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.