Valhalla (7 page)

“Well, he can start fires anyway.”

Eddie snickered. “You don’t have to be a killer to start fires.”

“Even voyeurs can do it, I hear.”

Stone looked over at Eve, who coolly met his gaze. She had no apologies to make.

“Tell us, voyeur,” Jagger went on. “What was it like, watching it all, huh? Was it exciting? Did you whip it out and give it forty strokes?”

Eddie laughed wildly. “Yeah, I can just see him—binoculars in one hand and his schlong in the other.”

“And I bet I know who he kept the binos on too—the spade!”

Finished with the fire, Stone got up, thinking of the picture he presented, the figure he cut—Jagger’s “Boy Scout” dutifully finishing making them all a fire, after having filled their bellies with food he had found for them, and after having spent almost two days looking after them, wiping their noses, trying to lead them to safety—after all that, here he stood listening to them dump on him as if he were some sort of hilariously pathetic whipping boy. But the anger he felt was cold and cerebral, more disgust than anything else. It was sufficient, however, to cause him to walk over to them now, in two swift strides that ended with his seizing both men by their jackets and lifting them sputtering off the sofa and throwing them backwards, onto the dusty wood floor. Jagger screamed like a ripsaw, but Eve did not move to help him, for Stone had turned on her now.

“You’re on your own,” he said. “In the morning I cut out. And for your information, I didn’t shoot the black because when I saw him he was already through with you. He was already leaving. Killing him wouldn’t have changed one damn thing.”

“So you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, then.”

“That’s right.”

“Then how come you didn’t tell us you saw it all?”

“Would you have understood?”

She continued to look at him, her eyes grave, unfrightened, unimpressed. “No,” she said. “And I don’t now. And I never will.”

Stone slept badly that night, partly because the wood floor of the living room proved even less comfortable than
the bare ground of the night before. He had propped himself up against his backpack and had his blanket wrapped almost double around him, but nothing made any difference. He would sleep for an hour or so, squirming and fighting the floor, dreaming of things that had his heart pounding hard each time he woke. And then he would lie there in the firelight of the open-doored potbellied stove and look at the others across the room: Eve and Jagger sardined against each other on the sofa and Eddie on the floor almost at their feet, tossing there as restlessly as Stone, after a game but futile attempt to stretch out on the treacherous springs of the mattressless bed. Jagger talked in his sleep and once Stone woke and saw him crying silently, lying there on his side staring at the stove light while the tears spilled over his nose and down his face. Of the three of them, only Eve slept soundly, almost as if she had spent the day swimming and sunbathing instead of as she had.

For Stone of course there was another reason why he slept so poorly, and that was his failure to fire on the blacks. Awake, he kept hammering away at the subject like a man practicing on a handball court, interminably hitting the same ball against a wall. He kept thinking of how he would have felt if he had fired and hit the black and then run all the way down to the bend to look upon his kill, only to find a
man
lying there, a human being bleeding away his life just as the groundhog had. And Stone knew that at that moment he would have taken on a burden of guilt he would never have been able to put down, not all the rest of his days. In his mind rape was one of the most despicable of crimes, sometimes even deserving of capital punishment. But who was he to take on himself the role of executioner? No, he felt he had done the right thing, the
only thing he could have done, given his lights as a reasonably moral man.

And yet he was nagged by contrary arguments every bit as valid. When he had seen the rapist getting up from Eve, he had not known whether Jagger and Eddie were dead or alive. In fact, he had thought they probably
were
dead. But it had made no difference. And then too he knew it had crossed his mind, more as an increasingly instinctive fear than as a conscious thought, that the two young blacks were probably not alone, that their main party might have been nearby somewhere, and that if he had shot at them he might have brought the whole gang down on Eve and the others, as well as on himself. So self-preservation, simple old gut fear, had entered in too. And he wondered if Eve had not sensed this in his failure to shoot. He wondered if that was not the true reason for her new contempt of him. But finally, after making all the rounds of the argument once again, he would conclude that none of it cut any ice. All that mattered finally was that he had not found it in him to murder a man in cold blood, and that was the only way he could think of the incident. There was no way to shoot a man blowing a kiss except in cold blood, as an execution. So he would pretend to himself that he had settled the matter, that it was over and done. And he would sleep again, briefly, only to wake and find himself on the handball court once more, hitting the same old ball over and over.

Finally he got up, with the blanket still wrapped around him, and went into the kitchen and sat down at the flimsy dinette table. He longed for a cigarette, but he knew that even if Eve had any left, he would not take one, not from her, not now. So he just sat there in the frigid room, staring across the table at the kitchen pump as though he
halfway expected the thing to speak to him, to whisper again Jagger’s imprecation:
voyeur
. For he was not unaware how snugly the incident at the creek bend fit the pattern of his life. Stone the spectator, the observer, the outsider—that was how he had always perceived himself, no matter how the facts might have argued otherwise. The reality was that he and his family had been insiders, not outsiders. Until college, he had lived in only two houses in all his life, both of them in Colorado Springs. And his paternal grandparents had lived in the same city; his mother’s people in Denver. He had had an older sister and a younger brother. He had been active in the Boy Scouts—something he would never tell Jagger. He had been an honor student, a joiner, and a jock, a first-string defensive back on his high school football team and the second-best middleweight wrestler in the school conference. He had dated and fornicated and drunk beer, drawing the line only at hard liquor and drugs because he was an athlete. In short, he had been about as typically apple-pie American as you could get: young, white, successful, attractive, comfortable.

Yet somehow he had always felt like a stranger in his own body, an alien wandering through his life. Nothing had been quite what it seemed to be. His grandfather, a motel owner and civic booster, had been an extrovert’s extrovert, a glad-handing Kiwanian who ignored his own son and his son’s family almost entirely, probably because the son—Stone’s father—was a reclusive, reticent tinkerer, an engineer who came home from the laboratory at work only to retreat immediately to his basement workshop, where he fashioned arcane microcomputer components, which eventually led to his establishing his own company and building it up to a point where he finally
sold it for enough money, he said, to see him “the rest of the goddamn way.” He and Stone’s mother had always slept in twin beds and the only times Stone ever saw them kiss was when his father would leave on a business trip, a listless peck as if to keep his spouse mindful of the tepidity of their relationship. His mother as a result was mostly confused, impulsively loving and hateful by turns, neurotic and valetudinarian the older she got. She was polite with Stone, somehow confused by him, reserving her strongest feelings for his siblings: fury and hatred for his older sister, a strong-willed girl who ultimately became a Washington lawyer; and an overwrought, tearful, smothering love for his sickly younger brother, Roger, who died of kidney failure at eighteen.

So Stone had tried to get by as best he could, mostly just going through the motions of his life, a good student, a good athlete, but deadly cool about it all, a youth who neither shouted nor bellylaughed, ever. The Vietnam years he spent at Boulder studying business administration and protesting the war along with everyone else, but mildly, never going so far as to pull down a flag or burn his draft card. A groin injury, sustained in a wrestling match during his senior year, kept him out of the armed services for good, and ultimately required corrective surgery. Free, he naturally left home for faraway places, finally choosing the impersonal sunshine and anomie of Southern California, where he met and married Jennifer, mostly because she was beautiful and would not go to bed with him except as his wife. And he went to work in a public relations agency, keeping his distance though, still the observer, only now watching the carnivores at work, the real go-getters. And at home he muddled through four years of marriage before he finally realized that Jennifer, a Mormon,
had based their whole relationship on the expectation that he would ultimately convert to her faith and return with her to Utah to be fruitful and multiply. Instead he walked out. Then the job had gone sour and he had moved on to other ones, and finally back to Denver for a few years, then to St. Louis.

And that had been his life, about as empty and boring a thirty-four years as one could have, no more really than a sleepwalk—until this last year, of course, until the times had slapped him rudely awake. Now an exciting life was all but unavoidable, even for a spectator, a voyeur, like himself. It seemed there was no alternative now except to live or die. The middle ground had disappeared.

He thought of his last conversation with Jennifer, on the phone from St. Louis to Ogden. She had married again, a Mormon this time, and was expecting her second child. Recently returned from Los Angeles, she told him of the conditions there, how all of Southern California now was virtually a province of Mexico. One heard Spanish more than English and the Mexican flag flew almost everywhere, even over public buildings. The earlier Chicano-black race wars had subsided, with the Chicanos the clear victors. And the whites, who had sat on the sidelines till it was too late, made one last attempt at reasserting their hegemony, with their police, their National Guard, their weaponry. But they too finally had broken before the awesome numbers of the Mexicans, the hungry and penniless hordes with absolutely nothing to lose and very little to gain either. Over a million whites had moved north and east, she said. There had been starvation. Recalling it all, she had cried on the phone. And she had said she still loved him, still prayed for him every night.

A glutton for punishment, he had called his parents that
same night, and heard much the same story. The Mexes, as his father called them, were everywhere, them and their fucking flags. He and Stone’s mother had to sleep in shifts, to keep the bastards from climbing right through their windows at any hour. And the niggers were no better, only fewer. Thank God he still had a case of twelve-gauge shotgun shells left. The two of them were down to eating soybeans now, had bought about five bushels of them, tasty as sawdust any way you prepared them. By winter the two of them would be dead, his father said, that was for certain. But meanwhile he was staying right where he was. The house was paid for. A Mex had offered him two gold coins for it and he had run the man off with the shotgun. In ’seventy-nine, a realtor had told him he could get one hundred and thirty thousand dollars for the place, and that’s just what he should have done, he said, sold it and bought gold, moved to Canada or New Zealand, anyplace where the Mexes and niggers were not.

When his mother’s turn on the phone came, all she could do was cry. Stone told her that he loved her, and then he said goodbye and good luck. And that was that.

Most of the time he tried not to think about his parents, for there was really nothing he could do, even if he had been able to get to Colorado. He wished that he loved them more. He wished that they loved each other more. And indeed he believed that it was not too late for them, that they just might find in adversity a closeness that had eluded them through all the years of prosperity. He hoped so anyway. It was about all he could do.

Suddenly, in the other room, he heard someone moving about, putting wood on the fire. Then Eddie came into the kitchen, blinking and coughing.

“So here you are,” he said to Stone. “What’s the matter—couldn’t sleep?”

Stone did not answer. Eddie sat down at the table. He got out a pack of cigarettes and shook loose a pair, giving one to Stone. Disconsolately he regarded the thinning pack.

“Jesus, four more left. When they’re gone, I die.”

Stone lit both cigarettes and dragged hungrily on his, grateful for the little man’s generosity. He said nothing, though. He was not about to forget the acrimony of a few hours before. But Eddie was.

“Hey, I’m sorry about all that earlier. You were right to lean on us.”

“I thought so.”

“Yeah, but you got to understand—Jag just ain’t himself since the plane crash. He’s scared, you know? And who wouldn’t be? So he strikes out at everybody. He wants us to hurt like he does.”

“But normally he was a pretty sweet guy, huh?”

Eddie laughed. “No way. He’s always liked to throw his weight around—but with a sense of humor, you know? Like, girls used to give him motel keys and he’d give the keys away to other girls, tell them he was gonna meet them there.”

“Funny.”

“Well, maybe not too. I just mean he meant well. Like calling you Boy Scout. He’s always got a name for everyone. Me, I got a dozen of them, everything from Eddie Asskisser to Gophernose. It don’t bother me.”

“Congratulations.”

“I just mean, don’t let him get to you.”

“I don’t intend to. I’m leaving in the morning, remember?”

Frowning, Eddie thought about that. He took a drag on his cigarette and carefully tapped it out, putting the butt back in the pack. “About all that,” he said. “I mean what Eve told us—I understand, believe me. To just blow a man away—I don’t think I could do it either, not unless I was there, you know? I mean, threatened, like I was.”