Valhalla (4 page)

Day after day, alone or with Miller, Stone sat in his cramped apartment looking out over the dying city, over the grim cemeterylike treestumps of the once luxuriant park at distant fires lighting up the graceful catenary curve of the arch downtown. Beyond it, he knew, the great river ran in tranquil mockery, reflecting more fires still, as East St. Louis burned brightest of all. And Stone thought about the phenomenon, not just the crash, but why it had been sufficient to devastate the nation so totally, almost like a nuclear strike. He knew that part of the answer lay in the very nature of the modern metropolis, that as the necessities of life came to rest more on technology and the consensual efforts of others, to that degree was the city inhabitant—and the city itself—vulnerable to breakdown. But Europe, which economically was supposed to come down with pneumonia every time America sneezed—Europe apparently was weathering this same financial collapse without suffering anything like the civil disorders in America. So the problem went deeper than the crash
alone. And he wondered if the good old American Way did not figure in somewhere, that heritage of personal freedom which more and more in recent years had seemed to border on license—the right to demand and take what one wanted seemingly as inalienable as the right to bear arms, to own and carry and use the most murderous arsenal in the history of civil populations.

But during the long nights he spent drinking and talking with Miller, he heard a very different rationale. Miller conceded that there was something to what Stone said—both factors certainly had contributed to the breakdown—but they were not the root cause. No, that honor, he insisted, could be laid nowhere else than at the feet of the black man, as the one great lump of alien humanity the republic had not been able to digest and assimilate.

Stone toasted him as “my friend, the racist,” and Miller laughed.

“You poor sap,” he said. “You poor, suicidal, nigger-lovin’ liberal sap.”

Stone shook his head. “Not true. I don’t love anybody.”

“And don’t hate either.”

“That’s right.”

Miller told him to try to be objective for once in his life, that chances were it wouldn’t cause him undue pain or hurt his tender sensibilities. “Just look around you,” he said. “Look at what’s happening every day. And keep in mind that this burg was a wasteland even before the crash—thanks to black crime, black indolence, black hatred.”

“Black magic?”

“They’re the catalyst, my friend, the one key element that’s made this whole simmering melting pot come blowing apart.”

Miller’s attitude was invariably cool, almost professorial,
as if he were discussing aspects of the Minoan civilization instead of his own. The racist’s usual vindictiveness was absent, or at least undetectable, as he would sit there drinking, calmly outlining his brief against the black man.

Whatever the reason for their failure—poverty, discrimination, racism—he said no reasonable man could deny that the Negro had turned America’s cities into virtual battlegrounds where cowed white citizens tolerated levels of crime and filth and violence unmatched anywhere in the modern industrial world. And it was equally apparent, he said, that no matter how many billions of dollars in welfare and housing and “affirmative action” programs a generation of Washington liberals had lavished on the problem, it had only grown worse.

“So when the crash finally came and the welfare checks suddenly turned up paper, your ghetto buddies were more than ready for the challenge. Here, finally, was an environment they understood, a battleground pure and simple, uncomplicated by HEW busybodies with their little bags of goodies ready to hand out in return for feigned docility.”

“You do carry on,” Stone said.

“Now was the time, in their own classy idiom, to let it all hang out. To run up the true colors. To take whatever they could get, however they could get it. And best of all, most important,
now was the time to get Whitey.”

Stone had laughed finally, shaking his head at the outrageousness of it all, at its oversimplicity, its heresy even. And he had pointed out that historically it was the poor and the hopeless who pillaged, and that in St. Louis most of those hopeless poor were black. Also, he said, there were plenty of whites out in the streets too, taking whatever they could get any way they could get it. They were simply
less visible because they were fewer and worked alone or, at most, in pairs. But they were no less violent, he said.

Miller gave him a look of drowsy disgust. “There you go, picking up the torch from Walter. After all these years the tube mercifully goes dead, and I figure I’m finally free, I don’t have to digest all that daily liberal swill anymore. But alas, here he is again, in the flesh—Cronkite reborn!”

Stone would protest again, trying as best he could to defend himself as well as the blacks. Yet, after his friend would leave, returning to his own cheerless apartment, Stone would look out his window at the random fires burning in the night and he would think about what was actually going on out there, what
had
been going on, for weeks and months. And the reality was straight out of Miller: gangs of young blacks moving through the city like locusts through a cornfield. The whites even had a name for them—the Mau Mau—after an infamous late-Seventies gang in New York that had appropriated the old Kenyan name and had terrorized the city by requiring of its initiates that they each kill and mutilate a white.

In St. Louis, while the few remaining police and firemen tried to control the vast daily conflagrations, the gangs would seek out likely neighborhoods and move in, hitting one house after another, breaking in, beating and killing the inhabitants and taking whatever they wanted, sometimes staying on for a day or two if the place was luxurious enough and had enough food and booze to keep them happy. Often they took “slaves,” whites whom they forced to serve them in one capacity or another, usually sexual. Predictably—to Miller anyway—the whites of the city made almost no resistance. It was his belief that the same monotonous decades of eastern liberal media propaganda
that had conditioned the black man to believe he could rob and rape and kill with impunity had conditioned the whites to confusion, impotence, and—even now—guilt. And frustratingly, Stone could not argue the point.

Occasionally, in the beginning, he would hear of various pitched battles between the gangs and the National Guard, but as time went on the Guard just seemed to disappear, along with the army and everyone else who had the wherewithal to get away. Yet a surprising number, like Miller and Stone himself, tried to hold on, going to work occasionally, drawing their bluebacks and spending them in bars and restaurants just as if the sky had not fallen. But whatever they did, they were careful to do it in groups, pooling cars, gasoline, and weapons. The rule was never to be out alone or unarmed, and while it worked most of the time, there had been exceptions.

Huddled in his blanket on the earthen floor, still trying to fall asleep, Stone could not forget his own personal encounters with the Mau Mau. On those increasingly rare days when they tried to make it to the office, he and Miller, in Miller’s car, would run into roadblocks thrown up by the gangs at various points close to the downtown. And like everyone else being stopped, they would dig down and pay the ransom—cigarettes, bluebacks, whatever they had—just to pass on safely. The young blacks, all having a great time, often would spit on the cars or piss on them or stove in a window with a rifle butt if the mood struck. And sometimes, if the victim complained or tried to drive on through, they would riddle the car with gunfire and drag him out and beat him.

And there were other adventures too. Twice Stone was mugged on the street in broad daylight, once by a gang of
young white kids. Another time he was attacked in his apartment stairwell by a black couple, a man and a woman, and he managed to get off one shot—into the air—from his twenty-two pistol, before they broke and ran. And he remembered, would never forget, a noon lunch at Flannery’s bar and grill. Renamed the Blueback, it was a popular place because middle-class blacks working downtown also favored it, and the assumption was that their presence would give it a degree of immunity from the Mau Mau. But the assumption proved wrong, as on this particular day a score of gang members swaggered in and proceeded to eat and drink whatever they wanted, from any table, any plate, until Flannery himself finally lost his Irish temper and tried to herd them out with a shotgun. Instead he was the one shot dead, along with two of his patrons. Others were beaten and raped. All were robbed. Finally the place was set afire. Lunchtime in Old St. Louis.

Often at night Stone would hear people crying out for help, and he would do nothing. During the day he would see people being assaulted, and he would just keep walking like everyone else. Once he stood among a downtown crowd watching a pair of policemen who in turn were watching an old couple being stomped by three armed young black men. No one did a thing. Self-loathing became like a disease.

Then, with the arrival of spring, things began to change. As the few remaining trees indifferently bloomed, the violence for some reason began to decline. Later Stone would learn that the gangs had moved on into the suburbs and the countryside, evidently figuring that they already had picked the city clean. But Stone stayed on, sitting at his window night after night looking out over the burgeoning
greenery at the city’s fires, smaller now that there was so little left to burn. He had no electricity or heat. Water ran at odd hours, at a maddening trickle. Miller finally decided to close the office, and when he invited Stone to go along to his lake cabin, Stone agreed. He had no idea what lay ahead of him or what the countryside might be like, and in truth he did not much care. He felt as he imagined dying men felt in a blizzard, an almost erotic apathy. So he gathered up his few belongings and joined Miller in the heavily loaded Volvo, almost nodding off as they crept out of the city and started southwest on I-44.

When they came upon the barricade Stone was not particularly alarmed because it looked pretty much like those he had encountered almost every day in the city: six or seven young blacks leaning across the hoods of their cars and pickups while two of their leaders stood out in front, flagging down the traffic with their weapons and collecting the “toll” before waving the cars on through. Then Stone noticed the great piles of booty next to the road and in the beds of the pickups and he realized that the roadblock was not the common city variety after all. He realized that in exchange for safe passage these youths were not demanding cigarettes and small change but
everything
, everything one owned.

It was a price Miller chose not to pay.

“Goddamn, we should’ve turned around while we still could,” he said.

The cars behind them were slowing down too, forming a line. Grimacing, he looked over at Stone.

“You better duck.”

Before Stone could say a word, the old man’s skinny leg stiffened on the accelerator and the Volvo leaped ahead,
smacking one of the blacks out in front a millisecond before it roared on into the barricade, in an ear-stunning crash that sent two of the parked cars spinning sideways onto the youths draped over them. But still the Volvo kept moving, clattering now, limping, losing fenders and rubber and glass. And it was then Stone looked over and saw Miller slumped across the wheel, all but headless, his face and brains being scattered across the dashboard by the same shot that had taken out the window next to him. Even as Stone looked, the body began to slump toward the open door next to it, and he reached out and held it steady for a moment, during which the car began to slow and a burst of automatic fire ripped into the trunk from behind. He realized the decision had already been made for him—all he had to do was let go. And he did, watching as his friend slumped out of the car onto the pavement like a messy sack of litter. Then Stone was into the driver’s seat, jamming his foot to the floorboard just as Miller had done. And he was crying. He was raging. He was pounding his fist against the blood-slick dash. His apathy was gone.

During the night Stone woke briefly at the sound of Jagger crying again and Eve attempting to console him, whispering and cooing like a mother with a sick child. The experience of waking into blackness evidently had shaken the tennis star. But as he got control of his voice, he said to her that though he was terrified now—“at being here, blind in this pigsty”—he wasn’t worried about the future, about living blind, because that would never happen, he would kill himself if his sight didn’t return.

Eve put her fingers to his lips and kissed him on the eyes and mouth and neck. Under the blanket her hand moved
to his groin, and her blond hair suddenly spilled in the moonlight, a shower of ice disappearing into his lap. Jagger threw back his head and sighed.

Across the room, Stone’s eyes closed and his hands tightened into fists. He wanted to hit something: the wall, Eddie, Jagger. Most especially Jagger. He longed for daylight.

The morning dawned wet and wondrous, with the sun rising in red shards beyond a heavy ground fog. But it was a beauty Stone and the others did not appreciate, for it had left them wet to the skin under sodden blankets. Quiet and sullen, they all got up and began moving about, changing into drier clothes and hopefully stretching their blankets out in the sun. Eddie and Eve fussed over Jagger, dressing him and helping him every way they could, only to get shoved and vilified for their trouble. Stone doled out a breakfast of two olives and a quarter cup of nuts for each of them, and Jagger called him their Boy Scout sadist.

“He’s getting off on all this,” he said to the others. “He digs it, can’t you see that? I’m blind, but I can see it. Freezing and starving and wet underwear crawling up your ass—he digs it, I tell you, the fucking Boy Scout sadist.”

Nobody responded and he went on, demanding to know where they were headed.

“Southwest,” Stone told him. “Farther into the Ozarks.
We should be getting into calmer country within a day or so. First town with a doctor, or first place you can stay, I’ll drop you off.”