Robert Stone - Children of Light

Look, you little bitch! Lu Anne thought. Then she was not sure whether she had not said it aloud. Look at my secret eyes!

Vera Ricutti and her husband were behind Josette; Vera had a costume over her arm, a gray cotton garment and a blue bandana. The Ricuttis looked up at Lu Anne with something that might be reverence.

“What’s wrong, kid?” Vera Ricutti asked.

“I was prepping,” Lu Anne said. The accusatory malice and disgust she saw in Josette’s eyes made her feel sick.

“You were screaming!” the girl cried. She turned to the Ricuttis for confirmation. “She was screaming in there!”

“I was singing,” Lu Anne said quietly.

Josette looked up at her with a twisted triumphant smile; Vera Ricutti was holding her by the arm.

“Don’t tell me!” she shouted at Lu Anne. “You were screaming.”

“I was prepping.”

The woman shrugged and grunted.

Joe Ricutti came forward and spoke quietly to her and she walked away.

“We’ll take care of it,” Joe said in his gravelly voice. “We’ll talk to Eric. I mean, you don’t have to take that from her.”

Lu Anne stood in the trailer doorway, her beach robe undone, leaning one elbow on her wrist and chewing her little finger.

“Shit,” she said.

Vera stepped up and gently urged her back inside.

“So you were screaming. You got a right.”

“Absolutely,” Joe Ricutti said.

Walter Drogue and his father were walking from their trailer to the beach. The old man wore a blue bathing suit that scarcely concealed his privates and a gondolier’s striped shirt.

“You think you have to be smart to direct pictures?” the old man asked his son. “Bullshit. Some of the biggest assholes you ever met are immortal.”

“I never said you had to be smart,” his son replied. “I said it was useful. I was thinking of my own case.”

“Ford,” the old man said. “A born political director. An Irishman with the eye of a German Romantic. Peasant slyness. He never got in trouble here and he wouldn’t have got in trouble over there like Eisenstein.”

“You’re lucky it was here you got in trouble,” young Drogue told his father. “Over there they would have just shot your ass and no fancy speeches.”

At the beach Blakely and Hueffer were waiting for them. The Chapman Titan had been driven onto its track.

“Check out the sky,” Blakely said.

Old Drogue went off to settle himself in a folding chair beneath a beach umbrella. Drogue junior, Blakely and Eric Hueffer looked at the horizon.

The line of storm cloud seemed to have risen some thirty degrees, so that the horizon line was a convergence of two gold-flecked tones of blue. The sun’s intensity was just beginning to fade.

“If those clouds will stay where they are when the sun sets,” Blakely said, “we’re gonna have us one fuckin’ humdinger of a sunset.”

“I’m God,” Walter Drogue told his assistants. “I still the restless wave. I command the sun. Where’s Joy?”

“Joy,” Eric Hueffer called, and Joy McIntyre stepped out from inside the nearest bathhouse door. She wore a form-fitting gray cotton bathing suit. A blue bandana was tied around her head.

“Want to watch a tape?” Hueffer asked.

“No,” Drogue said. “I want to watch her walk.”

A pair of grips were summoned to lower the arm of the crane; Drogue climbed aboard the camera turret and was weighted in.

“Joy!” Hueffer shouted. “Got your marks?”

“Yeah,” Joy said.

They weighted Toby Blakely in beside his leader.

“Action!” Drogue shouted, and the mounted camera retreated before Joy’s advance down the beach, hauled along by the grips at their guide ropes. Young Drogue peered through the camera’s eye, his baseball cap reversed like a catcher’s.

“O.K.,” he said, when he was satisfied.

The grips swung the Chapman’s arm to its original position and brought Blakely and young Drogue to earth. Joy leaned on one extended arm against the side of the bathhouse. Drogue, Hueffer and Blakely hunkered down near the water’s edge.

“She’s so fucking beautiful it’s gross,” Drogue said. “She comes out of there and you just think: I want to fuck her. You lose your sense of proportion.” He glanced over toward where his father sat and saw the old man’s glance fixed on the comely stand-in.

“Lee has a lot more dignity,” Blakely said. “And a pretty sexy frame for a woman with two or three kids. Or even more.”

The three of them walked over to where Joy was standing and looked her up and down.

“I like this bathing suit,” Hueffer said.

Drogue patted Joy’s shoulder, and seized a piece of her bathing suit between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s cotton. To be accurate, it should be wool, but we figured fuck it. So,” he said, pointing to Joy, “as not to cause unnecessary discomfort to our personnel.”

Joy smiled gratefully.

“Actually,” Drogue told his associates, “we’re cheating a lot with this suit. This thing is circa 1912. If we gave ’em the real Gay Nineties article this scene would look like Mack Sennett.”

“I should think this ’un might be good for a few laughs,” Joy said. The three men looked at her sternly.

“When you take it off, doll,” Drogue told her, “no one will be laughing.”

“Crikey,” Joy said. “Take it off?”

“Don’t you look at the script?” Drogue asked her. “Of course you take it off.”

“Crikey,” Joy said.

“Miss Verger is taking her suit off. It’s in the script. If she can do it, you can do it.”

“I suppose,” Joy said doubtfully.

Drogue turned to Hueffer and drew him aside. Blakely went along with them.

“What I need to know here is how it’s going to look when she takes that suit off. It’s tight, she’ll have to wriggle — O.K., we don’t want a striptease. We’ll probably cut to the suit falling away but I’m not sure how far into the disrobing we want to go. So let’s roll tape on this shot — have her come down the beach to her marks, take the bandana off and toss it. Then let her get out of that suit as gracefully as she can and drop it aside. See if she can start by raising her right arm and baring her right breast.”

“Good,” Hueffer said. Drogue reacted to his approval with a slow double take. “Do you want her to go into the water?”

“No time for that. We’re shooting for sunset and that means three takes if we’re lucky. Otherwise we have to do it again tomorrow.”

“If it doesn’t rain,” Hueffer said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Drogue said. “Hurry up. Go tell her what she has to do.”

“I’m thinking eroticism,” Drogue said to Blakely. “I’m thinking sacrifice. Motherhood. Yes?”

“Right,” Blakely said.

“I’m thinking human sacrifice. Madonnahood.”

“Tithood?”

“Tithood too.”

They watched Eric discuss the situation with Joy McIntyre. Eric was speaking enthusiastically and at some length. Joy was pouting.

“Look at the ass on the little bitch,” Drogue said angrily. “Christ almighty.”

“Well,” Blakely said, “don’t get pissed, boss.”

Late in the afternoon, as the highway curved down from the Cerro Encantada, Walker found himself driving within sight of the sea. He pulled over at the next turnoff, got out of the car and walked to the end of a promontory from which he could see the ocean and the trail that lay ahead of him. The sun was low and losing its fire, the ocean a cool darkening blue that made him shiver in the desert heat. Between the ridge on which he stood and the sea lay the Honda Valley. It was every variety of green — delicate pastel in the circular irrigated cotton fields, silver-green in the stands of eucalyptus, a sinister reptilian emerald along the base of its canyon walls. Miles away, perhaps as much as an hour of cautious driving over the tortuous highway, a paved road descended in figure-of-eight switchbacks to the valley. He could make out the hotel buildings. From where he stood they seemed to rest precariously in the folds of a red table rock that commanded the coastal plain.