Valhalla (18 page)

The two men had walked around the lodge and past the curving row of cabins behind it. Over the past few days Stone gradually had learned who was living where, starting with the Kellehers in their huge motor home parked closest to the lake. Next came the Dawsons in two cabins, Awesome and Ruby in one and Mama and her granddaughter in the other; then the O’Brien brothers and Pam and Kim all in a single cabin, followed by Spider and Newman in the next, then the Goffs, and finally Tocco and Annabelle in the last cabin in line—the one Stone and Eddie entered now.

Like the other cabins, it was divided into two rooms, the back one for sleeping and the front one for cooking, eating, and watching the fire. Smiley Baggs, in a coup even he could not have appreciated at the time, had bought old
used wood stoves for each of the cabins back when they had been considered valueless, not yet even antiques. Perfect for cooking as well as for heating the small structures, they were placed in the kitchen area, near the doorway to the bedroom. And like the log walls and rustic furniture, they made for a feeling of coziness and permanence, artifacts of a society that would endure regardless of supplies of gas and electricity and other ephemera.

As they entered, the meeting was already in progress, with Tocco presiding from a perch on the corner of his kitchen table. Grouped in front of him, some standing, some sitting, were Annabelle, Richard Kelleher, the O’Brien brothers, and—surprisingly—Eve and Jagger. On seeing the O’Briens, Eddie tried to smile nonchalantly but succeeded only in looking as if he were about to turn and sprint out the door. He fairly scooted across the room and squeezed in next to Jagger and Eve on a wicker couch. Stone decided to stay where he was, standing just inside the door. He stared at Eve for a time, but she failed to look his way. From Annabelle, however, he got a warm smile and her usual look of salacious invitation. He smiled back at her.

Tocco looked at Stone. “I was just telling the others that I figure it’s time we stopped playing Boy Scouts, like we’re on some kind of fucking jamboree. I happen to know things are a lot worse than Dawson and his fag sidekick are telling us. I know how we’re already burning firewood in this little dump we’re in, and it ain’t even cold yet. And you multiply our use of wood by five more cabins and the lodge—there just ain’t no way to keep up, not without chainsaws. Oh, maybe we could make it if that’s all we did—become a bunch of full-time wood gatherers. Unfortunately, we got one other problem—food. And like the
O’Briens were just saying, this whole countryside is hunted out. There ain’t nothin’ anywhere except wild dogs and cats, and I don’t figure we’ve sunk quite that low yet. The fishing is about played out—another month and the lake’ll be a sheet of ice. Which leaves us with what? A store of canned fruits and vegetables that will last about a month or maybe two if we go on starvation rations. And our daily milk and eggs, which could always fall off to zero—cows and chickens are temperamental too, right?”

“We already know all this,” Harlan O’Brien said.

“Maybe so. But I just want to spell it out. For everyone.”

Harlan told him to feel free and Tocco grinned at him.

“I’ll remember that. Where were we? Cows and chickens, right? Well, they may not be much, but they’re about all we’ve got. They’re our protein—our lives, actually—and don’t think that thought ain’t gonna cross some other people’s minds during the winter. Yesterday the O’Briens came across three bodies hanging in a barn, and this morning they see a gang of Mau Mau—probably the same gang that did it—not two miles from here.”

Stone was not the only one who hadn’t heard this last item before. Jagger and Eve both looked alarmed and young Kelleher shook his head in dismay.

“They coming this way?” Jagger asked.

Harlan O’Brien shrugged. “No way of telling. They was just camped. About twenty of ’em, mostly kids, mostly black.”

“And all armed to the teeth,” Tocco went on. “Now if they do come this way—if they see our cows and chickens, and yeah, our women—then we got troubles, my friends. Defending this place would be next to impossible. They
could come from anywhere, all sides at once. And besides—what’s to defend?”

“But now up on Valhalla,” Annabelle playfully interjected.

“You’re goddamn right!” Tocco snapped at her. “Up on Valhalla we could hold off an army. And in the meantime we’d live just like we used to—like fucking kings.”

Stone had a question. “If we could hold off an army there, why can’t the junkman? Why can’t he hold us off?”

“Because as far as we know, there’s only seven of him—him and his old man and his wife and three kids, plus a male handyman. And we’re—what? Nine right here. And with John Kelleher and Baggs and maybe Dawson and Spider, we could be four more, plus all the women. They could help too. And what’s more, we’ve got the firepower. I’ve been making a list of all the guns we’ve got here on the Point—all I’ve seen—and believe me, we’ve got the firepower.”

As Tocco spoke, Stone had been watching Jagger, and he was surprised at how much the man had changed from the night before, appearing not timid and frightened now so much as angry and impatient. His eyes kept darting from one person to the next. His hands moved restlessly. He seemed tight as a drawn bow.

Now he spoke to Tocco. “Yeah, maybe we could make it. And maybe we’d all get killed trying.”

“Against a junkman?” Tocco scoffed. “Against three old men, a woman, and a couple of kids?”

Eve asked how they even knew the place would be defended. “Maybe it’s not a fortress at all,” she went on. “Maybe they’d welcome us.”

Tocco grinned at her. “You know, you could be right.
Maybe they would. And as for it being a fortress, we really don’t know that. All we know is it
could
be one. That is, we could make it into one. Smiley’s got this handyman cousin lives somewhere around here, and the guy used to do plumbing and electrical work up there. Worked on the generators and the freezer room and all that. And according to him, the only really fortified thing he saw was the iron gate at the top. It’s electrically operated and stout enough to stop a tank, he said. But I say you can always go
over
a gate, no matter how stout it is.”

Jagger was openly scornful. “And you want us to try. You say attack the place without even knowing what the hell we’d be getting into.”

“Better than sitting here waiting for some gang of kiddie Mau Mau to slaughter us and rape our women.”

Stone looked over at Eve. She had winced at Tocco’s words. And now she looked down at her hands taloned in her lap. He wondered if she would ever look at him again. He wondered if he cared.

Over the next hour Tocco and the rest of them discussed the matter in such numbing detail and with so much heat that Stone considered walking out. Instead he sat down on the floor near the stove and contemplated Annabelle’s shapely ankles and what the rest of her legs, hidden under tight old jeans, might look like and feel like. Especially he thought of the inside of her thighs and how the soft white skin there would feel against his lips and ears. Occasionally he would look up at her and the smile would come again, subtle and knowing, easy as sunshine. And he would wonder if Eve had noticed, then just as quickly he would despise himself for caring what she thought.

Basically the discussion of Valhalla divided along lines adamantly pro and con, with Tocco and the O’Briens arguing for the assault and Jagger and Kelleher throwing up objections. The women, like Stone, seemed neutral, probably believing as he did that nothing would come of the discussion anyway. He had told them all what he had seen from the boat that morning, how the road at the top of Valhalla appeared to pass between sheer steep walls for thirty or forty feet, with the iron gate at the end of the passage, which made it a virtual pit, a rain barrel for plinking fish. But because he did not want to give encouragement to an enterprise that might imperil the junkman’s children, he neglected to add that the area immediately preceding the pit looked climbable. Instead he said that an attacking force could easily be wiped out on Valhalla—a conclusion that Tocco ridiculed. The place was an old monastery, he argued, and an egghead conference site after that. Sure, the junkman might put up some resistance, but what it came down to finally was men and guns. It always did. He himself was a Vietnam veteran, had got his share of slopes, and what it always came down to was firepower. Once the junkman and his family realized they were actually being shot at, that real bullets were coming at them, they would all fold like ARVNs. The gate would swing wide and the junkman would be popping champagne corks and “welcoming us like long-lost cousins.”

Jagger and young Kelleher countered that the road up to Valhalla might well be mined, that the junkman could have automatic weapons, and that even if they did succeed in taking the place, they might find nothing of real value there, not enough food for the twenty-some persons who would be needing it. In answer, Oral O’Brien laconically
suggested that there was only one argument for taking the place, and it was camped two miles down the road.

“One look at them hungry black dudes and you ain’t gonna want to be holed up in no little log cabin.”

And so it went. Nothing was resolved, except for everyone to think the matter over and meet again in a few days.

“If we’re gonna do it, we gotta do it soon,” Tocco said. “Time is of the essence.”

That was the last word on the subject. As the conferees filed out of the cabin, their hosts went along with them, Tocco falling in with the O’Briens and Annabelle with Stone.

“They’re probably gonna check out their guns,” she said to him. “Count their bullets.”

“You serious?”

She made a face: not that serious. “But he’ll probably do it,” she said. “Attack Valhalla, I mean. Paul’s crazy enough. Once he sets his mind on something, that’s it. He’ll do it.”

“But you’re not like that?”

“In a way, yeah. Only it’s when I set my mind on
somebody.
”

“An admirable trait.”

“I think so.” Looking at Tocco walking ahead of them, she spoke more softly now. “You know the Cadillac parked next to the driveway?”

He nodded.

“Well, that’s one of the guard stations. You just sit inside the damn thing for four hours and watch the driveway, see if anybody wanders in. It’s very lonely work. Very cold.”

“I can imagine.”

“And that’s where I’ll be tonight, eight to twelve. I’m on watch.”

“Interesting.”

“It could be,” she said. “It just could be.”

There were times when Stone thought eight o’clock would never come. Like a child waiting for Christmas morning, he suffered the hours one by one until the magic moment finally arrived, and even then he made himself wait another twenty minutes so the others gathered in the lodge—especially Tocco—would not automatically guess his destination. But then he was on his way, moving quickly around the lodge and up the gravel lane to the point where the Cadillac was parked, facing the blacktop a few hundred feet beyond. Seeing her in the back seat, he opened the door and got in, and wordlessly it began.

Even as they were kissing, she worked out of her heavy coat and jeans and sweaters, naked underneath it all. He asked her if she wouldn’t freeze to death in the cold night air and she said it depended on him and anyway she had a couple of blankets to pull around them. Within a few seconds he was out of his clothes too and she was going down on him, avidly, making him feel as shining hard as a saber. Then, straddling him, she eased herself onto him with her eyes closed and her head thrown back and her teeth bared. Her breasts seemed to rise up to him, unforbidden fruit that tasted as sweet as any he had ever known. And when she sagged against him finally he could feel through those same ripe breasts the slackening sprint of her heart. Raising her head, she looked at him and laughed.

“Well, it’s a beginning,” she said.

“It is that.”

Cold now, they pulled the blankets tightly around them,
tucking in the sides wherever they could. On the car windows their breathing was already condensing and turning to frost, which seemed to glow from the lights of Valhalla. The Cadillac was one of the last full-size models, a Fleetwood, with a back seat that seemed expressly designed for the use to which Stone and Annabelle had put it. In fact it was so capacious that Stone imagined he could have stretched out his five-eleven frame—if he had wanted to, which he did not, not with Annabelle still sitting on his lap.

“Walter—that’s your name, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re not a Walter.”

“Call me Stone, then.”

“Okay—Stone. I like you, Stone.”

“And I like you, Annabelle.”

She smiled and kissed him again. “I’ve been planning this for days.”

“What happens if Tocco pays us a visit?”

“People will say you died happy.”

“That bad, huh?”

She laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m just kidding. He wouldn’t fool with you. And me, I’m used to the back of his hand. But fuck him. He always says marriage is for jerks. Well then, I say so’s fidelity.”

“Makes sense.”

“My one talent.”

“No, your
second
one.”

She laughed again. “I guess you’re right. Better at it than the ice maiden anyway.”

“Forget her, will you?”

“It ain’t easy. Anyone looks like that, other women don’t just
forget
her.”

“Well, I have.”

“Sure you have.”

“About five minutes ago. I forgot everyone but you.”

Stone could feel himself getting hard again. So did Annabelle.

“This time, let’s make it last,” she said.

“I’m for that.”

Next to them on the seat was a rifle, which she eased onto the floor. Then she slipped down where the rifle had been, drawing him with her, on top of her.

“What happens if the Mau Mau come along?” he asked, grinning.

“No problem. I’ve always wanted to be ravaged by a black army.”

He kissed her lightly on the lips. “Can you settle for this, then?”

“Just watch me.”

In time they put most of their clothes back on, but loosely, so they were both still available to each other’s caresses. To keep warm she again sat on his lap and they drew the blankets around them, making Stone feel a little like an Eskimo doing what Eskimos did during the course of their long winters. But mostly he and Annabelle were content just to talk now, and as the minutes of her watch grew to hours he learned a good deal more about her and her paramour. Contrary to his first impression of her as a type that might have run a massage parlor, it turned out that she was better educated than he, owning a Masters degree in English literature from Northwestern University. After teaching for a few years in suburban Chicago high schools she had found her way into public relations just as he had, only with more success, rising to a vice presidency and partnership before she was thirty. It was then her path
had crossed Tocco’s, she said, as the company appointed her executive on his account, which essentially involved publicity for two Old Town nightclubs that he owned.