Valhalla (25 page)

It struck him that for a man who was going to participate in a coup d’état the next day, his mind was woefully unconcentrated. But then he had to admit that the “state” he and Tocco were planning to overthrow did not offer much in the way of a challenge. A regime of clowns, they could have been overthrown almost anytime, by almost anyone. If there was one thing about the coup that worried
him, it was afterwards, who or what would replace the triumvirate. Not himself certainly, of that he was sure. Within a week he would probably be on the road again, though heading nowhere in particular this time instead of toward Miller’s cabin on Table Rock Lake. Almost any other place would be better than the Point, he felt. For some reason, he still believed that the farther south he went, the better things would be. Somewhere he was sure to find a place with electric power again, a place with food and hope, a place where the night was lit by many lights and not just those burning atop a single obscene tower of nostalgic opulence.

As he sat watching the darkened lane through the car window, he had the feeling that he could almost hear time passing, the seconds falling away, their loss measured not by the tick of a clock or the thump of his heart so much as by a soft rustling sound, like the beating of wings far above him. And for a few moments he was overcome by a feeling of aloneness and alienation, a kind of terror at finding himself sitting watch with a gun in the front seat of an undrivable Cadillac on the shore of a small lake in southern Missouri, with no way out except his own feet and the stupid, stubborn hope that he could survive alone in a world ruled by hunger and fear and suspicion, where packs of dogs and feral children roamed as one, killing for food and fun. He could only wonder at the incredible concatenation of folly and bad luck and ill will that had conspired to bring the great gaudy giant of America down, not just to its knees but worse, blinded and muted and emasculated, stumbling about like the youth in the Mau Mau camp, flailing with his stick at an enemy he could not see.

It was close to seven o’clock when he first saw her, in his peripheral vision, an almost spectral figure moving past the car and down the snow-dusted driveway toward the blacktop in the distance. She was wearing a hooded, ankle-length raincoat over her other clothing and it gave her the look—especially because of the way she walked, slowly, head down—of a medieval monk in meditation. As he expected, she turned before reaching the blacktop and headed back up the driveway, moving just as slowly as before. She was not armed and did not look about her, at the darkness and all the dangers it could have held for her. And though she must have known that someone was in the Cadillac on guard duty, she seemed oblivious of that fact now, apparently so lost in her own thoughts that the world outside her head did not exist for her.

As she came abreast of the car, Stone threw open the passenger door and she jumped back, startled.

“It’s me, Eve,” he said. “Your old friend, Stone.”

She looked furious. “You scared the hell out of me!”

“Sorry about that. But then I figured you knew someone was in here. Remember if we don’t produce, Jagger won’t give us anything to eat.”

She just stood there in the driveway looking regal and angry.

“Why don’t you get in? It’s warmer in here.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, it really is.”

“I’m not talking about the temperature.”

“Yeah, I know. But I promise—it won’t be like last time.”

“You mean you won’t try to rape me?”

“Something like that.”

“How can I resist?”

“I really don’t know.”

He did not expect her to get into the car with him, was only making conversation, baiting her out of old resentment and frustration. So he was surprised as she shrugged now and slid into the seat next to him.

“Why the hell not?” She pulled the door closed. “Anything’s better than that goddamn lodge.”

“What’s wrong there?”

“Don’t get any wrong ideas,” she told him. “I’m here just to sit. And I’ll listen if you feel you have to talk. But that’s all. Anyway, you’ve got your Annabelle now, haven’t you?”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“What’s wrong in the lodge?” he repeated.

She laughed mirthlessly. “What do you think? Jag and those two creeps sitting around the fire all evening making plans—for the rest of us.”

“And you don’t like that?”

“Not that much.”

“Why don’t you tell him you disapprove?”

She looked at Stone as if he were a cretin. “And that would make a big difference, would it?”

“Well, true love and all that. My heart’s desire’s desire.”

She smiled wryly. “
My heart’s desire’s desire
. You ought to write a book.”

“Maybe so. I could call it
Cold and Hungry.
”

“Why not?” Suddenly she shivered. “It
is
cold in here. This seat is like a block of ice.”

Stone wondered whether to go ahead and play the fool. “Annabelle found it warmer on my lap.”

“Good for her. That isn’t my kind of heat anymore. I prefer natural gas.”

“And when it’s not available?”

“Shivering. I prefer to shiver.”

Stone smiled. “So be it, then.”

“Right. So be it.”

Though he still had the window next to him rolled part way down, their breath was beginning to condense and freeze on the other windows. And as before, with Annabelle, the lights from Valhalla illumined the passenger-side window like a fluorescent pane, a flat light against which the flawless lines of Eve’s profile stood out clearly. The cowl of her raincoat had slipped back and her hair had spilled forward, unkempt and gleaming in the soft light.

“I want to ask you a question,” he said to her. “What you said before, about me trying to rape you that night in the lodge—we both know it wasn’t that. But I wasn’t very nice. So how come you got in here with me?”

“I don’t know. I guess deep down I trust you.” She turned and looked at him, setting him up. “I trust you to do nothing.”

So there it was yet again, the inevitable bloodletting. Only this time, instead of reacting with anger, Stone smiled.

“To be so disappointed in me, you must’ve really had high hopes in the beginning.”

But she did not feel like playing. “I’ll admit I liked you. I liked you a lot.”

Stone had not expected that, and it silenced him. It rattled him. Just the idea that she had liked him once—it breathed life into his stubborn dream.

He blurted: “If I do nothing else in this life, I’m going
to convince you I was too late to do anything that day. It was over. I couldn’t help you. All I could do was kill the man. Execute him.”

“It’s over,” she said. “It’s past. It doesn’t matter now.”

“It does to me.”

Closing her eyes, she lay back against the seat. Then she shook her head slowly, wonderingly. “Can’t you get it through your head that none of that matters anymore. Personal feelings—love, hate, friendship, all that old junk—none of it matters now. To have all that, you’ve first got to have electricity and indoor plumbing and food stamps.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I think it is.”

“What about Romeo and Juliet? Or Eloise and Abelard?”

“They’re children, in fiction.”

“Not the last two. Not Abelard.”

“Maybe not. But look where it got him. And anyway, there was law and order then. A system. Not a mess like this.”

“It’s strange,” Stone said. “But because it is like this, I feel the need for ‘that old junk’ more than ever.”

“We’re different.”

“I guess so.”

She was silent for a time and when he looked over at her he saw that her eyes had teared.

“I get so scared sometimes,” she said finally. “I just shake. And I bawl. All the time like this—the tears just start. I can’t hold them back. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, whether we’re going to live or die, whether I’ll even see the spring again. We need someone to lead us, someone to show us the way. And what do we have?
Jag
.”

“For now,” Stone said. “But that could change.”

“For the better, though?” Her eyes did not believe it. “You know what they’re discussing tonight, our three stooges?—Sex. Newman has been carrying on about the Oneida community in the eighteenth century and the ‘exciting socio-sexual experiments’ they tried there. And Jag and Spider are eating it up. Every woman belonging to every man, that’s what they’re contemplating, a kind of round robin in which each guy uses one of the girls and then passes her on to the next guy.”

Thinking ahead to tomorrow, Stone was enjoying himself. By noon, there were going to be three very disgruntled men on the Point.

“And even that isn’t enough for Spider,” Eve went on. “He says the thing he misses most about the old days are skin flicks. So he wants us to have group sex and live sex shows in the lodge, just like on Forty-second Street. He volunteered to star with Tracy Kelleher.”

“And here I always thought power corrupted.”

“And you were always right. I can’t get over Jag. He was mean and arrogant before, but you could talk to him, you could get through. Not now, though. Now he’s tripping even more than the time he reached the quarters at Wimbledon.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about him,” Stone said. “Things change.”

She looked up at him. “You said that a minute ago. Why? You planning something?”

Stone may have loved her, but he did not trust her. “No, I just mean conditions change. There’s the Mau Mau. And the food problem.”

Visibly, she shivered. “Thanks. I needed that.”

Stone put his hand on her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s all right.” She looked up at him, trying to smile.

But again tears were welling in her eyes. And Stone could not help himself. Without thinking, he reached around her shoulder and gathered her to him and kissed her, tenderly at first, then more deeply, until finally she began to respond to him, even clutch at him.

It was then that they heard the shots, two of them, shotgun blasts coming from beyond the cabins.

Though Stone had been at the other end of the Point, he was among the first to reach the scene of the shooting. Just outside the chicken house a young Mexican male lay on his back, with a pair of broken-necked hens flopping fitfully near his outstretched and slowly opening hands. The lower front of his black leather jacket had been blown away and in its place a multicolored membrane of gut was ballooning out of him, flecked by a steady jet of blood.

Stone looked beyond the body at the corner of the barn, where Rich Kelleher stood leaning against the board fence, with his head hanging down. He was retching, getting nothing. His shotgun lay on the ground near his feet. Behind him, in the steel barrel, a wood fire burned brightly.

Stone went over to him and picked up his gun. “You okay?” he asked.

Rich did not answer.

“Was he the only one?”

The youth shook his head. “I missed the other guy. A black guy. He got away. He took the horses.”

Stone absorbed this bit of information calmly, saying
nothing. But he felt as if sentence had just been passed upon all of them.

Jagger, Newman, and Spider were on the scene now too, along with a number of others, including Tocco. Stone tossed the shotgun to him.

“Come on, there was another one,” he said. “We better make sure he ain’t out there in the dark drawing a bead. Or maybe Rich hit him and he’s down somewhere.”

He and Tocco were gone for only a few minutes, combing the pasture and the narrow strip of woods between the barn and the blacktop. During that time the noise behind them never ceased, one voice shrilling on top of another in a cacophony of panic.

Returning, Stone gave them the bad news. “He’s not out there. I guess he got away.”

Most of them seemed indifferent to this vital piece of information. Jagger was busy arguing with the O’Briens, almost screaming at them that they had to stand guard while the rest of the group assembled in the lodge for an emergency meeting. Harlan complained that he and Oral should be at the meeting too, that their lives were at stake the same as everyone else’s.

“You arguing with me?” Jagger bellowed. He was carrying a twenty-two-caliber pistol, waving it around like a swagger stick.

“Why not?” Harlan said to him.

Stone tried his hand at compromise. “Before anything’s decided, you’ll have your say,” he told Harlan.

Jagger’s eyes were wild. “
Say
?
What say
? This ain’t no fucking democracy! He’ll do what he’s goddamn told!”

Beyond Jagger, Stone saw Eve standing back in the shadows, looking at the dead youth, whom Spider was kneeling over as he went through his pockets. For the
moment, he had put down his Sten gun, laid it across the victim’s legs. And suddenly, as Jagger continued to rail at him, Stone was struck by the idea that now was as good a time as any. There was no reason to wait till morning. Instead he waited only a few seconds, until Jagger’s eyes pivoted from him to Harlan. Then, tightly gripping his rifle, a twenty-five-aught-six issued to him earlier, he drove the muzzle of the gun into Jagger’s stomach, doubling him over. And almost as part of the same movement, he kicked Spider in the rump and sent him sprawling across the dead man. As Harlan jumped to retrieve Jagger’s fallen pistol, Stone picked up the Sten gun.

If he had expected any hurrahs, he did not get them. For the most part, everyone looked more stunned than anything else, as if they saw the incident only as yet another act of violence, on top of one they still had not begun to deal with in their minds. The exception was Tocco, who cheered lustily and moved forward with his shotgun to prod the fallen mighty to their feet.

“Right on!” he bawled. “Just right on, Walter! A very nice piece of work. I’ll watch these two for now, keep their noses good and clean.”

Jagger was having a hard time getting to his feet. Between ragged, sobbing breaths, he cursed Stone.

“You bastard…motherfucker…I’ll get you.”

Stone asked for the keys to the lodge, and when Jagger failed to give them up, Tocco prodded him in the stomach again. Gasping, Jagger produced the keys. As Stone took them, Smiley Baggs stepped out of the shadows.