In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  He rose and Tom rose with him, uncertain what he should do.

  “You can find your own way out. Here.” He picked up a red rubber ball. “Throw this over the roof on your way out. Show it to the dogs first. They will chase it. Then scoot up the driveway. They never go farther than the end of the driveway. Nothing in their universe is more important than chasing this ball.”

  Tom staggered as far as Sarah’s. She opened the door and he grinned foolishly, stumbled over the threshold. She pulled out a chair for him and he slumped into it. He ranted about Helgi History and chess, but his mind couldn’t focus, and he told her he was going to meet with Siggi and have a discussion about his treatment of Freyja.

  “Don’t go there,” Sarah said as she handed him a bowl of skyr. “Here. Food and coffee will help. Visiting Helgi History is dangerous. If he dislikes you, he’ll sic his dogs on you. If he likes you, he’ll drink you to death.”

  Tom sat with his head back and his eyes wide open. “I haven’t felt like this since I got drunk as a teenager,” he said. “The room keeps trying to spin like Albert’s trees.”

  “If you need to puke, do it outside.”

  “I thought I might be able to talk to Siggi,” he said stubbornly.

  “His friends are Freemen on the Land. No rules apply to them. No laws. They think that by calling some place an embassy, the law can’t touch them. That’s no ordinary building. It’s a survivalist bunker. Johnny Armstrong dug it down. He does blasting and concrete work. It’s built with rock and steel. You want to get them out of there, you need to bomb them out.”

  “Freyja was going there with a twenty-two.” He could hear that his words were slurred and slow.

  “Into the Valley of Death rode the four hundred,” Sarah declaimed. “They say they have pretty good parties. A lot of people like to go the embassy. Lots of liquor. It’s all free. Especially if you’re young and cute.”

  “Embassy?” he said, trying to catch hold of fragmented images and thoughts. “Edmonton,” he said, but there were spaces between his sentences as the thoughts took a long time to get from his head to his tongue. “A guy rented. Wrecked the place. Wouldn’t leave. Claimed it was an embassy.”

  He struggled to keep the room from spinning. He focused on a cuckoo clock. He felt that if he just looked at it and nothing else, the floor and tables and chairs, the walls, would remain still. What he couldn’t still were the memories—liquor was bad for memories; it let them loose like zombies, like ghosts, like an insane mob from the asylum. He’d tried to bury them. Some of his former colleagues buried them with booze. They started drinking as soon as their shift was over. The rule was never to admit the maimed, the dead, the screaming, the crying that sounded like it was ripping out a mother’s soul. It seemed to work, but then someone would shoot himself, or force someone else to shoot him, or shut himself in a garage and turn on the car, or have an inexplicable accident after the zombies rose up and swarmed him and he couldn’t fight them off any longer.

  Tom rubbed his head with his right hand. He hated that term: “male violence”—he protested against people who used the term as if it was only men who were violent—but it was dead girlfriends, dead wives, dead rape victims that had to be put in body bags, and men raging, justifying what they’d done, yelling out the women’s faults as if jealousy, disappointment, imperfection were to be punished with death. He could only remember two cases of wives having killed their husbands. Girlfriends never killed their boyfriends. Boyfriends killed their girlfriends all the time. But not me, he thought, not me, not Henry, not... but the room began to spin like a carousel. He staggered up from his chair and into the yard, where he leaned against a tree and threw up until all he had were dry heaves.

  When he went back inside, Sarah gave him a glass of water to wash out his mouth. He leaned out the door, rinsed his mouth and spit. He came back inside and sat down, and Sarah poured him a fresh cup of coffee.

  “Valhalla is the end of the world,” Sarah said. “Nothing from here to Hudson Bay, then there’s Siberia. This is as far as people can run. Why are you here?”

  An image of Valhalla in winter appeared, and he stared at it as if it were on a screen. “It was like a postcard. A Christmas card,” he said, correcting himself. “Snow,” he lifted his right hand and described a curve with it, “drifts.” He put down his hand. “Everything covered in snow. Quiet. Perfect. No noise.”

  It was like he had forgotten she was there and he was talking to himself. He was remembering the constant noise of the traffic that passed by his parents’ apartment. The sirens. Ambulances. Fire trucks. The noise of the buses. The noise in his head that wouldn’t go away. He thought that in the silence of the country, the silence of the snow, the noise would recede, and for a moment, he was distracted by the word “recede,” pleased with it. It was a good word. The noise would recede so he couldn’t hear the sound of cars racing, tires squealing, the harsh sounds of vehicles colliding. He broke into a cold sweat when he heard them. People he’d worked with killed themselves to stop the noise. Now, he sat in Sarah’s kitchen staring into space, trying to smother the sounds, and Sarah watched him as his eyes moved back and forth, seeing images she could not see.

  “I shouldn’t have drunk Black Death,” he declared. “It let all the devils out.” He thought he would get up and go. And because Sarah was a literary-type person, he would say, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, to a house, or something made of clay and wattles, daub,” the word coming to him through the confusion of his drunkenness, “and wattles.” What, he wondered, are wattles? Nine bean rows and a hive for the honeybee. He couldn’t remember the rest of it. He’d memorized it in grade ten. Instead of saying anything, he licked his lips. They felt dry and cracked.

  “People wash up here,” Sarah said. “They’ve run out of places to go. We all become a little strange, but everyone just wants to be treated like they’re normal.”

  He went to get up, and then felt the room move and sat down before he fell down. He remembered Helgi turning and saying that Baby Jesus had arrived, and there was Joseph with his long white beard at the window, and he was carrying a child.

  “Baby Jesus came,” he said. “I saw him. In the window in his father’s arms.”

  “Joseph’s an old fool and his wife is a young fool. She didn’t have an immaculate conception. She wanted to get pregnant so she’d have his pension and welfare. He thinks they’re a living crèche.”

  Tom licked his lips. He pulled the skin of his forehead together in an attempt to keep the room from spinning.

  “Horst and Karla,” he said. “A house fallen into ruin. That’s what Helgi said.” Everything was fragmented. Baby Jesus, a ruined house, a crèche.

  “They’re not the only ones,” Sarah said. “That could describe a lot of people.”

  “Siggi,” he said, veering back to a random thought. “Survivalists.”

  “I don’t know what they want to survive for if everybody else is dead. You hear Siggi and his friends talk, it’s a kind of men in the wilderness. When they talk about women, it’s not by any name. It’s ‘my woman,’ or ‘Come here, woman.’ Women will just be in the background, keeping the place clean, making meals, providing sex on demand. I heard they’ve got five hundred pounds of dried beans. The same of rice. Rooms full of freeze-dried stuff.”

  “Beans,” he said, as if the word was filled with meaning.

  “Siggi has a lot of fans. When he has money, he spreads it around. He hires local. A local is having a bad time, he might drop off a few dollars. Anybody comes to Valhalla who looks suspicious, people let Siggi know.”

  The door opened and Freyja came in.

  “You were planning on starting World War III, I hear,” Sarah said.

  Freyja looked at Tom and his silly grin and said, “What happened to him?”

  “Ossified. Helgi History. They played chess.”

  “I wish Ben had left me a note.”

  “He’s sorry. He didn’t think
you’d think what you did, if you know what I mean.”

  “You’re a portal,” Tom said loudly. “Helgi History said so. You will transport me to a better world.” He might have been making an announcement to an audience.

  “I think I’ll transport you home and put you to bed.” She put her hand under his arm. “Come on. Helgi probably thinks this is a big joke.”

  To Sarah, she said, “Have you heard the latest? Helgi is helping Joseph write a book on the meaning of life. In a language they’re inventing. No one else will be able to read their great revelation.”

  “No worse than having the Bible in Latin and nobody but the priests can read Latin,” Sarah said. “I’m sure it’s a great idea discovered at the bottom of a green bottle.”

  “Do you want to call Mary and tell her to go get Jesus? They’ll lay him down behind a pile of books and forget him, or, if he cries, they’ll give him a shot of brennivín . I know those two.”

  “Mary,” Tom said as he swayed a bit in his chair.

  “She wears pink lamb slippers. I’m sure you’ve seen her around.”

  There was a fly buzzing around the table. Tom tried to grab it. Freyja put her arm on his shoulder before he fell.

  “How long will Siggi hang around this time?” Sarah asked.

  “He can’t risk leaving before he’s got his debts paid. Tom has complicated things. Siggi thinks Tom’s still a cop, here because he’s undercover.”

  “What does he want from you?”

  “I don’t know. He has his moods. There are days when he can’t live without me. Other days he thinks I’m a rabid bitch that should be put down. I never know from one day to the next what he’s going to do. Siggi is completely paranoid since the Freemen turned up. They’ve gotten him to cut up his driver’s licence, his health card, his birth certificate. He was a nervous wreck anyway.”

  “We’ll reason with him together,” Tom said. He kept squinting to try to get the cuckoo clock into focus.

  “Come on,” Freyja said and pulled on his arm. “You can reason with your bed.”

  “I hope he’s got painkillers,” Sarah said.

   Chapter 27

  Work

  During the night, he woke up terribly thirsty. There was a glass of water beside his couch and two Tylenol. Sally wouldn’t have done that. She didn’t believe in mollycoddling. His mother never believed in mollycoddling, either. Unless he had double pneumonia and a confirmed brain tumour, he was expected to look after himself. After he took the pills, he drank the water, grateful for Freyja’s thoughtfulness.

  When he woke up in the morning, the room no longer thought it was a carousel. He lay there, wondering if he dared lift his head.

  “You’re alive,” Freyja said. He raised his head slightly to look, then laid it down again. She was standing in the doorway to the porch with a glass of orange juice. “Drink this. I’ll make you coffee. What were you drinking?”

  He eased up, rested his back against the wall, sipped the orange juice and leaned back. He had moved the wolf from the living room to the top of a pile of chairs, so he was staring into its snarling face.

  “Black Death,” he said. It felt like during the night, his mouth had been lined with shag carpet. He rubbed his tongue against his teeth. Shag carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed for a year.

  “Really?” Freyja said. “Helgi must really like you. Sharing his favourite drink.”

  “I was holding my own with the chess game.”

  “He usually wins in three moves. Did you survive more than three moves? He can be so drunk he falls off his chair and has to have help getting back, and he still wins. If he doesn’t win right away, he likes getting his opponents drunk. You don’t usually get drunk, do you?”

  He refused to move his head. “No,” he said, studying the ceiling the way he might in the Sistine Chapel. He promised himself that as soon as possible he’d pull off the wallpaper. “I saw Baby Jesus and his father.”

  “That’s Joseph. He’s always looking for a free drink.”

  Tom kept his head absolutely still and shut his eyes. “You can’t do that.” His voice sounded like a frog croaking. He ran his tongue over his lips. They were cracked and sore.

  “Do what?”

  “Call a person Baby Jesus and name his parents Mary and Joseph. It’s sacrilegious.”

  “Nowadays, you can call people anything you want. I’ve had students called Edsel, Seven Up, Rover. Anyway, his real name is Joseph, and he married Mary because she was called Mary. He has delusions of grandeur about his destiny. They’re going to set up a living crèche at the annual Christmas party. You can donate a few dollars to Jesus. It’ll pay for baby food and disposables.”

  “I’ve a rather large drum pounding in my head.”

  She got two pills out of her purse, and he struggled up and took them with a sip of orange juice. When she brought coffee he sat up straighter and said, “I thought the liquor would make me welcome and loosen him up.”

  “Helgi? Really? How much liquor do you think it would take to loosen him up? He has brennivín in his morning coffee.”

  She made him scrambled eggs and toast, and by the time he’d finished eating, he was feeling better. The pain in his head had been reduced to a dull throb.

  “Since you’re mollycoddling me anyway, would you be willing to pack up Jessie’s personal things? I haven’t done anything with her bedroom.”

  “I’m mollycoddling you because I feel partly responsible for the condition you’re in. I shouldn’t have let you go there alone.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “You would have been a distraction for him. He lit up like a Roman candle when I mentioned your name. He’s obviously an ardent admirer.”

  “He’s an ardent admirer of old Icelandic books and chess sets. When Dolly was single, he invited her to his place one afternoon. They made it as far as the bed. He got her down to her panties. Then he went to top up his drink, and she waited and waited and finally got dressed. When she went into the living room, he was sitting in his undershorts studying a chess move. He’d forgotten she was there. She was so insulted that she knocked over a pile of his books. And it knocked over another pile. She said it looked like an earthquake had hit. She threw that red ball of his into a burr patch. It must have taken him hours to get the burrs out of his dogs’ fur. Do you think he’s a hot prospect?”

  “Chess is an absorbing game,” he said, and then thought that wasn’t what she expected to hear, so he added, rather lamely, “That wouldn’t have happened if it was you. He says your name with reverence.”

  She glared at him but was a bit mollified by his compliment.

  “When you went to see the Godi did you hear anything about Angel?”

  “She may have gone to visit the group on the beach. What’s his name’s group. Jason.”

  “Could she have committed suicide? Lots of kids commit suicide when they feel hopeless. I’ve taken some short courses on suicide prevention.”

  He thought about the way Angel was lying on the beach. She was too far up from the waterline. There had been no waves, and even if there had been, there wouldn’t have been any in the harbour, not enough to carry her that far up the beach. And there’d been the smell of whisky.

  “Can’t you ask your Mountie friends to help?”

  The coffee turned bitter in his mouth. He thought of the talk that went on in the station, in the cars, the way the cops talked about anyone with any Aboriginal blood, like some of his colleagues saying, “Indian girls are all going to be whores anyway, so it’s not doing any harm to get a piece before they get ruined.” Complaints about rape or disappearances were shoved into a bottom drawer, men who were known to hire prostitutes often provided party places for cops, requisitions for help in finding missing Aboriginal women were laughed off. Not worth anyone’s time or the taxpayer’s dollar. No one was going to look at Angel’s file. Ben didn’t know anyone important, didn’t live in the right neighbourhood, didn’t have an important job. “Throwaway
people,” a journalist had said. “These people exist to be used.” He’d heard the snickering laughter. It was like a Force-wide conspiracy by people who knew that society didn’t care enough to object, the same way that police in the USA were able to pick up black teenagers and have sex with them in return for not charging them with crimes they hadn’t committed.

  “Siggi and friends,” he said, “they’re survivalists? Freemen on the Land? End-of-the-world stuff? Kill-your-neighbours-and-eat-them kind of stuff? What about them?”

  “Maybe. They’re crazy, but Siggi keeps them under control. Lots of sex at the embassy parties but no gang bangs. They know they’ve got to keep on the good side of the community. Siggi spreads his money around to create goodwill. He doesn’t want anyone destroying it.”

  “He thinks I’m undercover. I think you or Sarah said that. Will that keep him away?”

  “It’s hard to know how he thinks. It depends on what he and his friends are up to. They’re always up to something. If there’s a straight way to do a job and a crooked way, they’ll choose the crooked way. They believe no one should have to pay income tax. The government is a criminal organization because it’s stealing their hard-earned money.”

  “Hard-earned like how?”

  “Liquor on dry reserves. Cigarette smuggling. Marijuana grow ops.”

  “There are people buying young girls from the Inuit communities up north. They’re paying fifteen to twenty thousand for them. Flying them into Montreal or Toronto and putting them to work.”

  “No,” Freyja said. “None of that. Not that I know of.”

  “Bikers?”

  “Connections, distribution. Look,” Freyja put her hand over his, “stay out of it. They’ve got weapons. Automatic rifles, land mines, dynamite, crossbows. You’d think they were preparing for a war.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “Siggi used to take me there. That was when we had just started going out. He wasn’t always so crazy. At least, he didn’t seem to be until he got involved with these guys. They are out of control at times. They set up targets on the lake. One of them trapped a wolf. They froze it standing up and set it out on the ice with the feet frozen in, then they shot at it until there was nothing left.”