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.