Children of Light (33 page)

Walker stayed where he was, watching her, ready to jump.

“You don’t think that filthy tomb person with the shit for eyes, you don’t think he saw who I was? Answer me,” she screamed. “Answer me! Answer me, Walker, goddamn it!”

Walker only stared at her.

She threw her head back and howled, waving her fists in the air.

“For God’s sake, Lu Anne.”

“Talk to me about Gadarene Swine? Who do you think it was, bound in fetters and chains? Where do you think I came by these?” She pointed around her, at things invisible to him. “Don’t you torment me! Torment me not, Walker!”

“C’mon,” he said. “I was joking.”

Her lip rolled back in a snarl. He looked away. She turned her back on him and went to a place beside the house where the mud was deep and there was a pile of seed husks, head high.

“Jesus,” she cried, “Son of the Most High God. I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not.”

“Amen,” Walker said.

She clasped her hands and looked at the last wisps of rainbow. “I
adjure thee, Son of the Most High God. I adjure thee. Torment me not.” She buried her face and hands in the pile of chaff. After a moment, she got up and went up to Walker. She seemed restored in some measure and he was not afraid of her.

“You’re a child of God, Walker,” she said. “Same as me.”

“Of course,” Walker said.

“That’s right,” Lu Anne said. “Isn’t it right?”

“Yes,” Walker said. “Right.”

“But you can’t take the unclean spirit out of a woman, can you, brother?”

She touched his lips with her fingertips, then brought her hand down, put it on his shoulder and looked at the sky. “Ah, Christ,” she said, “it’s dreadful. It’s dreadful we have spirits and can’t keep them clean.”

“Well,” Walker said. “You’re right there.”

“No one can take it out. Man, I have watched and I have prayed. And I’ve had help, Walker.”

“Yes,” Walker said. “I know.”

“If you don’t believe me,” Lu Anne said. “Just ask me my name.”

“What’s your name, Lu Anne?”

“My name is Legion,” she said. “For we are many.”

For a minute or so she let him hold her.

“Is it all right now?” he asked.

“It’s not all right,” she said. “But the worst is over.”

He was delighted with the reasonableness of her answer. He went to get himself a drink. When he returned Lu Anne was lying in the stack of seed husks.

“Well,” he said, “that looks comfortable.”

“Oh yes,” she said, “very comfortable.”

He lay down beside her in the warm sun and buried his arms in the seeds.

“Downright primal.”

“Primal is right,” Lu Anne said. She laughed at him and shook her head. “You don’t know what this pile is, do you? Because you’re a city boy.”

She sat in the pile, sweeping aside the seed husks with a rowing motion until the manure it covered was exposed and she sat naked in a mix of mud and droppings, swarming with tiny pale creatures that fled the light.

“There it is,” she told Walker. “The pigshit at the end of the rainbow. Didn’t you always know it was there?”

“You’ll get an infection,” Walker said. He was astonished at what Lu Anne had revealed to him. “You’re cut.”

“Out here waiting to be claimed, Gordon. Ain’t it mystical? How about a drink, man?”

When he bent to offer her the bottle she pulled him down into the pile beside her.

“I had a feeling you’d do that,” he said. “I thought …”

“Stop explaining,” Lu Anne told him. “Just shut up and groove on your pigshit. You earned it.”

“I guess it must work something like an orgone box,” Walker suggested.

“Walker,” Lu Anne said, “when will it cease, the incessant din of your goddamn speculation? Will only death suffice to shut your cottonpicking mouth?”

“Sorry,” Walker said.

“Merciful heavens! Show the man a pile of shit and he’ll tell you how it works.” She made a wad of mud and pig manure and threw it in his face. “There, baby. There’s your orgone. Have an orgoneism.”

She watched Walker attempt to brush the manure from his eyes.

“Wasn’t that therapeutic?” she asked. “Now you get the blessing.” She reached out and rubbed the stuff on his forehead in the form of a cross. “In the name of pigshit and pigshit and pigshit. Amen. Let us reflect in this holy season on the transience of being and all the stuff we done wrong. Let’s have Brother Walker here give us only a tiny sampling of the countless words at his command to tell us how we’re doing.”

“Not well,” Walker said.

“Yeah, we are,” Lu Anne told him. “We’re going with the flow. This is where the flow goes.”

“I wondered.”

“Yeah,” Lu Anne said, “well, now you know.”

“I suppose anything would be better than this,” Walker said, but he was not so sure. He had come chasing enchantments. After all, he supposed, he would as soon be blessed in pigshit by Lu Anne as in holy water by some sane woman’s hand.

“I’ll tell you what we can do now that we’re here,” Lu Anne suggested. “We can have a pigshit fight. How’s that sound?”

“That’d be fine,” Walker said.

For a while they exchanged handfuls of pigshit, heaving it toward each other in an increasingly halfhearted manner.

“This is the scene they left out of
Porky’s.
The pigshit fight scene. We should have one in
The Awakening.
”

“When you’re washed in the blood,” Lu Anne said, “the shit is sure to follow.” She looked down at her bare breasts, fondling them. “And milk. But I have none and never will.” She held each breast between her filthy fingers and squeezed her nipples. “I should have tits all around,” she said. “I should have seven like a dog.” She lay back resting her head and shoulders in the chaff; her lower body stayed in the muck. “I wish they could take me out for fertilizer with the pigshit. I’d be worth more as fertilizer than I ever was as an actor.” She sat up, looking at Walker with cool curiosity. “What’s with you, Gordon? What you all seized up about?”

Walker tried to compose himself.

“I’m a little tired,” he said.

Walker saw her gaze sweep past him toward the top of the road. When he turned he saw two Mexicans in the green uniform of the tourist police. One of them was holding a shotgun pointing in their direction—not quite aiming it, but coming close. Both of the policemen wore expressions of profound melancholy.

“Hi, you all,” Lu Anne said to them.

A
cluster of little brown children were at the foot of the
posada
stairs waiting to watch them as they passed. Walker led the descent, holding Lu Anne by the hand. Both of them stared straight ahead, affecting a sort of blindness. A woman shouted from the kitchen and the children scattered to conceal themselves.

The woman who had shouted came out to be paid. She had the physique of the valley people; dark and round with high cheekbones and bold intelligent eyes. Her husband was hiding in the kitchen.

Walker gave the woman fifty dollars. She raised her chin and lowered it.

“
Ochenta
,” she said. Walker gave her the extra thirty dollars without complaint. It was good, he thought, to be in a place where people knew what they needed.

When she had been paid, she backed away without turning, her eyes downcast. The afternoon sun streamed in through the open front door and it seemed to Walker that she was avoiding the shadow Lu Anne cast.

Outside, the two tourist police were waiting and the man who had driven them to Monte Carmel, standing at something like attention beside his car. Walker and Lu Anne got in the taxi and the policemen into their cruiser.

“How much did you give her?” Lu Anne asked.

“Eighty,” Walker told her.

It had not been a bad buy. They had been able to shower at the
posada
and children were sent out to buy clothes for them. The tourist police and a state policeman in town had been paid a total of four hundred dollars.

“Fortunately,” Walker said, “money’s waterproof.”

They were both barefoot. Walker was wearing a pair of Mexican jeans he could not button and an aloha shirt with red palm trees on it
that said
MAZATLAN
. Lu Anne had a white rayon blouse and a wide print skirt that was too small for her.

At the airfield, young Benson was pacing beside his plane, drinking a can of Sprite. He managed a warped smile and a silly little wave as they drove up. When they got out, the taxi driver turned at once for town. The police parked beside the runway and stayed there.

As they took off into the sun, a score of children and teenagers broke from cover and ran out for a closer glimpse of them. The goats that had been grazing beside the strip fled. Not until they were truly airborne did the police car drive away.

Within minutes they saw the dazzling sea ahead. They were both in the rear seat. The Benson boy pulled his headphones from his ears and turned to speak to them. His expression was one of grave perplexity.

“Don’t ask questions, son,” Walker said to him. “Fly.”

One of the Benson drivers took them back to Bahía Honda. When they passed China Beach, just outside the mouth of the bay, Lu Anne said that she wanted to get out and walk.

“I’m exhausted,” Walker said. “I can’t believe you’re not.”

“I’m fine,” Lu Anne said. “I walk here all the time at low tide. It’s a much shorter distance at sea level.”

The driver pulled over and they went to the edge of the bluffs.

“See how low the tide is?” Lu Anne said to Walker. “And we can be back at my bungalow before dark.”

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.