw.

“Don’t read the script, Lowndes,” Drogue said. “You’ll spoil the end for yourself. I mean, give us a chance, huh?”

“I want to see what one looks like,” Lowndes told the director. “I wanted to read what she wrote in it.”

“I understand,” Drogue said smoothly. “Now if you’d like to watch — and I’m sure you would — you could get a fine view from the back of that pickup behind the camera.”

He directed Lowndes’s attention to a red Ford truck near the clearing.

Lowndes ignored him.

“Work well,” he told Lu Anne. She smiled at him as he walked away, a smile she knew would encourage his quickening attentions. She had no particular idea why she had done it.

“Work well?” Drogue demanded. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”

Lu Anne helped herself to another stick of sugarless gum.

“I know his type, Walter. He’s what a former husband of mine would call a moldy fig.”

“And you have a weakness for that type?”

She shrugged. “I’m indifferent. I believe that type has a weakness for me.”

Drogue stared at her. “What former husband?”

“Oh,” Lu Anne said, “the clarinet player.”

He took her by the arm and they walked together toward the trolley.

“Look at this light,” he said. “What does it do for you?”

“It makes me sad,” she said.

“Come on,” he told her, affecting an excited tremolo, “this is El Greco light. It’s holy.”

She looked at the sky, hoping to catch his excitement. It looked to her like late-summer weather at home. Edna, she thought, would know the oppression of that yellow-gray dog end of summer light. But the air was different where they were. It was the West, and not old Pierre Pelican land. Even in famished Baja there was an edge of hope to the air.

“We’ve just done Joe Gates on his buckboard,” Drogue said. “Atmospheric, sinister as shit. I mean,” he said, “the dude’s been a millionaire half his life. Give him his cue and he’ll give you three hundred years of servitude and lonesome roads.”

Lu Anne smiled for him.

“Joe was in Salt of the Earth , you know that? Dad brought him in. He played the Black Worker, or as they used to say, the Negro Worker, and let me tell you, the Negro Worker was bad! This big young hulk of a guy — huge pecs, chest like a fucking draft horse. He didn’t give a shit about blacklists, he was rich in real estate.”

Toby Blakely, the cinematographer, walked up to join them.

“Turned out,” Drogue went on, “they never even noticed him in Salt. He worked through the whole decade. He played weepy singing convicts on death row, he played old wimpy butlers, the whole shtick. But you should have seen him as the Negro Worker.”

Blakely took off his baseball cap, a half-servile gesture.

“If we’re gonna use this light we’d best be doing it, boss. It’ll be hell to match and I’m afraid there’s a storm coming.”

“That’s not possible,” Drogue said. “I’m assured it’s not possible.”

“Well,” Blakely drawled cautiously, “they do have these out-of-season storms, Walter. They’re called chubascos. ”

“Well, fuck that,” Drogue said. “ ’Cause I gotta match that light. And I’m gonna personally piss on the Virgin of Guadalupe if it rains on my picture.”

“That’s not helping, Walter,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had put his glasses on; he was watching them from beside the truck.

“Now listen,” Walter said to her. He walked in step with her and they performed a wide paseo around the sweating figure of Toby Blakely. “We’re going to do great things with this trolley ride to the beach. We have a wonderful spooky light and we know how to use it. Then if the light holds — if we have any kind of sunset at all — she gets to walk on water.”

Lu Anne said nothing. She had been hoping to save Edna’s walk down the beach for a special day, even perhaps for the last day of location. But they were shooting out of sequence for reasons of economy. There were at least ten days of filming on the Grand Isle set.

“Do you mind doing both those scenes today?”

“I can do them both,” Lu Anne said. “They go together.”

Drogue stopped, facing the trolley, arresting Lu Anne in mid-stride, clutching her arm.

“Look at that light, kid.”

“Yeah,” Lu Anne said. The light frightened her.

“So tell me — if you were taking your last trolley ride, how would you do it? I mean, would you do it standing up holding the bar like Joy or would you sit?”

Lu Anne thought about it.

“Maybe I should try it both ways. I sort of think sitting. You know, a little stunned. Standing, it’s like Queen Christina. ”

Drogue smiled. “What’s wrong with that?”

“I think what you want is an anti — Judy Garland, right, Walter? I’ll take care of that for you.”

“The question is sitting or standing and for me it’s a question of composition,” Drogue said. “I’ll get another tape of Joy on the trolley while you sit up here. I’ll watch the tapes, you think about it.”

“When the time comes,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll know.”

“Hey, I like the way you think, kid.”

Lu Anne watched him walk off in his crouched, bent-backed scurry. His movements were always startling. He was given to sudden violent gestures that continually caught her off guard and made her feel like cringing.

As she watched, he pivoted without warning, as though he were dodging the swoop of a predatory bird.

“Tell Frank you love it,” he said. With a limp outstretched arm he indicated the faked trees and the trolley, the whole artificial world they had made there. Frank Carnahan was the production designer. “Tell him you feel like you’re back in the bayou.” She nodded. On the way to her trailer she saw Carnahan headed toward the beach that would be their next location.

“Frank!” Going up to him, she tried a little variation on Walter’s walk. “Hey, I love it,” she told the designer. “I feel like I’m back in the bayou.”

Carnahan looked pleased. His breath smelled strongly of rum. All designers were alcoholic Irishmen; it seemed to be traditional. The smell of liquor made her want a drink. Or something. Carnahan smiled with pleasure.

“Don’t think there isn’t a story behind it, Lee.”

As Carnahan unfolded the story behind it Lu Anne’s eye roamed the location in search of people from whom she might score. She had already solicited Joy and Jack Glenn, the young actor who played Robert Lebrun; both had disclaimed possession. Bill Bly, who stood stroking one of the trolley horses, was always a prospect. But Bly and Lu Anne had a past which she did not care at that moment to reexamine; and she knew he had been appointed to oversee her secretly. George Buchanan, a middle-aged actor who played Alcée Robin, was not in sight. A few years earlier George had been able to produce anything conceivable at an hour’s notice but he had become a family man and joined A.A.