Valhalla (3 page)

Jagger seemed more alert now, not so lost in shock and confusion. “Ask him where that leaves us,” he said to Eddie.

“Mostly with the dogs,” Stone answered. “The wild dogs. City pets running in packs now, eating anything they can find, including each other.”

Eve turned her face away. “Enough, all right? I don’t want to hear about it.”

Jagger perked at that. “What’s this, Eddie? Our own little cannibal getting squeamish?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“And why not? Cannibals eat men, don’t they? All kinds of men—white, black, tall, short—”

“Shut up.”

“But why? Ask her why, Eddie. Did I leave someone out?”

Stone cut in. “Look, Jagger, I got some idea what you’re going through. But don’t take it out on her, okay? In fact, it might be a good idea not to take it out on anybody.”

Jagger cocked his head theatrically, as if he were trying to catch a distant birdsong. “What is that I hear, Eddie—the voice of the Lord? Charlton Heston? Tell me, pray.”

Eddie giggled. “That’s more like it, Jag. More like yourself. Tomorrow you gonna see. I promise. Tomorrow you gonna see just like a hawk again.”

Jagger smiled in his direction. “Fuck off, Eddie. Will you do that for me?”

Stone got up and left the small, concrete-walled room. In the failing light he gathered up some branches and twigs and took them back to the ruin. Eve was standing outside, hugging herself in the sharp evening air.

“Thanks for helping us,” she said. “I’m really grateful. We need your help. But if you want to go on—tomorrow, I mean—it’s okay. We’ll get by. I mean, I know how Jag is.”

“Forget it.” He began to break the branches into firewood.

“No, I mean it. You don’t have to stick with us.”

“You don’t want me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Stone smiled wearily. “It’s okay. I’ll probably cut out tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to.”

“We’ll see.”

Carrying the wood into the room, he built a fire just inside the doorway, on the dirt floor. Jagger and Eddie were already sitting back against the cold walls, huddling under blankets. And now as the fire licked up into life, Eve slipped in next to Jagger and drew his blanket over
her as well. Stone, dressed more warmly than the others, neglected the third blanket for the time being. Later, as the night turned colder, he knew he would be glad he had waited to use it.

“Jesus, we are lucky,” Jagger was saying. “We no sooner crash than along comes this Boy Scout to the rescue. He finds us peanuts, he cremates our dead, and now he even lights up the night and warms the old cockles of our hearts. We are indeed fortunate.”

“Well, we are,” Eve told him. “You should thank him instead of sounding off.”

“Oh, I do, I do. I’m so thankful to be sitting here on this killing, fucking ground with four peanuts in my gut and a fire burning I can’t even see. I am truly thankful.”

“You’re not alone, you know,” Stone told him. “I don’t imagine Eve or your buddy here digs all this any more than you do.”

In the firelight, Jagger grinned. “Hey, you hear that, Eddie? Eve, he calls her. Already his great good friend Eve. Tell me, what’s he look like, this new great good friend of Eve?”

Eddie looked over at Stone and shrugged, explaining that he had no choice except to serve his master. “Oh, he’s about your height, I’d say, Jag. Five-ten or -eleven. But heavier. Maybe one seventy-five, one-eighty.”

“His face, dummy. His hair. What’s he look like?”

Eddie looked at Stone again, appealing for his compassion. “Just normal, I’d say. Just your average guy. Hair’s about like yours, only darker, straighter.”

Eve, snuggled up against Jagger, was watching Stone. “He looks strong,” she said. “And decent. And honest.”

That made Jagger laugh, so hard tears formed in his sightless eyes. He hugged Eve to him. “Strong and decent
and honest! Too much, just too much. Tell me, Boy Scout—Eve fill you in about us, the three of us? If not, maybe I better, since I can do it so much simpler and faster. Because what we’re about is money, my friend—my money, my old man’s money, my old lady’s money. Now I realize the stuff ain’t exactly itself anymore, but when it was, that’s what we were about, in fact that’s
all
we were about. Because there was beaucoup of it, you see—enough to take off that vital little economic edge in the big tournaments, and enough to keep Eddie picking up after me all these years, and most definitely enough to buy the love and devotion of a whole chorus line of
decent, honest
tramps like your sweet Evelyn here, who’s unfortunately probably the last in line, thanks to the exciting new times we’re living in.”

“Fascinating,” Stone said.

“Oh, it is. It really is. Why, at home in Santa Barbara our tennis courts have silk nets and the whirlpools come with semen traps. Eve has a bidet of solid gold.”

She told him to shut up, and again he hugged her.

“Why not?” he said. “Why the hell not?”

Eddie was nodding solemnly at Stone. “It’s true what he says. If it wasn’t for his money, Jag could’ve been on top, one of the top two or three in the world. He could beat anybody when he was up, and I mean anybody. But how you gonna stay up through a whole tournament when you already got it all, huh? When you got everything? You can’t, that’s what. You just can’t. No way. And that was his one weakness—he had it all. He always did.”

Jagger sighed. “Good old Eddie. Always been queer for me.”

Eddie, bristling, slammed a rock against the wall. “I told you not to say that anymore!”

Jagger raised a hand in surrender. “Hey, I’m sorry, little buddy. Peace, okay? Go to sleep. Rest your eyes. I’m gonna need them.”

Eddie sat there, abruptly speechless, all his anger suddenly love again, an anguish of love. “No, you ain’t,” he said finally. “You gonna see again, Jag. Just like I said. I promise.”

“Sure. Sure, Eddie.” And suddenly Jagger was crying again, shaking and blubbering in Eve’s arms.

Stone looked at her and she lowered her eyes, as if she were ashamed of something.

As the fire brightened against the darkening night Stone wondered if the others sensed as strongly as he did what an ironic and pathetic tableau they presented, sitting there on the dirt floor of a small cavelike room staring at a fire burning in the entrance, protecting them against—what?—mastodons, sabertoothed tigers, other tribes? And it struck him how unbelievably cataclysmic the last eleven months had been, to the point now where he and this trio of strangers could gather like troglodytes in a cave and not even mention it, not discuss at all that terrible descent, the collapse of civilization as they had known it and as they had thought it would always be—and as it would have been too, Stone believed, except for the swine the people had elected to govern them through the Sixties and Seventies. From the thousand silly days of Kennedy on through the moral and fiscal debaucheries of Johnson and Nixon followed by the bland incompetence of Ford and the tiny man who owned to his mediocrity as “Jimmy,” and on to this last and final clown, all had bent like ragweed before the winds of special interest, the old and the poor no different from the black and female, farmers and laborers the
same as big business, ecofreaks the same as strip miners. Instead of standing up to them and saying no you cannot have this or that all-important thing because we are poor now, because we are almost broke—instead of that small courage, this company of twits, this coterie of Olympian pissants, all thought ahead to reelection and smiled and scraped
and printed money
, printed it until the paper was worth more than the legends on it, printed it until the world stood ass-deep in the stuff, printed it until the presses became like infernal machines incapable of pause, roaring on toward the final inevitable explosion.

And all that time no one seemed to have even the dimmest notion of what a price everyone would ultimately have to pay for this profligacy. Oh, Stone had been vaguely aware of occasional lonely crackpot Jeremiahs on the economic front predicting untold calamities ahead, which probably was the reason gold and Swiss francs and old comic books had risen in value so dramatically, surpassing even the heady rate of the general inflation. But on television and in the newspapers and the magazines he read, he could not remember hearing or seeing one word about what an economic collapse might actually be like in the modern world, no prescient voice pointing out that if a crash were to occur, it would be different from past collapses not just in degree but in
kind
, as a nuclear explosion was different from the noises of gunpowder.

In the Great Depression—which now would have to be renamed, he reflected, if anyone was still in the naming business—then, America still had been a rural nation, with most of her citizens living on farms and in small towns. They had gardens and chickens and pigs and milk cows. Their water came from hand-pumped wells and they defecated into holes under outhouses and fed their garbage
to their animals. They lived among relatives and friends, and thus were able to help each other. And above all, they lived under the rule of law, fearing the ministrations of both an Old Testament God and local police departments unencumbered by the strictures of modern civil rights legislation. And so they had gotten by, somehow had muddled through until Hitler put them all back to work.

But things were different this time. So very different. Now, when the world’s holders of dollars finally panicked and began dumping them, rightly concluding that Washington could no longer control its spending, they had started a calamity apparently without end, a collapse that simply went on and on. In the beginning there had been the predictable runs on banks, followed by the predictable closings and timid reopenings as the government quickly bowed to public pressure. But even then, the people got nothing out of the banks except paper, hastily printed dollars losing value at a rate even the Washington bureaucrats could no longer calculate, for suddenly there was almost no one who would trade a thing of value for them. Suddenly everyone saw them for what they were: rag paper and green ink, and nothing more. And the store owners began locking their doors to preserve what assets they had left, farmers decided to hold on to their crops, and workers stopped going to work—why waste time earning something of no value? Only the welfare constituency—the poor, the old, the handicapped—clung to their faith in the government, specifically in the millions of spiffy blue-green computerized checks printed and mailed by the Treasury twice a month. But when the people found that even these miraculous instruments had no more value, could no longer be converted into the things they needed in order to live—it was then the rioting began. Supermarkets
were the first to go, followed by the fast food outlets, then stores of any kind, and finally private homes and apartments. Suddenly all was at risk: one’s wallet, one’s house and car, one’s life.

Stone would not soon forget those first long months after the crash. His apartment had been on the fifth floor of a hilltop building west of the park, so he had had a grand view of the city’s demise, whole blocks and neighborhoods in it going up in flames night after night. He kept thinking of himself as a character in an old black-and-white World War II movie, a lone refugee sitting through the bombing of Britain.

It was a time when everyone still expected the federal government to regain control of the situation, and in truth Washington did try in every way possible, at all its myriad levels. The National Guard was promptly moved into the city to quell the rioting and restore order, as in other large cities across the nation. And army truck convoys from Fort Leonard Wood streamed into town loaded with food—canned meats and vegetables and flour and beans—which was distributed free at points all around the city. The government outlawed the buying and selling of gold and silver, and after a time the Treasury issued uncountable billions of “bluebacks,” new dollars printed in a purplish blue ink instead of green and pegged at the December 1979 purchasing power of the old dollar. Unfortunately there was nothing behind the bluebacks except a sense of desperation and hope, and the colorful currency soon went the way of its green predecessor, rapidly becoming only paper again, wheelbarrows of it.

Early on, the government had decreed martial law. And it enjoined the great mining companies to maintain coal shipments to the nation’s utilities, which in turn were enjoined
to continue supplying power to their customers—whether or not those customers were able to pay for the service. And it was the same for water and gasoline and natural gas, as well as for garbage collection and police and fire protection—all the essential delivery systems were to remain intact. But governmental fiat somehow did not function as smoothly as the profit motive, and interruptions and breakdowns in service soon were epidemic. Mountains of garbage formed in the streets and in time were set afire, creating a smoldering whitish acrid smoke fouler even than that spewed out by the area’s vast chemical plants when they still had been operating. The air was all but unbreathable. The old and the sick died. The living spilled their sewage out of windows and drank foul water that dribbled intermittently from the city’s taps. And throughout the day they scurried through the smoky streets carrying precious containers of water and kerosene and what food they could find or barter for.

In midwinter the army’s food shipments dwindled and then dried up altogether—just as the black market began to reach into every corner of the economy. And it was a seller’s market: your Cadillac for my carton of cigarettes, your kingdom for my steak. And the rumors—the truths—began. Whole companies of National Guard and army troops had deserted and set up shop in various sections of the city as privateer forces dedicated to their own enrichment by any means possible, including pillage and blackmail and murder. In a little over three months the city lost half its population, as the upper classes fled to mountain resorts or Canada or overseas while those with less money simply tried to make it into the country, to the farm or small-town home of some relative or friend.

Rural sections of the country, including most of Appalachia
and the Ozarks and the Great Plains, as well as most areas in the Rocky Mountain states, were reputed to be in comparatively good order, suffering none of the tumult afflicting the urban areas. But as Stone understood it, from rumor and intermittent radiocasts, no large city or suburban area had escaped the plague. From the drab row houses of Boston to the opulent estates of Beverly Hills, the story everywhere was the same—the nation had gone mad. And some cities apparently had suffered even more than St. Louis. In Detroit the combination of gale force winds and rampant arson had unleashed a firestorm in which thousands died. Elsewhere, in New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, the situation evidently was identical to that in St. Louis: fire, hunger, race war, terror.