Valhalla (2 page)

“Eddie, you there? You still there, Eddie?”

“It’s okay,” the woman said to him. “Everything’s all right now. Eddie tried to—”

She broke off as the little man roughly brushed past her, getting down on the ground with his friend and hugging him, patting him on the back.

“I’m right here, Jag. It’s okay now. Don’t worry. I’m right here.”

The blinded man began to weep. “I can’t see,” he said. “I can’t see, Eddie.”

“It’ll be okay, Jag. I promise. It’s just a bump. Tomorrow you gonna see again. I promise, man. You gonna see just like a hawk again.”

The woman went outside and Stone followed her.

“They go way back,” she said. “They’re very close.”

Stone was not sure about the note of derision in her voice. It could have been only weariness.

“You don’t recognize him?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“Jag. Haden Jagger. He used to be a pretty big tennis
player. Family’s got a lot of money—or
had
anyway. I don’t know what the rules are anymore.”

“The only rule is no rules.” Stone looked back into the room at the blinded man. He thought he might have heard the name somewhere, sometime, but he had never been much of a tennis fan, not even when the big tournaments were still being held and telecast. “No, I don’t recognize him,” he said. “He can’t see anything at all, huh?”

“Light and dark, I guess. Like the walls inside and the opening—he can see the difference. And he can see shapes. He can make us out as we move in the light.”

“Well, that sounds pretty good. Maybe when the swelling goes down—”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“You his wife?”

She looked off in the direction of the crash. Her fine large gray eyes gave nothing. “No, his girl,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

“My name’s Stone,” he told her. “Walter Stone. And you can forget the Walter.”

She did not smile. “Eve Williams.”

Her coldness put him off. “Well, what about it? You want any help, or should I keep moving?”

“We don’t have any food.”

For the moment he ignored that. “When was the crash?”

“Yesterday, at dusk. We stayed in the plane till this morning. Then we came here.”

“What about the pilot?”

“What about him?”

“You just gonna leave him there?”

“What else? We haven’t got any shovels. We haven’t got anything.”

“Where were you headed?”

“Oklahoma. One of his father’s ranches. Jag’s.”

“One
of?”

She nodded, looking bored. “He’s in real estate. Everywhere.”

“Eve!” It was Eddie, calling from inside. “He wants a smoke.”

Eve looked at Stone. “He won’t talk to me. Not since the crash. Everything comes through Eddie.”

Going back into the room, she got out a pack of Salems and flipped one up. But Eddie took the whole pack instead and began to shake cigarettes into his pocket until she snatched the pack back from him. He lit one of the Salems and carefully placed it in Jagger’s mouth.

“Here you go, buddy.”

Stone, watching all this, was almost swooning with hunger. Cigarettes were one item that Miller, a great drinker but a non-smoker, had not included in his hoard of Armageddon supplies. And they were scarce, in fact had regained their World War II status as one of the few currencies around, almost up there with gold and silver coins. Stone, a smoker for almost twenty years, had not had one for a day and a half. So he was direct.

“I’d like one of those.”

Saying nothing, she held the pack out to him and he took one, lighting it with a match, a precious fire-lighting match he would not normally have wasted in so frivolous a cause. But a day and a half was a long time. As he inhaled, holding the delicious smoke in his lungs, the girl’s eyes suddenly filled and she turned away from him. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“Listen, don’t worry. I’ll stay with you for now. We’ll
get him to a doctor, and get you some food and a roof over your head.”

She glanced back at him, the tears still in her eyes, and for the first time she looked lovely as well as beautiful. She looked human.

“All we know is tennis courts and country clubs and bars,” she said. “The three of us, we’re like babies out here.”

Stone smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid that’s true for everyone. We’ve got to learn to walk again.”

In time Stone found that the three of them had not bothered to search the plane thoroughly, for food or anything else they might have needed. So while Eddie stayed in the ruin with Jagger, he and the girl headed back for the crash site. As they walked, she asked him about himself and he told her briefly about starting out with Miller eight days before and how Miller had been shotgunned at the blockade on the freeway coming out of the city. He gave her none of the details of the killing because the whole thing still filled him with rage, a rage that quickly sickened into feelings of impotence and futility. He only told her that he had had to abandon the car finally a few miles past the blockade and that he had been on foot ever since. Their destination had been—and now
his
was—an A-frame cabin Miller owned on Table Rock Lake. He did not add that the place had its own well, with a hand pump in the kitchen, or that its cellar was filled with canned goods and freeze-dried foods and toiletries and medicines, and probably some buried gold too—Stone would not have put even that past the old man. While most people these past years had been amassing debt and expressing their own unique individuality, Miller had been quietly
preparing for doomsday. It had been his hobby. A boozing, bigoted old hack, he for some reason had taken Stone under his seedy wing, through much of the protracted hell of the last year. Why the old man had taken so long to flee to his prepared sanctuary, Stone never did know.

“You two were just going to stay there together?” the girl asked.

“For now, yeah.”

“Didn’t he have a family?”

“He was divorced. Three times.”

“And you?”

“Once.”

“So you were just good friends.”

“I guess. I didn’t know many people in St. Louis. I came here a year ago from Colorado—just in time for the crash. How’s that for a smart career move?”

She smiled. “What career was it?”

“Public relations. Sales promotion.”

He did not bother to add that his coming to Missouri had been a move of desperation, that after seven years of having progressively better positions in P.R. agencies in Los Angeles and Denver, eighteen months before he had found himself in the unemployment line along with twenty million other Americans, and finally had settled for the rinky-dink job with Miller in St. Louis only when it became obvious that the unemployment compensation checks could no longer be counted on, that the federal government was no more solvent than its citizens.

“It was a year to remember,” he said finally.

“Aren’t they all.”

When they reached the plane, Stone had to help Eve climb up into the cockpit. Seeing the dead pilot, her eyes filled with tears again and she turned away. Stone helped
her on into the cabin then, where the floor was so steeply pitched they almost had to climb from one seat row to the next. As they sifted through the clutter, Eve told him a little more about herself and the others. They had spent most of the summer with Jagger’s mother at her place on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, she said, waiting like everyone else for some sort of government to take hold and get things running again. They played a lot of tennis, and they swam a lot and went sailboating and sat on the dock drinking vodka tonics and soaking up the sun. And finally they saw the fires begin, right across the lake, first the Playboy hotel and then some private residences, beautiful lakefront homes like Mrs. Jagger’s lighting up the night sky for what reason Eve could not even imagine.

“I mean, I could understand them wanting all that, to take it from the rich finally. But why burn the places, huh? Why burn it all? What do they get out of it?”

Stone shrugged. He knew the answer, but then he imagined that she did too. “The booze probably ran out,” he said, settling for the flip, the cruel. But that was the custom now, even for liberals like himself, the do-gooders of yesteryear. Somewhere along the line they had lost the knack for eating shit and turning the other cheek.

Anyway, that had been the clincher, she said. They realized they had to get out, even from that posh country retreat. And during one of the increasingly brief periods when the phone service was working, Jagger had gotten in touch with Arvin Jensen, the man in the cockpit. He was from Milwaukee, she explained, a private charter pilot Jagger had used in the past, when he was still playing the pro circuit. Jagger offered him a coin collection of his mother’s and said their destination would be his father’s ranch in eastern Oklahoma, a four-thousand-acre spread
with a landing strip and just about everything else they would need to see them through this “rain delay,” as Jagger called it. Unfortunately the ranch was also the last place on earth his mother would have fled to, out of fear that she might have to look upon his father once again. After twenty years of divorce and two intervening marriages, she still hated the man.

“Jag told her okay, it was up to her. If she wanted to stay behind and get burned out and raped and killed, it was her business, not his. So he had us pack up. And we left.”

“Just like that?”

“He’s not a sentimentalist.”

“I’d say not.”

“In fact he’s pretty much a gold-plated bastard. But at least you know where he stands. Usually on your face.”

Stone laughed, but the girl was not even smiling. He asked her about the plane, if she knew what had caused it to go down, and she told him that they had run out of fuel.

“We only had half a tank when we started. Jensen put down in Peoria and Springfield, but they were out too. So he thought he’d try some airport west of St. Louis. But when we got over it, he saw it was burning: buildings, planes, everything. We couldn’t even land. So he just kept on flying, hoping to find some other place. And I guess his gauge was off. When the engines started sputtering, he called back and told us to buckle up, we were going down.”

Stone looked at the tangle of seats, the torn and battered fuselage. “You were lucky, you and Eddie.”

“We took the seats Arv told us to. Those facing the back.” She nodded toward three seats anchored against the bulkhead that divided the cabin and the cockpit. “But Jag
said no way. He was going to
see
what happened to him.”

Her smile, canted and pained, reflected on that brutal irony.

Stone said nothing. Suddenly he did not want to think about Jagger or about the pilot sitting up front with a tree stuck in his chest, for that would only lead him to think again of Miller and the old man by the stream and all the others, all the anonymous ones, the bodies. And he was tired of them. He was tired of death.

In the compartment above the built-in bar he found two sixteen-ounce cans of cashew nuts and one of almonds, plus a small bottle of stuffed green olives—a find that set his salivary glands running like a freshet. Eve wanted to open the cans on the spot, “for just a little taste,” but Stone said they had better wait and open them in front of the others, share and share alike.

“That’s a nicety Jag would only laugh at,” she said. “Eddie too.”

Stone held one of the cans out to her, but she shook her head.

“No, you’re right. We’ll do it later.”

They also gathered up three blankets and packed another suitcase with a variety of clothing they might need. In the plane’s tiny lavatory Stone came up with a half-dozen bars of motel soap, a box of Kleenex, and two rolls of toilet tissue.

“You don’t miss a thing,” Eve said.

“I used to sell it.”

“What?”

“Toilet paper. My first job. I was a salesman for a paper supply company.”

She laughed, beautifully, showing her fine even teeth. And Stone felt a new hunger as sharp as that prompted by the cans of nuts.

“Don’t tell that to Jag—you’d never hear the end of it,” she said. “And what was it you PR’d for on your last job?”

“Various things. Dog food was our biggie.”

The smile came again. “You’re putting me on.”

“Afraid not. I go for the funny jobs. I like to give people pleasure.”

“You’re angry.”

“Hardly.”

“Look, I know the feeling. I’m a Texas Polack, as Jag is forever reminding me.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Maybe because I’m half Irish. My mother’s side.” She finished packing the suitcase and got up. “What next?”

As she stood there, facing him, it struck Stone how ridiculous their conversation had been, how absurdly normal in the context of the crash site. He looked through the open door of the plane at Jensen’s body.

“There’s still him.”

“What can we do?”

“We can’t just leave him.”

“You have a shovel?”

“A camp shovel, yeah. But it’s too small. It would take too long. In fact, just getting him out of here would take too long.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know—cremate him?”

“It’s up to you.”

Stone found a shallow pool of gasoline in the ripped-open wing-tank of the plane. Using paper cups, he scooped out enough of it to pour over the dead pilot and onto the
sheets and sticks he piled around the body. Then he lit the far end of one of the sheets and the fire skipped up into the cabin and blossomed, like a great orange flower. Shouldering his pack, Stone picked up his gun and the packed suitcase while Eve followed him with the blankets. Neither of them looked back, neither said a word, as they walked on, away from the blazing plane and the blackening body inside it.

At the ruin, Stone almost had to use force to keep Jagger and Eddie from gobbling up all the nuts and olives. He tried to explain to them how scarce food was, at least in this far suburban reach of St. Louis. The Mau Mau had picked it clean, he told them. Any house or farm that hadn’t been sacked or burned was usually filled with sharp-shooting farmers who hadn’t planted anything but their own gardens for over a year—surely they were aware of that, weren’t they? Neither answered.