Robert Stone - Children of Light

Walker was uncertain whether Lowndes had tried to strike her or not. He hesitated for a moment, decided the loose fists were provocation enough and decided to go, coke-confident. He felt drunk and sick and ashamed of himself; Lowndes would pay for it. He heard Axelrod shout something about the picture and Charlie Freitag cry that enough was enough. Walker had lived through some dozen bar fights. He was not an innocent and Lowndes was offensive and, he imagined, easy. He was making fierce faces, his right hand floating somewhere back of beyond in the ever-receding future, when Lowndes decked him with a bone-ended ham fist all the way from Escambia County. There was a brief interval during which he was unable to determine whether he was still or in motion.

“You pack of Jew bastards,” Lowndes was screaming. “You bloodsuckers. I’ll kill every one of you.”

Walker felt for the side of his head. After a moment he concluded that he had not been mortally wounded, but he was bleeding and there was not much vision in his left eye. He struggled to stand and after an effort succeeded. No one helped him. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief; his hand came out glistening with coke crystals. He licked them off.

When he stood up he saw that Bill Bly had Lowndes by an arm and was forcing him to his knees. Bly’s free hand was outstretched to keep Axelrod from closing on the fallen man. Charlie Freitag, his face frozen in an icy bitter smile, had placed himself between the struggle and Lu Anne.

She had kicked off her sandals; Walker saw her eyes go wrong. In the next instant she turned and bolted for the pathway that led toward the beach bungalows. For just a moment, Bly hesitated in his subduing of Lowndes and made a motion toward her. On impulse Walker raced down the path after her, slowing to keep his balance on the turns, his heart throbbing. He ran desperately and mindlessly, pursuing. He could hear the padding of her bare feet on the stucco surfacing of the shadowy walkway but she kept one turn ahead of him all the way down.

The sand slowed him as he ran along the beach. He heard her door slam and when he arrived before her bungalow a light was on inside. He rapped on the door and called her name. After a few moments he went around to the rear patio and found its door unlocked. There was no one in the house when he went inside. Her bedroom was sandy and disordered.

He had started wearily for his own quarters when he saw headlights on the turnoff that led from the hotel’s highway gate to its front door. In one desperate rally he raced through the deserted lobby and burst out the front door just as one of the company limousines started away. Running after it, he pounded on the rear door. Lu Anne was in the back seat.

“Wait,” Walker said. He was too out of breath to speak. “Lu. Wait.”

She stared straight ahead, one hand clasped to her mouth.

“ No va sin mío ,” Walker panted to the driver. “Lu, no va. Sin mío. ”

She nodded. The driver pulled over to the side of the driveway. Running back to his room, Walker heard Bill Bly calling her.

He took his cocaine stash, his roll of bills and a green windbreaker that was on the bathroom door. Securing this much, he ran full tilt back out to the limousine and climbed in beside Lu Anne.

“Go,” she said to the driver, “please.”

As they drove to the gate, she leaned against him, trembling with his trembling. He fought for breath.

“I have to get away, Gordon,” she said quietly. “I need a day or two. I need a quiet hour.”

He nodded, unable to speak.

“I wanted you to come,” she told him. “I think I did. I wasn’t running from you, was I?”

He tried and failed to answer. He shook his head, his chest heaving.

At the highway they stopped while the driver opened a locked gate, drove over a cattle grid and locked the gate behind them. Peering through the rear window, Walker saw no pursuing lights.

“Where are you going, Lu Anne?” he asked her as the car sped south along the highway. “I mean, where are we going?”

Lu Anne smiled wearily.

“They’ll think you made off with me,” she said.

“Yes,” Walker said, “they will.”

“What pictures were they talking about, Gordon? Some pictures that … some picture he had?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it of me? It was, wasn’t it? It was of us.”

“Maybe he had a picture. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter now. He’s fucked.”

Walker watched the dry brush race past in the car’s headlights. After a while he patted his pocket to be sure his drug was there. There was a box of Dr. Siriwai’s pills in the same pocket. He sighed.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

“Morning,” she said soberly. “We’re going to where it’s morning.”

“Will there be something to drink?”

She had taken Lowndes’s bottle of scotch and she handed it to him. He drank it gratefully.

“Bats or Birdies?” Lu Anne asked.

“It’s your party, kid. You tell me.”

“We’ll know when we get there,” she told him.

Ten miles to the south, the road on which they drove turned inland, crossed the mountains on the spine of Baja, and ran for thirty miles within sight of the Sea of Cortez. At the final curve of its eastward loop, a dirt track led from the highway toward the shore, ending at a well-appointed fishing resort called Benson’s Marina. At Benson’s there was a large comfortable ranch house in the Sonoran style, a few fast powerboats rigged for big-game fishing and a small airstrip. Benson ran a pair of light aircraft for long-distance transportation and fish spotting.

Early on during production, Lu Anne had been told about Benson’s by Frank Carnahan; she and Lionel had hired Benson’s son to fly them to San Lucas for a long weekend. The flight had produced much corporate anxiety after the fact because the film’s insurance coverage did not apply to impromptu charter flights in unauthorized carriers. Charlie Freitag had been cross and Axelrod had been upbraided.

In the early hours of the morning, their car turned into Benson’s and pulled up beside his dock. Walker had slept; a light cokey sleep, full of theatrical nightmares that had his sons in them.

Lu Anne walked straight to the lighted pier and stood next to the fuel pumps, looking out across the gulf. Walker climbed from the car and asked the driver to park it out of the way. In the shadow of the boathouse, he had some more cocaine. The drug made him feel jittery and cold in the stiff ocean wind.

After a few minutes, Benson’s son Enrique came out looking sleepy and suspicious. He was a Eurasian, the son of a Texas promoter who had realized his dreams and a Mexican-born Chinese woman. When he recognized Lu Anne he smiled.

“You two want to go to Cabo again?” he asked. He shook hands with both of them and Walker watched him realize that it was not the same man who had been with her on the last flight.

“No,” Lu Anne said. “We want to go to Villa Carmel.”

He was looking down at the ground in embarrassment, an unworldly young man.

“I don’t know, ma’am. There’s a chubasco over the mountains. I have to get the weather.”

“Of course,” Lu Anne said.

The youth stood with them for a minute or so and then went back inside the main house.

“We should go back,” Walker said.

She shook her head.

“You’re screwing them up,” Walker told her, taking a slug from the bottle of scotch. “You should be back at work tomorrow. I should be gone.”

Lu Anne kept looking out to sea.

“I don’t think I want to go back to work tomorrow. And I don’t want you to go.”

“It’s senseless,” Walker said.

“Then why did you come?”