Valhalla (8 page)

Stone said nothing. He wondered if the little man was being honest or if he was simply frightened at the prospect of carrying on alone with Jagger and Eve.

“Yeah, a guy just wouldn’t know until the moment of truth,” he went on. “I mean, whether he’d do it or not.”

“Eve seems to know.”

Eddie laughed again. “Well, Eve, she’s tough. Smalltown Texas tough. With a couple years in Vegas on top of it, selling the old flesh. So, yeah, I guess maybe she could do it, probably without batting an eye.”

Stone was trying hard not to show his sudden anger. “What do you mean, selling the flesh?”

Eddie shrugged, as if he regretted that he could not tell a lie. “Selling as in a couple hundred bucks a night.”

“You’re quite a friend, aren’t you.”

“Well, ask her. She’ll tell you. When Jag found her, she was being kept by this greasy guinea torpedo. The guy had bet Jag on a match and lost big. Jag took Eve as payment—how about that, huh? Just like slavery. Only Eve could’ve walked, of course, except she dug Jag and decided to stay.”

“One big happy family.”

Eddie considered that. “Well, we used to be, I guess. And I think we will be again—when Jag gets his sight back.”

“Good old Jag.” Stone put out his cigarette and got up. “We better sleep while we can.”

He went back into the other room and got down on the
floor again, angling the upper part of his body onto the lumpy backpack. As he squirmed for a comfortable position, he looked over at Eve on the couch. Her mouth was slightly open and he could see her teeth, he could see her tongue. She had one arm crooked under her head, using it as a pillow, while the other hung to the floor, where her hand rested, limp and elegant. He wondered if he hated her as much as he wanted her.

Disgusted with himself, he rolled over, facing the wall. Before closing his eyes, he checked his watch, an electric Bulova, and found that it had stopped at two o’clock, probably for good, its battery dead. And oddly, instead of disappointment he felt only a grim amusement. It struck him that the watch was a thoroughly fitting timepiece for a modern American, in his modern American world. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep.

At first light, he woke and went outside, using the back door. He intended only to stretch his legs and to urinate, but a sudden pressure in his bowels led him on toward the decrepit outhouse. The morning was a carbon of the day before, both misty and sunny, with the tall grass so wet his pants were soaked by the time he reached the tiny structure. Dank and dirty inside, it smelled more of mold than of excrement. Nevertheless it served his needs, and when he emerged from it he was feeling unexpectedly good, almost as if he had spent the long night not alone on a hard floor but in bed with a woman. And then just as quickly the feeling was gone, as he saw beyond the house, legless in the ground fog, an armed young black man leaning against the broken-down rail fence.

Crouching, Stone moved to his right, until the house blocked the man’s view of him. Then he sprinted for the
back door, throwing it open and charging through the kitchen and into the living room, where he found the others huddled timidly under the guns of two white men who were standing just inside the front door. The older one, a redneck farmer type, grinned amiably at him.

“Come on in, boy,” he said. “No need to be bashful.”

Once the strangers realized that Stone and the others posed no threat to them, they lowered their weapons and called outside for the black man to come on in. The older one, the leader, even went so far as to shake hands all around.

“Name’s Smiley Baggs, and this here’s Oral O’Brien,” he said, introducing the other white man, a lean long-haired youth wearing a buckskin jacket and cowboy boots and hat. Cold-eyed and expressionless, he barely nodded.

When the old man came to Jagger, he kidded him for not responding to his outstretched hand. “What’s the matter, boy—you don’t like hillbillies?”

“He can’t see,” Eve explained. “He was blinded a couple of days ago. Our plane went down.”

Baggs looked genuinely chagrined. He patted Jagger on the shoulder and apologized, saying how sorry he was and that he hadn’t meant any harm but was just a dumb Okie with his foot in his mouth most of the time.

The third man had come in from outside and Stone saw
that he was Mexican or Puerto Rican, not black. Like the other youth, his attitude was one of glum hostility. He did not even nod as Baggs introduced him.

“And this here’s Spider. Don’t ask me his last name, ’cause I cain’t pernounce it.”

“Dominguez,” the youth hissed. “Dome-een-gez.”

“That’s it, all right,” Baggs laughed.

Eddie then did the honors for the four of them, describing Stone as “our rescuer, our shepherd. He just came along two days ago, and he’s been looking after us ever since.”

With each introduction, Baggs smiled and said, “Pleased to meetcha.” His partners said nothing. Finally he took off his hat and sagged onto the davenport, grunting and sighing.

“Yessir, this is purty damn all right up here. It’s jist a bit more like home, that’s what it is. We was camped out down below on the crick last night and we seen smoke up here, jist comin’ outen the trees. So we decided to have a gander this mornin’. And goldang if we don’t find sumpin I didn’t even know existed. Been livin’ in these parts all my life, and I didn’t know there was a house up here. Don’t that beat all?”

As the old man rambled on, Jagger kept asking what was going on and Eddie tried to fill him in, describing the three men and trying to reassure him. But Baggs was oblivious of them, busy now explaining what mission the three of them were on. “Some consarned pilgrim” had stolen a five-hundred-pound calf and six laying hens from the lodge, he said, and of course that wasn’t something to be sneezed at, not these days, when a full belly was harder to come by then a milkshake in Hades.

“And of course we’re scavengin’ too,” he went on. “With all them mouths we got to feed at the lodge—well, it’s jist purty much a full time job for damn near ever’body. Way it is for you too, I bet.”

Stone nodded. “Yeah, that’s the name of the game, all right.”

“You bet it is.” Baggs was still smiling, but he was also looking through the kitchen door at the Mason jars on the sink, some of which still held food. “And by the looks of things, I’d say you folks been playin’ the game a mite better’n we have.”

“Yeah, we did find some canned goods here,” Stone said. “You’re welcome to share what’s left.”

He meant only the small amount in the kitchen, but the old man was too fast for him.

“Well, we shore do appreciate that. Mighty neighborly of you.” He looked over at the young cowboy. “Oral, why don’t you hep ’em out a bit—check around and see they didn’t miss nothin’. Maybe there’s a cellar.”

Jagger suddenly started calling for Eddie. “They stealing our food?” he cried. “Huh? Tell me! Tell me!”

“No one’s stealing anything,” Stone broke in. “We’re sharing it, that’s all.”

“The hell we are! And who are you to say anyway, Boy Scout?”

Eddie and Eve both attempted to quiet Jagger, without much success. Stone tried to speak over the ruckus, asking Baggs about the “lodge,” what it was and where it was. Beaming, Baggs explained that it was “jist a little old fishin’ lodge” he had on a lake about three miles away, and over the last couple of months it had been accumulating
“old-timey guests and neighbors and pilgrims” at a clip that simply had to stop.

“Like Spider here,” he said. “He come with this family of Negras whose car jist played out. And Oral, him and his brother Harlan is both with me now. Their daddy was an old friend of mine, with a little old farm outside Spalding. Well, the boys come home one night and find the house and buildins all burned down and their daddy shotgunned and dumped down the privy. So they come with me too.”

“This Spalding,” Stone asked, “is that near your lodge?”

“Jist across the lake.”

“How big?”

“Couple thousand, it used to be.”

“They got a doctor there?”

“Used to. Before the trouble.”

“What trouble?”

Baggs shrugged. “Same gang as burned out Oral’s place, I guess. Must’ve been a mess of them. People cleared out and didn’t come back for a coon’s age. They jist now stragglin’ back.”

“But you don’t know if there’s a doctor?”

“Cain’t say as I do. But there ain’t jist Spalding. There’s also Blackburn about twelve mile up the road. They got three, four doctors there, last I knew. Why? Guess you want one for him, huh?” Baggs nodded toward Jagger, who was silent now.

“Yeah.
They
do anyway,” Stone said, meaning Eve and Eddie. “Then I can go my way. So I was wondering—you going back there? Could you show us the way?”

For a few moments Baggs tried to look dubious, as though he had to give the matter serious thought. Then he gave it up and grinned. “Why the hell not? I could use a
change of company. Old Oral and Spider here ain’t all that swift, are you, boys?”

Neither of them answered.

After sharing a breakfast of canned applesauce, corn, and tomato juice, they all got ready to leave. Baggs had Oral and Spider bring the rest of the precious Mason jars up out of the cellar and supervised their packing in Eddie’s suitcase, among the few items of clothing that the blacks had not carried off. He also packed the butter churn and most of the kitchenware. Then Oral went out into the woods and returned with two horses, one a sturdy pack-horse already burdened with Baggs’ camping equipment. But the animal stoically accepted the new items as well, everything except Stone’s backpack and gun, which Stone preferred to carry himself.

The second horse was Baggs’, a big sorrel that he evidently rode while the younger men traveled on foot. But now he led it over to Eve and helped her up into the saddle. Then he and Eddie repeated the operation with Jagger, placing him behind Eve. Baggs joked that he wouldn’t mind being blind himself if it meant he could hold Eve in his arms all day long, and Jagger told him that he had a great sense of humor and would go far in the world. Baggs looked over at Stone and made a face, that of a man who had just dropped a book in a library.

“Well, let’s get started,” he said. “We ain’t gonna get no smarter here.”

The old man led off, with Stone at his side and Spider and Oral coming after, each leading one of the horses. Next to the one that carried Eve and Jagger, Eddie dutifully trotted alongside, stumbling occasionally, watching his master more carefully than he did the road.

As the column moved on down the two-rutted lane, past the cedar woods where Stone had hunted the day before, he found himself wondering if his only kill, the pitiful groundhog, was still hanging where he had left it or whether the vultures and other scavengers had already done their zestful work. He would never know now, not that it mattered. The lane led to a dirt road, which in turn came to a blacktop that Baggs was not at all wary of, promptly turning onto it. And indeed there seemed to be no reason not to take the road. They passed a number of small Ozark farms, none of which looked abandoned, and no one fired at them. And while they were on the road, two cars, one a late model LTD and the other an ancient Volkswagen Beetle, came shooting past. Stone tried to wave down the LTD, hoping to get Jagger to a doctor sooner, but the car almost ran him down. Baggs laughed at him.

“Boy, don’t you know where you at? This may be a road we’re on, but what it’s runnin’ through is pure jungle. Strickly dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost.”

As they walked on, Baggs told Stone more about his lodge and its inhabitants. Fifteen years ago he “jist fell into it” when the army engineers put a dam on Big Sweet creek. Till then all he had was four hundred acres of Ozark rock and scrub on which he raised a few calves and chickens just so he could pretend he was a farmer. In reality he made his living—“if you could call it that”—with a Case backhoe, digging septic tanks and graves at the Spalding cemetery. But when the army put in the dam—well, suddenly he had about a mile of lakefront property, of which he promptly sold half for the money to put up his fishing lodge. And it “did right well too” for almost ten years, he said, until gas and everything else got so expensive people
had to cut down on their vacations. Even so, he figured he was “sittin’ relative purty compared to most folks these days, what with plenty of water, plenty of bass and firewood and enough land to raise a fair size garden and keep a few horses, cows, and chickens.” In addition, there was the building, he said, the main one plus the six cabins, all made out of logs, all “solid as Gibraltar.”

“And there you got it,” he went on, “—the guts of the problem. You find yourself with all that—in the middle of a jungle. The trick is, how do you hang on to it? Do you and the missus jist load up the shotguns and sit at the windows day and night, ready to blow away any stranger comes amblin’ by? Do you carry on like some starvin’ dog buryin’ ever’ bone it finds?”

“I don’t know,” Stone said. “You tell me.”

“I sure will. No sir, what you do is share the wealth—and the responsibility for holdin’ on to it.”

“Makes sense.”

“You bet it does. So instead of me and the missus tremblin’ in our boots day and night, sittin’ there countin’ our eggs and firewood, I got me a damn little
colony
all my own, and all of ’em dedicated to preservin’ and protectin’ what’s mine. How about that, huh?”

Baggs chuckled at the thought, as if he were putting something over on the whole wide world. And as they went on, Stone had to admit to himself that he found the old man more than a little impressive. Not only did he maintain a quick and steady pace uphill and down, but he was able to do so almost without a break in his rambling monologue, no slight achievement for anyone of any age, and especially for one who had to be in his sixties. And despite the hokey, hillbilly persona he was at such pains to foster, Stone did not for a minute think he was anything
but shrewd and smart, an assessment the old man only reinforced as he expanded on the people who made up his personal little “colony.” Among their number was Awesome Dawson, he said, a black ex-professional football player, along with his wife, his mother, his daughter, and Spider, who had been traveling with them. Their car had broken down near the lodge and, while Baggs had made it a point in normal times never to rent a cabin to a black—“my reg’lars just wouldn’t of stood for it”—he was more than happy to take them in now.