That afternoon Baggs and some of the others had proudly taken Stone around, showing him their garden and the chicken coops and the pasture where the two cows grazed, all of it pretty much hidden from view by the thick growth of cedars that had been left along the road and next to the entrance drive. There was a barn filled with hay cut from his land across the blacktop, and there were neat rows of corded firewood, as well as the fishtraps positioned just off the dock where Stone sat now. The cellar was well-stocked, Baggs boasted. They would have meat and vegetables and fresh eggs and milk through the winter, there was plenty of firewood, and water of course was everywhere, every drop of it to drink. There was no need to worry about him and his “little colony,” Baggs said. They would get by. They would flourish.
Tocco did not agree. Speaking later with Stone, he said all a man had to do was consider Baggs’ rationale for taking in all the people he had, supposedly as protection for him and Flossie, so they could keep what they had. On its face, that was ridiculous, according to Tocco. If that had been Baggs’ motive he would have stopped with the “O’Briens and their two little bimbos,” just enough hands to do the chores and take turns standing guard.
“Who needs an army composed of women and old people, huh?” he asked. “No, all old Smiley had in mind was acquiring as many guests as he could—for no better reason than he likes people. Honest to Christ, that’s all he’s after. The more, the merrier. If you don’t believe me, ask old iron pants Flossie. Smiley’s having the time of his life. Every cabin’s full, every moment’s spoken for. And for a guy like him, that’s happiness. He don’t worry about tomorrow any more than a dog does.”
From there, Tocco went on to analyze the food and firewood supplies, pointing out that there were woodstoves in each of the cabins and that there was no way you could multiply twenty-some stomachs against the available food supply and come up with anything except hunger and malnutrition. By February, he said, the Point was going to be looking like Valley Forge. And even Smiley Baggs wouldn’t be smiling then.
Stone imagined that Tocco was right. At the same time, he knew it was not his problem. Tomorrow he would be leaving. And by February he would undoubtedly be having the same problems himself, only elsewhere.
Suddenly from across the inlet came the rich sound of a guitar followed by a plaintive voice singing a song Stone could not quite hear, just a word here and there, a phrase. The melody sounded like the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” And Stone wondered if it was intentional, if the junkman somehow had seen him or possibly just sensed him sitting there on the dock in the darkness brooding about his lost world, and had decided, impishly and brutally, to put the record on his outdoor speakers:
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…Oh I believe in yesterday.
As he stared over at Valhalla, Stone caught sight of a figure moving just inside a parapet that ran along the edge of an apparent courtyard, below which the sheer face of the rock plunged a good three hundred feet into the lake below. The figure moved through the glow of an outdoor light, jogging and shadow-boxing, and Stone realized there had been no sadistic conspiracy against him, but only a man getting some exercise out of doors, to the sound of music. Incredibly Stone also was able to make out a white stripe running down the man’s outfit—a jogging suit! It was such an outrageous touch of luxury that Stone found himself wondering again what else the man had at his disposal. And it was only one slight step from there for Stone to put himself in the junkman’s shoes—Adidas, no doubt—and leave the courtyard for even more sybaritic treasures inside the walls of his Valhalla. First, after cooling off, he would take a long hot deep bath, soak in the tub until his body felt heavy as rock, and properly ravenous, and then he would eat, dine slowly on steak and mushrooms and baked potato and a richly tossed salad soaked in Italian dressing, all washed down with a fitting Cabernet. Then there would be cigarettes, brandy, coffee, and more brandy while listening to music—Sarah Vaughan perhaps—before going to bed finally, slipping into a king-size bed with plump pillows, warm blankets, silk sheets—and of course a woman in it, a warm-smiling lush-haired girl with a beautiful body and a keen appetite for all the serious play and lovely rage of sex. And while he was dreaming, he thought, why not let there also be love, that ultimate luxury?
Even as he was thinking this, night-dreaming there in the dark at the end of the pier, he saw her coming toward him from the lodge, moving across the beaten-down grass with her elegant model’s stride. And he tried to control himself, to beat back the waves of feeling—resentment as much as desire—that swept him each time he faced her, especially since the incident at the creek bend. For a few moments he thought she had not seen him in the dark and simply had gone for an aimless stroll out to the lake as he had done. But as she reached the dock and continued toward him, smiling slightly, he knew that he was wrong.
“The light from Valhalla,” she said. “I saw you out here.”
“Thought it was the music.”
“Well, that too.” She shook her head in wonderment. “God, it’s been so long. Who is that, the Beatles?”
“Yeah. The junkman is having his nightly constitutional, I guess—to music and bright lights.”
“I wonder why he calls it Valhalla.”
“It fits, doesn’t it? A haven. A sanctuary.”
Eve smiled dubiously. “Not as I remember my mythology. The word means hall of the dead. A home for those slain in battle.”
“Maybe we should tell him. He might leave.”
“I wonder if he needs a housekeeper.”
“You’d break up the trio?”
Her smile faded, as she recognized the question for what it was, his first shot at her. “No,” she said. “I guess not.”
Stone was grateful for the darkness. She could not see him clearly, not so easily read his anger and his need.
“We probably shouldn’t be out here,” she said.
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “The dark. The Mau Mau. Whatever.”
“Oh, I don’t know. There are guards posted. And I’ve got a gun.” He patted his sagging coat pocket.
“Well, Smiley just told me not to wander.”
“You haven’t. The circus,” he said, “is it over?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. But, yes, it’s over. Most of the people have gone back to their cabins.”
“What would you call it?”
“I don’t know. The old woman was sincere, that’s obvious.”
“And Awesome Dawson?”
“Him too. If he weren’t, Jag wouldn’t have sat still for it all.”
“Where is he now?”
“Jag? Still in the lodge. Mrs. Baggs—Flossie—is putting us in the room next to theirs. Their daughter’s room, I guess, when she’s home.”
“And Eddie?”
“The main room. On a couch.”
“Me too.”
Eve gave him a playful look. “Oh really?”
Stone smiled. “Different couches.”
The raillery seemed to embarrass her and they both fell into an awkward silence. As on the first time he saw her, she was wearing her safari suit with the colorful scarf. Her long blond hair, hanging limp in the damp lake air, kept catching the lights from Valhalla. She put her hands on the dock railing and looked down at the lapping water. Finally she spoke, but struggling now.
“Listen, before you go tomorrow, I just wanted you to know—we’re grateful for all the help you’ve been. We really are.”
Gratitude was the last thing he wanted from her, and this meager expression of it only angered him all the more. “How about yesterday at the creek?” he said. “You appreciate that now too?”
She looked at him. “What is it—you want to fight? You don’t just want to part friends?”
“I was wondering if you’d changed your mind, that’s all—if maybe hindsight had given you a different perspective?”
“About what? Whether I was raped or not?”
“About afterw
ards.”
“You mean, what didn’t happen?”
“Yeah, that.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
But Stone could not let go. “Oh, come on, I can take it. I’m a big boy now.”
“I didn’t come out here to fight.”
“Me either. I just want a simple answer, that’s all.”
“And all I want is to forget it. To put it behind me. Please.”
“Especially my part in it?”
She sighed in defeat, like a grown-up with an obnoxiously insistent child. “All right. You want to rake it all up again, I guess I can accommodate. The answer is yes, I do keep going over it. I can’t help myself. But it always comes out the same. Maybe it was the moral thing to do, not shooting him, I don’t know. What I do know is what you saw—what you had to see—me on the ground and him doing what he did, or just finishing, and Eddie down and Jag out of sight somewhere, dead for all you knew. And I think what a cool customer to see all that and do absolutely nothing, just stay where you were and watch. I think what a very cool customer. And I ask myself if a person could ever really know someone like that, someone that cool, you know?”
Stone resisted an urge to slap her, to take her by the hair and run her off the dock, shove her back toward her precious Jag and Eddie. Instead he smiled.
“Cool—now there I think you could give me some lessons, lady. In fact, I think maybe you invented the stuff.”
“So we fight,” she said. “All I wanted was to part friends.”
It was then he said it, without even wanting to. “I never wanted to be your friend.”
She turned and looked at him, her eyes grave and unreadable in the faint light. She said nothing and Stone had the feeling that minutes were passing, that the two of them had been caught in some kind of time stutter, a stasis not unlike that of sculpture. They could have been marble. Then slowly he became aware of sound, a voice somewhere, a voice shouting. He watched as her eyes shifted slightly, looking past him toward the lodge, where the shouting was coming from, the voice that he recognized now as Eddie, Eddie screaming into the night.
“He can see! He can see! Eve, where are you?! Jag can see! He can see!”
Four
The good news spread through the camp so rapidly that by the time Stone and Eve reached the lodge others were crowding in behind them to get a look at Jagger. Shaking and sobbing, he was sitting on the edge of his bed next to Flossie, who was patting him on the back and stroking his head and neck, trying to comfort him. Smiley, in pajama tops and work pants, was standing just inside the bedroom door, by turns grinning and frowning and wringing his hands, as if he could not decide what emotion the occasion called for. Next to him, Dawson looked more awed than awesome, somehow appearing small and timid the way he stood there gazing down upon Jagger as if the man were Jesus returned to Earth. And in point of fact the whole scene, lit by candlelight, did have a kind of mystic ambience to it, an odd similarity to the umbrageous tableaus one remembered in Renaissance religious paintings.
And Eve only reinforced this effect as she fell to her knees in front of Jagger and looked up into his eyes to see if he actually had regained his sight. He in turn took her face in his hands and brought her up to him, kissing her and nodding in unspoken answer to her unspoken question. And just in the way his eyes moved and responded, Stone could see that the man did indeed have his sight back, and for the second time that evening Stone felt tears starting in his own eyes, joining those of Jagger and Eve and everyone else in the room except Smiley Baggs, who continued to look more rattled than anything else. Eddie, standing next to Stone, kept pounding him on the back, hugging him in joy.
“Didn’t I tell ya he’d see again!” he cried. “Didn’t I, huh? Didn’t I?”
Spider, Ruby Dawson, the Goffs, young Kelleher—they too had crowded around the old brass double bed, congratulating Jagger, touching him, trying to share in the wonder of his recovery. And Stone could see the man’s growing panic, his shrinking from the tumult, as he gently pushed Eve away and covered his face with his arms, like a man in a crashing automobile. Flossie immediately was on her feet, pushing everyone back, lashing them with her bullwhip of a voice.
“All right now, everybody out! He’s had enough, cain’t you see that? Come on now, everybody out. Everybody but his girl here. Out! Out!”
Eddie tried to protest, telling Flossie that he was Jagger’s buddy, that Jag would want him to stay above anybody, he knew he would, just ask him—but Flossie swept on, oblivious of opposition. And everybody moved back down the hallway to the main room, where still others were gathering now—Kelleher and his daughter, Tocco and his girlfriend Annabelle, and finally Mama Dawson herself, blinking in the firelight and grinning as if nothing unexpected had happened. She was wearing pants and a long cloth coat, with an Indian blanket over that, which gave her the look of a superannuated ambulatory papoose.
Flossie quickly pulled her on through the crowd, taking her back to Jagger’s room, where only Eve and Flossie herself would be witness to Jagger’s first sighting of his healer, if that was what she was, and if Jagger accepted her as such. Somehow Stone doubted that he would, despite his having sat still for the bizarre ceremony. Certainly the Jagger he knew would realize that it was all only coincidence, that Mama Dawson had just happened to practice her black magic on him at the same time his sight was returning naturally. That at least was how Stone viewed the incident, and how he felt any rational person would. Still, he would have liked to have been in the room with them, to see Jagger’s face as he finally saw the old woman, and especially her hands, those knobby appendages that had crawled onto his face like a pair of arthritic tarantulas.
The others seemed to feel the same way, all standing around, looking down the hallway as if they expected Jagger and Mama Dawson to emerge arm-in-arm at any moment. The one exception continued to be Smiley, who evidently found any kind of waiting completely beyond his capacities.
“I say this calls for a celebration,” he cried. “A bonfire and apple cider! What d’ya say, huh? Let’s git to it!”
Tocco agreed. “Why the hell not?” He headed for the door, pulling Annabelle after him.
Mrs. Goff, who reminded Stone of a spinster librarian, smiled wryly at him. “When in doubt, build fires,” she said.
Kelleher worried that it would be too cold out and asked his daughter Tracy if she was dressed warmly enough. She smiled indulgently and took his hand.
“Of course,” she said. “Come on, Daddy. Let’s help.”
He trailed after her with a mock rueful look that did nothing to dispel Stone’s feeling that the man would have walked into a wall of flame if it had been his daughter’s wish.
Outside, in a picnic area near the pier, Spider and Tocco started a fire, while Stone found himself hungering for hot dogs and beer as never before in his life. And evidently he was not the only one experiencing hunger either, for within a few minutes Smiley appeared with some freshly cut-up chickens and two loaves of bread to go with the cider. Using metal roasting forks, the celebrants soon had a steady supply of hot roasted chicken and toast, and though it was not quite the same as hot dogs and beer, Stone felt an uncommon glow spreading inside him, something almost like well-being. And it struck him how accustomed he had become over the past year to anxiety and fear, to the point now where he was not even aware of the feeling until a moment like this, when he experienced a temporary reprieve from it. He knew the reason for the glow was not the food so much as the fellowship and the fire, that atavistic joy he had always taken in the smell of wood smoke and the sight of flames beating against the darkness. Normally he would have been frightened of that darkness, worried that there might be someone or something out there crouched and waiting, preparing his demise. But he felt none of that now, possibly because the group was so large and because most of them were armed at all times. And then too the simple configuration of the Point itself entered in, the fact that it was bounded on two sides by wa
ter and that a pair of guards were posted around the clock on the landward, exposed side. So he felt, if not total security, at least an adequate approximation of it, enough anyway to relax for the first time in weeks.
It occurred to him that another reason for his good spirits could have been Jagger’s recovery, if not a miracle then at least a gift. Now he could dislike the sonofabitch without feeling guilty.
Tocco had disappeared for a few minutes, and now he returned with a bottle of Jack Daniels, which he proceeded to pass among the few in his favor—Annabelle, Smiley Baggs, and, for now, Stone. He also offered a pull to old man Goff, who laughingly refused, as if it were a bottle of lye he was passing up. But Dawson, Spider, the Kellehers, and the rest of the women—all had to make do with the cider. This, however, did not seem to bother them so much as the fact that Tocco and the others were enjoying the whiskey. Dawson especially took exception to it, complaining that Tocco was spoiling the celebration.
“Just like he spoils everything,” added Dawson’s wife, Ruby.
Though Tocco was solidly built, a tough balding husky man around forty, he was still a good seventy pounds lighter than the monstrous Dawson. But he did not seem to know this. In answer to the Dawsons, he calmly took another drink, holding the bottle in such a way that his middle finger stood obscenely erect.
“You go too far, man,” Dawson said.
“Tell me about it—man.” Tocco was sitting on the end of a picnic table, and now he reached out and gathered in Annabelle. While he offered her the bottle with one hand, the other moved across her bosom, holding her against him.
“Maybe you don’t remember, preacher,” he went on. “Or maybe you never knew. But this is what life is about—booze and sex.” He nuzzled Annabelle’s neck.
Valhalla Page 9
