Children of Light (31 page)

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.”