Robert Stone - Children of Light

“God,” Lu Anne said, “they did you up like a celestial. Then they turned you loose with more spikes and prongs than a bass lure. There must have been young boys cut to ribbons.”

“That taught them respect,” Joe Ricutti said. “They should bring it back.”

Shortly afterward young Drogue appeared at the trailer; Josette and the Ricuttis took their equipment and left, unbidden.

“How are you?” young Drogue asked. She told him that she was fine. The pins on the dress made her think of defense and escape. Thorns. If I could, she thought, I would emit the darkness inside me like a squid and blind them all and run.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Drogue said.

They walked in a wide circle among the trees, hand in hand, Lu Anne wearing the thin white beach robe over her underwear.

“The most important question to me,” Drogue told her, “is whether you want to do it tonight. If you don’t, we’ll wrap.”

She said, after all, it was just walking in the water. She told him she would do it and that was what he wanted to hear.

Back at the trailer Vera Ricutti asked her if there was anything she wanted. Darkness was what she thought she wanted. Cool and darkness.

“Just to put my feet up awhile,” she told Vera.

When she was in the cool and dark the Long Friends emerged and began to whisper. She lay stiff, her eyes wide, listening.

Malheureuse , a Friend whispered to her. The creature was inside her dresser mirror. Its face was concealed beneath black cloth. Only the venous, blue-baby-colored forehead showed and part of the skull, shaven like a long-ago nun’s. Its frail dragonfly wings rested against its sides. They always had bags with them that they kept out of sight, tucked under their wings or beneath the nunnish homespun. The bags were like translucent sacs, filled with old things. Asked what the things were, their answer was always the same.

Les choses démodées.

She turned to see it, to see if it would raise its face for her. Their faces were childlike and absurd. Sometimes they liked to be caressed and they would chew the tips of her fingers with their soft infant’s teeth. The thing in the mirror hid its face. Lu Anne lay back down and crossed her forearms over her breasts.

Tu tombes malade , the creature whispered. They were motherly.

“No, I’m dead,” she told it. “Mourn me.”

In the next moment she found herself fighting for breath, as though an invisible bar were being pressed down against her. She turned on the light and the Long Friends vanished into shadows like insects into cracks in the walls; their whispers withdrew into the hum of the cooler. Delirium was a disease of darkness.

Her pills were on a shelf in the trailer lavatory. She went in and picked up the tube. Her body convulsed with loathing at the sight of the stuff.

Outside, the sun was declining, almost touching the uppermost layer of gray-blue storm cloud over the ocean. Wrapping the beach robe around her, she stood for a moment close to panic. She had no idea where to go, what to do. In the end she went to the nearest trailer, which was George Buchanan’s.

Buchanan rose in answer to her knock; he had set his John D. MacDonald mystery on the makeup counter.

“George,” she said breathlessly. “Hi.”

“Hi, Lu Anne.” He looked concerned and cross. He was a stern-faced man, a professional villain since his youth in the fifties. “I’m not here, you know. I’m hiding out.”

“Are you, George?”

“My son is with his girlfriend back at the bungalow. I came out here to give them a little … what shall we call it?”

“George,” she said in a girlish whine, “do you have a downer? Please? Do you?”

He looked stricken. He was so shocked by her request that he tried to make a joke of it.

“For you, Lu Anne, anything. But not that.”

“It was just a shot,” she said.

“Hey,” Buchanan said, “this is me, Buchanan. I’m into staying alive. I mean, Christ’s sake, Lu Anne, you know I don’t use that stuff. It tried to kill me.”

She shook her head in confusion.

“I mean, I can’t believe you asked me.”

She slammed his door shut, turned and saw Dongan Lowndes, the writer, apparently on the way to her trailer. He had seen her coming out of Buchanan’s quarters. He did a little double take to let her know that he had seen it.

“Mr. Lowndes,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t remember your first name.” She bit her lip; she could not seem to lose the whininess in her manner.

“Forget it,” Lowndes said. “Call me Skip.”

“Skip,” she said, “Skip, you wouldn’t have a downer on you? Or maybe back at your room?”

He stared at her. Had he taken the reference to his room for a proposition?

“No,” Lowndes said. “Or uppers or anything else.”

“Oh dear,” Lu Anne said. She smiled disarmingly for Lowndes. “I was hoping for a little something.”

“Sorry,” Lowndes said, looking as though he were. She saw that he was anxious to please her.

“Even liquor would do,” she said. “I don’t usually drink when I work, but now and then a small amount can prime a person.”

“Right,” Lowndes said, “well, I don’t drink anymore myself. I can’t. But can’t you send out to the hotel for it?”

She shifted her eyes from side to side broadly in a comic parody of guilt.

“I don’t want people to know.” She paused and sighed. “Dongan, could you?”

“Skip,” Lowndes said.

She looked at him impatiently.

“Skip,” he repeated. “Call me Skip.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “I can just see why your folks called you that. Could you get us a bottle, Skip, so we can sneak a slug down here?”

“I have trouble handling it,” Lowndes said. “I’m off the stuff.”

For a little while he looked at her, a faint fond smile playing about his thick lips.

“I guess I could, though.”

She opened her eyes wide and swallowed bravely. So go and do it, she was telling him, you shit-eating bird. The Long Friends cackled admonition.

“Scotch?” he asked. His gaze was sad. Whether he was begging for her favors or simply disillusioned, she could not tell and did not care.

“Yes,” she said, sounding absurdly eager, “that’d be nice.”

“I’ll go up and get a bottle,” he said. His voice wavered as he said it, like an adolescent’s.

Lu Anne did not feel particularly like drinking liquor but it seemed important that there be something to take.

“Oh great, Skip,” she said. “Now, you remember the car we came in, huh? Well, you just go back to that car and get him to take you up the hill and you can get us a jug. Only carry it in something, will you, because I don’t want people to think we’re a couple of old drunks.”

“Right,” Lowndes said. “I’ll brown-bag it.”

“And when you’re up there,” she said as he started for the car, “you ask them if a Mr. Walker has arrived, O.K.?”

“Mr. Walker,” Lowndes repeated. “And a plain brown wrapper.”

Across the clearing, Lu Anne saw Jack Glenn, the actor playing Robert Lebrun, in conversation with Joe Ricutti. She went over to them. A few years before, she had heard an agent describe Glenn — a natural who could fence, juggle, swing from vines and play comedy — as too small to be big. Whenever she repeated the story she got her laugh and people said it was a voice from Vanished Hollywood. But the agent had not vanished and Jack Glenn, at five feet nine inches, worked irregularly. Someone had told her it was because he was fair-skinned; a fair-skinned actor had to be taller. It was a matter of semiotics, the person had said.

He turned to her approach. “Ah,” he said with his hand over his heart, “ Les Douleurs d’amour. ” He kissed her hand, correctly, with the appearance of a kiss. Glenn was nice-looking and bisexual but for whatever reason she had never been attracted to him. Perhaps because he was fair and short.