Robert Stone - Children of Light

He knelt breathless beside her and realized that he was happy. That was why he had come, to be with her in harm’s way and be happy.

She looked into his face and touched his hair. “Poor fish,” she said. “I was always there for you.”

“Well,” Walker said, “here I am.”

“Too late.”

She raised her eyes again.

“And nothing up there, eh? No succor? No bananas?”

He helped her to her feet.

“Who knows?” Walker said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe, eh?”

She stayed where she was; Walker was above her on the trail, which grew steeper as it ascended.

“Do you know why I was an actress?” she asked him.

“Why?”

A sudden luminous smile crossed her face. He could not imagine what force could drive such a smile through tears and regret.

“You’ll see,” she said, and took him by the hand. She climbed with strong sure steps. Just short of the crest, she released his hand and fell to her knees.

“This is the way we go up,” she said. He watched her struggle up the last rise, one knee before the other. When he tried to help her, she thrust his hand away.

“This is how the Bretons pray,” she told him. “The Bretons pray like anything.”

So it was on her knees that she mounted the top of the hill. Walker went on before her, to find a featureless building of the local stone with a thatched roof. Over the door, a wooden sign rattled on the unimpeded wind of the mountaintop, lettered to read Seguridad Nacional. There was a noxious smell in the thin air.

He stood panting before the building, and he realized at once when he had seen it last and why the landscape to the east had seemed so familiar. Ten or perhaps twelve years before, he had come down from Guadalajara by limousine to visit her on the set of a Traven remake. The unit had been based on the Constancia Hot Springs in the cultivated valley to the east. He had worked many Mexican locations and sometimes confused them in memory, but he remembered it quite well now, seeing the homely building with its sign. The unit’s laborers had thrown it up in a day or two.

Lu Anne crawled over the coarse yellow grass of the hilltop on her knees. A long slow roll of thunder echoed along the mountain range. An enormous bank of storm clouds was drifting toward them from the coast.

“This is a holy place,” Lu Anne said. “Sacred to me.”

“This is the police post from that Traven picture,” Walker told her. “It isn’t anything or anywhere. It’s fake.”

“It’s holy ground,” she told him. “The earth is bleeding here.”

Walker went around behind the building; the ground there was muddy and stinking. He found an empty wooden trough with a litter of corncobs around it. There was a barred window through which he could see stacked ears of maize and heaped grain sacks.

He went back to where Lu Anne was kneeling.

“For God’s sake, Lu Anne! It’s a fucking corncrib on a pig farm.”

Lu Anne leaned forward in her kneeling posture and pressed her forehead into the dirt.

Walker laughed.

“Oh wow,” he cried. “I mean, remember the ceremony they had? The governor of the state came out? They were going to make it a film museum.” He stalked about in manic high spirits. “It was going to be a showplace of cinema, right? For the whole hemisphere, as I recall. Second only to Paris, a rival collection. Oh Christ, that’s rich.”

Lu Anne raised her head, filled her hands with dry earth and pressed them against her breasts.

“A film museum,” Walker shouted. “On top of a hill in the middle of a desert in the middle of a jungle. Funny? Oh my word.”

He lay down in the spiky desert grass.

“So everybody went away,” Walker crowed, “and they turned it into a pig farm.”

He lay crying with laughter, fighting for breath at the edge of exhaustion, shielding his eyes against his forearm. When the first lightning flash lit up the corners of his vision he had a sense of lost time, as though he might have been unconscious for some seconds, or asleep. He raised his head and saw Lu Anne standing naked over him. He scurried backwards, trying to gain his feet. A great thunderclap echoed in all the hollows of their hill.

“What have you done to me, Walker?”

There was such rage in her eyes, he could not meet them. He looked down and saw that her feet were covered in blood. Streaks of it laced her calves, knees to ankles. When he looked up she showed him that her palms were gouged and there was a streak of blood across her left side.

“I was your sister Eve,” she said. “It was my birthday. Look at my hands.”

She held them palms out, fingers splayed. The blood ran down her wrists and onto the yellow grass. When he backed away, rising to one knee, he saw a little clutter of bloodstained flint shards beside the pile of her clothes.

He turned to her about to speak and saw the lightning flash behind her. The earth shook under him like a scaffold. He saw her raised up, as though she hung suspended between the trembling earth and the storm. Her hair was wild, her body sheathed in light. Her eyes blazed amethyst.

“Forgive me,” Walker said.

She stretched forth her bloody hand on an arm that was serpentine and unnatural. She smeared his face with blood.

“I was your sister Eve,” Lu Anne said. “I was your actress. I lived and breathed you. I enacted and I took forms. Whatever was thought right, however I was counseled. In my secret life I was your secret lover.”

Propped on one knee, Walker reached out his own hand to touch her but she was too far away. The lightning flashed again, lighting the black sky beneath which Lu Anne stood suspended.

“I never failed you. Other people begged me, Walker, and they got no mercy out of me. My men got no mercy. My children got none. Only you. Do you see my secret eyes?”

“Yes,” Walker said.

“Whose are they like?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Only truth here. It’s a holy place.”

“It’s not a place,” Walker said. “You’re bleeding and you’re going to be cold.” He stood up and took off his windbreaker to cover her but she remained beyond his reach. “It’s nowhere.”

“Gordon, Gordon,” she said, “your road is mine. I own the ground you stand on. This is the place I want you.”

“There’s nothing here,” he said. He looked around him at the stone, the bare hilltop. “It never was a place.”

“Panic, Gordon? Ask me if I know about panic. I’m the one that breathed in the boneyard. I’ve had the Friends since I was sweet sixteen. I can’t choose the music I hear, whether it’s good music or bad. I’m your actress, Gordon, this is mine. I know every rock and thorn and stump of this old mountain. I may be with you somewhere else and all the time we’re really here. Did you think of that?”

“No,” Walker said.

“Don’t be afraid, Gordon. Look at me. Whose eyes?”

He only stared at her, holding his windbreaker.

“Gordon,” she said, “you cannot be so blind.”

“Mine,” he said.

“They are your eyes,” she told him. “I’m your actress, that’s right. I’m wires and mirrors. See me dangle and flash all shiny and hung up there? At the end of your road? Mister what-did-you-say-your-name-is Walker? See that, huh?”

“Yes, I see.”

“Yes? Hey, that’s love, man.”

“So it is,” Walker said.

She cupped a hand beside her ear. “You say it is?”

“I said it was, yes.”

“Well, you’re goddamn right it is, honey.”

Walker was compelled to admit that it was and it would never do either of them the slightest bit of good.

“Why me? I wonder.”

“Why?” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Oh la.” She shrugged. “One day many years ago I think you said something wonderful and you looked wonderful saying it. I mean, I should think it would have been something like that, don’t you?”