Children of Light

“What’s that?” Drogue asked. “Some S & M joint known only to weirdos?”

“I don’t think it’s in L.A.,” Patty said.

“He means Lowndes is gonna make us look bad. That’s what he thinks.”

“The hell with what he thinks. He got the whole thing started with his dissolute ways. Anyway, no story in New York Arts is going to hurt us. Or is it?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to get the picture back,” Axelrod said. “Lowndes is unfriendly. The Europeans might go for it. Oggi and those clowns.”

“Christ,” Drogue said irritably. “Does Charlie know about this? He’ll make the night horrible with his cries.”

Axelrod shook his head.

“I think it’s a minor matter,” Drogue said. “It would be nice if we could sort it out without bothering Mr. Freitag.”

“Don’t tell him while he’s eating,” Patty said. “He’s had a bypass.”

“Not only that,” Axelrod said. “He’s got guests.”

“Well,” Drogue wanted to know, “can you get the damn thing back?”

“We’re gonna suggest to Mr. Lowndes that he do the right thing.”

“Don’t start bouncing him off walls. Then we’ll really be in the shit.”

“What I’d like to do,” Axelrod said, “I’d like to have the local police athletic league take his head for a couple of laps around the municipal toilet bowl. Except we’d have to pay mordida and the pigs would probably swipe the print.”

“If he’s unfriendly,” Drogue said, “be my guest. Put the screws to him. Just don’t give him anything to sue about.”

“We’re gonna make him sweat,” Axelrod said. “If he doesn’t deliver maybe we should throw him off the set and tell Van Epp he’s unethical. That way we might kill the story before he writes it. Then Van Epp has nothing to fight for.”

“Let’s see how it goes tonight,” Drogue said. “But I don’t want to get involved. If you want him off the set you have to go to Charlie.”

“Charlie should be outraged,” Axelrod said. “The guy’s supposed to be high-class and he deals with blackmailers.”

“Charlie’s instinct will be to buy him out. Put him on the payroll. Option his next book. Wait and see.”

“You should advise him not to do that.”

“I can’t advise him,” Drogue said. “My father can advise him. Not me.”

“What are you gonna do with Jack?”

“I should pour salt down his throat and make him walk to Tijuana. But since he’s Dad’s old pal I guess I’ll pay him off and fly him home. For my father’s sake.”

“Wow,” Patty said, “that’s Christ-like.”

“Damn right,” Walter Drogue junior said. He picked up one of the photographs and examined it. “This is a truly ugly picture,” he said. “I’ll never be able to look at these two turkeys in the same light.”

“Walker’s into it.”

“Walker’s a bum,” Drogue said. “He’s going to end up like Jack.”

“A lot of them do,” Axelrod said.

“He’s got no survival skills,” the director said. He looked at the picture again. “Neither of them have.”

Patty Drogue lit a joint and took the picture from her husband.

“If any kind of shit hit any kind of fan,” Drogue asked Axelrod, “not that I think it will — do you suppose Walker has some kind of moral turpitude thing in his contract? Some kind of Fatty Arbuckle-type thing?”

“That would cut him out and take his points? I don’t know, Walter. It’s not my department. I doubt it.”

“I’m not trying to take the guy’s points, Axelrod. Why does everybody suspect me of being other than a nice person? I just wondered what kind of risk he ran.”

“Not much,” Axelrod said. “Not like she does.”

Walter took a drag on the joint and gave it back to his wife.

“Sometimes I’m inclined to think this is all Charlie’s fault,” he said. “Charlie’s a silly man. Silly shit happens around his pictures.”

“Really,” Patty Drogue agreed.

“The sixties,” Walter Drogue said to them. “You think they were that great?”

Axelrod shrugged.

“Everybody shoplifted,” Patty Drogue said. “People handed out flowers. You could get laid three times a day with an ugly body.”

“That’s all over now,” Axelrod said.

Bathed, anointed, as cool and clean as chastity, she climbed the lighted path. Walker came behind her, walking carefully. They passed a garden bar and lighted tennis courts, following a yucca-bordered path that led to Charlie Freitag’s casita.

The casita’s sunken patio was lit by flickering torches, set at intervals along its border of volcanic stone. A party of grim mariachis was performing; their music seemed strangely muted to Lu Anne, as if each brass note were being instantly carried off on the wind.

Axelrod appeared from the darkness. He smiled at her and hurried past, approaching Walker. The Long Friends, jubilant, fanned out among the guests. She thought it odd that they seemed happy there.

Across the patio from the musicians was a walled barbecue pit where white-capped chefs labored over a spitted joint. The air was smoky with roasting beef. A great cauldron of boiling sauce stood to one side of the pit and, nearby, a company of men in toques blanches sharpened carving knives. The waiters had set up a buffet and a long well-attended bar.

Axelrod and Walker were conspiring.

“Fuck him then,” she heard Walker say. “Is he here?”

“Not yet,” Axelrod answered. He turned to Lu Anne. “How are you, Lu?”

“A little tired,” she said. He was studying her. His hard features were firelit. “Will that do?”

“It’ll do fine,” Axelrod said. “Remind her, Gordo. She looks beautiful but she’s a little tired.”

She tried working with them.

“When they ask me how I am,” she assured them, “or how I feel, I’ll say a little tired.”

“Smile,” Walker told her, “when you say it.”

“I’ll try it with the smile,” she said dutifully, “and if it works I’ll keep it.”

She thought some quarrel might be breaking out among the Long Friends, some dispute over precedence or family history. Her anxiety quickened.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. In the patio below, Freitag’s guests were mingling, carrying their drinks among the cloth-covered buffet tables. There were not so many of them as she had thought at first. Her Friends hung on the edge of the light.

“It’s fine,” Walker assured her. “It’s nice here.”

“It’s just friends,” Axelrod said. “Just …” He paused; both he and Walker were watching Dongan Lowndes descend into the lighted garden, making for the bar.

“Just buddies,” Walker said.

“Let’s get down there,” Axelrod told them.

Smiling, unclear of vision, Lu Anne strolled among the guests with Walker at her side. He was conducting her to Charlie.

She went to him in expectation of elaborate greeting but he simply took her by the hand. His fondness seemed so genuine that it made her sad. She thought she could feel Walker beside her grow tense with a suitor’s unease, as though Charlie were his rival.

“You lovely girl,” Charlie said. “You champion.” He turned to Walker. “Want to ask me if I like it?”

A tall horse-faced woman with prominent front teeth stood at Charlie’s elbow. Next to her was a stocky Latin man with a dour Roman face and straight black Indian hair that fell in a sweep across his forehead. He was in black tie and dinner jacket, the only man present in formal clothes.

“You like it,” Walker said. “Have you spoken to Walter?”

In the grip of his emotion, Charlie Freitag turned and sought Walter Drogue among his guests.

“Walter,” he fairly shouted. “Call the director!” A few people turned toward him in alarm. “Get over here, Drogue!” The party recognized his good humor and relaxed.

Walter Drogue made his way to Freitag’s side and a circle began to form around them. Lu Anne saw Lise Rennberg, Jack Glenn and Eric. George Buchanan sipped Perrier. Carnahan and Joy McIntyre were dissolved in rowdy laughter. When he had gathered his principals about him, Charlie raised his glass. “Here’s to all of you,” he proclaimed. “Artists of the possible!”

“And absent friends!” Joy McIntyre cried. Freitag, who had no idea who she was, looked at her strangely for a moment, his smile on hold.

“Like father, like son,” Charlie told Walter Drogue junior when they had quaffed their cup of victory.

The young director gave forth with an insolent simper, the malice of which was lost on Big Charlie Freitag.

“It ain’t over till it’s over, Charlie.”

Freitag’s eye fell on Dongan Lowndes.

“Mr. Lowndes,” he said, “you’ve been lucky. You’ve seen this business at its best. You’ve seen a fine picture made by serious people and it doesn’t get any better than that.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Lowndes said thickly.

“Maybe we can get you to come out and work with us someday.”

Ignoring Charlie, Lowndes looked at Lu Anne for a moment and turned on Walker.

“Would I like it?” he asked. “What do you think?”

“Well,” Walker told him, “it beats not working.” Everyone laughed, as though he had said something funny.

Charlie performed introductions for the Mexican and Dongan Lowndes. The others were known to one another. The tall woman was Ann Armitage, a former comic actress and the widow of a blacklisted writer. The Mexican was Raúl Maldonado, a painter.

The thuggish musicians played their way into darkness. A pair of violinists stepped out of the void into which the mariachis had vanished and commenced to stroll. Freitag went off to speak with Lise Rennberg and the attendant circle dissolved.

“Let’s go talk,” Axelrod said to Lowndes. The novelist was disposed to remain beside Lu Anne. He gazed at her with drunken ardor. Lu Anne returned his look, pitying his flayed face, his sores and fecal eyes.

“Is it important?” Lowndes asked, without disengaging his gaze from Lu Anne’s.

“Not exactly important,” Axelrod said. “Scummy.”

He slid his hand under Lowndes’s arm and drew the man aside. Ann Armitage was asking Lu Anne how she was. Lu Anne stared at the old actress blankly.

“Line!” she called.

“A little tired,” Walker told her.

Lu Anne smiled confidentially. An expression of weariness passed across her face.

“The truth is,” she told Ann Armitage, “that I’ve been feeling a little tired.”

Ann Armitage did the double take for which she had once been famous.

“What are you two? An act?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lu Anne said.

Miss Armitage looked them up and down, world-wearily.

Before the guests could make their way to the seating, young Helena stood on a wooden bench and raised her hands for silence.

“We don’t want you sitting with your worst enemy or your ex-spouse or their lover,” she told the guests. “So as some of you may have noticed, we’ve had lovely little place cards with your many famous names inscribed thereon. So — sorry about the milling. Wherever your card is — after you’ve helped yourself to the buffet — that’s where you’ll sit. And you may in fact want to take note of your place before you fill your plates with all this delicious food.”

There was some smattering of applause punctuated by a harsh raspberry. Joy McIntyre had made her way, unerringly but unsteadily, to Charlie Freitag’s side.

“I mean,” she demanded in a nasal croon, “I mean, what is this, Charlie? High tea with Rex?” She seized his dinner gong and marched off to accost the violinists.

“Who is that woman?” Charlie Freitag demanded of those nearest him. He was told she was Lee Verger’s stand-in.

People walked about carrying their western-style metal plates, colliding with each other and adjusting their spectacles, trying to see in the light of tiny table lamps or flickering torchlight.

“Bang bang went the trolley!” Joy McIntyre sang at the top of her voice. The strolling violinists backed away from her like a pair of ornamental fowl. Charlie returned to his guests.

“That woman,” he said to Walker, “is she actually a stand-in?”

Before Walker could answer, the patio echoed to a horrendous screech.

“My God,” Freitag said. “It’s her again.”

It was Joy again. Bill Bly, uninvited but on watch, was attempting to relieve her of the dinner gong. Joy declined to surrender it.

“Get your bloody hand off me fucking wrist, you great fucking poofta bastard!” she protested. The guests had fallen silent. Joy’s struggle, the crackling of cooked meat and the violins, sweetly paired to “Maytime,” were the only sounds in the patio.

“The press is here,” Freitag said. “This looks like hell.” He looked about him in the dimness for Dongan Lowndes and saw the man squared off with Axelrod as though the two of them were at the point of blows.

“Jesus wept,” the gentleman producer cried. Walker took the opportunity to slip away.

Lu Anne sat at the head of one of the buffet tables playing with people’s name cards. Maldonado and Miss Armitage had attempted to enlist at a more congenial sector of the party but, encountering outbursts and angry voices at every turning, had been driven back into the shadows. In the shadows Lu Anne ruled. She had discovered that she, Miss Armitage and Maldonado, Walker and Lowndes, Charlie, Axelrod and the Drogues were all seated together at the very table beside which Charlie had introduced them.

“Do you think,” she asked the couple, “that some table game might be played with these? Something along the order of Authors or Old Maid?”

Miss Armitage smiled sweetly.

“Yes, I do,” she said. She seized the stack of place cards from Lu Anne’s grasp until she had her own and her escort’s, and put them on the next table. “It’s called Switcheroo.”

She picked up two place cards from the same adjoining table and handed them to Lu Anne.

“I’m too old to sit still for silly women, Miss Niceness, just as you’re too old to be one. I’m going to leave you to the luck of the draw.”

Maldonado replaced their cards.

“I want to sit here,” he said heavily. Miss Armitage pursed her lips and looked at the ground. The Mexican took his chair and slowly undid the knot of his dress black tie.

“You’re welcome here, Mr. Maldonado,” Lu Anne said.

Maldonado looked at her.

“Am I?”

“Oh yes,” Lu Anne said. “You and your companion are both welcome. You have the good opinion of my friends.”

Maldonado graciously inclined his head. Ann Armitage gave a comic grimace. “Well, praise God and shut my mouth. If that’s not …”

The painter raised a flabby hand, bidding his friend to silence.

“You all are admired in secret places,” Lu Anne told them. “In quarters that you mustn’t imagine, they think well of you and they give good report.”

“How very mysterious,” Maldonado said. “What does it mean?”

Lu Anne was at a loss to explain. Never in her life had she seen the Long Friends so unafraid of sound or light, almost ready, it seemed, to join her in her greater world and make the two worlds one. Seeing them gathered round, shyly peering from between their lace-like wings, murmuring encouragement, she could only conclude that they approved of her new acquaintanceship with Charlie’s two friends. Moreover, they were beautiful, the two, the elegant old actress and the sad-faced handsome man who had removed his dinner jacket. They were as beautiful and charged with grace as Lowndes was hideous and unclean.

Charlie Freitag came to their table like a man seeking refuge from the field of defeat. There was a meager ration of salad and beans on his plate. He looked sweaty and unwell. Lu Anne, who loved him as her friend, was concerned.

“What’s this?” Charlie asked. “No one’s eating?”

“Charlie,” she asked, “Charlie, dear, aren’t you well, my poor friend?”

He took her by the hand. “Me? I’m fine. I’m thinking of you.”

“I’m well enough, Charles.” She smiled. “A little tired.”

“You must be wiped out, for Christ’s sake,” Charlie said. “We have you in and out of the water thirty times a day. You’re living on hotel food and missing your family.” He looked about the torchlit patio uneasily. “Everyone’s overworked. But I thought, what the hell, we’re over the hump. I thought since Gordon was coming down and we had this man from New York Arts … and I thought we could all use a lift.”

“Indeed we could,” Lu Anne said. “And it’s my birthday.”

Charlie was surprised. “Well, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “But I thought your birthday was last month.”

Lu Anne gave him a conspiratorial wink. Ann Armitage stared at her, unblinking.

“Where is Gordon?” Charlie asked quickly.

“Well, he was just here,” Lu Anne said. She could not remember his leaving; she was suddenly anxious. “I don’t know.” To her horror she saw Dongan Lowndes approaching the table, followed with a vigor bordering on pursuit by Axelrod.

“Isn’t anyone going to eat?” Charlie asked them in mounting distress.

As though in benison, Walter Drogue junior and Patty arrived, their plates piled high. Charlie and Patty Drogue exchanged kisses.

“Where’s your old man?” Charlie asked young Drogue. “Won’t he be joining us?”

Patty, who had hastened to stuff her mouth with food, attempted unsuccessfully to speak.

“He’s having a little trouble with his date,” young Drogue said.

“Yeah?” Charlie asked. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

“You must have seen her, Charlie,” Drogue said. “The little Australian job with the dirty mouth?”

Freitag covered his eyes with his hand for a moment.

“Hilarious,” he said softly. He looked about guiltily as though old Drogue might catch him gossiping. “What a riot!”

“Best body on the unit,” young Drogue said. “Present company excepted.”

“That’s Wally,” Ann Armitage said. “I take it he’s in good health?”

“He damn well better be,” Freitag said. “I had a look at that little dollop.”

Lu Anne, knowing that in time she must, turned toward Dongan Lowndes. As she did so she felt what could only be his hand against her knee.

“Walking the bones, Mr. Lowndes?” she asked him.

His damp hand slithered off like a cemetery rat. She watched his face as the rat-hand fled home to him. His blunt features were momentarily elongated and rodentine as he reabsorbed it, the rat within. For all the effort in the world she could not tear her eyes from his nor could she feel a grain of pity. Let the rat stay wherein it dwelled, she thought. Let it gnaw his guts forever, feed behind his eyes. So long as she was safe from it.

Lowndes’s eyes were moist as he stared down her rebuke. She saw in them what he himself must take for human passion, desire, infatuation, an impulse to master the beloved. The trouble was that he was not a man. Not human.

“Mr. Lowndes,” she heard Axelrod say in a low voice, “you want to look at me when I talk to you?”

At last she tore her eyes free from Lowndes’s, a rending.

“Mr. Maldonado,” she asked the man across the table from her, “are you a good painter?”

Miss Armitage started to speak but fell silent.

“One’s never asked,” Maldonado said.

“Lu Anne,” Charlie said sternly, “Raúl is one of Mexico’s very finest painters. He shows throughout the world.”

“I should say so,” Miss Armitage said.

“I myself,” Charlie declared, “own some choice Maldonados. They’re on display in my home and to me — they mean Mexico. The sunshine, the sea. The whole enchilada.”

Maldonado and Miss Armitage looked at him coldly.

“You know what I mean,” he stammered. “Everything we so admire about …” He fell silent, looked at his plate and mopped his brow.

“Dad owns about a ton and a half of them,” young Drogue said.

“In bohemian company,” Lu Anne said, “or some equivalent, in some demimonde like ours — one faces the deliberately tactless question.”

Maldonado smiled faintly. “Mierda,” he said.

“You better believe it,” Ann Armitage said.

“Everybody here knows whether they’re good or not,” Lu Anne told him. “Given the least encouragement, everybody here is ready to say.”

“I am not a good painter,” Maldonado told the company. There was a momentary silence, then a chorus of demurrers.

“The great ones,” Charlie said with an uneasy chuckle, “they’re never happy with their work. They need us to encourage them.”

“I wish you were a good painter,” Lu Anne said to Maldonado. “Maybe you are, after all.”

“If for you I could be,” Maldonado said gallantly, “you may be sure that I would. Maybe for myself as well. But I think it would make my life difficult.”

Lowndes’s presence had quieted the Long Friends; they were out of temper again, out where she could not control them and where they might cause her some embarrassment. She began to feel panicky.

“Oh God,” she said, “where’s Gordon? I need him.”

“Jon,” Freitag said to Axelrod, “would you do me a favor and find your friend Walker? Be a pal.”

Even in the unsteady light it was apparent that Axelrod was red-faced with anger.

“Sure, Charlie,” he said. He put a hand on Lowndes’s shoulder again. “What do you say, Dongan? Want to help me find our pal Gordo?”

Lowndes brushed his hand away violently. “I don’t go for this tinseltown familiarity,” he told Axelrod.

“That’s not nice, Dongan,” Axelrod said.

“Mr. Maldonado,” Lu Anne said, “would you find him for me?”

“Can’t you walk?” Miss Armitage asked. “Find your own goddamn friends.”

Lu Anne was carefully pouring the decanted red wine into her glass. She drank it down.

“I can’t see so well,” she explained. “And there’s such a crowd.”

“Of course,” Maldonado said. “Mr. Walker. I’ll find him. I’ll go now.”

He touched his napkin to his mouth, although he had not been eating, and went off.

“Christ almighty, Charlie,” Miss Armitage said to her host. “Where do you get these people?”

“The same place I got you,” Charlie Freitag said brightly. There were no laughs for him at the table.

Walker was in the pool-house lavatory, sniffing cocaine from the porcelain surface of the sink, when the door opened behind him. In the mirror over the sink he saw a man framed in the doorway, discovering him in flagrante. The man appeared wild-eyed and disheveled; he was wearing a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck and dark trousers. It was an unwelcome sight.

“Cocaína,” the man said.

Walker turned slowly toward the man in the mirror and recognized Maldonado.

“It’s all right,” he said slowly, having no idea himself what he might mean.

“Among my friends,” the painter explained, “it’s frowned on as bourgeois. As gringo. My companion — Miss Armitage — is very bitter on the subject.”

“I’ll bet,” Walker said. He went past Maldonado to lock the door. “I thought,” he explained, “I had locked this.”

“No,” Maldonado said, “it was open. This is difficult,” he told Walker. “To have some or not?”

“Do have some,” Walker suggested. “I mean, it’s your decision of course.”

“I shall,” Maldonado said. “Why not?”

They took some. The painter paced, frowning.

“A case could certainly be made,” Walker said, “that it’s bad for the Indians. In terms of exploitation.”

Maldonado waved the argument away.

“It’s neither good nor bad for the Indians. It makes no difference for them. It’s ourselves and our societies that we’re destroying.”

“That’s as it should be,” Walker said.

They had more. Instead of pacing, Maldonado fixed Walker with a grave stare.

“Who is the woman, Walker?”

“Do you mean Lee Verger? You were introduced.”

“Lee Verger,” Maldonado repeated. “An actress?”

“A very good actress. Quite well known.”

“Is she acting now? Tonight? Performing?”

Walker hesitated.

“Not tonight,” he said. “Not really.”

“She’s your woman?”

“Yes,” Walker said.

“She sent me to get you. I’m not some house cat to be sent on such an errand but I obeyed her. She asked me if I was a good painter and I replied that I was not. I wanted to humiliate myself.”

“Well,” Walker said, “you’ve probably fallen in love with her.”

“I can explain,” Maldonado said. “I can explain to her. With your permission.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Walker said. “Let’s go back and talk.”

The party seemed to be going well as Walker and Maldonado made their way back to Charlie Freitag’s table. The violinists patrolled unmolested; happy conversation bubbled up from every quarter. Only at the party’s core, in the circle around Freitag, a dark enchantment prevailed.

Maldonado resumed his seat across from Lu Anne. He and all the others at the table watched in silence as Walker guided himself into a chair beside her and she moved to steady him. When he was down beside her she took his hand and kissed it and put her arm around his neck.

“I want to explain myself,” Maldonado said. “I want to explain what I said against my painting.”

“There’s no need for that,” Miss Armitage said. “Everyone knows how wonderful you are. And everyone can see you’ve been drinking.”

The voice of Joy McIntyre rang again through the patio.

“The choreographer at the Sands is dead!” she bellowed. “The choreog—” She began the phrase again but was cut off in mid-word, somewhat disconcertingly.

“Why are people always saying that?” Lowndes asked.

“ ’Cause we’re in tinseltown,” Axelrod told him. “And they’re sending you a message, Dongan.”

“I want to speak about my painting,” Maldonado said. “This lady has challenged me and I dedicate my remarks to her.”

“The lady will excuse you,” Ann Armitage said firmly. “She knows there are things not to say in public. She understands that sometimes we say things that can hurt us in important ways.”

“All the same,” Maldonado said softly.

Walker finished the drink at his place.

“We are true artists here,” he explained, “we work without a net.”

Old Drogue came out of the darkness; there appeared to be dark welts on his neck. He made his way to the table to sit between his son and Patty.

When Charlie rose to welcome him, he raised his right hand in a kind of benediction and sat down.

“Yay, Pops,” Drogue junior said. Patty enfolded his arm in hers.

“I come from Colima,” Maldonado told them. “My people were dust. I went to school and studied art because art is prized in this country. My teacher had been a student of the American William Gropper, so he painted like Gropper and so did I. In Tepic I have a roomful of my early work — all very realistic and political.”

“Passionate,” Miss Armitage told the people at the table. “Fierce and full of rage. It’s wonderful work.”

“It resembles the cartoons of Mr. Magoo,” Maldonado said. “A Mr. Magoo passionate, fierce and full of rage.”

“He tortures himself,” Ann Armitage lamented.

“I torture myself by enduring banalities in silence. I wish on my mother’s grave I had never learned the English language.”

“You probably went too far,” Walker suggested. “You should have learned a little restaurant English. Enough to order flapjacks. Certainly not enough to understand Miss Armitage on the subject of Mexican painting.”

“What’s he doing here anyway?” Miss Armitage asked Charlie of Walker. “Why isn’t he somewhere chained to a hospital bed?”

Charlie muttered soothingly and looked at the table.

Maldonado turned to Lu Anne.

“Before you there should only be truth. Because of your eyes.”

“How serious everything’s become,” Lu Anne said. “First the choreographer at the Sands and now this.”

“You started it,” Walker pointed out to her. “Ask a tactless question and you get the long answer.”

“The choreographer at the Sands?” Lowndes asked.

“I’ve never spoken the truth in English,” Maldonado told them. “Is it possible?”

“Oh yes,” Lu Anne said. “But very Protestant.”

“I’ve taken to diving,” the artist told her. “I take pictures wherever there’s coral. Then from the pictures I paint. Can you imagine what it’s like to vulgarize the bottom of the ocean? The source of life? When you know the difference?”

“Courage,” Walker told the artist, “you’re talking to the right crowd. There are people at this table who can vulgarize pure light.”

“I want to tell you more,” Maldonado said. “More of the truth.”

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Lu Anne asked the people at the table.

“Great face,” old Drogue said. “Good bones.”

“Mr. Maldonado,” Lu Anne said, “if you were the god of good bones it wouldn’t matter what you told me. The truth is no concern of mine.”

“Can’t you see she’s crazy?” Miss Armitage asked her friend.

“Because I lie so well in your language,” Maldonado said, “and because I listen so well to lies, I’m successful. Perhaps also because I’m beautiful and have good bones. Now I have an arrangement with a very prestigious department store. They sell my paintings there and my prints. They also use my designs. So I can look forward to the day, Miss Verger, when my visions will be stamped on every shower curtain in America. In every swimming pool, Jacuzzi and bathtub. On the toilet wallpaper and in the toilet bowl. Wherever sanitation is honored — Maldonados. Standing tall.”

“Somebody’s got to do it,” young Drogue told him.

“Hey, man,” Patty said to her husband, “you know we own a lot of this guy’s stuff and he’s telling us it’s all crapola.”

“We can fix that tomorrow morning,” young Drogue said. “One phone call.”

“Do you want me to forgive you, Mr. Maldonado?” Lu Anne asked. “I would forgive you if I could.” The Long Friends gathered round her. “But I myself am no more than good bones. A rag, a hank of hair and good bones.”

“Just a minute,” Maldonado said. “We have a bargain. This is the time of truth among truth tellers. You people,” he told the people at the table, “you who know how good you are! Tell us!”

“Come off it, man,” Axelrod said.

“Yeah, man,” Dongan Lowndes said. “Come off it.” He seemed restored to full vigor and he was doing an imitation of Axelrod.

Axelrod looked at him pensively.

“I don’t want anyone to leave,” Maldonado said with a hint of menace. “I want everyone to explain themselves.”

Lowndes raised his glass, which contained tequila au naturel, in Charlie’s direction.

“Thank God it’s Freitag,” he declared.

“This is fun,” Walker said. “This is better than poker. Who opens?”

“What do we need?” Ann Armitage asked. “Do alcoholism and impotence make a pair?”

“Miss Armitage,” Walker announced, “was the only person in America actually hanged during the McCarthy period. She was strung up at the height of her career from the witching elm at the Hamilton horse trials.”

“You louse,” Ann Armitage said in her cultivated voice. “You eunuch.”

“Miss Armitage is a student of sexual prowess in males,” Walker continued, “and a major Mexican art critic. She combines in her single self the principal attributes of Eleonora Duse, Eleanor Roosevelt and Eleanor of Castile. Also Rosa Luxemburg, Sacco and Vanzetti. If a passing divine hadn’t noticed her dangling there during the dressage competition and recognized the visible manifestations of grace, her poor alcoholic impotent husband might be alive today. Pretty soon she’s going to write her memoirs and we’ll see a parade of virtue as long as Macy’s at Thanksgiving but with twice as much gas and imagination.”

“Everyone’s under a lot of strain,” Charlie Freitag said grimly.

“They’re all drunk, Charlie,” Axelrod explained. “That’s what it is.”

“Tell him about yourself, Gordon,” Walter Drogue junior said.

“Walter’s a wonderful dresser,” Walker told the Mexican, “and he’s a feminist and he’s not taking a writing credit on this movie because he hasn’t written it.”

“Watch it, buster,” Patty Drogue said.

“These are only insults,” Maldonado complained. “It’s childish to insult people for being only what they are. I want to hear about ability.”

“Laughter,” Lu Anne said. She looked radiant in the firelight and everyone watched her. “Ability and sighs.”

“For Christ’s sake, Maldonado,” Walker said, “everybody here is at least pretty good.” He took Lu Anne by the hand. “This one thinks the owl was a baker’s daughter but she’s as pure as country water.” He turned to Freitag. “And Charlie — Charlie,” he said, “are you O.K.?”

“Everyone’s under a lot of strain,” Charlie Freitag said.

“Charlie’s under a lot of strain,” Walker explained.

“Tell him about yourself, Gordon,” young Drogue said again.

“He knows, Walter. He and I are compañeros in crime. Two flash acts. Where did we go wrong? Who knows? Who gives a shit? We’ve done O.K.” With a sweep of his arm he encompassed the patio, the neat lighted pathways and the dark bay. “Here we all are, man. On top of the hill.”

“Top of the world, Ma,” Axelrod said.

“Then there’s Axelrod,” Walker said, “who should have been pushed out of a ninth-story window of the Half-Moon Hotel at an early age.”

“Your momma,” Axelrod said.

People were coming by in various stages of intoxication to eavesdrop and to bid Charlie Freitag farewell. The fires were being banked and the meat wrapped in foil to keep it warm.

Maldonado sagged in his chair. His charge was wearing down, fatigue and drink weighed down on him. He looked at Lowndes, who was wide awake at the end of the table, an unsound smile on his face.

“What about him?” Maldonado asked Walker.

“He’s a bone god,” Lu Anne said.

“We’re not going to talk about him,” Walker said. “He’s dangerous work for the likes of you and me.”

Axelrod slapped Lowndes on the back.

“He’s a collector. He collects art.”

Everyone at the table looked at the former novelist.

“It’s been heaven,” Patty Drogue said. “Can we go now?”

“I’m going to turn in,” Charlie said. “I think we all should. When all is said and done,” he told them, “we still have a lot of work to do.”

“Oh,” Lu Anne said, “but not tomorrow, Charles. We’re free tomorrow.”

“Damn right,” Lowndes said. Everyone turned to him. “This lady doesn’t need some damned Freitag to tell her when to retire,”

“Hey, Dongan,” Axelrod said, “that’s not polite.”

Freitag appeared not to have heard himself insulted.

“Dongan …” he began, “I hope you’ll bear with us.”

“Don’t call him Dongan,” Axelrod said, “he doesn’t go for tinsel-town familiarity. Hey, Charlie,” he said, taking Lowndes by the arm, “how long has it been since we had to buy pictures off some wise fuck?”

“What kind of pictures?” Freitag asked.

“Yes,” Ann Armitage asked, “what kind of pictures, Mr. Lowndes?”

“I don’t know what you goddamn people are talking about,” Lowndes said. “What are you so worried about? Isn’t there a clear conscience in the crowd here?”

“I have to tell you,” Lu Anne said, “that we played with the bones. Yes, we did. Gordon.” She looked beseechingly at Walker and then at each of the others in turn. “Mr. Lowndes. Walter. Charlie. Sir. And you, sir, and you, madam, whose forgiveness I implore. We went to the cemetery, and where the ovens — the crypts — were broken, we played with the bones.”

“You go ahead, Patty,” young Drogue said. “We’ll be right there.”

“Don’t follow the counsels of drink, Lowndes,” Walker said. “Liquor’s not your friend. Tomorrow, we’ll have a conference call — you and Axelrod and Van Epp — it’ll work out great. Everybody will make out great.”

“What pictures?” Charlie Freitag asked. “What pictures have you got, Mr. Lowndes?”

“Charlie,” old Drogue said, “let them work it out. Don’t put your health at risk.”

Lu Anne got up and went to Freitag and took his arm. Lowndes watched her hungrily.

“They said it would make us sick and we didn’t listen,” she told Freitag. “All summer we would creep over in the middle of the day. Inside it was cool and awful-smelling. We played with the bones until old black Pelletier come yelling at us. You all know how kids are. My sister would run across the street, eat a Sno-ball — never even wash her hands.”

“Go to bed, Lu Anne.” Charlie turned to Walker. “Gordon, please.”

Walker stepped beside her.

“Pictures?” Maldonado asked.

“He’s a reporter,” Ann Armitage explained to her friend. “He has a hot picture and he wants to be paid off.”

The information seemed to depress Maldonado utterly.

“How do you like the sound of that, Lowndes?” Walker asked. He turned to Maldonado. “He can write the birds out of the trees, this guy. The good fairies brought him insight and invention and sound. But the bad fairy took his balls away.”

“Don’t provoke him,” Lu Anne said. “You only think he’s a man. He isn’t really.”

“So here he is,” Walker said. “He’s got all this great stuff going for him. He’s a first-class writer and a fourth-rate human being. He doesn’t have the confidence or the manliness to manage his own talent. He doesn’t have the balls.”

“But you would, would you?” young Drogue asked Walker. “If you were as good as you claim he is, you’d be one terrific human being. Is that what you’re telling us?”

“If I was that good,” Walker said, “I would never waste a moment. I’d be at it night and day. I’d never take a drink or drug myself or be with a woman I didn’t love.”

“Listen to him,” old Drogue said. “You try to tell people writers are assholes and nobody listens.”

The Drogues turned away into the darkness.

“Good night, all,” Ann Armitage said. She drew herself up and waited for Maldonado. “You guys slay me,” she said, “with your going on about balls.” Sadly, the portly Mexican rose and went with her.

“I did get sick,” Lu Anne said. “I breathed them inside me from a cemetery wall. Playing with the bones. Them, there.”

She pointed to the Long Friends who were clustered about Lowndes trying to touch him with their long, delicately clawed fingers, affecting to enfold him in the fine tracery of their dark wings.

“Little sister,” Lowndes said. “You’re a long way from home.”

“I’ve come a long way from my cemetery wall,” Lu Anne said. “Sometimes I think I’ve ceased to be God’s child. I think you found me out, Mr. Dongan Lowndes.”

Axelrod and Lowndes stood up at the same time, Axelrod placing himself between Lowndes and Freitag. Freitag stepped back with Lu Anne on his arm.

“You’re a sweet woman,” Lowndes said. “You don’t belong with this pack of dogs.”

Freitag gasped.

“All right, fucker,” Axelrod said. He tried to take hold of Lowndes but the writer got by him.

“You have found me out,” Lu Anne screamed. “The shit between my toes has stood up to address me.”

Lowndes had bulled his way past Axelrod and was headed for Freitag and Lu Anne. He had lost his glasses and he staggered as though blinded by Lu Anne’s light.

Her teeth clenched, Lu Anne made a swipe at Lowndes’s face.

“He’s all filth inside,” she said. “Look at his eyes.”

Lowndes raised his hands to protect himself. Walker stepped in and gently pulled her back.

Lowndes had backed up against an adjoining table. He had lowered his head into something like a boxer’s stance and his fists, only half clenched, were raised before his face. His pale brown myopic eyes, tearful and angry like a child’s, darted from side to side, trying to focus on the enemy center.

It was enraging to see the man in such a posture, Walker thought. His insides churned with anger, and with pity and loathing.

“Get away from me, you crazy bitch,” Lowndes shouted at Lu Anne.

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?”

He thought of the bird trilling in the Hollywood hills.

“Where’s he gone?” Lu Anne asked. She meant young Benson.

“I guess he’s gone to find out the weather.”

“Pig’ll come after us,” she said. “He’ll figure out where we’ve gone to.”

“Who will?”

“Billy,” she said. “Bly.”

“I don’t know why you want to go to Villa Carmel. What’s there?”

She smiled at him quickly, surprised him.

“Wait until you see.”

“Weren’t we near there once?” Walker asked. “You were shooting somewhere in the Sierra. A long time ago.”

“We were miles away. We were shooting a Mexican setting of Death Harvest in Constancia.”

“Was it Constancia?” Walker asked. “Or was it Benjamin Hill?”

“It was way the other side of Monte Carmel. Villa Carmel is on this side. The Pacific side.”

“Why do you want to go there?”

“The reason …” she began, and paused. “The reason is a pretty reason. You’ll have to trust me.” She took hold of his hand. “Do you?”

“Well,” Walker said, “we’re out here together in this storm of stuff. What have I got to lose?”

“We’ll see,” Lu Anne said.

Young Benson came back with his map case and climbed to the small room above the boathouse that was his operations shack. He was sporting the leather jacket and white silk scarf it pleased him to wear aloft. When he turned on the lights, an English-language weather report crackled over the transmitter. Walker and Lu Anne on the pier below could not make it out.

She looked through her tote bag and came up with a white bank envelope filled with bills and handed it to Walker.

“What’s this?”

“To pay him.”

He started to protest. She turned away. “My party,” she said.

Climbing the wooden stairs to Benson’s office, he put the envelope beside his wallet, still stuffed with his winnings from Santa Anita. Both of them had so much money, he thought. It was so convenient.

“How’s the weather?” he asked young Benson when he was in the office.

“Garay!” young Benson said, looking wide-eyed at him. “Man, what a shiner you got!”

Walker put a hand to his swollen face.

“Is it real?” the young pilot asked. Walker looked at him in blank incomprehension.

“I thought it might not be real,” the youth explained. “I thought maybe it was fake.”

“Ah,” Walker said. “It’s real. An accident. A misstep.”

“Yeah,” Benson said. “Well, let’s see. Reckon I can get you all over there. We might have a problem coming back. When you need to be back?”

“I don’t know. Can you wait for us?”

“That’s expensive,” the young man said uncertainly. “If the chubasco settles in we might get stuck.”

“When can we leave?”

“When it’s light,” Benson said.

Walker took five hundred-dollar bills out of the envelope.

“Take us over for the day. If we’re not back by sunset tomorrow we’ll throw in a few hundred more.”

“Three hundred for the day, if I wait. Five hundred if I have to wait overnight.”

“Good,” Walker said. He gave the youth five hundred. “Hold it on deposit.”

She was waiting for him at the foot of the steps.

“Will he take us?”

“He’ll take us at first light. He says the weather might keep us over there. Is there a hotel in Villa Carmel?”

She did not answer him. He looked at the sky; it was clear and lightening faintly. The moon was down. The autumn constellations showed. Venus was in Taurus, the morning star.

He asked her if she knew what it meant because it was the sort of thing she knew. Again she failed to answer him.

After a while she pointed to their driver, who was asleep behind the wheel of his parked limousine.

“Pay him,” she said. “Pay him and send him back.”

“You’re sure?”

“Gordon, I’m going to Monte Carmel. Do you want to be with me or not?”

He went over and woke up the driver and paid him and watched the car’s taillights bounce over the road between Benson’s and the highway.

“Why there?” he asked her.

He thought, to his annoyance, that she would ignore his question again.

“Because there’s a shrine there,” she said. “And I require its blessedness.”

“That’ll be lost on me,” Walker said.

She looked at him with a knowing, kindly condescension.

There was light above the Gulf of California, gray-white at first, then turning to crimson. It spread with all the breathtaking alacrity of tropical mornings. Walker found its freshening power wearisome. He was a little afraid of it.

Morn be sudden, he thought. Eve be soon.

Benson came out of his office and clattered down the steps to the dock, sweeping his scarf dashingly behind him in the wind.

“Let’s go, folks.”

“Is it a Christian shrine?” Walker asked. “I mean,” he suggested, “they don’t sacrifice virgins there?”

“Never virgins,” Lu Anne said. “They sacrifice cocksmen there. And ritual whores.”

“If you could give me a hand with the aircraft, mister,” young Benson said over his shoulder as they fell in behind him, “I would appreciate it a whole lot.”

Benson hauled open the hangar’s sliding door and moved the wheel blocks aside. Then he and Walker guided the aircraft out of the hangar and into position. By the time they were ready to board, the morning was in full possession. The disc of the sun was still below the gulf, but the morning kites were up against layers of blue and the lizard cries of unseen desert birds sounded in the brush until the engine’s roar shut them out of hearing.

“She’s a real sparkler,” Benson said when they were airborne. Walker, who had been sniffing cocaine from his hand, looked at the youth blankly again. Was he referring to Lu Anne, buckled into the seat behind him?

Benson never took his eyes from the cockpit windshield.

“I mean the day is,” he explained. “I mean you wouldn’t know there was bad weather so close.”

“Yes,” Walker said. “I mean no. I mean we’ll never get enough of it.”

A few minutes out, they could see the peaks of the coast on the eastern shore of the gulf and the sun rising over them. The whole sea spread out beneath them, glowing in its red rock confines, a desert ocean, a sea for signs and miracles.

He turned to look at Lu Anne and saw her crying happily. The sight encouraged him to a referential joke.

“Was there ever misery loftier than ours?” he shouted over the engine.

She shook her head, denying it.

“Everybody O.K.?” Benson asked.

“Everybody will have to do,” Walker told him.

Within the hour they were landed on a basic grass airstrip in the heart of a narrow valley rimmed with verdant mountains. The air was damp and windless. A knot of round-faced, round-shouldered Indian children watched them walk to the corrugated-iron hangar that served the field. A herd of goats were nibbling away at the borders of a strip. Through a distant stand of ramon trees, Walker could make out the whitewashed buildings of town — the dome and bell tower of a church, rooftops with bright laundry, a cement structure with Art Deco curves surmounted with antennas. Villa Carmel.

While Benson did his paperwork, a middle-aged Indian with a seraphic smile approached Walker to inquire whether a taxi was desired. Lu Anne was out in the sun, shielding her eyes, squinting up at the ridgeline of the green mountains to the east.

Walker directed the man who had approached him to telephone for a car and within ten minutes it arrived, a well-maintained Volkswagen minibus with three rows of seats crowded into it. He bought a bottle of mineral water at the hangar stand and they climbed aboard.

They drove into the center of Villa Carmel with two other passengers — Benson and an American in a straw sombrero who had been lounging about the hangar and who never glanced at them. In the course of the brief ride, Walker underwent a peculiar experience. He was examining what he took to be his own face in the rearview mirror, when he realized that the roseate, self-indulgent features he had been ruefully studying were not his own but those of the man in the seat in front of him. His own, when he brought them into his line of sight, looked like a damaged shoulder of beef. The odd sense of having mistaken his own face remained with him for some time thereafter.

When they pulled into the little ceiba-shaded square of Villa Carmel, Benson and the American got out and the driver looked questioningly toward Lu Anne and Walker.

“Tell him the shrine,” Lu Anne said.

Walker tried the words he knew for shrine—la capilla, el templo. The elderly driver shrugged and smiled. His smile was that of the man at the airport, a part of the local Indian language.

“Monte Carmel,” Lu Anne said firmly. “Queremos ir ahí.”

Without another word, the driver shifted gears and then circled the square, heading back the way they had come.

They drove again past the airstrip and followed the indifferently surfaced road into the mountains. As they gained distance they were able to turn and see that the town of Villa Carmel itself stood on the top of a wooded mesa. The higher their minibus climbed along the escarpment, the deeper the green valleys were that fell away beside the road. They passed a waterfall that descended sheerly from a piñon grove to a sunless pool below. Vultures on outstretched motionless wings glided up from the depths of the barrancas, riding updrafts as the sun warmed the mountain air.

When they were almost at the top of the ridge, the minibus pulled over and halted at the beginning of a dirt track. They could see across the next valley, which was not wild like the one from which they ascended but rich with cultivation. A railroad track ran across its center. There were towns, strung out along a paved highway. Miles beyond, another range of mountains rose, to match the range on which they stood.

“We’ve been here,” Walker said to Lu Anne. “Haven’t we?” He got out of the bus and walked to a cliffside. “We stayed in that valley, at a hot springs there. You were working in these hills. Or else,” he said, nodding across the valley, “in those.”

Her attention was fixed on a winding rocky pathway that led up a hillside on their right, toward the very top of the hill. Walker saw her question the driver, and the driver, smiling as ever, shake his head. He walked back to the bus.

“Is he saying,” Lu Anne asked, “that he can’t drive us up there?”

Walker spoke with the driver and determined that, indeed, the man was cheerfully declining to take them farther.

“He says he can’t make it up there,” Walker told Lu Anne. “He says the bus wouldn’t go up.”

Looking the track over, Walker saw that it appeared to be little more than a goat trail, hardly a road at all.

“Pay him,” Lu Anne said.

He had nothing smaller than a twenty. Shamefacedly he put it in the driver’s hand. The driver responded with no more than his customary smile.

“I want him to come back this evening,” Lu Anne said.

When Walker suggested this to the driver, the driver said that it would be dangerous for them to spend the day in the mountains alone. There were bad people from the cities, he said, who came on the highway and did evil things.

“We won’t be near the highway,” Lu Anne said.

So Walker asked the man to return before sundown and the man smiled and drove away. Walker suspected they would never see him again.

Lu Anne walked across the road to the foot of the path.

“Hey, bo,” she said. “Don’t you know we’re going up?”

Walker knew. He fell into step with her.

“The next hill,” he said to her when they had gone a way, “that never was a thing that troubled me.”

“No,” Lu Anne said.

“I was always hot for the next hill. Next horizon. Whatever there was. That’s why I came along now.”

He paused, looked around and took a pinch. It was very wasteful. When he had satisfied himself, he took a drink of bottled water. Lu Anne took some cocaine from him.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re Walker.”

“They don’t call me Walker for nothing,” Walker said. “It’s a specialty.”

“Of what does it consist?” Lu Anne said.

“Well,” he said, “there’s the road. And there’s one.”

“And how does one approach the road?”

“One steps off confidently. One in front of the other. Hay foot, straw foot. Briskly.”

“Oh,” Lu Anne said, “that’s you, Gordon. That’s your style all right.” She linked arms with him. “Tell us more.”

“Well,” he said, “there are things to know.”

“I knew there would be. Tell.”

“There’s to and fro. There’s back and forth. There’s up. Likewise down. There’s taking care of your feet.”

“And the small rain,” Lu Anne said.

“And mud. And gravel and sand. And shit. And wet rot and dry rot. And going over fences.”

“Can you look back?”

“Never back. You can look down. You have to see where you’re going.”

“But is there a place for art?” Lu Anne asked with a troubled frown. “It’s all so functional.”

“There’s whistling. That’s the principal art. The right tunes in the right places. Whatever gets you through the afternoon.”

“How sad,” Lu Anne said. They walked on, winding upward along the hillside. “How sublime.”

“The road is never sublime,” Walker told her. “The road is pedestrian.”

When they had walked for half an hour, they could see both valleys — the plains to the east and the forested barranca through which they had come.

They stopped to drink the rest of their water and take more of the drug. The road over which they had driven ran close to the summit; the top of Monte Carmel was only a quarter mile or so above them.

“Your road is mine, Walker,” she told him.

“Right,” he said. He glanced at her; she was clutching the collar of the army shirt she had thrown on after the party. Her eyes were bright with pain.

“It was always me for you.”

“I knew that,” he said. He was thinking that, of course, they would never have lasted three months together by the day. Arrivals, departures, fond absences and dying falls were all there had ever been to it. Bird songs and word games, highs and high romance. “We weren’t free.”

“Oh, baby,” she said, “there ain’t no free.”

“Only,” Walker said, “the comforts of philosophy.”

“Which in your case,” Lu Anne said, “is me.”

Walker laughed and so did she.

“Likewise the consolations of religion,” Lu Anne said, “which is why we are out here …”

“Under the great vault of heaven,” Walker suggested.

“Under the great vault,” she repeated, “of heaven.” She stopped and began to cry. She knelt in the dust, her eyes upturned in absurd rapture, doing the virgin’s prayer. Walker was appalled. He bent to her.

“Can’t you help me?” she asked.

“I would die for you,” he said. It was true, he thought, but not really helpful. He was the kind of lover that Edna Pontellier was a mother. At the same moment he realized that his life was in danger and that he might well, as he had earlier suspected, have come to Mexico to die. His heart beat fearfully. His sides ached.

“I don’t require dying for,” Lu Anne said. He considered that she deceived herself. Weeping, she looked childlike and stricken, but even in his recollection she had never been more beautiful. She had grown so thin in the course of the film that her face had contracted to its essential lines, which were strong and noble, lit by her eyes with intelligence and generosity and madness. The philosophy whose comforts she represented was Juggernaut.

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?”

“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.

“What about your kids?” Walker said.

Lu Anne was looking up at the rain. She bit her lip and rubbed her eyes.

“Goddamn you, Gordon! What about your kids?”

“I asked you first,” Walker said. “And I told you about mine.”

“Mine, they’ve never seen me crazy. They never would. They’d remember me as something very ornate and mysterious. They’d always love me. I’d be fallen in love, the way we nearly were just now.”

Walker yawned. “Asleep in the deep.”

He arranged his windbreaker and his duck trousers to cover them as thoroughly as possible.

“Yeah,” Lu Anne said, and sighed. “Yeah, yeah.”

They settled back against the mud and straw.

“Things are crawling on us,” Walker said sleepily.

“Coke bugs,” Lu Anne told him.

For some time they slept, stirring by turns, talking in their dreams. When Walker awakened, he was covered in sweat and bone weary. He kicked the false door aside. The sky was clear. He sat up and saw the yellow grass and the wildflowers of the hilltop glistening with lacy coronets of moisture. On his knees, he crept past Lu Anne and went outside. The chubasco had passed over them. The wall of low gray-black clouds was withdrawing over the valley to the east, shadowing its broad fields. An adjoining hill stood half in the light and half in the storm’s gloom. Its rocky peak was arched with a bright rainbow.

Walker examined his nakedness. His arms, torso and legs were streaked with Lu Anne’s blood; his shorts dyed roseate with it.

“Sweet Christ,” he said. There was no water anywhere.

When he heard her whimper he went inside and helped her stand. She was half covered with bloody rags and her hair matted with blood, but her stigmatic wounds were superficial for all their oozing forth. She had been making her hands bleed as much as possible, the way a child might.

She came outside, shielding her eyes with her forearm.

“How’s your Spanish?” Walker asked her.

“I can’t speak Spanish. I thought you could. Anyway, what’s it matter?”

“Sooner or later we’re going to have to explain ourselves and it’s going to be really difficult.”

“Difficult in any language,” Lu Anne said. “Almost impossible.”

“How do you think I’d make out thumbing?”

“Well,” she said, “you don’t seem to be injured, but you’re covered with blood. Only people with a lot of tolerance for conflict would pick you up. Of course, I’d pick you up.”

“We’d better have a drink,” Walker said.

“Oh my land,” Lu Anne said when Walker had given her some whiskey, “look at the rainbow!”

“Why did you have to throw my cocaine away,” Walker demanded. “Now I can’t function.”

“It’s right back there somewhere,” she said, indicating the brush around the stone house. “You can probably find it.”

“It’s water-soluble,” Walker told her. “Christ.”

“I have never been at such close quarters with a rainbow,” Lu Anne said. “What a marvel!”

“You know what I bet?” Walker said. “I bet it’s a sign from God.” He went to the shelter where they had lain and sorted through their clothes. There was not a garment unsoiled with Lu Anne’s blood. “God’s telling us we’re really fucked up.”

Lu Anne watched the rainbow fade and wept.

“What now?” Walker demanded. “More signs and wonders?” He held up his bloody trousers for examination. “I might as well put them on,” he said. “They must be better than nothing.”

“Gordon,” Lu Anne said.

Walker paused in the act of putting on his trousers and straightened up. “Yes, my love?”

She came over and put her arms around him and leaned her face against his shoulder.

“I know it must all mean something, Gordon, because it hurts so much.”

Walker smoothed her matted hair.

“That’s not true,” he told her. “It’s illogical.”

“Gordon, I think there’s a mercy. I think there must be.”

“Well,” Walker said, “maybe you’re right.” He let her go and began pulling on his trousers. “Who knows?”

“Don’t humor me,” Lu Anne insisted. “Do you believe or not?”

“I suppose if you don’t like my answer I’ll get hit with a rock.”

She balanced on tiptoe, jigging impatiently. “Please say, Gordon.”

Walker buckled his belt.

“Mercy? In a pig’s asshole.”

“Oh dear,” Lu Anne said. She walked away from him toward a rock against which he had left the whiskey and helped herself to a drink. When she had finished drinking, she froze with the bottle upraised, staring into the distance.

“Did you mention a pig’s asshole?” she asked him. “Because I think I see one at this very moment. In fact, I see several.”

Walker went and stood beside her. On a lower slope, great evil-tusked half-wild pigs were clustered under a live oak, rooting for oak balls. A barrel-size hog looked up at them briefly, then returned to its foraging.

“Isn’t that strange, Gordon? I mean, you had just mentioned a pig’s asshole and at that very moment I happened to look in that direction and there were all those old razorbacks. Isn’t that remarkable?”

Walker had been following her with her faded bloodstained army shirt. “It’s a miracle,” he said. He hung the shirt around her shoulders and took hold of one of her arms. “The Gadarene Swine.”

Dull-eyed, she began walking down the hill. Walker started after her. She tripped and got to her feet again. He followed faster, waving the shirt.

“Lu Anne,” he shouted, “those animals are dangerous.”

She stopped and let him come abreast of her. When he moved to cover her with her shirt, she turned on him, fists clenched.

“Who do you think it was,” she screamed, “that breathed in the graveyard? Who was bound in the tomb?”

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.

“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.

He called her name until his voice was gone. Then he lay down and tried to pray her back and went to sleep. Hours later the tide came in and woke him. He struck out along the dark beach toward the hotel, guiding his steps by the phosphorescent surf. The waves beat him back when he tried to wade around the point of the bay, so he sheltered against the low bluffs to wait for light. When it came he started again and got around the rocky point dry-footed. He walked, staggered, ran in short bursts, stopping when the pain forced him to.

He was terrified that she was gone. That she might be nowhere at all and her furious loving soul dissolved. He could not bear the thought of it.

When he saw a runner up the beach, he had a moment’s hope. It was so quickly dispelled that he tried to bring it back for examination. The runner was a man out for a morning jog.

The moment’s hope had been a grain of mercy. A shred of hope, a ray. There were a thousand little clichés for losers to cling to while they lost. Why should they seem so apt, he wondered, such worn words? Why should they suit the heart so well?

Watching the runner’s approach, he wondered what mercy might be. What the first mercy might have been. She had asked him if there was one and he had denied it with an oath.

He should have told her that there was, he thought. Because there was. As surely as there was water hidden in the desert, there was mercy. Her crazy love was mercy. It might have saved her.

Jack Glenn pulled up and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

“Shit,” he said breathlessly. He placed his hands palm out over his kidneys and began to walk up and down quickly. “Like … where you been? They’re having kittens, you know. Where’s Lu Anne?”

“Not back?” Walker asked.

“She’s vanished,” Glenn said. “Wasn’t she with you?”

“Yes,” Walker told him.

“So where is she?”

“In the water,” Walker told him.

“Hey, I don’t see her, Gordon.”

Walker saw another figure running up the beach toward them. It was the stuntman, Bill Bly.

“Hey, Gordon,” Jack Glenn said, “I don’t see her.” He turned to look Walker up and down. “Your eye looks bad. Where’d you get the weird duds?”

Walker did not answer him.

“Oh my God,” Jack said. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Because I’m looking, Gordon, and, you know, I don’t see her. Something is wrong, isn’t it?”

Walker nodded.

“Oh my God,” Glenn said. “Oh Jesus Christ, Gordon.”

Walker looked at the young man’s face. It kept changing before his eyes. Glenn was looking at the water, horror-stricken. For a fraction of a second, Walker thought he might be seeing her there. But when he turned there was nothing.

“I lost her,” Walker said.

Around two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon Shelley Pearce, Jack Glenn and a French actor named Celli were at the bar in Joe Allen’s. Because it was a rainy, chilling day and because they had spent the morning at a memorial service, they were drinking brandy and each of them was somewhat drunk.

They had begun to talk about the drunk-driving laws and about accidents friends of theirs had had when Gordon Walker came in. They watched in startled silence as he came up to join them.

“Well, hello, Gordon,” Jack said.

He introduced Walker to Celli. Celli gave Walker a hearty American handshake while the others watched him to see whether he knew who it was that he was meeting.

“How was it?” Gordon asked Shelley.

“Oh, it was good, Gordon. Real good as those things go.”

Walker nodded.

“I was gonna say you should have been there, but of course you shouldn’t.”

“I wasn’t asked.”

He signaled the bartender and ordered a Perrier.

“I mean,” Shelley said, “what do you mean, ‘How was it?’ It was god-awful. Her kids cried. He looked relieved, which he damn well was. There was press but they didn’t stay.” She took a long sip from her snifter. “The press likes a coffin and we didn’t have one.”

“It was a long time afterward to have it,” Celli said. “Because in France we do everything right away. The memorial, two months, it seems different.”

“Well,” Shelley said, “maybe they were waiting for her to …”

“Right,” Jack Glenn said quickly. “That was another blow. That she wasn’t found.”

“It wasn’t a blow,” Walker said. “It was better. I thought it was.”

“Did you, Gord?” Shelley asked. “That’s good. I see you’re drinking Perrier.”

“I had hepatitis,” he explained. “If I hadn’t had the gamma globulin shot I would have died.” He ran his finger around his glass. “So my drinking days are over.”

“Isn’t it tough?” she asked him.

“What have you been up to?” Walker asked her.

“Isn’t it tough not drinking? How do you manage it?”

“Oh,” Walker said. “Well, I watch television.” He laughed in embarrassment. “Evenings it’s hard, you get blue. And I drink a lot of tomato juice with Tabasco.” He cleared his throat. “I drink unsalted tomato juice because my blood pressure’s a little high.”

“That’s neat,” Shelley said. “That’s prudent. Do you jog?”

“Not yet. They say I might start in a month or so. When my blood pressure’s better. I’m starting to write again.”

“So you never really had a heart attack?” Jack asked.

“Apparently not.”

Shelley ordered another round and another Perrier for Walker.

“What brings you to the coast?” she asked him. “What’d you do, lurk outside? The mystery mourner?”

“I hear you opened your own shop,” Walker said to her.

“That’s right, man. Power to the people.”

“She says they’ll only represent women,” Jack said. “The truth is, she’s taking two-thirds of Keochakian’s clients. The poor guy’s on the phone twenty-four hours a day begging people to stay.”

“Did you go with her?” Walker asked Jack Glenn.

“You bet I did.”

“I don’t understand why you’re in town,” Shelley said. “You doing deals or what?”

“We’re moving out,” he said. “We’re relocating East.”

“We are?” she asked. “Who are we?”

Walker sipped his Perrier.

“Connie came back from London when I got sick. So we’re together. We’re relocating. East.”

“Oh, Gordon,” Shelley said. She put a hand to her chest as though it were her heart that was at risk. “Is that ever neat! Connie came home. For heaven’s sake! How about that, fellas?” she asked her friends. “Isn’t that neat?”

“Really glad to hear it,” Jack said.

Gordon thanked him. The Frenchman raised an eyebrow and looked into his glass.

“I haven’t been reading the trades,” Walker said. “How’s the picture?”

“It’s on the bottom of the Pacific,” Shelley said. “With the late Lee V.”

“They’re recutting it,” Jack said. He shrugged. “They shot some scenes with Joy. Lots of luck.”

“It’s wonderful that Connie came home,” Shelley said. “Hey,” she said delightedly, “how about that for a title? Connie Came Home? But I suppose people would think it was an animal picture.”

Jack Glenn laughed and bit his lip.

“I think it’s wonderful, Gordon,” Shelley said. “Plumb wonderful. Really.”

Walker looked away.

“When she died, Gordon, did you think of any great quotes from Shakespeare? He can quote Shakespeare from here to Sunday,” Shelley explained to her friends. “He’s a walking concordance. So was she. Come on, Gordo,” she insisted. “You stood on the shore when she went down for number three. What did you say?”

“I was very drunk the night it happened. The truth is, I remember very little of what went on. What I remember is pretty bad. Anyway, why don’t you stop?” he said.

“You’re no fun anymore now that you stopped drinking. Drunks aren’t fun when you’re not drunk. I bet nobody ever told you that before.”

“Often,” Walker said. “Repeatedly.”

“I can think of a quote,” Shelley said. “Too much of water hast thee, maid.” She reached across the table and pushed his Perrier into his lap. “How’s that grab?”

Walker tried to dry his clothes with his napkin.

“The reason I came here after the service,” he told Shelley, “was to see you.”

Shelley swallowed hard.

“Oh,” she said brightly. “Oh, me.”

“I was hoping that in future … I was hoping that in future you might represent me.”

She blinked and looked around Joe Allen’s as though she were expecting someone. She was smiling brightly.

“Sure, Gordon. Absolutely.”

“I have some things in mind,” he told her.

“Oh yeah?” her voice came as a croak. “Excuse me,” she said, and cleared her throat. “Like what?”

“We can talk another time. I have to go.” He stood up and shook hands with Jack and Celli. “I thought that at my present age I might stop going with the flow.”

“We’ll do good stuff,” Shelley said, not looking at him. “You better believe it. Hey. I’m sorry about your drink, Gord.”

“It’s just water,” he said. “So long.”

“Right,” Shelley said as he went toward the door. “And I paid for it too.”

“Goodbye, Shelley,” Walker said.

When he was outside they sat in silence for a while.

“Excuse me,” Celli said. “But I don’t know how to make of it.”

“You were pretty tough on the guy,” Jack Glenn said. “Pretty tough on Lu Anne too.”

Shelley turned on him.

“Goddamn it,” she said. “I mourned her. You think I didn’t mourn her? I thought she was wonderful. I always thought it was like somebody fed her a poisoned apple.”

She took out her handkerchief and cried into it. Jack ordered another round.

“One more,” he said. “One more can’t hurt.”

When the drinks came Jack handed Shelley hers. “Drink me,” he said. Shelley drank.

“She used to talk about her big night as Rosalind,” Jack said. “I think it was a student thing.”

“I was there,” Shelley said. “I had applied to Yale Rep, so I drove down from Northampton. I saw her do Rosalind.”

“And was it, like, tremendous?”

“Yeah,” Shelley said. “Yeah, it was nice.”

“Sweet are the uses of adversity.” Jack asked, “That’s As You Like It, right?”

“That’s it,” she said. She put her handkerchief away. “Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

“Great line,” Jack Glenn said.