Valhalla (12 page)

“Didn’t I tell ya he’d see again!” he cried. “Didn’t I, huh? Didn’t I?”

Spider, Ruby Dawson, the Goffs, young Kelleher—they too had crowded around the old brass double bed, congratulating Jagger, touching him, trying to share in the wonder of his recovery. And Stone could see the man’s growing panic, his shrinking from the tumult, as he gently pushed Eve away and covered his face with his arms, like a man in a crashing automobile. Flossie immediately was on her feet, pushing everyone back, lashing them with her bullwhip of a voice.

“All right now, everybody out! He’s had enough, cain’t you see that? Come on now, everybody out. Everybody but his girl here. Out! Out!”

Eddie tried to protest, telling Flossie that he was Jagger’s buddy, that Jag would want him to stay above anybody, he knew he would, just ask him—but Flossie swept on, oblivious of opposition. And everybody moved back down the hallway to the main room, where still others were gathering now—Kelleher and his daughter, Tocco and his girlfriend Annabelle, and finally Mama Dawson herself, blinking in the firelight and grinning as if nothing
unexpected had happened. She was wearing pants and a long cloth coat, with an Indian blanket over that, which gave her the look of a superannuated ambulatory papoose.

Flossie quickly pulled her on through the crowd, taking her back to Jagger’s room, where only Eve and Flossie herself would be witness to Jagger’s first sighting of his healer, if that was what she was, and if Jagger accepted her as such. Somehow Stone doubted that he would, despite his having sat still for the bizarre ceremony. Certainly the Jagger he knew would realize that it was all only coincidence, that Mama Dawson had just happened to practice her black magic on him at the same time his sight was returning naturally. That at least was how Stone viewed the incident, and how he felt any rational person would. Still, he would have liked to have been in the room with them, to see Jagger’s face as he finally
saw
the old woman, and especially her hands, those knobby appendages that had crawled onto his face like a pair of arthritic tarantulas.

The others seemed to feel the same way, all standing around, looking down the hallway as if they expected Jagger and Mama Dawson to emerge arm-in-arm at any moment. The one exception continued to be Smiley, who evidently found any kind of waiting completely beyond his capacities.

“I say this calls for a celebration,” he cried. “A bonfire and apple cider! What d’ya say, huh? Let’s git to it!”

Tocco agreed. “Why the hell not?” He headed for the door, pulling Annabelle after him.

Mrs. Goff, who reminded Stone of a spinster librarian, smiled wryly at him. “When in doubt, build fires,” she said.

Kelleher worried that it would be too cold out and asked
his daughter Tracy if she was dressed warmly enough. She smiled indulgently and took his hand.

“Of course,” she said. “Come on, Daddy. Let’s help.”

He trailed after her with a mock rueful look that did nothing to dispel Stone’s feeling that the man would have walked into a wall of flame if it had been his daughter’s wish.

Outside, in a picnic area near the pier, Spider and Tocco started a fire, while Stone found himself hungering for hot dogs and beer as never before in his life. And evidently he was not the only one experiencing hunger either, for within a few minutes Smiley appeared with some freshly cut-up chickens and two loaves of bread to go with the cider. Using metal roasting forks, the celebrants soon had a steady supply of hot roasted chicken and toast, and though it was not quite the same as hot dogs and beer, Stone felt an uncommon glow spreading inside him, something almost like well-being. And it struck him how accustomed he had become over the past year to anxiety and fear, to the point now where he was not even aware of the feeling until a moment like this, when he experienced a temporary reprieve from it. He knew the reason for the glow was not the food so much as the fellowship and the fire, that atavistic joy he had always taken in the smell of wood smoke and the sight of flames beating against the darkness. Normally he would have been frightened of that darkness, worried that there might be someone or something out there crouched and waiting, preparing his demise. But he felt none of that now, possibly because the group was so large and because most of them were armed at all times. And then too the simple configuration of the Point itself entered in, the fact that it was bounded on two
sides by water and that a pair of guards were posted around the clock on the landward, exposed side. So he felt, if not total security, at least an adequate approximation of it, enough anyway to relax for the first time in weeks.

It occurred to him that another reason for his good spirits could have been Jagger’s recovery, if not a miracle then at least a gift. Now he could dislike the sonofabitch without feeling guilty.

Tocco had disappeared for a few minutes, and now he returned with a bottle of Jack Daniels, which he proceeded to pass among the few in his favor—Annabelle, Smiley Baggs, and, for now, Stone. He also offered a pull to old man Goff, who laughingly refused, as if it were a bottle of lye he was passing up. But Dawson, Spider, the Kellehers, and the rest of the women—all had to make do with the cider. This, however, did not seem to bother them so much as the fact that Tocco and the others were enjoying the whiskey. Dawson especially took exception to it, complaining that Tocco was spoiling the celebration.

“Just like he spoils everything,” added Dawson’s wife, Ruby.

Though Tocco was solidly built, a tough balding husky man around forty, he was still a good seventy pounds lighter than the monstrous Dawson. But he did not seem to know this. In answer to the Dawsons, he calmly took another drink, holding the bottle in such a way that his middle finger stood obscenely erect.

“You go too far, man,” Dawson said.

“Tell me about it—
man.”
Tocco was sitting on the end of a picnic table, and now he reached out and gathered in Annabelle. While he offered her the bottle with one hand, the other moved across her bosom, holding her against him.

“Maybe you don’t remember, preacher,” he went on. “Or maybe you never knew. But this is what life is about—booze and sex.” He nuzzled Annabelle’s neck.

Ruby turned away in disgust. Dawson only shook his head. Tocco laughed happily. And Smiley Baggs decided there had been enough acrimony. Moving between the two men, he gave Dawson a consoling pat on the back.

“Come on, Ray,” he told him. “You gonna miss the fire, and the food be all gone soon. Man wants a little drink, hell, that don’t hurt no one.”

Dawson sullenly helped himself to more chicken. Stone meanwhile was trying to hold up his end of a conversation with Mrs. Goff, or Edna, as she insisted he call her. By whatever name, she seemed to have no interest at all in the food or the fire or in fact in anything except “the phenomenon,” as she termed it. A lifelong schoolteacher, she said she had made it a point each year to study some new subject in depth—“more out of boredom than anything else”—and faith healing had been one of those subjects. The one universal characteristic of such phenomena, she said, was that the person to be healed had to be a believer, in effect had to contribute as much to the miracle as did the miracle worker. And she wondered if Stone had any idea what Jagger’s condition might have been, that of a believer or a skeptic. Stone told her he could not be positive but in the few days he had known the man he had seen no evidence of his belief in anything except his own well-being, and this excited Mrs. Goff. She asked Stone what he thought had happened—why Jagger had recovered his sight—and he said that he could not think of any reason except the obvious, that the swelling in Jagger’s head had gone down and relieved the pressure on his optic nerve.

The old woman smiled thoughtfully at that. “What a
strange coincidence, happening right after Mama Dawson did her thing. It’s almost as if the powers that be were trying to trick us into superstition again.”

Stone asked what powers those might be, and she shrugged in mock despair.

“I wish I knew. For sixty years now I’ve been trying to find out.”

Stone decided that Edna Goff was not quite the straitlaced small-town librarian he had thought. Though he was not a Missourian, he was familiar enough with the state to know that a free-thinking teacher in its southern environs was about as common as a Maoist.

“Well, keep trying,” he told her. “And if you have any luck, let me know.”

Throughout their conversation, her husband had stood meekly by, listening but offering nothing. Stone had heard that the old man had heart trouble and emphysema, which probably explained why his only concern in life seemed to be in staying as close to his wife as he possibly could.

Moving on, Stone hoped to get some more whiskey before it was all gone. At his approach, Annabelle, who was still Tocco’s captive, gave Stone a look that was openly ironic and amused and something more, something that dared him to turn away. She was about thirty, a slim, full-breasted woman with abundant auburn hair and the manner of a massage parlor hostess. Her normal expression of languid amusement was not too different from the look she had given him, but there had been an added thing, almost as if she had surreptitiously measured his genitals and found him wanting.

Tocco meanwhile was holding forth on the failure of the O’Brien brothers and their girlfriends to attend “this gala affair.” Only Oral was on guard duty, he said, along with
Sister Newman, who was out at the barn, “probably right this minute cavorting with his favorite goat.” No, there was only one reason Harlan and the girls weren’t there, he said, and everybody knew what that was—because after dark the two brothers and Pam and Kim turned into helpless, blubbering canasta addicts, having to play the game all night long, sometimes all four of them at a time and sometimes in pairs, and sometimes switching partners, but always doggedly keeping at it until daylight or until they collapsed.

“By mornings, their playing hands are just all raw,” Tocco laughed. “Oh, them poor kids.”

Baggs, Eddie, and Spider all were laughing with him, unable to help themselves. But Dawson and his wife and the Kellehers obviously did not care for his sense of humor and glumly stood watching the dying fire. Most of the chicken and cider was gone. Stone managed to get one last pull on the fifth of Jack Daniels, then he drifted to the edge of the group and sat down alone on a log. He was feeling enormously tired all of a sudden. It had been a long, long day.

Watching the others, he began to see that the Kellehers were not at all the tight-knit little family he had supposed at first. The son, Richard, was in his early twenties, a blond, clean-cut, athletic-looking youth who seemed always to be alone, even—or perhaps especially—when he was with his father and sister. The father appeared to be in his late forties, a slim gray-haired man with a strangely fey and vulnerable look for a man who had built up and operated one of the largest plumbing supply companies in the state. Had his daughter Tracy been his wife, the word for him would have been uxorious, for he doted on her and looked after her and kept so close to her one would have
thought she was wasting away with some insidious disease. If so, she failed to look the part, for she was a paradigm of that clean-scrubbed, vibrant, blond beauty one had always associated with cheerleaders and cover girls on
Seventeen
. Yet there was about her too, as with her father, an unsettling aura of the aberrant. There was just something not quite normal in the way she stood with him, not unlike Annabelle with Tocco, leaning back against him, holding his arms firmly around her waist and insinuating her golden head against his. And her look was simply too dreamy, too moonstruck. Stone did not push the thought any farther than that, because he knew it would have been preposterous. They were both so obviously the most proper of Wasps that he imagined it all was simply a case of a man and his daughter clinging to what little they had left in the world—each other. Still, Stone did wonder why the son was excluded from that tight little circle. He wondered why Richard looked so angry and isolated, so different from his father and his sister.

While Stone was reflecting on the Kellehers, Eve and Flossie and Mama Dawson came out of the lodge. Everyone moved to meet them, anxious for the latest word on Jagger.

“He’s okay,” Flossie said. “He’s still got his sight. He jist wants to be alone, that’s all.”

Dawson asked his mother what Jagger had said to her, and she grinned almost sheepishly.

“Oh, not much. He’s still a purty frightened boy. I guess he’s scared it won’t last, that what the Lord give him, the Lord can take away again.”

“Do you think it’d be all right if I went in to see him?” Eddie asked Eve.

“I don’t know. He says he wants to be alone.”

Eddie laughed uneasily. “Like Garbo, huh?”

Stone had been saving something for Eve, and he gave it to her now. “Home-made cider,” he said.

She took the drink and thanked him, without really looking at him.

“How much does he see?” Stone asked.

“I guess better at the sides, his peripheral vision. Straight ahead is kind of fuzzy. He’s very frightened.”

“Why would he want to be alone, then?” Eddie asked.

Eve just shook her head. Then she moved away from them. It seemed that she too wanted to be alone.

The next morning Stone woke to find Flossie standing over him in the half-light like some deranged old Hollywood wrangler in drag, dressed and powdered and perfumed, with her hair up in rollers.

“It’s six o’clock,” she said. “Rise and shine.”

Still not quite believing what he had seen, Stone watched the apparition stride across the room and repeat its message to Eddie, who was lying on another couch, buried under blankets. Like a fearful turtle, he peeked out at her.

“No late sleepers here,” she said. “Here, we work.”

Then she marched on into the kitchen, contentedly humming “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Like Stone, Eddie slowly sat up on his couch, keeping the blankets around him.

“Why’d I ever leave California?” he lamented.

Stone told him. “Mexicans.”