In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  As soon as Ben said there was no liquor in her blood, Tom remembered the smell of whisky on her clothes and skin. Once again, he was kneeling over her, his face close to her muddy face, her blank eyes.

  Ben leaned against the fender of his truck and shut his eyes for a moment. Tom thought he might collapse. He’d seen that before, people’s legs giving way when they were overwhelmed with grief. Ben took two deep breaths, then opened his eyes.

  “I asked you to help the other day. I shouldn’t have done that. You don’t owe us nothing. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I’ve been blaming you. I wanted it to be you. You don’t come from here. If it’s not you, then who is it? You never knew her in the city?”

  “No,” Tom said. “I never knew her in the city.”

  “She wasn’t drinking. She kept her promise and I didn’t keep mine. I started drinking.” He shook his head in pain at his betrayal of his granddaughter’s trust. “I’ve quit. I went to her grave and I said, ‘Please forgive me.’ I shouldn’t have asked for your help. You don’t...” He paused, as if uncertain how to finish saying what he was going to say, and took a deep breath.

  Tom finished the sentence for him, not out loud but in the echo chamber that his skull had become. Belong. You don’t belong.

  “Maybe you should take a couple of days off,” Tom said.

  Ben shook his head. “No money coming in. We live close to the bone here. You’ll see. No jobs with big money. You wanna eat, you gotta make wages every day. No credit from Horst for me. Betty was from the reserve. Him and Karla, they don’t like Indians.”

  “There’s a false floor in Frenchie’s truck. You said you never got the good stuff anymore. What is the good stuff he hides under the floor?”

  “Pickerel fillets,” Ben replied bitterly, his anger now having a safe focus. “I used to take a few pounds to sell off the back of the truck. It was just a few bucks. Maybe twenty, thirty dollars for each guy. But then the Whites got involved. They wanted to go big time. They always want to go big time. I didn’t want to, so they gave their contract to Frenchie. He had the restaurants and butcher shops all lined up. They’d take all he could supply. All back-door stuff. Cash money. Cheaper than retail. No record. The taxman never sees any of it. You keep your mouth shut about it. Everyone would have years of income tax to pay if the government ever found out. Besides, it’s not like anybody is getting rich. It just means they get to live like normal people. They’ve got to be careful, though. They can’t put it in the bank. A lot of them sleep uneasy on their mattresses. Think of it as their private retirement plan. Their kids’ college education plan.”

  “You’re not in it?”

  “Not anymore. I had a few old customers for a while, but I lost those. Every dollar. Frenchie wants every dollar. The Whites know buyers. I could have bought Angel a guitar if I was still hauling the fillets. I don’t blame the guys. They’re getting bigger money. They’re not hurting anybody except the taxman, and that’s not hurting anybody except the pricks in Ottawa.”

  “Nothing to do with Angel?” Tom asked.

  Ben shook his head. “She had nothing to do with fish. She had planned on getting an ice cream job at White’s. She kept her money in a big glass pickle jar. Wages aren’t good, but the tips are.”

  “That’s the waitresses,” Tom said. “Not the ice cream girls.”

  The thunderhead was moving toward them more quickly now. It was close enough that they could see the white line on the surface of the water where the rain was hammering down from the clouds. Where they stood, it was still calm, hardly a ripple, hardly a breeze, the trees motionless, the sunshine sparkling on the water. Lightning bolts made jagged lines and sheet lightning raced through the clouds. The first sudden blasts of wind struck them and Ben raised his hand, then climbed into his truck and backed away. Tom waited for another minute, his eye on the approaching lightning, then went into his house, pulled the door tight and lowered the windows. He hoped, as the first squall of rain struck, that there were no boaters, deceived by the sunlight, who had lingered too long on the lake.

  The thunderhead passed over, a dark mass of churning clouds, and a lightning bolt struck so close that thunder shook the house. The sharp smell of ozone filled the air. With the lightning came the rain, sudden, hard, driving straight down, ripping the tips off the spruce trees and flinging them into puddles. The rain slammed against the roof, so loud that if anyone had been with him they couldn’t have heard each other shout. Lightning struck all around, and then the wind appeared, jerking, twisting gusts of it, and he felt the house shudder.

  Darkness had engulfed Valhalla, and then with each lightning strike, everything lit up for a moment, bleached white.

  Anything left loose was flying through the air. He was glad his supplies were in the house. He wished he’d picked up bits of sawed-off ends. They’d end up in the swamp, in the forest, on the lake, maybe in Oz. He hoped they wouldn’t end up through anyone’s window.

  It had become so dark that he switched on the lights in the kitchen. He put water on for coffee, but before the water could boil, the electricity went off. He rummaged in a drawer for a flashlight and went to the shed at the back door. There was a wooden box. He looked in and saw kindling and a few sticks of wood left over from the winter. He found a paper bag with more paper bags stuffed into it, took one, crumpled it and put it into the wood stove. He added a few pieces of kindling and two small pieces of split wood. He knew that the electricity would come back after the storm was over. He waited in the kitchen, turning on his flashlight every so often to see if the water was boiling, and when it was ready he carefully poured the water as the kitchen filled with light, then was plunged into darkness.

  His favourite place in the house was the front porch. From there he could watch the sun rise, watch the surface of the water change from silver to azure, watch the night gradually steal away the horizon. The shutters were partially up, and he closed all but one that looked out onto the lake. It had become so dark that he couldn’t see the nearest trees. Then lightning flashed, showing the tall spruce thrashing about in the wind, beyond them waves breaking as far as he could see, their white edges threatening as knives, then total darkness, but the image remained on his eyes like the afterimage from a strobe. He was blind, then suddenly, without warning, was given sight and could see everything in exquisite detail.

  He felt a kind of nervous excitement about the storm, like the house was a ship in a gale, with the rain beating on it, the wind making it shudder. His coffee was strong and sweet with condensed milk. Then all at once a terrible loneliness crept over him, a loneliness like he’d felt in his parents’ apartment as he watched the street from the corner window on nights when the rain swirled, or the snow whipped along the street, and he saw people hurrying by and wished he could go with them, wherever they were going, for he imagined that there was always a family waiting for them, expecting them, glad to see them safely home. His face felt sunken, as though it had lost most of its flesh, and his body felt weak, the way it had felt when he’d been ill with the flu and his mother had let him stay home from school. He wished now that he had a partner, a friend, a lover to sit beside, to share the storm with, to marvel at the imprinted images of the trees and waves, to comfort and reassure each other under a blanket.

  The storm was from the northeast, and that meant that the waves would pile up on the shore, batter the north dock, surge over top of it. Experienced boaters knew to anchor close to the centre of the harbour because when the waves broke over the dock, they would send heavy spray flying through the air, enough spray that it could fill a boat and sink it. He went to the living room and was rewarded with thunder and lightning so close he didn’t have time to count the seconds between them and saw the waves breaking high over the reef in great white crests. There was a steady roar of waves breaking on the shore. With the intermittent shrieking of the wind under the eaves, the pounding of the waves, the thrashing of the trees, no cries for help could
be heard, not from a sinking ship or from a house. The gods of thunder and lightning, of wind, made rescue impossible and everyone had to ride out their own storm in their own way.

  Lightning flashed again and he saw a garbage can from the dock flying through the air, frozen in time. When the lightning flashed again, the garbage can was gone. The tenters on the beach would have been driven off. If they were inexperienced and hadn’t folded their tents and retreated to their vehicles before the storm reached them, their chances of rescuing their equipment had quickly passed. If they had realized the danger soon enough, they’d have everything packed inside their vehicles.

  The rain and wind pounded the house for two hours, then the wind eased and the rain fell straight down like a waterfall. The drumming of the rain on the roof gradually slackened, then diminished to a quick swish of sudden gusts. The lightning and thunder had been swept southwest. The crack of lightning and the roll of thunder were gradually fading. When sheet lightning flashed, he could see the ground covered in large puddles.

  The lights in the kitchen flickered on, then off, paused, and then turned on again.

  The dark, low clouds brought night earlier than usual. He searched for a pair of rubber boots. When he went out, there were lights in one of the four dormers of White’s Emporium, but the store and café were dark.

  The windows of the one-room cabins were lit, and vehicles hunched in front of them like dark beasts. Valhalla was a long way from the city for a day’s fishing trip. Better to overnight it. Drive there, get a boat into the water, maybe get a few hours fishing in, fish all the next day, fish the following morning. Most fishermen came for more than that, for five days, maybe a week if they had the time. Fishermen were always leaving and others arriving.

  The fishermen were nearly all male. Two to a cabin. Father and son. Brothers. Fishing buddies. Occasionally, a husband and wife, the sort of wife who could drink a beer with the boys, gut her own fish, handle a boat and trailer.

  As he stood there, in the middle of a puddle, he wondered if Travis had asked for the names and addresses of everyone staying in the cabins on the night Angel died. Men on their own, boozing, bored, looking for local action maybe. If he were in charge, it would have been the first place he looked.

  It wasn’t his problem anymore. The Whites were supposed to keep the names and addresses, the licence plate numbers of their renters. He wondered then, for an instant, how far back the Whites’ records went. There were places that kept them for decades, back to their beginnings, particularly if anyone important had stayed. It was a source of pride, and usually promotion. A prince or a movie star, a wealthy businessman, a politician slept and fished here.

  He waded through puddles until he was close enough to Freyja’s house to see that there were no vehicles in her yard except her Jeep. He felt relieved, then foolish, for how would he explain what he was doing if he were seen—that he had been worried, that against his best intentions, he’d allowed himself to care. Still, he waited there in the shadow of a birch until he saw Freyja pass a kitchen window. He thought he would go back to his house, and then that he wouldn’t.

  It was a good time for exploring, because people shunned the outdoors when everything they touched was water laden. The air was still damp, and the temperature had dropped, but soon it would be warm again.

  He thought about what Mindi Miner had said, the classifications he’d made of who could have killed Angel, if she’d been killed. Some of the new drugs were hard to detect, maybe were undetectable. Cults were always strange, led by one or more people who thought they had divine connections. They attracted the weird and the desperate. If they were like the group on the beach, the group Morning Dawn was so afraid of, anything was possible.

  He went past the store, walked on the grass because the surface of the road had turned to mud, followed the road as it curled away among trailers and houses to the path that led north through the bush. The path was little used and overgrown with grass. Branches crowded each side and grass grew high in the centre. Vehicles had pushed down the grass to form two tracks. The rain had brought silence, for the wet muted everything, made the air heavy. In the distance, lightning cracked and thunder rolled. Because of the clouds, the trees were deep in darkness.

  There were few cottages between the village and the Odin group’s settlement. Or so Sarah had said. The cottages started north of the settlement. Not many, maybe twenty, tucked among the trees, fronting on the water.

  The clouds were breaking up. Intermittently, moonlight would light up the ground. The first thing he saw was an outline of a series of peaked roofs set one against the other. The roofs made a row of six sharp angles. Then there was a space and six more. He stood still as a cloud obscured the moon. When moonlight flooded the open ground, Tom made out the upper edge of a Viking ship. The high prow with the dragon head, the long curved line of the gunwale were fierce against the sky. He bent down to look at the keel, but it was obscured by shadow. The ship was set on wooden cradles. He reached out and felt the clinker-built sides. He stepped back to get a broader view. The mast was not up. It would not be raised until the ship was on the water.

  “May I help you,” a voice said from behind him. Startled, he turned to face a small gnarled man, a dwarf. Not quite a dwarf, he thought, maybe five feet tall.

  “Sorry,” Tom said. “Just curious. A Viking longship?”

  “We built it here. It would have taken the Vikings six weeks. It took us more than a year.”

  “Is it just decorative or is it functional?”

  “We sail it every season.”

  The dwarf turned on his flashlight and played it over Tom’s face and upper body. The sound of rain dripping into puddles was loud in the silence. Finally, he said, “Constable Parsons, I am Brokkr. Would you like a tour?”

  “Yes,” Tom said, surprised that he was known. He wasn’t surprised at the constable title, though, a generic term that people frequently used. “I’d like a tour.”

  The rain dripping from the trees and bushes, the early darkness that pooled around everything, seemed to weigh against talking, against making any noise as he followed Brokkr past one, then another hut. “How many huts?” he asked.

  “Twenty. At the moment there are ten in use. Plus our longhouse.”

  Brokkr opened the door to one hut, turned on a light, and Tom realized that he had expected not electricity but a flaming torch or, at least, a lamp with a candle in it. There was nothing exceptional about the hut except that three beds were built as benches against three walls. The bed frames had been made of slender tree trunks. The bark had been peeled off and the varnished wood reflecting the electric light gleamed dully. There were two tables and a desk and chairs, a metal stove with a wood box to one side.

  “All built by our people,” Brokkr explained. “They were accountants, teachers, housewives, bankers, librarians, but they learned crafts, learned to use the materials around them, to be in touch with their natural soul.”

  “Sounds like an educated group.”

  “In the beginning they were sophisticates. Mostly from the United States, a few from the British Isles. They learned to touch their true, primitive selves, to commune with nature.”

  “All in praise of Odin,” Tom said.

  Brokkr paused, turned off the light, led the way down two steps to the grass. “We await his return.”

  Outside, a large dark mound loomed before them. Brokkr led him along a stone path that ran parallel to the building to a heavy wooden door. The inside was lit by recessed electric light. Brokkr led the way, but the passageway was low, and he said, “Be careful. People sometimes bang their heads on the beams.” Tom ducked down.

  They entered a long room with people sitting on benches and stools on both sides. The room was divided into thirds lengthwise, with the centre third being a walkway. Halfway down the walkway was a narrow fire pit made of stone and sand. A woman in a loose white gown was sitting on a stool and playing a sitar.

  Tom recogniz
ed the sweet smell of marijuana. Everyone in the room seemed busy. Women were weaving on upright looms, others knitting or spinning. A number of men were carving. Others were working with leather. Everyone was doing a quiet task. Even the children were busy knitting.

  Tom and Brokkr waited in the entrance until the sitar player had finished, then Brokkr motioned Tom to come forward and sit on a bench. In the light, Tom could see that Brokkr’s body was twisted to one side and his head was abnormally large for his body. The young man beside Tom was braiding strands of leather into a rope. He nodded and smiled. Beside him a young woman was spinning wool. She caught Tom’s eye, nodded and smiled, then turned her attention back to the sitar player as the music began again.

  When the sitar player finished and went to sit to one side, a woman began to chant in a high-pitched voice in a language Tom didn’t recognize, then another voice and another joined in. Once all the women were chanting, the men began to join in, not all at once but one at a time. They didn’t stop their work to chant. They were wrapped in silence until the music entered them, caught them up. What had been one person chanting for others was, finally, all, except for Tom, chanting as one. As the music filled the room, Tom wished he knew the words, and he shut his eyes so nothing would distract him from the sound.

  When the singing stopped, everyone sat in silence, mesmerized, and then began to stand up and stretch and move toward a large silver samovar that sat on a wooden table. They made themselves tea.

  Brokkr led Tom to a handsome older man with white hair. He was medium height and had the confident look of someone who was used to being in charge. Brokkr introduced Tom, then stepped back.

  “I am Godi-4,” the man said and held out his hand. “I am the spiritual leader of Odin. Welcome to our great hall. Will you share tea with us?”

  Tom followed him. One of the young women, wearing a modest white shift with blue trim, put a metal ball into his cup, and then filled it with boiling water from the samovar. The smell reminded Tom of tanned deerskin. She lifted out the ball, then handed him the cup.