Children of Light Read online

  Axelrod thought about it.

  “As a completely blind item,” he said, “it might not be so bad. It might even be a little … good.” He shrugged.

  “Man, Lowndes is going to make this location look like Bosch’s Garden. If we were down here making kiddiebop with grown-ups talking dirty and popping bloodbags, they could run that print on the cover of Christianity Today and we could tell them to eat it. But what if the story just reads as production problems? And then your lofty scene dies the death? They’ll blame it on coke.”

  “They’ll blame it on Lu,” Axelrod said.

  “That’s right.”

  “So,” Axelrod said testily, “why the fuck you give her cocaine, then?”

  “Did you approve of my coming down here, Axelrod?”

  “I thought it was a bad idea.” He sulked, eyeing the bank of storm cloud as though he wanted to tear it in half. “I might have been able to stop you. I might have hung up on Shelley.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Fuck you, Gordon.”

  “You wanted me down here. Tell me why.”

  “I thought we might have a few laughs.”

  “You figured I’d bring down some blow. You were out.”

  “I could’ve scored somewhere, Gordon. I thought maybe it would be … I don’t know what I thought.”

  “You thought it would be like old times.”

  “Yeah,” Axelrod said disgustedly, “that’s about it.”

  “So did I,” Walker said. “Maybe they’ll bring them back. They bring everything back.”

  “We gotta nudge Mr. Lowndes a little. So he gives us back our print. I mean,” Axelrod said, “it would be great not to have to tell Charlie about this.”

  “What we have to do,” Walker said, “is make him understand he’s playing in the wrong league. Make him understand his position.”

  “Right,” Axelrod said.

  “We have to make him look down and see where he’s liable to fall. We’ll tell him how we see the big ones and the little ones fall every day. Like sparrows.”

  “Yeah,” Axelrod said. He smiled. “Let’s tell him that, Gordon.”

  Half an hour later Walker went into the bedroom. His first impulse was to draw open the blinds but he thought better of it. When he turned on the corner ceiling lights he discovered Lu Anne to be awake. Her hair was wet and she had changed into black lace.

  “You do take a lot of showers, Lu Anne.”

  “I take a lot of showers for a coon-ass. Is that what you meant?”

  “Let’s not be crazy,” Walker said.

  “Let’s not you be paranoid,” she told him. “Goodness,” she said. “I was drunk when I went to sleep and I’m still drunk.”

  She rolled off the bed.

  “Christ,” she said, from all fours, “there’s crawling.”

  Walker put on a sweatshirt and went into the bathroom to shower.

  “How long will you stay?” she asked him through the open door.

  “I thought I’d go back on Monday. Leave you to work.”

  “Stay longer.”

  “Lu Anne,” he said, “I can’t afford this hotel. I’m here on Sun Pix and Amcan.”

  “So short a time,” she said, “after so long.”

  “It’s been hard for me to get away. The chance came. So I grabbed it.”

  “No, no,” Lu Anne told him. “It was more elaborate than that. You connived. What were you thinking of?”

  “Honest to God, I don’t know. Maybe of cheating time. Throwing a two-by-four in the treads.”

  She sipped from a glass of mezcal, shivered and handed it half finished to Walker. He put it aside.

  “Come back,” she said.

  He took off the trunks and sweatshirt he was wearing and climbed into bed with her. In the vulgar half light she seemed to draw away as he approached. She did so without moving, with a silent, subtly visible retracting of herself. It was as though she drew in all softness, took up her own slack and curled the flesh around her long bones. Her eyes went dull, her lips were shadows. He could not tell whether it was something she was doing or some warp in his abused perception.

  Gallic severity. A crucifix. Charlotte Corday.

  “Come in, Gordon,” she said.

  He found the game for him. The game for him was to ease through the ivory casing, to loose the bound flesh, draw out the woman and beyond the woman some creature of another sort.

  The creature was inside, it fucked like pure madness. It was madness and it frightened him. Down the gullet of fear itself, he charged with a silent hurrah.

  “How nice,” Lu Anne said.

  When she turned her face to his, she looked flushed and dimpled and happy. The Lady of Mortifications was fled home to Port Royal, madness appeased. Lu Anne was at home.

  She seems so young, he thought. Her face was smooth, the skin beneath her eyes was sound. It struck him then how good the doctor and the children must have been for her.

  “Allons,” Walker declared. “Laissez le bon temps …”

  She put her hand over his mouth.

  “I forbid you to use that idiotic phrase,” she told him. “It’s for morons. Only cretins use it. And people from Shreveport.”

  “I was feeling moronic. Happy in my sex life. A stud once more.”

  “You were always a stud, Gordon.”

  “Ofttimes,” he said, “of late not always.”

  Suddenly she said, “How are your boys, Gordon?”

  He fell silent inside. Her question fell upon his inward man like frost. He swallowed the pain.

  “They’re fine.”

  “In school?”

  “Stuart’s in school. Deak’s on his own.”

  “Deak is the funny one, right? The pretty one.”

  “Stuart,” Walker said. “He’s the funny one now.”

  “They’re the only ones you love,” she said. “You always fretted over them.”

  “Hostages to fortune,” he said. He was thinking that if they began to talk about their children they would drown in a sea of regret. Walker had always pictured regret as something like vomit. The association was not gratuitous.

  “I think I’ll do a little more coke,” he said brightly. “It might sober me up for dinner.” When he got up and looked in the mirror he thought of Lowndes and the pictures. He assembled his works, feeling more sober than he could possibly be.

  “I shouldn’t have any more,” Lu Anne said uncertainly.

  “Good thinking,” Walker said. He was trying frantically to get his hit and put the stuff away.

  “Well,” she said finally, “if you’re having some I want some too.”

  “You’re on half rations,” he told her. “Recuperating.”

  “There are some would have me drink,” she said mysteriously, “there are those who would have me dry.”

  He chopped two narrow lines for her and handed over the equipment, the mirror and the drinking straw whose festive colors had shown up so well on the color photographs.

  For the drawn blinds and the dim light, it might have been any hour. How foolish of him, he thought, to have forgotten about the blinds. On locations people were always watching, peering in trailers, looking for lighted windows.

  “Don’t think about your kids,” she told him earnestly. She leaned her head on one arm to lecture him. She was wearing a pair of silver-rimmed aviator glasses he had not seen before and he suspected she had appropriated them to use as a prop when she felt admonitory.

  “Seriously,” she said, “your kids don’t care about you. Don’t care about them.”

  Walker did not answer her. He reached down, took a pinch of coke under his fingernail and touched it to his gum.

  “I saw you do that,” Lu Anne said. “Now listen to me—you don’t care a damn about your daddy, do you?”

  “My father is dead,” Walker said. “And my mother is dead. And my brother is dead.”

  He repeated this statement, this time as a little song, t
o the tune of an Irish jig.

  “There was a time …” Walker began. He managed to stop, shut up before it was too late. He had been about to discourse on the subject of his father. Without trying to conceal it from her he put the mirror on his pillow and took some more. She took the straw from his hand and snorted until he thought she would pass out. He put it back down quickly before she could exhale on it.

  “But honestly, Gordon! They won’t be worrying about you. You ought not to worry about them. I’ve got children myself, Gordon.”

  “I know that, love.”

  “Yessir. Four.” She held her hand, the long fingers splayed and trembling, before his face. “Four counting the dead and I insist on counting the dead, that’s the custom in Louisiana, Gordon, where the living and the dead are involved in mixed entertainments. And are not tucked away in the ground but dwell among us. Their hair grows and their fingernails and they go on getting smarter in those ovens under their angels. Which represent the angels that attended them in life. Or their crosses. Or their Médailles miraculeuses.”

  “Stop,” he said.

  “Life too much for you, brother? Huh? What says the gentleman?”

  “The gentleman allows that things are tough all over.”

  “Gordon,” she demanded, “are you listening to me?” She took her glasses off and gave him a look of pedagogic disapproval. “Show the courtesy to listen to the person in the same bed as yourself. I have four!” Her hand quavered before his eyes. “They don’t care about me. I’m a biological function of their lives. That’s it. Three lives, one death. That’s all, man. Would I let them destroy me? No, I would not, Lionel. Gordon, rather. You wrote the book, Gordon. She doesn’t let them dominate her life! She will die for them, sure, but she won’t live for them. Isn’t that the way it goes? They need not have thought that they could possess her. Isn’t that what you wrote, Lionel?”

  “Lionel didn’t write it and neither did I. Madame Chopin wrote it.”

  “A red-necked Irishwoman who would trade her kids for a pint of Jim Beam. That’s the big secret, you know. She didn’t care about her kids. What she really wanted to be was an actress. Isn’t that right, Gordon?”

  “I don’t know what’s right, my love. I’m drunk and you’re bananas. That’s the score.”

  “I want more now, please, Gordon.”

  “Well, honeychile,” Walker said, “you ain’t getting no fuckin’ more. Because you have degenerated into a goddamn lunatic. What kind of party has a lunatic at it?”

  “Plenty,” she insisted. “Plenty of parties do. And I want more. Damn it, Gordon!” she said. Then she cocked an ear as though she had heard something.

  “Listen, Gordon. A recitation. Sir King, we deem that ’tis strange sport, to keep a madman as thy fool at court.”

  “Rest easy, Lu Anne.”

  “This is the forest primeval.” She paused thoughtfully and repeated the line. “Gordon, do you know how long it took me to understand that Evangeline was not a good poem?”

  He put her arm under his head and wrapped his arms around her. His thought was to suffocate her fire, keep her from burning up.

  “Longer than most, I bet.”

  “That would be about right,” she said. “Late in life.

  “Do you know why I take so many showers?”

  “Yes,” he said, “sort of.”

  “Say why.”

  “Because you have hallucinations in which your friends advise you to take showers.”

  “They hardly advise me, honey. French,” she breathed confidentially, “can be the vehicle for some very low observations. And Frenchman French, well!”

  “They aren’t really there, Lu Anne. That’s all there is to it.”

  “They aren’t there in your life. They’re in mine.”

  “Lu Anne,” Walker said. “Do you understand that I love you?”

  “Yes, yes.” She patted his arm. “Yes, I understand.”

  “Does that penetrate the … whatever it is?”

  “Whatever it is,” she said, “I guess love penetrates it.”

  He took his arms from around her and kissed her hand.

  “Gordon,” she whispered, “what I said about our children …”

  A long time ago he had learned to watch for a catch in her voice, a look in her eyes. He had learned what it portended. He had called it shifting gears. Once he had told her that she had two speeds: Bad Lu Anne and Saint Lu Anne. There on the bed beside him he saw her slide into Bad Lu Anne. Bad Lu Anne was not in fact malign, but formidable and sometimes terrifying. As soon as he saw her eyes, he jumped.

  He body-checked her as she rose, and like a coach miming a tackle, eased her in his grip across the foot of the bed and held her there. It took all his strength and weight to keep her down. Her face was pressed against his chest, her mouth was open in a scream of pain, but not a sound came out of her. Panting, he held on. If she chose to bite him he would have to give way. Sometimes she bit him, sometimes not. This time she only kept on screaming, and in the single moment that his grip relented she drove him off the bed and clear across the room and into the beige cloth-covered wall. He hung on to her all the way. His body absorbed her unvoiced scream until he felt he could hardly contain, without injury, the force of her grief and rage.

  At last she stopped thrashing and he loosened his grip. He backed away, and they lay together on the floor. She cradled her hands prayerfully beneath her cheek; she was facing him. Her lips moved, she prayed, mouthed words, sobbed. He put his hand on her shoulder, an inquiring hand, to ask if she wanted him there or not. When he touched her, she drew closer to him.

  “Hey, now,” he whispered absurdly. He put his arm around her, his every move seemed feeble and irrelevant to him. “Hey, now,” he kept repeating, like a man talking to a horse. “Hey, now.”

  Around sundown, Axelrod walked into the Drogues’ bungalow with his envelope full of photographs. Young Drogue and his wife were watching a Spanish-language soap opera on their television set. Axelrod set the envelope before them.

  “Should I be overjoyed?” Drogue asked. “Is this all of them?”

  “All except one print. Dongan Lowndes has it.”

  “Jack gave it to Lowndes? But that’s ridiculous.” He looked from Jon to his wife, with an expression of pained mirth. “Isn’t it?”

  Axelrod presented Walker’s theory of the Picturesque Lead with Jack’s photograph to support it.

  “Somehow,” Drogue said, “I find it hard to take this dopey snapshot seriously.”

  “According to Walker, Lowndes is gonna really dish it to us. He says the NYA story will make this location look like Butch’s Garden.”

  “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 loc
al 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.”