Valhalla

by Newton Thornburg

  And so it went. Ruby Dawson and Flossie joined in, naturally siding against Tocco. Newman settled back into his seat, satisfied with his new allies. But Tocco belligerently held his ground, content to stand alone. He was, if nothing else, a fighter. Unfortunately he was also boring, with the result that Stone soon found himself not even listening, just sitting where he was, on the edge of a table, observing Baggs’ unlikely colony of pilgrims scattered about the large room. More and more, Stone was coming to appreciate what a comfortable place it was, with its sturdy rustic furniture and its log walls and plank floors and the huge fieldstone fireplace. Nevertheless, as the evening dragged on, he became increasingly tired and bored. And when Awesome and his mama inevitably nudged the meeting from secular matters to those involving Jesus Christ, Stone began to look for a way out. But this night not even Tocco defected, possibly because the temperature outside was close to the freezing point. So Stone finally made the move on his own, slipping through the small congregation and out the door as unobtrusively as he could, like any other hopeless pagan.

  It was the kind of escape Stone had always celebrated by lighting a cigarette, and he found himself reaching for one now, only to find the usual empty pocket. In his frustration he kicked at the air, almost throwing his leg out of joint. Behind him, on the porch, there was a laugh.

  “My sentiments exactly,” said Eddie.

  He skipped down the stairs and fell in next to Stone, who was heading for the dock.

  “Couldn’t take one more minute of that crap,” he said. “And I don’t see how the others can either, people like Tocco and Kelleher.”

  “Boredom.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “How about Eve and Jagger? They’re staying too.”

  Eddie sighed. “Yeah. How about them? I just can’t figure what’s going on with those two, can you? Jag is like a zombie—I don’t even know the guy anymore. And Eve is like his keeper.”

  “It’s the Dawson thing I can’t understand. Yesterday he treats Jagger like King Tut. Last night Mama miraculously brings back his sight. So what are they tonight?—enemies. It doesn’t figure.”

  “You can say that again.”

  They were at the dock now. The lake was calm and the sky was clear. The quarter moon, just coming up behind the lodge, shone through the oaks and cedars like a dim, imperfect spotlight. In contrast, across the cove Valhalla blazed brightly, as if advertising the inexhaustibility of its electricity. But this night there was no music playing, no “Yesterday” to rub Stone’s nose in.

  “You want to sit or walk?” he asked Eddie.

  “Walk. My ass would freeze.”

  “Walk, it is.”

  They headed up the shore for a hundred yards or so before the Point turned into a stretch of woods beyond which Stone earlier had seen a distant row of lakefront cottages, run-down and abandoned. Circling back, the two men then walked through the trees to the other end of the Point and down the lane to the county blacktop before turning around and retracing their steps. As they walked, Eddie unburdened himself.

  “Did you notice inside? Eve didn’t even mention me, just her and Jag, like they don’t even care whether I go along or not. I keep wondering what I did, what I said.”

  Stone tried to console him, saying that the problem wasn’t him but Jagger, that the man had gone through a terrible ordeal and probably just wasn’t himself yet but would be again in time, and would need Eddie then.

  After that, the little man went on and told Stone more than he wanted to hear about Jagger and himself, going all the way back to their beginnings in grade school. His father, Willie Gardner, had been the tennis pro at the Santa Barbara Country Club, Eddie said. “Never that great a player himself,” the man had just gone along collecting his paychecks and correcting backswings and occasionally concentrating on “this rich kid or that one,” hoping their talent would make up for what they lacked in motivation. Then finally he really had someone to work with—Eddie himself, his own kid, poor, talented, burning with motivation.

  “And Christ, did he work me! Four, five hours a day, every day of the week all year around. I was twelve years old and had an arm on me like Popeye. Even then my game was power. Hit the sumbitch as hard as I could every shot. And it worked too. I was about the best in town under sixteen. So naturally Pop expected me to mop up on the other kids at the club during the spring tournament.” Eddie paused then, shaking his head admiringly. “And I did too—all but one of them. From nowhere this skinny blond kid appears, a club member all right—he’d have to be to play—but I didn’t know him from Adam. Later I found out his family had been living in Europe the last couple of years—they had homes all over the place. But that day me and my old man didn’t know who the hell the kid was except that he was beating everybody same as me. Only without any training. No backhand at all. Just keeps running around the ball and swatting it back. Well, finally it comes down to the two of us and I start banging away at him, smashing balls harder than I ever had before. And everything comes back. It’s like I’m playing two of him, three of him. Anyway, I get waxed—six-two, six-one. And I walk back to my dad thinking he’s gonna kick me to death. Instead he’s grinning like hell. ‘That kid,’ he says. ‘He’s a natural.’”

  “Jagger, huh?”

  “You know it. Haden Jagger. The best ever, my dad always said. The most natural talent. No Sweat, they called him, the other pros. He didn’t run, he floated.”

  “Still, he never made it to the top, did he?” Stone almost laughed, hearing himself. When it came to Jagger, he was about as fair-minded as a Persian mullah.

  “I already told you the reason for that,” Eddie said. “He had too much of everything. Everything except motivation.”

  Eddie went on for what seemed like hours, not just recounting the story of his and Jagger’s life together but examining it too, justifying it, celebrating it. And to Stone it sounded as if Eddie were talking mostly for his own benefit, trying to sell a bill of goods not to Stone but to himself.

  Essentially, despite how wondrous Eddie thought the story, there was not much to it. Jagger’s grandfather had been a prosperous realtor in Santa Barbara, making money through the fabulous decades of growth during and after the Second World War. So his son, Haden’s father, had plenty of money to work with when he set up his own commercial realty firm specializing in the development of shopping malls across the country. Where his father had made thousands, he made millions. And Jagger’s mother had not come penniless to the marriage either, having a lot of old copper mining money behind her, enough in fact to have always considered the Jagger millions somewhat tainted, because they were so new. In any case, both parents were rich, attractive, willful, and incompatible, with the result that young Jagger spent most of his childhood in private schools and summer camps, with only brief unhappy visits to the various homes and apartments of his many-times divorced and remarried parents. Not unexpectedly he in turn became even more willful and spoiled than they were, a rude, arrogant, violent kid who was forever being written off by headmasters and psychiatrists—until tennis and puberty rescued him. Suddenly he was not this mean, delinquent kid no one wanted but a golden boy, a tall, lithe, handsome Wunderkind with a tennis racket. Mom and Dad both wanted him then, fought over him even, as did colleges all across the country, each seemingly in dire need of a rich, blond tennis star. And the girls—the girls became like field mice for a hawk, something always there, ready to be devoured. And Jagger accommodated them, always, anyway, anywhere, anytime.

  For twelve years it went on, Eddie said, like one long wild party without end, a traveling orgy. Eddie naturally had gone along, happily settling for a life in Jagger’s shade as infinitely more exciting than any he could have lived in the sun on his own. First, there was the two-year stint at Stanford, most of it on probation, before Jagger had turned pro and joined the tour, dabbled in it actually, choosing only the plums—Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the French and Italian Opens, and maybe a half-dozen oth
er tournaments each year, all selected on the basis of where they were being held, whether or not they would be right for the party.

  And they usually were, Eddie said. Proudly, he went over it all for Stone, a stirring litany of dissipation and saturnalia involving celebrities and drugs and booze and sex—but all in relation to the tennis, of course, the two elements always in delicious and ironic union. There was the beautiful TV star going down on Jagger in the Wimbledon locker room at the very moment his name was being announced for the next match, and then watching with Eddie as he played flawless tennis for almost an hour, owning the first set and leading in the second before his strength began to fail and a laboring Bjorn Borg came back to crush him in straight sets. There were the jokes about his endorsing Head rackets, because he was the only known “head” on the tour. In fact there were even times when he won stoned, floating on the court with a snootful of coke, stroking the ball almost in slow motion.

  But mostly it was the life off the court that mattered. There was the time at Monte Carlo when their host had dumped his mistress and Jagger overboard out in the harbor, and Eddie had jumped in after them, stroking and laughing with them all the way to the beach, where the two of them strode nude out of the water and continued hand in hand to Jagger’s hotel, there to finish what they had only begun aboard the yacht. That had made Time, Eddie said, the People section. The paparazzo’s photo of them walking nude was famous—certainly Stone had seen it, hadn’t he? No? Eddie could not believe it.

  And naturally there were the husbands, everywhere the cuckolded husbands screaming bloody murder and sometimes trying to administer beatings but more often receiving them instead. And, again, most of all, there were the girls, always the girls, enough so Eddie himself could pick and choose. He had lived like a king, he said. He had the best of everything, everywhere.

  “And finally there was Eve,” Stone said.

  Eddie stopped dead, as if he had been doused with a bucket of water. “Were you even listening?”

  “Sure. But Eve’s the one I want to hear about.”

  “Why? You don’t stand a chance against Jag. Don’t you know that, for Christ’s sake?”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  Eddie grinned, amused at Stone’s ignorance. “It ain’t just what he is, man—I mean the glamour and all. He’s also rich. Very rich.”

  “Here? Now?”

  Making a face, Eddie waved it all away: the Point, the Ozarks, the present. “This’ll end,” he said. “There’ll be order again. You can bet on it. I know Eve is.”

  “How’d you ever form such a high opinion of her?”

  They were at the lodge porch now. Inside, the group was singing the hymn “Amazing Grace” to piano accompaniment. Eddie sat back against the step railing.

  “How? It was easy. Like I told you before, she’s about the tenth in line. His tenth ‘traveling girlfriend,’ I guess you’d call them, the special ones. And you know what? There’s one thing they all had in common. When he dumped them they just moved on to some other rich guy, without even looking back.”

  “Ingrates,” Stone said. “The least they could have done was slash their wrists.”

  Eddie gave him a despairing look. “Yeah. Why not? The real fun was over.”

  Around three the next morning Stone woke shivering on the sofa in the main room. Summoning all his courage, he threw off his blankets and dashed over to the fireplace to put more wood on the dying fire, then he dove back onto the sofa and cocooned himself inside the blankets once more. Across the hearth from him, on the other couch, Eddie lay snoring peacefully. Stone had intended just to roll over and go back to sleep, but it did not come and he soon found himself mulling over the rest of what Eddie had told him about Eve.

  Her childhood homes, he said, had been a succession of small rented farms and ranches in the Texas panhandle, the home country of both her parents, who for some reason had been content to scratch out a meager living in that severe and barren country. Eve however had been “hot to trot” from grade school on, Eddie said, so when a fiftyish Houston oilman “caught her act” at the highway hamburger palace and invited her to come along with him, she had accepted. Seventeen at the time, she had not even bothered to stop off at home to get a toothbrush or say goodbye to her parents. She just left, hopping into the oilman’s Cadillac and spending the next two years with him in Houston, in a comfortable little apartment he visited three or four nights a week, often taking her out to movies and nightclubs and even supervising her continued education, paying for her tuition and books at a local junior college and helping her improve her diction and broaden her knowledge. At the same time he carefully introduced her, step by step, to the even more fascinating world of grown-up sex, both straight and kinky, with a special emphasis on group endeavors involving female prostitutes the oilman would bring in for the occasion.

  The man had dearly loved his sex, Eddie claimed, loved it so much in fact that he finally died of it—in the saddle, on top of Eve. Nineteen then, Eve later told Eddie that the experience had left her frigid for almost a year afterward. Alone and frightened, she had left town with a few hundred dollars and two suitcases full of expensive dresses, settling finally in San Francisco, where she found work as an exotic dancer. And for the first time she began selling it, on her own, without a pimp or call service, just dropping in at the posher bars and picking up an occasional prosperous-looking gentleman who was only too happy to pay extravagantly for the services of such an extravagantly beautiful girl. And she continued her other education too, enrolling in various classes at San Francisco State.

  At twenty-one, she drifted to Las Vegas, again finding a job as a dancer, in a chorus line this time. And again she practiced her avocation as well, finally taking up with a man named Tunella, aka Tony Tuna, loan shark and allaround sport of Chicago, Vegas, and Tijuana. He was the man who bet too much against Haden Jagger—and lost.

  Stone had no way of knowing whether it all was true or not, whether Eddie was inventing or embellishing or merely recounting what Eve and Jagger had told him. Stone did know, however, that it was almost impossible for him to associate this sordid little history with the Eve that he knew. She simply had too much style, too much class, to have come out of a background such as Eddie described. For one thing, she did not even have a southern or country accent. And yet he could not see any reason for Eddie to lie about her. So he had no choice finally except to believe it, at least for now, until he learned otherwise.

  As he lay there thinking about her, he was not aware of the figure standing in the hall doorway, evidently having just paused there for a few moments. Then, as the figure moved, its long robe swishing in the fire-crackling silence, Stone looked up and saw that it was Eve. She did not even glance his way as she went to the fire and knelt in front of it, holding out her hands.

  “Cold back there, huh?” he said.

  “Freezing.” She still had not looked at him.

  “Jagger asleep?”

  “Finally.”

  “That his problem? He can’t sleep?”

  “Who says he has a problem?”

  “Eddie, for one.”

  Eve made no response. She had sat down on the hearth, tucking her green velvet robe tightly around her legs and buttocks. Stone could see now that she was shivering.

  “You want my blanket?” he asked.

  “What would that leave you with?”

  “Well, I’ve been in here, closer to the fire.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”

  Stone had the feeling that hours passed then, though it was probably only a minute or so, during which she continued to sit there as close to the fire as she could safely get, her face aglow with it, her hair coruscating, a blaze in itself. And she said nothing. She was alone, isolate, gone somewhere. Abruptly she came back.

  “He can’t sleep because he’s afraid he’ll wake up blind. And when he’s awake he’s afraid he’ll bump his head and become blind again. And
when he sleeps he dreams he’s blind and down in that hole where the blacks kept kicking him and tormenting him.”

  “Can’t blame him for that, I guess,” Stone said.

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “And Dawson? Why was he so hostile tonight?”

  Eve smiled wryly. “Jag didn’t know they were black. When he saw Mama for the first time last night he said something—I don’t remember what it was, I wasn’t listening. And then today he told Dawson that his sight was already coming back—he knew it before the service last night, but went through with it anyway—don’t ask me why. I guess Dawson figures he’s lying, that it’s just racism.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I don’t think anymore. I try not to. I just want to be warm again.”

  Stone suggested that she sit up on the end of his couch and share his blanket.

  She gave him a despairing look. “Don’t you ever give up?”

  “Couldn’t it be kindness?” he asked. “Couldn’t it be I just want you to be warm?”

  She did not answer.

  “Why not risk it?” he said. “I promise I won’t attack you.”

  Shrugging, she got up and sat down at the end of the sofa, where his feet had been. Sitting up himself, he drew the blanket over them. He put his arm behind her, on the back of the sofa.

  “That feel better?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Across the room, Eddie rolled onto his side, facing away from them. He sighed and made a faint whimpering sound, like a child dreaming.

  “We had a little talk tonight, Eddie and I,” Stone said. “Some of it was about you.”

  “And it makes you think I should be a pushover, right?”

  “I already know you’re not that.”

  “Good.”

  “What bothers me is I feel we’re about to separate, and I won’t be able to—” Stone fumbled for the right words. “—to press my case.”