Robert Stone - Children of Light

“But you don’t happen to remember what?”

“Oh, you know me, Gordon. I don’t listen to the words awfully well. I’m always checking delivery and watching the gestures. Anyway,” she said, marking a line with her finger between his eyes and hers, “it’s the eyes. Down home they say you shoot a deer, you see your lover in his eyes. A bear the same, they say. It’s a little like that, eh? Hunting and recognition. A light in the eyes and you’re caught. So I was. So I remain.”

“If a hart do lack a hind,” Walker said, “let him seek out Rosalind.”

She smiled distantly. The lightning flashed again, farther away. “What good times we have on our mountain,” she said. “Poetry and music.” She closed her eyes and passed her bloody hands before her face, going into character. “If the cat will after kind, so be sure will Rosalind.”

Walker took a deep breath.

“But it never worked out.”

“Things don’t work out, Gordon. They just be.”

Walker stared at his friend. “You’re all lights,” he said. He was seeing her all lights, sparkles, pinwheels.

“Oh yes,” she said cheerfully. “Didn’t you see? Didn’t you?” She shook her head in wonder. “How funny you are.”

“I never did,” he said.

“This is the mountain where you see the things you never saw. There are eighty-two thousand colors here, Gordon. I’ve been your mirror. Now I’ll be more. And you’ll be my mirror.”

“More and a mirror,” Walker said. “How about that?”

“Gordon, Gordon,” she said delightedly, “your two favorite things. More and mirrors.”

“It’s a kind of cocaine image, isn’t it?”

“No, my love, my life. It’s the end of the road. It’s through the looking glass. Because there’s only one love, my love. It’s all the same one.”

“I’m not going to make it,” he told her. “I can’t keep it together.”

With her lissome arms and her long painterly fingers she wove him a design, resting elbow on forearm, the fingers spread in an arcane gesture.

“All is forgiven, Gordon. Mustn’t be afraid. I’m your momma. I’m your bride. There’s only one love.”

“I’ve heard the theory advanced,” Walker said.

“Have you? It’s all true, baby. Only one love and we’ll fall in it.”

“O.K.,” Walker said.

“O.K.!” she cried. “Aw-right!” She stepped toward him; he still saw her against the sky and the storm. “So you might as well come with me, don’t you think?”

“On that theory,” Walker admitted, “I might as well.”

Her limitless arms embraced him. He went to her. She pursed her lips, briskly business, and took the wad of cocaine and the Quaalude box from his pocket.

“Put your toys away,” she said. She flung them over her shoulder into the dry brush. “We don’t take our toys when we fall in love. We’ll be our toys when we fall in love. We’ll be our own little horses.”

He looked over her shoulder to where she had tossed the drug.

She frowned at him and pulled at his collar.

“And we take our clothes off. We don’t require clothes.”

Walker took off his windbreaker. As she was unbuttoning his shirt it began to rain. He shivered. He watched her unbuckle his trousers, smearing blood across them.

“I know there’s a reason,” he said, “that we don’t require clothes, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“Gordon,” she sighed, “don’t be such an old schoolteacher.”

He watched her blood seep into his clothes as she undressed him. He could not believe how much of it there was.

“Rain,” he said to her.

“We’ll pray,” she answered. “And then we’ll sleep.”

He looked up into the storm and saw the black sky whirling.

“No!” he shouted. “No you don’t.”

His pants fell down about his ankles as he started to run. He kicked them off, bent to pick them up and ran off dragging them behind him. Lu Anne stayed where she was, watching him sadly. He ran to where she had left her own clothes and scooped them up. The clothes and the sharp stones around them were covered with blood.

The door of the building looked massive, but half of it came off in his hand when he pulled at the latch. Behind it, about four feet inside the building, the owners of the grain had built a serious door, secured with a rusty padlock. Walker huddled in the sheltered space between the broken false door and the true one.

Outside, Lu Anne stood in the hard tropical rain and shook her hair. The rain washed the blood from her wounds and cleaned the grass around her.

“Lu Anne,” he called. “Come inside.”

She stopped whirling her hair in the rain and looked at him laughing, like a child.

“You come out.”

He picked up his windbreaker and went after her. He was wearing his shoes and socks and a pair of bloodstained Jockey shorts.

“Come on, Lu,” he said. “Chrissakes.”

He advanced on her holding the bloody jacket like a matador advancing on a bull. When he came near, she picked up a stone and held it menacingly over her shoulder.

“You better stay away from me, Walker.”

“You are so fucking crazy,” Walker told Lu Anne. “I mean, you are , man. You’re batshit.”

She threw the stone not overhand but sidearm and very forcefully. It passed close to his bruised right cheekbone, a very near miss.

“Fuck you,” he said. He turned his back on her but at once thought better of it. He began to back toward the shelter with the windbreaker still out before his face, the better to intercept stones. When he was back in his shelter he discovered the whiskey in Lu Anne’s tote bag.

“Hot ziggity,” he whispered to himself. He took two long swallows and displayed the bottle to Lu Anne.

“Lookit this, Lu Anne,” he shouted. “You gonna come in here and have a drink or stay out there and bleed holy Catholic blood?”

He watched her pick her way daintily over the sharp stones toward his shelter.

“I’ll have just a little bit,” she said. “A short one.”

Walker was wary of attack.

“You won’t hit me with a rock, will you?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

“You almost took the side of my head off just now.”

“It was just a reflex, Gordon. You presented an alarming spectacle.”

“Panic in the face of death,” Walker admitted. “Obliteration phobia.”

“You were washed in the blood,” Lu Anne told him. “You’ll never get there again.” She reached for the bottle he was cradling. “I thought I was offered a drink earlier.”

Walker watched her help herself to several belts.

“What was going to happen?” he asked her.

“I guess we were going to die. What’s wrong with that?”

“Living is better than dying. Morally. Don’t you think?”

“I think we had permission. We may never have it again.”

Walker took the bottle from her and drank.

“We’ll begin from here,” Walker said. “We’ll mark time from this mountain.”

“Who will, Gordon? You and me?”

“Absolutely,” Walker burbled happily. “Baptism! Renewal! Rebirth!”

Lu Anne pointed through the rain toward the road they had climbed. “It’ll be all down from here, Gordon.”

“Christ,” Walker said, “you threw my coke away. I had at least six grams left.”

“Takes the edge off baptism, renewal and rebirth, doesn’t it? When you’re out of coke?”

“We should have some now,” Walker said petulantly. “Now we have something to celebrate.”

“Screw you,” Lu Anne said. “Live! Breathe in, breathe out. Tick tock! Hickory Dickory. You get off on this shit, brother, it’s yours. And you may have my piece.”

Walker took up some of their bloodstained clothing and placed it over Lu Anne’s wounds to staunch the bleeding. The rain increased, sounding like a small stampede in the thatch overhead.