Valhalla (13 page)

“I don’t know—they couldn’t be worse than this cold. Fucking goddamn Midwest.”

“You got a point. Only this is the Ozarks.”

“Fire’s out, ain’t it. What’re we gonna do?”

As if he had been hiding down the hallway, waiting for Eddie to ask this very question, Smiley came on into the main room and announced, redundantly, that it was six o’clock, “fire building time.”

Neither man responded, just sat where he was, and Baggs laughed.

“What’s the matter, boys? A mite too early for you? Listen, all you need is to be married to old Flossie for forty year and you git right good at gittin’ up with the chickens. ’Fack, you git to lookin’ forward to it.” Again, the old man whooped with laughter.

The wood for the fire was already on hand, piled next to the fireplace, and within a few minutes Baggs had emptied the ashes and rekindled a new fire from the embers of the old. As he worked, he explained to Stone and Eddie what the next hour held for them. Breakfast would be served at seven. If they used the bathroom, they would see that there were two buckets of water: a double-size one on the floor for flushing the toilet and one up on the sink for “drinkin’ and washin’.” Whenever a bucket was empty, they were to take it out to the lake and refill it. And if any bathroom was being used, or if the septic tanks were backing up, as unfortunately was the case more and more lately, there was also a new outhouse near the barn that they could use—all of which he already had told them the previous afternoon.

When the fire was going to his satisfaction, Smiley picked up the two empty wicker carriers and went outside to refill them with firewood. Stone and Eddie moved closer to the flames before shedding their blankets. Shivering still, they put on their boots.

“I wonder how Jag is,” Eddie said. “I bet he didn’t sleep all night long, you know? How could he? You’d have to be
afraid if you closed your eyes you might wake up blind again. Especially Jag.”

“Why
especially?
”

“I don’t know—I guess because he’s an athlete. They live by their senses.”

“And you don’t, huh? You wouldn’t mind being blind?”

“I didn’t say that. I only meant I could probably take it better than he could.”

“Because he plays better tennis, huh?”

Eddie was angry now. “Maybe so—yeah. You got some better yardstick?”

Stone shook his head in wonderment. “I don’t know—there must be something about the man I can’t see. To me, he’s such an obvious shit—yet he seems to inspire such abject devotion.”

“
Abject
, my ass! I’m his
friend!
”

“Sure you are. His
abject
friend.”

Eddie had the look of a wolverine again, cornered, ready to strike. And Stone was at a loss to understand why he had baited the little man. It seemed he could not even talk about Jagger without losing all sense of proportion and values. Now he tried to undo some of the damage.

“Look, I’m sorry. It’s not you I got anything against—it’s your friend.”

But Eddie was not buying. “Any fucker that’s against Jag is against me.” He wheeled and headed for the bathroom.

Stone found breakfast better tasting and more filling than the previous night’s supper. There was tomato juice, fried mush, scrambled eggs, and toast with real butter. He did miss coffee, however, once again reluctantly settling for a hot grain beverage that tasted more like soup than anything
else. Because of the cold, the group ate not in the many-windowed dining room but in the kitchen, at a long table squeezed in near an old wood-burning stove. Ruby Dawson had come in early to help Flossie with the breakfast, and now the two of them served everyone else—except Eve and Jagger, who had not come out of their room yet, and Kelleher and Tracy. No one mentioned the absence of the latter two, so Stone assumed it was a routine thing, a special dispensation they received for some reason or other. About Jagger, though, there was a good deal of interest and speculation. Tocco wondered why, if the man really had regained his sight, he was not up and about, hungrily taking everything in. Eddie not unexpectedly took umbrage at that, saying that Jagger had not been blind from birth, for Christ’s sake, but only for a couple of days. Mama Dawson calmed the waters.

“No sense wondering if he’s still got his sight—of course he does. The Lord wouldn’t give it to him one day and take it back the next. The Lord is not cruel.”

“Amen to that,” her son added.

“Well, just excuse the hell out of me,” Tocco said. “Remember, I don’t have that pipeline direct to God you all have. I gotta make do with common sense.”

“Very common,” Newman put in.

Tocco looked over at him, smiling, apparently not upset in the least. “Eat your mush, rabbi,” he said. “Pretend it’s bacon.”

The conversation then veered to the visit of an ex-grocer from Spalding the morning before, by boat, from across the lake. Occasionally he would bring them supplies of one kind or another, surplus he would trade for eggs or sell outright, to Kelleher, for silver, a revelation that gave Stone a pretty good idea why the plumbing contractor and
his daughter did not have to get up as early as the rest of the group. But the matter of interest now was what the grocer had said—that he had heard that a group of Mau Mau had overrun the Tomahawk Summer Camp five miles north of the lake, on Spalding Creek. Of course no campers or Boy Scouts were ever there anymore, the grocer said, just the Wiggans family, who owned and operated the place. A number of their relatives had moved in with them and it was rumored they had a pretty good stock of food and supplies. If there were any survivors, Evans hadn’t heard about them. In his opinion, they were all dead now. Murdered.

Tocco, who had brought up the matter, tried to use it as a springboard to his favorite subject—taking over Valhalla. “Up there we wouldn’t have to worry about no goddamn Mau Mau,” he said. “We’d have everything we needed, and we’d be able to hold off an army.” But no one was interested. Just the thought of the Mau Mau seemed to terrify them so much that all they were interested in was debunking the grocer’s story. Certainly the Mau Mau were not as close as all that, they said. And as for their killing everyone at the camp, that was ridiculous. All the Wigganses would have had to do was share with them—“just as we would here at the Point,” Newman said. “There’s no reason to get yourself killed. Not unless you’re totally selfish and stupid.”

“Rabbits,” Tocco said to Stone. “We dine with rabbits.”

Stone noticed that the O’Brien brothers and their girlfriends contributed almost nothing to the conversation, and indeed seemed not even to hear it, so deep was their exhaustion. Both boys had fresh scratches on their necks, and one of the girls, Pam, had a fiery-looking rash on the right side of her face, as if it had been rubbed raw by
sandpaper—or whiskers. Looking at the four of them, at their flushed faces and heavy eyes, Stone was reminded of what Tocco had said about them the night before, that by morning their hands would all be raw, poor canasta addicts that they were—Stone remembered and grinned.

Breakfast was almost over when Eve came in, looking red-eyed and nervous. Everyone immediately began to bombard her with the same questions—How was he? Could he still see? Was he coming to the table?—and she tried her best to answer. Yes, he was fine and he still had his sight. And it was better now. He could see straight ahead as well as at the sides. But he hadn’t slept very well and he wasn’t coming out for breakfast—she hoped they understood.

“’Course, we do,” Flossie purred, patting her hand. “I’ll just make you both up a tray and you can take it back to the bedroom, okay?”

Eve thanked her.

“Don’t mention it.” Flossie was on her feet again, starting to fill a tray. “Somehow doing for him is like doing for the Lord. Don’t ask me why. I just know it’ll come back to me someday, a hundredfold.”

Tocco laughed out loud. “That’s not exactly altruistic, Flossie. In fact, it sounds downright selfish if you wanna know.”

Flossie did not deign to look at him. “No one wants to know what you think about anything, Paul Tocco. It’s the Lord I answer to, no one else.”

Tocco looked lugubriously across the table at Stone, in a comic plea for commiseration. “How’d I ever get stuck in the Bible Belt, huh? Could someone tell me that?”

Mama Dawson could. “Because you was lucky, sonny.
Because the Lord Jesus looks after every one of us—even one who’s a foulmouthed, evil-tempered disciple of the devil.” Her almost toothless mouth gaped in silent laughter.

Smiley supplied the sound, bellowing happily. Awesome and Ruby and Newman all joined in, eager to voice their common disapproval of Tocco. But it bothered him not at all. Smiling, he filched a piece of Mama’s toast and popped it into his mouth.

“God’s gonna get you for that,” he said to her. “You cute little ebony sex goddess, you.”

Some others laughed then, including Smiley Baggs. His good spirits were not doctrinaire. It was a lighthearted moment. Yet it did not dispel Stone’s growing conviction that he sat at a deeply divided table, except perhaps when it came to fear. That, he believed, was democratically shared by all.

Later Jagger did come out of his room, only he was not the Haden Jagger that Stone remembered. For one thing, the old sneer was gone, the snotty hauteur that had seemed to challenge one’s right even to the same air he breathed. And the malice was absent too, that stinging tone of voice that for days had struck Stone like a kid glove across the face. But in their place, it was not some sudden sweetness that had blossomed, not some gentle softening of the Jagger personality. Rather he seemed merely cold and frightened, as if he were being led to a battle he knew he could not win. As he made the rounds with Smiley, Flossie, and Eve, seeing for the first time persons he already had been introduced to, he was barely civil, mostly just nodding, saying nothing. And when he came to Stone, he could not
look him in the eye, settling instead for a listless smile and a few mumbled words to the effect that he
guessed
he owed him some thanks for the help Stone had given them. Then he hurried on, inexplicably moving more stiffly and cautiously than he had when he was blind. And as soon as he could, he broke away and went back to the lodge, to stay alone in his room through the rest of the day.

As far as Stone was concerned, it was all a definite improvement, a change he was quite willing to live with. Not so with Eddie. Twice during the morning he came complaining to Stone.

“What is it with him, huh? What’s he up to? My God, you can’t even talk to him. He just looks at you and goes his way, like he’s in some kind of trance or something. Like he can’t be bothered with me—
me
, his best friend. Does that make any sense?”

“I don’t know. Give him time. This is his first day back.”

“Back from where? Shit, he was never gone. When he was blind, he was the same as ever. Not like now.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.” Sulking, Eddie marched off.

Stone could see that Eve too was puzzled by Jagger’s behavior, though she said nothing about it. But then there was little she had to say about anything, to anyone. Instead she just went her own way, having as little to do with Baggs’ “colony” as she could, which resulted in a few of the women—Ruby Dawson, Pam, and Kim—casting knowing glances at each other and calling her Queen Eve behind her back. The only one she did not seem to avoid was Edna Goff, probably because the old woman was intelligent enough not to crowd her or treat her like the virgin bride of some newly anointed saint.

At ten o’clock, when Smiley organized what he called his “corn-pickin’ brigade,” Eve went along with the others out past the barn to the large garden the group maintained. Most of it had already been picked clean, with all its produce canned and stored. But there were still a dozen rows of field corn left, and these Smiley wanted picked and shelled before the weather turned bad. He divided the brigade into two groups: the first to pick the ears off the dead plants and bring them in bushel baskets to the second group, which stripped off the husks and shelled the ears into grain bins in the barn. This group required men who were “stout hands,” Smiley said, so he assigned himself to it, along with Stone and Tocco—a choice Stone soon understood, as he discovered how difficult the job was, requiring hands that were not only strong but leathery. Unfortunately Stone’s were made of tender skin and within a half hour they were sore and blistered, as were Tocco’s. But before they changed places with the pickers, Baggs had something he wanted to talk over with Stone.

“When you leavin’?”

“Tomorrow morning, if that’s okay. I figured I could use another night sleeping inside.”

“Why go at all?”

Stone told him again about Miller and the cabin on Table Rock Lake. He said that he felt he owed it to the old man to look after the place until he could see it safely into the hands of his family.

“Thought you said he was divorced.”

“He was. Three times.”

“He’s divorced and dead, and you think it matters what happens to his property. He could care less.”

“Maybe I do.”

Baggs rolled his eyes at Tocco. “Afraid the man’s daft, Paul. Afraid the attic is a little drafty.”

Stone grinned. “And staying here—that would be a smart move? Way it looks to me, you’re gonna have enough trouble feeding the mouths you already have, without adding more.”

“That’s my point,” Smiley said. “I don’t need mouths. I need hands. A man’s hands. Someone who can take care of hisself and handle a gun. Way it is now, the only real hunters I got is Harlan and Oral. The rest—like Paul here—if I send ’em out huntin’, they’re jist as like to come home with a foot shot off.”

“Thanks, Smiley,” Tocco said. “It’s nice to know I’m appreciated.”

Stone asked Baggs what made him think he was any more a hunter than Tocco, and the old man shrugged. The answer was obvious.

“You got a deer rifle, with a scope. You got a thirty-eight. You got ammo.”

“All Miller’s,” Stone said.

Baggs sighed. “Okay, then—the truth. You jist look able, that’s all. Like maybe if it gits a little hairy around here this winter, you won’t fold. Like maybe if you had to shoot a man to save your own skin, you could do it. So far the only ones like that here is the O’Briens and Paul here and maybe Spider. The rest, I figure, would most likely roll over and die rather than cause a fuss. So I could use you.
We
could use you. Think about it, okay?”