“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.