Robert Stone - Children of Light

Walker looked into his friend’s eyes. It was obvious enough that she was bone weary. Only exhaustion was keeping her devils in check. The easygoing tourist who stood before him contemplating a stroll was an illusion.

Yet, he thought, it would be horrible to arrive at the hotel’s front door in broad daylight. He decided it would be unthinkable. They could walk slowly, bathing in the surf, watching the sunset colors, and then he would put her to bed.

“O.K.,” he said to her. “Why not?”

He helped her down the short thorny path from the highway and they walked across the beach to the edge of the surf.

China Beach was altogether different from the beaches on the bay. The unbroken Pacific landed there and that afternoon there was a strong west wind, a tame follower of the storm. It gathered great rollers before it to break against the black sand.

“What a sight you are, Gordon,” she said. “In your sexy trousers and your rip-roaring sport shirt from the sin city of surf. Devil take the hindmost, Gordon Walker. My one true pal.”

“That’s me,” Walker said.

“Don’t you love the black sand?”

“I do,” he said. They walked on the sand at the tide line, beyond the waves’ withdrawing.

“Black is enough,” Lu Anne said. “Basalt. Obsidian.”

“I think,” Walker said, “we have got beyond fun.”

“I don’t know about that, Gordon. It doesn’t sound good.”

“We’re going to have a sunset,” Walker said. “Can we handle it?”

“As long as our money holds out,” Lu Anne said.

“If it costs more than two hundred we can’t have one.”

“We’ve got to,” Lu Anne said. “Otherwise the fucking thing will just sit there.”

“I’d like that,” Walker said. “It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it, if the sun just …?”

She put a hand against his chest to interrupt him. They stopped at the water’s edge.

“We can’t be apart now,” she said.

He nodded.

“Of course, we could never be together.”

“That’s true,” Walker said.

He started on but she stayed where she was.

“Oh, I am rather tired now,” she said. “Let’s rest.”

They lay side by side on the dry black sand. It was cooling beneath them as the disc of the sun declined.

“Hey, Lu Anne,” Walker said, “can I ask you a question? It’s about your concepts.”

“You mean my delusional system, do you not?”

“Yes, of course. You’re insightful.”

“My insightfulness,” she said, “has been remarked upon.”

“So — what’s a bone god?”

She put her hand across his mouth, but after a moment she laughed. The laugh was strange; it seemed not quite her own.

“Well,” she said, “a bone god is a little old African knuckle deity.”

“I should have known that when the son of a bitch hit me.”

“Poor man,” she said. “Poor thing that thinks it’s a man and plainly isn’t.”

“He’s one of us, really,” Walker said.

“No, sweetheart,” Lu Anne said. “He’s one of what I am.”

The sun sank. The sea and sky ran colors unimaginable.

“How about that,” Walker said. “It went down for free.”

She was running the black sand through her fingers.

“It’s still on me,” she said. “My milk. The blood and shit.”

“I haven’t been thinking,” Walker said. “You need antiseptics.” He yawned. “You need a tetanus shot at the very least.”

He stood up wearily and offered her his hand. She took it and stood and opened the clasp of her schoolgirl’s skirt to let it fall away. She had a man’s cotton boxer shorts beneath it.

“I feel dirty, Gordon. I want a dip in the ocean.”

“Come on, Lu,” Walker said nervously. “I don’t want you to.”

“Look there, Gordon,” she said, “you can see the hotel’s lights.”

She had pointed beyond the darkening headlands of Bahía Honda to a wide cove where the hotel stood on its private peninsula. The tiki lights had blazed on and the little covered lights along the walkways. When he turned back to her she had removed her blouse and was kicking the formless boxer shorts aside.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t want you going in. If you go in I have to and I would just hate it. I mean, I’m done for, babe.”

“It’s my birthday,” she said.

“No it’s not.”

In three lovely backward steps, she danced beyond his reach. He advanced toward her, his arms spread as though it were basketball and he was guarding her.

“Stop it now, Lu!”

She feinted to the left, reversed and performed her three-step retreat. They were such beautiful moves, Walker thought. Straight-legged steps from the hip. She was in shape and he, to say the least, was not. He had gone in on the feint and lost her. Faked out.

“See the world, Walker? How it goes?”

“Stop!”

Smiling, she shook her head. She pivoted, pointing left and right as though she were working out her blocking. Walker backed toward the ocean, deciding to play deep. He realized at once that it had been a mistake. He would be depending on his speed and she was faster.

“Cut it out,” he said.

“Give me my robe,” she said. “Put on my crown. Hey, it’s Shakespeare, Walker.”

She crouched, hands on her thighs, dodging.

“Immortal longings,” she said. “Here comes your dog Tray, Gordon, lookit there.”

If she went, he thought, the water would slow her down. I’ll get her in the water, he thought.

“Want to marry me, Walker? I see a church.”

“I beg you,” he said.

She clapped her hands. He blinked and stepped back. She feinted left, then right.

“Give me your answer, do!” she sang. “I’m half crazy, all for the love of you!”

He shouted and charged. She spun away. He held the incorporeal air. He turned without stopping and saw her hip deep, backing into the surf. The left side of his chest exploded in pain. He stopped open-mouthed, fighting for breath. He could no longer see her face. She was a dark form against the fading sky.

“This is the last,” she laughed, “of the Gestae Francorum. ” He held his chest and stumbled toward her.

“Come with me, Gordon. This is best.”

“Yes,” he said. He sought to trick her. By the time he reached the water she was under the tuck of a wave.

The tide was low and the drop precipitate. He tried to shake the pain off. Step by step he lurched toward her into the water. Each step hurt him and each wave’s surge threatened to throw him off balance.

“It’s bliss,” he heard her say. She was standing on a bar, her hair wet down. The light gave her an aura of faint rainbows.

“Come,” she called. “Or else save me.”

Walker lost his footing. He was swimming free. He saw her ahead of him and to the left, perhaps twenty feet away. A tall wave rose behind her and she was swept away. A second later the same wave hit him at its breaking point; he tried to slide beneath it and hit sand. He was in two feet of water over the bar where she had stood. The wave smacked him down, drove him off the bar into deeper inshore water and held him down in it. When he surfaced he was afraid he had breathed seawater. For a moment he could not draw breath. When he was able to swim, the pain subsided.

He thought he heard her voice on the wind. Then the rip drew him out, a tiger of a rip that brought him to the edge of panic, and if she called again he never heard her.

He could only just make out the beach in the darkness, and it seemed farther away each time he looked. In the end he settled into a stroke that kept him parallel to shore, and after what seemed a very long time, he rode the waves in.

Staggering up on the beach, he stepped squarely on her skirt. It surprised him; he thought he had swum miles along the shoreline. When he lay down he found that she had weighted the skirt down with a stone and his heart rose. It made him certain that she would be back and he had only to wait for her. It was another stunt of hers, another death-defying leap. She was the better swimmer.