Valhalla (17 page)

“You mean she sounds white.”

“Both of you do.”

Dawson looked at him dubiously. “I didn’t think you and Jagger was such hot friends.”

“We’re not. I’m just saying that maybe it wasn’t racial, what he did.”

A slow, almost sheepish smile began to spread on Dawson’s face. “That’s the second time you got me. And it makes me feel pretty damn stupid, if you want to know. I’m supposed to be the Christian here, not you. And yet here you are, the one who gives the man the benefit of a doubt, the one who shows him a little Christian charity.”

“Why Christian?”

“Why not?”

“Just the benefit of a doubt, like you said.”

Dawson’s smile went ironic. “Those words, Christian and charity, they’re not exactly your kind, are they?”

“Maybe because I’m not exactly a Christian.”

“I figured that—saw you leaving the service early. As a boy, were you a believer?”

“No.”

“Any other faith?”

“Never. An infidel all my life.”

Dawson shook his head sadly. “For some, faith comes hard.”

“It’s not a matter of faith for me, just common sense. If Jesus came walking across the water toward us right here and now, I still wouldn’t believe. I still couldn’t accept Christianity. Because it is absurd.”

Dawson continued to shake his head, but more in wonderment now than sadness. “I couldn’t get through life without it,” he sighed. “Without
Him
, I mean.”

Stone smiled coldly. “You might be surprised,” he said.

Stone had not by any means forgotten what Dawson had told him about the the three bodies the O’Briens had found. In fact everywhere he looked at the lovely, burgeoning morning he saw not the deepening blue of the sky or the lifting mists or the still-low sun dazzling the water but rather the three shot bodies hanging obscenely against it all, mocking it. He wanted to question Dawson more about the incident. He wanted to learn all he could about it. But the racial problem—the fact that he thought the gang was probably black—stood like a brick wall between the two of them. So he settled for silence, mulling over the incident in his own mind, wondering if the killers were indeed a gang of Mau Mau moving through the area, and
if so, whether they were moving
toward
the lodge or away from it.

Soon, though, he found himself looking up at Valhalla as they rowed past it, under it. Close up, he saw that its lakeside face was not a sheer wall of rock as it appeared from the Point so much as a rough and craggy combination of layered earth and limestone, with forbidding overhangs and a great number of boulders at the base, rising above the surface of the water like a herd of dozing hippos. Stone noticed the road running along the side of the mountain, and how it narrowed and climbed at the upper end, passing through what amounted to a kind of pit, a defile with sheer walls on either side and no cover at all. At first Stone thought that anyone trying to gain the top would have to pass through that pit, which would have put him in a position not unlike that of a fish in a rain barrel. But then he saw that farther back on the road the mountain wall was not impossibly steep, and that it connected with the low parapet that bordered the courtyard. And it struck him how uneasy the junkman must be on his little mountain of plenty, surrounded by a cold and hungry world. Even as he was thinking this, he heard a rattling sound up on top, a sound very like the vibration of a swimming pool’s diving board.

He looked questioningly at Dawson, and the big Negro laughed and nodded.

“Yeah, you heard right,” he said. “It’s a diving board sure enough. Somebody up there’s swimming. And when you figure the air’s about forty-five degrees right now—well, you just know that pool’s gotta be heated, right?”

Stone again looked up at the summit. He had heard about the pool and the maddening sound of the diving board, but he had thought it related only to summertime
and warm weather. It had not occurred to him that the man might have heated his pool, gone that far in his profligacy.

“Did you ever think of coming over here and begging?” he asked Dawson. “You know, rowing over with a bunch of bushel baskets and maybe a bell to ring?”

He had meant it as a joke, but Dawson seemed angered by the idea.

“Nothing up there I want,” he said. “I’ve got my family and I got Jesus, and that’s enough for me.”

Stone almost put his finger in his cheek and popped it, as the only fitting comment on such sanctimonious twaddle. But he let it pass.

They had rounded the bend at the base of Valhalla and entered an area of the lake in which the gray barren limbs of a number of dead trees rose out of the water, as if to mark the spot where they had drowned. Dawson quietly brought the oars into the boat and dropped anchor.

“This is the place,” he said. “Lotta big trees and logs down there. The bass love the cover.”

He got out the can of nightcrawlers and threaded three of the creatures onto the multiple hooks attached to his line. Then he dropped the line overboard and let it sink.

“If there’s any fish down there, they’re close to the bottom,” he said. “Where it’s nice and warm.”

Stone took the spinner off and rigged his line to match Dawson’s, figuring the black man knew more about fishing the lake than he did. But almost an hour passed before they even got a nibble—on Stone’s line as it turned out. But for Dawson the time was not wasted. First he tried to save Stone’s soul, going on about his own “conversion” and how he had never known an unhappy day since that blessed hour. And he painted a picture of the holy trinity sitting
on tenterhooks right up above them, panting for Stone’s soul, so that he too might know the love of Christ and gain the peace that passed all understanding. Stone finally told him, somewhat dryly, that he appreciated all this concern for his soul, but that, as he had explained before, he didn’t have a religious bone in his body and would just as soon embrace astrology as he would evangelical Christianity. Dawson sighed in temporary defeat and moved on to what was obviously his second favorite subject: his life in racist America.

He had been born in Gary, Indiana, which he called the toughest and blackest town in America. His father had absconded when he was just a tot, and Mama had raised him and his four sisters all by herself, running a tiny grocery by day and an adjoining storefront True Faith church by night. In his teens Dawson had blackslid, forgetting Jesus in favor of the streets. School had been a laugh, a warehouse for superfluous black kids. But he had had something extra going for him—his size and strength—which ultimately landed him a football scholarship at Southern Illinois University. He had played there four years, hoping for a career in the pros. But he had been too slow and clumsy, so it was all downhill then for a while, the streets again, and drugs, and finally even crime, a holdup he’d got involved in only because he was drunk at the time. Returning home after receiving a suspended sentence, he reluctantly went along with his mama and sisters to Soldier Field to hear Billy Graham preach, and it was there he found the Lord again. He had cried like a baby, cried like the poor lost soul he was. And from that point on his life was lived for Jesus. He became an assistant football coach, he led youth groups, he met and married Ruby, he became a father, and finally he became a head coach, at the
second largest high school in Kansas City. He helped Mama in her ministry and the government appointed him to various youth rescue programs in the ghetto. Boys like Spider were the ones he worked with, scores of delinquents he could proudly say he had rescued from living empty lives devoted to crime and pleasure.

“And when it got bad up there you headed south,” Stone said.

Dawson nodded. “When it was kill or be killed, yes sir. We came in two cars, both mine—maybe you saw them parked behind the lodge, the Toyota Celica and the Malibu wagon. It took us two weeks to get this far. And then the Malibu broke down and there was no more gas.”

Over the next hour the two men caught four keepable large-mouth bass and two stripers, a catch that pleased Dawson enormously. He called Stone his good luck charm and said it was fortunate that Newman had backed out on him at the last moment.

“I’m always trying to get that man to do something physical around the place—not just use his head—but he always finds excuses. I tell him that people like their leaders to do just what they do, at least part of the time. But he’d rather make charts and theorize.” He laughed at his colleague’s eccentricity.

Stone, however, was not amused. “Who says the people need leaders?”

Dawson leaned back, frowning, lacing his hands behind his head. It evidently was not a question he had ever asked himself.

“They just do,” he said. “Otherwise you got—what, anarchy?”

It was Stone’s turn to laugh. “Twenty-some people in a
fishing lodge? They could get by, I’d say. They could muddle through, maybe not with the tidiness and dispatch Newman might wish. But they’d be on their own, wouldn’t they? And they’d be free.”

Dawson looked almost rattled by the prospect. He shook his head in firm denial. “No, it just don’t work that way. People need leaders.”

“You sure? Maybe it’s the other way around.”

Dawson had had enough of that. Wheeling on the stern seat, he looked away from Stone, who was doing the rowing now, stroking hard as they moved back past the huge boulders below Valhalla. Up on top there was the sound of music, a hard rock number already blaring from the outdoor speakers at nine in the morning. The sun had climbed from the lake and the mists were gone Pausing in his rowing, Stone looked up at the top and saw a little boy sitting on the parapet. He was waving down at the boat and yelling something, but Stone could not make it out. Then two teenaged girls appeared next to the boy, and they too began to wave and call. They were dark and pretty with fine white smiles Stone could see even from where he was, so far below. He smiled and waved back.

“Must be the junkman’s kids,” he said to Dawson. “They seem happy enough.”

Dawson did not wave back at them. “Riches don’t make people happy.”

“Maybe they don’t know that.”

One of the girls disappeared for a few moments and came back with what looked like sheets of paper. Both girls got down on the parapet then, busying themselves in some way. When they stood up, they were holding paper airplanes. The taller girl promptly launched hers and it dipped toward the rocks below before looping upward and
finally slipping into the lake a good distance from the boat.

“Let’s go,” Dawson said. “I’m hungry.”

“Not yet. I think they’re trying to send us a message.”

There were six more airplanes in all, three that crashed on the rocks below the parapet and two that fell into the lake as the first one had, too far from the boat. But the last plane, the seventh, glided like a falcon straight down to the boat, and Stone managed to catch it by standing on his seat. The girls cheered and jumped up and down on the parapet, and Stone smiled and waved the paper plane at them. Then he opened it. The message was scrawled in orange crayon:

Hi there fellas—how about a date?

Mitzi and Molly

P.S. We’re easy
.

Smiling still, Stone signaled agreement and the girls cheered again. He handed the note to Dawson, who barely glanced at it before contemptuously tossing it into the lake.

“It was a joke,” Stone told him. “Kids having a little fun. That’s all.”

Dawson did not respond, and Stone just sat there for a few moments staring at him, as if he might find some clue to the man’s behavior. But there was nothing.

Stone waved goodbye to the girls and their brother. Then he began to row again, hard.

Until Dawson got him up to go fishing, Stone had planned to leave the Point that day. But by the time they returned and had a late breakfast, it was already getting close to noon. And also he was tired, having slept only five
or six hours when Dawson woke him. So he decided not to leave that day, and possibly not for the next couple of days either—the brutal killings just a few miles from the Point had dampened what little enthusiasm he had for traveling alone.

After eating, he found a place to nap at the far end of the sun porch, on an old plastic-covered lounger set just inside the windows and warmed by the slanting fall sunlight. He slept for almost two hours before Eddie found him and shook him awake, whispering that there was a secret meeting in Tocco’s cabin and they were both invited. Since he had nothing better to do, Stone reluctantly got up and went along. He was surprised to find that the little man could not stop smiling.

“What happened?” he asked. “You find some cigarettes?”

“Better than that.”

“Grass?”

“Naa,” Eddie said. “I went milking. I was on the milking detail this morning.”

Stone grinned. “Cow tits, huh? Just what you were always looking for?”

Eddie gave him a patronizing look. “It’s
who
I went milking with, man. Little Pam and little Kim. The O’Brien boys were off hunting, as usual.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. And would you believe them poor hillbillies don’t believe in eating pussy—unmanly, I guess they figure it.”

“Girls told you that, did they?”

Eddie was grinning blissfully. “Let’s just say it came out.”

“Okay. It came out.”

“Along with something else.”

“Where? Up in the haymow?”

Eddie made a face of absolute glee. “I couldn’t believe it, man. I mean, those girls belong on the tour. They really do. They weren’t just willing, they were flat out eager and starving for it. My face got chafed. Look at me.”

“Do I have to?”

“And they never had it anal either. The old sawdust trail. The poop chute. They were virgins, man.”

“You’re a vulgar bastard, Eddie, you know that?”

“Vulgar and happy.
And chafed.”

He did a little jig, leaping up and clicking his heels together. And Stone felt like kicking him—probably out of jealousy. He himself had been so unhappily and unwillingly celibate for so long that he could not help envying the little man his carnal morning, if indeed he was telling the truth about it, and Stone imagined that he was. Pam and Kim looked nothing if not accommodating.