Robert Stone - Children of Light

“They’ll blame it on Lu,” Axelrod said.

“That’s right.”

“So,” Axelrod said testily, “why the fuck you give her cocaine, then?”

“Did you approve of my coming down here, Axelrod?”

“I thought it was a bad idea.” He sulked, eyeing the bank of storm cloud as though he wanted to tear it in half. “I might have been able to stop you. I might have hung up on Shelley.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Fuck you, Gordon.”

“You wanted me down here. Tell me why.”

“I thought we might have a few laughs.”

“You figured I’d bring down some blow. You were out.”

“I could’ve scored somewhere, Gordon. I thought maybe it would be … I don’t know what I thought.”

“You thought it would be like old times.”

“Yeah,” Axelrod said disgustedly, “that’s about it.”

“So did I,” Walker said. “Maybe they’ll bring them back. They bring everything back.”

“We gotta nudge Mr. Lowndes a little. So he gives us back our print. I mean,” Axelrod said, “it would be great not to have to tell Charlie about this.”

“What we have to do,” Walker said, “is make him understand he’s playing in the wrong league. Make him understand his position.”

“Right,” Axelrod said.

“We have to make him look down and see where he’s liable to fall. We’ll tell him how we see the big ones and the little ones fall every day. Like sparrows.”

“Yeah,” Axelrod said. He smiled. “Let’s tell him that, Gordon.”

Half an hour later Walker went into the bedroom. His first impulse was to draw open the blinds but he thought better of it. When he turned on the corner ceiling lights he discovered Lu Anne to be awake. Her hair was wet and she had changed into black lace.

“You do take a lot of showers, Lu Anne.”

“I take a lot of showers for a coon-ass. Is that what you meant?”

“Let’s not be crazy,” Walker said.

“Let’s not you be paranoid,” she told him. “Goodness,” she said. “I was drunk when I went to sleep and I’m still drunk.”

She rolled off the bed.

“Christ,” she said, from all fours, “there’s crawling.”

Walker put on a sweatshirt and went into the bathroom to shower.

“How long will you stay?” she asked him through the open door.

“I thought I’d go back on Monday. Leave you to work.”

“Stay longer.”

“Lu Anne,” he said, “I can’t afford this hotel. I’m here on Sun Pix and Amcan.”

“So short a time,” she said, “after so long.”

“It’s been hard for me to get away. The chance came. So I grabbed it.”

“No, no,” Lu Anne told him. “It was more elaborate than that. You connived. What were you thinking of?”

“Honest to God, I don’t know. Maybe of cheating time. Throwing a two-by-four in the treads.”

She sipped from a glass of mezcal , shivered and handed it half finished to Walker. He put it aside.

“Come back,” she said.

He took off the trunks and sweatshirt he was wearing and climbed into bed with her. In the vulgar half light she seemed to draw away as he approached. She did so without moving, with a silent, subtly visible retracting of herself. It was as though she drew in all softness, took up her own slack and curled the flesh around her long bones. Her eyes went dull, her lips were shadows. He could not tell whether it was something she was doing or some warp in his abused perception.

Gallic severity. A crucifix. Charlotte Corday.

“Come in, Gordon,” she said.

He found the game for him. The game for him was to ease through the ivory casing, to loose the bound flesh, draw out the woman and beyond the woman some creature of another sort.

The creature was inside, it fucked like pure madness. It was madness and it frightened him. Down the gullet of fear itself, he charged with a silent hurrah.

“How nice,” Lu Anne said.

When she turned her face to his, she looked flushed and dimpled and happy. The Lady of Mortifications was fled home to Port Royal, madness appeased. Lu Anne was at home.

She seems so young, he thought. Her face was smooth, the skin beneath her eyes was sound. It struck him then how good the doctor and the children must have been for her.

“ Allons ,” Walker declared. “ Laissez le bon temps …”

She put her hand over his mouth.

“I forbid you to use that idiotic phrase,” she told him. “It’s for morons. Only cretins use it. And people from Shreveport.”

“I was feeling moronic. Happy in my sex life. A stud once more.”

“You were always a stud, Gordon.”

“Ofttimes,” he said, “of late not always.”

Suddenly she said, “How are your boys, Gordon?”

He fell silent inside. Her question fell upon his inward man like frost. He swallowed the pain.

“They’re fine.”

“In school?”

“Stuart’s in school. Deak’s on his own.”

“Deak is the funny one, right? The pretty one.”

“Stuart,” Walker said. “He’s the funny one now.”

“They’re the only ones you love,” she said. “You always fretted over them.”

“Hostages to fortune,” he said. He was thinking that if they began to talk about their children they would drown in a sea of regret. Walker had always pictured regret as something like vomit. The association was not gratuitous.

“I think I’ll do a little more coke,” he said brightly. “It might sober me up for dinner.” When he got up and looked in the mirror he thought of Lowndes and the pictures. He assembled his works, feeling more sober than he could possibly be.

“I shouldn’t have any more,” Lu Anne said uncertainly.

“Good thinking,” Walker said. He was trying frantically to get his hit and put the stuff away.

“Well,” she said finally, “if you’re having some I want some too.”

“You’re on half rations,” he told her. “Recuperating.”

“There are some would have me drink,” she said mysteriously, “there are those who would have me dry.”

He chopped two narrow lines for her and handed over the equipment, the mirror and the drinking straw whose festive colors had shown up so well on the color photographs.

For the drawn blinds and the dim light, it might have been any hour. How foolish of him, he thought, to have forgotten about the blinds. On locations people were always watching, peering in trailers, looking for lighted windows.

“Don’t think about your kids,” she told him earnestly. She leaned her head on one arm to lecture him. She was wearing a pair of silver-rimmed aviator glasses he had not seen before and he suspected she had appropriated them to use as a prop when she felt admonitory.

“Seriously,” she said, “your kids don’t care about you. Don’t care about them.”

Walker did not answer her. He reached down, took a pinch of coke under his fingernail and touched it to his gum.

“I saw you do that,” Lu Anne said. “Now listen to me — you don’t care a damn about your daddy, do you?”

“My father is dead,” Walker said. “And my mother is dead. And my brother is dead.”

He repeated this statement, this time as a little song, to the tune of an Irish jig.

“There was a time …” Walker began. He managed to stop, shut up before it was too late. He had been about to discourse on the subject of his father. Without trying to conceal it from her he put the mirror on his pillow and took some more. She took the straw from his hand and snorted until he thought she would pass out. He put it back down quickly before she could exhale on it.

“But honestly, Gordon! They won’t be worrying about you. You ought not to worry about them. I’ve got children myself, Gordon.”