Valhalla

by Newton Thornburg

  As Stone followed them with the crosshairs, he kept telling himself that they probably had killed Jagger and Eddie, and that he had to shoot them, now, this second, while he still had a chance. Over and over he silently screamed this ultimatum at himself. But nothing happened. His finger, his being, continued to tremble against the steel of the trigger, and could go no farther. Staring at them through the scope, like a sweating voyeur through a peephole, he watched them amble out of sight. Then, putting the rifle down, he uttered a cry that even in his own ears sounded in no way human: a cry, he thought, that a chicken might make in death.

  He went back down the hill the same way he had come up it, but more slowly now, with the rifle feeling like a log in his hand and the binoculars a boulder lashed about his neck. When he reached the bottom, he started around the hill on the creek path, not even running, dreading what lay ahead of him at the bend, wishing that he believed prayer might change things there, bring Jagger and Eddie back to life, leave Eve as she was before, whatever that meant. Already he was trying to tell himself that his failure to act had resulted from his shooting of the groundhog, that the one had led ineluctably to the other. But he also told himself that he did not want to rationalize the incident, in fact did not even want to think about it. Later there would be plenty of time for that. There would be a life of time.

  But suddenly now the bend came into view ahead of him—and he saw all three of them, alive. The log and the boulder fell from him and he almost shouted with joy and relief. Eddie was sitting back against a tree trunk while Eve daubed his face with a towel. Jagger sat at their feet, his head hanging. But even he looked up as Stone approached.

  “You’re a little late,” Eve said. Her face was dirty and tear-streaked.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “You didn’t see?”

  “See what?”

  “We had a little problem. We were robbed. I was raped.” She looked at Eddie. “And him they tried to kill.”

  “With a rifle butt,” Eddie put in. A fissure of blood ran from his hair, forking across his face.

  “Who?” Stone asked, still playing the innocent.

  Eddie grimaced. “A couple of spades, what else.”

  Stone turned to Eve. “You okay?”

  “I’ll live.”

  He asked about Jagger.

  “They played with him,” she said. “They kept spinning him around and had a great time watching him trip and fall down, trying to get at them. Finally they pushed him down the creek bank over there. He couldn’t get back up. He didn’t know where he was.”

  Jagger shook his head in regret and rage. “I came within a hair of killing one of the mothers—had him by his fucking neck for just a second before the other hit me with the rifle, right across the wrist. Fucking animals.” Suddenly he smiled. “We could’ve used you, Boy Scout. You could’ve done one of your good deeds for them, and they would’ve been so grateful they would’ve left us alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stone said, to all of them. “I wish I’d been here.”

  Eve looked at him. “Why? It wasn’t your fault.”

  From her and the men he pieced together a chronology of what had happened. She had been washing out some things in the creek and Jagger and Eddie had both been stretched out in the grass, resting and catching the sun. Eddie, like Jagger, had had his eyes closed. And suddenly the two young blacks were upon them. They took the pistol, which Eddie had left lying on a rock. He had tried to fight for it, but the one with the rifle had swung the butt against his head and he had fallen into a rocky ditch, which explained why Stone had not been able to see him from the hill. He was knocked out and bleeding so heavily they must have figured he was dying, which left them free to concentrate on Jagger and Eve. Only the one, the leader, had raped her. The other had contented himself with ransacking the luggage and taking what he wanted, which had not amounted to much, she said. Nothing had seemed to please him. Nothing had enough color for him.

  Stone was surprised at her attitude as she told him this. Her eyes were dry and her voice flat and hard. He had not known she was so tough. Almost diffidently then he told them his own story, a few terse words about the stone house and its well-stocked root cellar.

  “That’s where your pack is?” Eve asked.

  “Yeah. I left it there. I knew we’d be going back.”

  “Your life support system? That’s hardly like you.”

  “A new facet,” he said.

  She nodded, studying him. “I’d say so.” She turned to the others. “Can you two travel?”

  “For real food?” Eddie said. “You bet I can.”

  Jagger shrugged. “Yeah. Why not?”

  Eve looked back at Stone. “Okay. But before we go, I’ve got some things I have to do, some ablutions. And I’d like you to stand guard, all right? Look if you have to—I really don’t give a damn at this point. I just want to be clean again, that’s all. And I don’t want anybody killing me or raping me before I achieve that blessed state, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  He watched as she gathered up a towel, a blanket, and her travel kit. Then he followed her down the creek a short distance, to a point where a pool had formed in the lee of a large boulder. As she started to undress, slipping out of the blouse and jeans she had put on after the attack, he reluctantly turned away, holding his gun, pretending to study the terrain around them. But all he really saw was in his peripheral vision, the slender white figure tenderfooting nude across the rocky shoal to the pool. Then, involuntarily, he glanced at her, just as she slipped down into the water, and he was surprised at the fullness of her breasts. Earlier, seeing her through the rifle scope, her blouse had half-covered her, so he had only assumed she was flat-chested, a typical model. He was not sure why this discovery should have been of any interest to him, for the girl was obviously growing to dislike him, and indeed would end up hating him if she were ever to learn the truth about what he had done, or more precisely, not done.

  He looked at her once again and saw her scrubbing herself furiously, as though she were trying to rub off her skin. On a rock next to her was the bathroom kit, with a douche syringe sticking out. He looked away, ashamed of himself. Absently he checked his rifle, saw the shell still in the chamber, which meant there were five more in the magazine. If he had been a man, he reflected, a man for these times, there would have been only five bullets altogether—or less, depending on how well he would have shot. But there were six. And it would always be so. He could never change it, not now, not ever.

  It had been the gesture, he told himself, the blowing of the kiss. It had transformed the black from a rapist into a person, with a sense of humor, perverted maybe, sardonic, but humor nevertheless, an attribute of a human being. And how could he, Stone, have done to a human being what he had done to the groundhog, squeezed that slender trigger and then as if by magic a moment later watched the life being torn from the creature, in a spray of flesh and blood and bone?

  “Are you crying?” a voice said.

  Stone whirled and found Eve standing next to him, dressed again, with the blanket wrapped around her. He blinked his eyes.

  “Allergy,” he said. “It comes and goes.”

  “Does it?”

  “I didn’t have it out west.”

  Her look was curious again, searching. But she turned away and started back for the bend, carrying her towel and kit. He walked alongside her.

  “You’re pretty tough,” he said. “I’m surprised.”

  “Why? What’s the alternative—have a breakdown? They hurt Eddie more than me, and Jag most of all. Poor bastard, thrashing away down on those rocks, not knowing where he was or even what was happening. He kept calling for me, but I was silent. I didn’t want them to hurt him more.”

  “That’s what I mean—tough.”

  “Well, maybe this is a time for it.”

  “Maybe so.”

  They were at the bend now. Jagger was sitting on a log and Eddie was standing
behind him, dutifully kneading the muscles of his neck and shoulders, as if he were preparing him for a tennis match.

  “They’re back,” he said to Jagger.

  “I can hear that, asshole. Back all nice and squeaky clean, huh?”

  No one responded.

  “Funny, Eddie—I would’ve thought she’d give up baths for a time. Sort of keep the memory alive.”

  Eddie made a face. “Come on, Jag. Don’t talk like that. Not now.”

  “Why—you don’t think she enjoyed it, having a couple of spades going at her, after a whole summer up at Geneva with just us, just me? Shit, I’ll bet these are the first genuine itch-free moments she’s had in a long time.”

  Instead of defending herself, Eve said how sorry she was at what they had done to him, and that he couldn’t do anything back. And she bent down to kiss him. He pushed her away.

  “Go on,” he said. “Go reflect on your good fortune. And incidentally, where’s the Boy Scout anyway? How come he ain’t defending you with his usual zeal?”

  “It’s time we got started for the cabin,” Stone answered. “It’s over a mile and it’s uphill most of the way. And we only have a couple hours of light left.”

  Jagger shook his head. “I don’t know. Suppose we run into Eve’s new boyfriends again?”

  “We won’t. It’s in the opposite direction.” Too late Stone realized what he had said, but Jagger and Eddie did not pick up on it. Eve, however, was staring at him, her expression that of someone who had been slapped hard in the face. He started toward her, but she turned away and kept moving. He followed. At the creek bank she had to stop.

  “I just saw through the rifle scope,” he said. “A half mile away. If I’d shot, I could’ve hit you.”

  She would not look at him. “Then why hide it? Why come waltzing in here like some fucking choir boy with a gun?”

  He spread his hands in a gesture of futility and impotence. But she was not looking. “A mistake,” he tried.

  She turned then, raking him with her eyes. “You bet it was.”

  For some reason Eve chose not to tell the others what she knew, at least at that point. Once more Stone had to help them all pack up. And then he led off, again following the trail next to the creek. He knew that Eve’s feet had to be in even worse shape than they were earlier, yet she did not utter a word of complaint. Nor did Jagger and Eddie. At first Stone thought it was the food that had silenced them, the prospect of eating their fill. But as they trudged on, still as quiet as a file of cattle, he began to wonder if the reason was not simply numbness, that battering of the spirit formerly experienced most deeply by the very poor and the very unlucky but now democratically shared by almost everyone.

  When they reached the farmhouse, over an hour after they had set out, the sun was already going down, spreading like a forest fire in the cedar woods beyond the tiny dwelling. Stone picked up his backpack on the porch and carried it inside. The others followed silently, not at all as excited by the place as he had been that afternoon. As they settled in—Eve and Eddie both seeing to Jagger’s comfort—Stone got some spoons and the jars of canned food he had left in the kitchen and gave it all to Eve, to serve the others. Not eating himself yet, he went outside and gathered up some kindling and firewood while there was still light. Then he set about building a fire in the old potbellied stove. As he worked, it struck him how oddly silent the others continued to be, almost as if by some prearranged mutual agreement. It was Jagger who finally broke the silence.

  “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 shoo
t. 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.