Valhalla (24 page)

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. So here I sit when we get our first message from outside.”

“It wasn’t exactly full of hope.”

“No, I guess not. I guess it’s still bad. Everywhere.”

Stone sat there for a time saying nothing, wondering whether to mention his scouting mission the day before. Finally he plunged ahead.

“I suppose you heard—Eddie and I located the Mau Mau again.”

Dawson feigned puzzlement. “Mau Mau? What Mau Mau? There ain’t no Mau Mau in this country, and there never was.”

“It’s what we call them. You know that.”

“Yeah, and I still don’t know why. Explain it to me.”

“After that gang in New York—I already told you.”

“And that’s your only reason?”

“No,” Stone said. “Because most of them are black. And they kill people. They mutilate them.”

“Well, at least you admit it. You admit your prejudices.”

“It’s not a prejudice. It’s an observed fact.”

“Aw, that’s bullshit! Just because the O’Briens find some mutilated bodies hanging in a barn—what does that prove? Harlan and Oral wouldn’t be the first rednecks to make phony charges against black kids.”

“That day on the boat,” Stone said. “You didn’t call it a phony charge then.”

“Well, I’ve had time to think since.”

Stone felt that he had been backed into a corner, lumped with the O’Briens as a racist, and he resented it. He wanted to defend himself, yet he did not want to tell Dawson—or anyone else—about his shooting of the black youth. So he dissembled.

“I’m afraid you’re wrong,” he said now. “Yesterday we came across one of their own. He was dead. And his eyes had been put out. His tongue was cut out. He’d been castrated.”

Dawson closed his eyes, as though in pain. Then he got up and walked slowly over to the stove and held his hands out to it, probably more out of habit than need, for the room was quite warm.

“Let me see if I got this straight,” he said. “The O’Briens find a couple of mutilated white folks, so naturally you conclude that a gang of black kids did it. Then yesterday you find a mutilated black kid. And who did that? Why, the same bunch of black kids.” He turned back to Stone now. “You see anything illogical in that?”

“I still believe it was them in both cases. We found the dead boy in their last camp.”

“So maybe someone else attacked the camp. The gang fled. The attackers took the kid prisoner and tortured him. Mutilated him. It’s happened before.”

Stone did not want to argue the point anymore. “You could be right,” he said.

“But you don’t believe it.”

“No.”

“Well, at least we know where we stand.”

Stone sat there for a time, studying the huge man. “One
thing puzzles me,” he said finally. “Why you’re so sensitive about this thing. An intelligent, educated man like you—do you actually think white people still give a shit what a man’s skin color is?”

Dawson gave a soft laugh of scorn. “Yeah, I kinda do. I still kinda do.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” Stone told him. “It isn’t that the Mau Mau are black—it’s that they kill people. The problem ain’t race. It’s survival.”

Dawson came back and sagged into his chair again. Stone knew that his mending rib forced him to move gingerly, but even making allowances for that, the man somehow seemed older by a decade, as if Tocco had maimed his spirit as well as his body.

“What about Jagger?” he said to Stone. “What’d he say when you told him about the kid?”

“I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone till now.”

“I don’t think he’d approve of that.”

“Well, that’s too bad.”

Dawson smiled reflectively. “Newman was in here yesterday. He’s getting nervous. I think he’s afraid his new cohort’s going bananas.”

“A reasonable fear.”

“You think so? I don’t know—crazy like a fox maybe. I get the feeling the man just don’t like sharing things. I think he figures all the food and guns is rightly his because he was a tennis star. Because he was richer and prettier than the rest of us.”

Stone was interested in what Dawson had said about Newman. “You think Newman will stick with him?”

Dawson shrugged. “I don’t know. Kevin’s an okay kid. Maybe too bookish and analytical, but his heart’s in the right place. If Jagger tried to force most of us out, Kevin
wouldn’t go along. No way.” Dawson looked dolefully out the window at the brilliant day. “But now Jagger, he’s a cat of a different color. Anything that man do wouldn’t surprise me.”

At lunch that day Jagger fully lived up to Dawson’s expectations. Rising from his chair and drumming for silence with a soup spoon, he announced that after a meeting of the “executive committee”—that is, himself, Newman, and Spider—it had been decided that Paul Tocco would have to leave the Point. Looking straight across the table at the condemned man, Jagger gave his reasons.

“He’s been well enough to work for days now, but he will not work. He’s been asked to share his cabin with Rich Kelleher, but he won’t do it. He won’t give his ex-cabinmate her clothes, and as we witnessed right here this afternoon, he won’t settle for a half ration as a non-producer. Therefore it’s been decided that he will leave before noon tomorrow. Understood?”

By way of answer Tocco threw a glass of warm milk in Jagger’s face. Then he reached out with one arm and began to sweep his part of the table clean of tableware, food, everything, dumping all of it onto Newman, Smiley, and poor Mr. Goff, who howled as if he were being buried alive. Jagger meanwhile was motioning for Spider, who sat guard with his ever-present Sten gun while the rest of the group ate. He jumped up and started toward the table just as Tocco angrily lumbered to his feet, knocking over his chair.

“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “Especially not for any bunch of cocksucking fags like you three.”

He turned toward the advancing Spider as if the youth
were carrying some sort of toy instead of a submachine gun. And when Stone saw Spider’s eyes begin to flare in panic, he moved as rapidly as he could, jumping Tocco and pulling him backwards before the frightened Mexican decided to spray the room with nine-millimeter bullets. Tocco tried to shake Stone off and the two of them crashed into the wall and knocked over a table. On the floor, Stone tried to yell some sense into him.

“Let it go, man! Let’s get out of here!”

Tocco indifferently got to his feet, still glaring at Spider and Jagger as if they posed no danger to him at all. Then he turned and bulled his way out of the lodge, shoving anybody in his way, which included Flossie coming out of the kitchen. Squalling like a wounded goose, she tumbled into a chair, which in turn toppled over backwards.

As he headed out of the front door, trailing Tocco, Stone caught Annabelle’s eye at the table and signaled for her to follow.

Outside, Tocco turned on him. “Look, will you get lost! I don’t dig you any more than them other fruits, you got that? All they did was take my gun—you took my goddamn girl.”

“If you leave,” Stone told him, “maybe I can get you a gun.”

In answer, Tocco gave him the finger and walked on alone. Annabelle caught up with Stone, and they both watched as Tocco disappeared into his cabin.

“What now?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe I should leave with him. There’s no way I can stay here much longer, not with Jagger running the show.”

“If you go, I go.”

Stone looked at her. “That’d be some trio.”

“Not your typical
ménage à trois.”

“Not hardly.”

“So what do we do?”

They were at Tocco’s porch now, standing there listening as he tossed things about inside. They heard some glass breaking. Cautiously, Annabelle went up to the door and opened it a crack.

“Can we come in?” she asked.

“Do what you want, for shit sake!” was the answer. “You’re free, white, and twenty-one.”

Annabelle motioned to Stone and they both went on into the cabin, which was pretty much a shambles, though obviously not from the tantrum he had just thrown so much as from a week of them, a week of never picking anything up.

“So what do you want?” he asked. “You come here to gloat?”

“You know better than that,” Annabelle said.

“Who wants to stay here anyway? Goddamn summer camp for cripples.”

“It’s one way of staying alive.”

Tocco laughed at her. “That’s what you call this? No nightclubs, no pizzerias, no sports. This ain’t living, baby. This is dying hungry, that’s what it is.”

“Like I said before,” Stone put in. “I can get you a gun. And maybe a backpack.”

Tocco would not look at him. “Mister Generosity,” he said to Annabelle. “He takes you and offers me a gun in exchange.”

“I wasn’t yours to take,” Annabelle told him. “I’m not his. I’m my own person.”

“Oh Jesus, women’s lib even now, even here.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Here she is, eating fried mush and
turnips and douching with cider vinegar, and she still acts like some wise-ass lady P.R. executive in the Loop. What a bimbo.”

As Stone, unbidden, sat down in a chair near the front door, Tocco finally turned and looked at him. “So you can get me a gun,” he said.

Stone nodded.

“Big deal.”

“You don’t have to take it.”

Tocco was sneering. “You’ve got a piece. So what are we gonna do with it? We gonna give it to me so I can tuck my tail up my ass and crawl out of here, right?”

“What’s the alternative?” Stone asked, though he already knew.

Tocco repeated his words, laughed at them. “
What’s the alternative
? Well, I’ll just tell you, buster. I’ll tell you what we could do with your little piece. We could stick it in Spider’s ear, that’s what. We could lift his fucking tommy gun and then kick his fucking ass. And then we pay a call on Jagger and kick his ass too—kick them both right out of here.”

It was an idea that had occurred to Stone more than once over the past week, an idea he had resisted only because he still planned on leaving the Point himself soon, which of course made any such coup seem like an unnecessary borrowing of trouble at a time when he already had his fair share. But now, with Annabelle watching him and Tocco openly challenging him, the decision was not so easy.

“Just like that, huh?” he said to Tocco.

“Why not? What could they do? I get that Sten gun, who’s gonna argue with me?”

Annabelle, for some reason, was amused. “You’re forgetting
something, Paul,” she said to Tocco. “If you kick Jagger out of here, the ice maiden goes too. And I don’t think we want that.” She looked at Stone. “Do we?”

“That would be up to her,” Stone said. “What she does is her affair, not mine.”

“Well, good. Then there’s no reason not to do it, is there?” Annabelle was smiling brightly, enjoying his predicament. “Well, is there?”

Stone said nothing for a few moments. Tocco was at her side now, waiting for his answer too. Finally he gave it.

“No reason. Of course we can do it.”

Tocco smacked his fist into his hand. “Beautiful! Just beautiful!”

But Stone had a dash of cold water for him. “One condition, though—I’m the one who puts the gun in Spider’s ear.”

“Why—don’t you trust me? You think I’d pull the trigger, for Christ’s sake?”

“And we move on Jagger together. No one gets hurt. Not if we can help it.”

“Whatever. Just say when.”

“Tomorrow morning.”

Tocco had dropped into the room’s one easy chair. Smiling and rubbing his hands together, he looked like a glutton about to feast. “Now, ain’t this gonna be beautiful! Ain’t this just what we need around here—a touch of war!”

“What about Newman?” Annabelle asked.

“Don’t worry about him,” Stone said. “If the Mau Mau took over tomorrow, ten minutes later he’d be sitting at their elbow.”

Annabelle laughed uneasily. “Might give it a try myself.”

Stone drily wished her luck. But Tocco did not even hear. He was still enjoying his feast.

“Tomorrow Spider and Jagger. And after that—why not Valhalla? What do you say, Stone? Why not Valhalla?”

Stone had no ambitions in that direction, but he did not want to argue the matter, not now anyway. “Why not?” he said.

At six that night Stone sat alone in Tocco’s car staring at the narrow driveway where it curved through the trees toward the blacktop. The sky was overcast and what little he could see was due almost entirely to the lights of Valhalla, as usual burning brightly across the cove. He had already sat through the first half of his watch and looked forward to relief at eight o’clock, though he did feel a touch of guilt in that regard because Rich Kelleher, at the other end of the Point, was standing his usual double watch, from four till midnight. Stone had not spoken with the youth since the previous night, but to all appearances he was the same as before: taciturn, solitary, unapproachable. And though he was staying in the lodge now, he did not seem to have fallen in with Jagger and the others, preferring still to go his way alone, working on the farm and firewood details during the day and volunteering for the double watch at night.

Stone did not doubt that the sexual hijinks of Rich’s father and sister had much to do with his introversion, or at least the reinforcing of it. But even allowing for that,
Stone still did not understand what Rich liked so much about standing guard, especially in these cold damp days of late fall, with no heated guardhouse and no alcohol to warm the blood. For himself, Stone liked nothing about it. The leather-seated Cadillac felt about as warm as a duck blind, especially without Annabelle there to build a fire in him, which he knew was not about to happen, not when they had the alternative of a comparatively warm bed to look forward to later. And Stone was not even sure about that anymore, after their conversation with Tocco that afternoon. It was clear that Tocco still wanted her and would take her back, possibly without even beating her if he was feeling uncommonly magnanimous. And Annabelle just might go too, Stone believed, for he still sensed a strong rapport between the two of them. They were both true big-city carnivores, creatures very much at home in the glass and concrete, and all but impotent here in the country, which in a way threw them together. Also, he would not have been surprised if Annabelle was beginning to see in Tocco’s brutal possessiveness a closer approximation of love than his own casual sexual opportunism, though why she would be interested in “love” at this juncture, he could not say—a judgment which, he suddenly realized, had been turned on him not many days before, by Eve. And the realization made him smile as he sat there in the car, in the Valhalla-lit night.