Valhalla

by Newton Thornburg

  “And when it got bad up there you headed south,” Stone said.

  Dawson nodded. “When it was kill or be killed, yes sir. We came in two cars, both mine—maybe you saw them parked behind the lodge, the Toyota Celica and the Malibu wagon. It took us two weeks to get this far. And then the Malibu broke down and there was no more gas.”

  Over the next hour the two men caught four keepable large-mouth bass and two stripers, a catch that pleased Dawson enormously. He called Stone his good luck charm and said it was fortunate that Newman had backed out on him at the last moment.

  “I’m always trying to get that man to do something physical around the place—not just use his head—but he always finds excuses. I tell him that people like their leaders to do just what they do, at least part of the time. But he’d rather make charts and theorize.” He laughed at his colleague’s eccentricity.

  Stone, however, was not amused. “Who says the people need leaders?”

  Dawson leaned back, frowning, lacing his hands behind his head. It evidently was not a question he had ever asked himself.

  “They just do,” he said. “Otherwise you got—what, anarchy?”

  It was Stone’s turn to laugh. “Twenty-some people in a fishing lodge? They could get by, I’d say. They could muddle through, maybe not with the tidiness and dispatch Newman might wish. But they’d be on their own, wouldn’t they? And they’d be free.”

  Dawson looked almost rattled by the prospect. He shook his head in firm denial. “No, it just don’t work that way. People need leaders.”

  “You sure? Maybe it’s the other way around.”

  Dawson had had enough of that. Wheeling on the stern seat, he looked away from Stone, who was doing the rowing now, stroking hard as they moved back past the huge boulders below Valhalla. Up on top there was the sound of music, a hard rock number already blaring from the outdoor speakers at nine in the morning. The sun had climbed from the lake and the mists were gone Pausing in his rowing, Stone looked up at the top and saw a little boy sitting on the parapet. He was waving down at the boat and yelling something, but Stone could not make it out. Then two teenaged girls appeared next to the boy, and they too began to wave and call. They were dark and pretty with fine white smiles Stone could see even from where he was, so far below. He smiled and waved back.

  “Must be the junkman’s kids,” he said to Dawson. “They seem happy enough.”

  Dawson did not wave back at them. “Riches don’t make people happy.”

  “Maybe they don’t know that.”

  One of the girls disappeared for a few moments and came back with what looked like sheets of paper. Both girls got down on the parapet then, busying themselves in some way. When they stood up, they were holding paper airplanes. The taller girl promptly launched hers and it dipped toward the rocks below before looping upward and finally slipping into the lake a good distance from the boat.

  “Let’s go,” Dawson said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Not yet. I think they’re trying to send us a message.”

  There were six more airplanes in all, three that crashed on the rocks below the parapet and two that fell into the lake as the first one had, too far from the boat. But the last plane, the seventh, glided like a falcon straight down to the boat, and Stone managed to catch it by standing on his seat. The girls cheered and jumped up and down on the parapet, and Stone smiled and waved the paper plane at them. Then he opened it. The message was scrawled in orange crayon:

  Hi there fellas—how about a date?

  Mitzi and Molly

  P.S. We’re easy.

  Smiling still, Stone signaled agreement and the girls cheered again. He handed the note to Dawson, who barely glanced at it before contemptuously tossing it into the lake.

  “It was a joke,” Stone told him. “Kids having a little fun. That’s all.”

  Dawson did not respond, and Stone just sat there for a few moments staring at him, as if he might find some clue to the man’s behavior. But there was nothing.

  Stone waved goodbye to the girls and their brother. Then he began to row again, hard.

  Until Dawson got him up to go fishing, Stone had planned to leave the Point that day. But by the time they returned and had a late breakfast, it was already getting close to noon. And also he was tired, having slept only five or six hours when Dawson woke him. So he decided not to leave that day, and possibly not for the next couple of days either—the brutal killings just a few miles from the Point had dampened what little enthusiasm he had for traveling alone.

  After eating, he found a place to nap at the far end of the sun porch, on an old plastic-covered lounger set just inside the windows and warmed by the slanting fall sunlight. He slept for almost two hours before Eddie found him and shook him awake, whispering that there was a secret meeting in Tocco’s cabin and they were both invited. Since he had nothing better to do, Stone reluctantly got up and went along. He was surprised to find that the little man could not stop smiling.

  “What happened?” he asked. “You find some cigarettes?”

  “Better than that.”

  “Grass?”

  “Naa,” Eddie said. “I went milking. I was on the milking detail this morning.”

  Stone grinned. “Cow tits, huh? Just what you were always looking for?”

  Eddie gave him a patronizing look. “It’s who I went milking with, man. Little Pam and little Kim. The O’Brien boys were off hunting, as usual.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit. And would you believe them poor hillbillies don’t believe in eating pussy—unmanly, I guess they figure it.”

  “Girls told you that, did they?”

  Eddie was grinning blissfully. “Let’s just say it came out.”

  “Okay. It came out.”

  “Along with something else.”

  “Where? Up in the haymow?”

  Eddie made a face of absolute glee. “I couldn’t believe it, man. I mean, those girls belong on the tour. They really do. They weren’t just willing, they were flat out eager and starving for it. My face got chafed. Look at me.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “And they never had it anal either. The old sawdust trail. The poop chute. They were virgins, man.”

  “You’re a vulgar bastard, Eddie, you know that?”

  “Vulgar and happy. And chafed.”

  He did a little jig, leaping up and clicking his heels together. And Stone felt like kicking him—probably out of jealousy. He himself had been so unhappily and unwillingly celibate for so long that he could not help envying the little man his carnal morning, if indeed he was telling the truth about it, and Stone imagined that he was. Pam and Kim looked nothing if not accommodating.

  The two men had walked around the lodge and past the curving row of cabins behind it. Over the past few days Stone gradually had learned who was living where, starting with the Kellehers in their huge motor home parked closest to the lake. Next came the Dawsons in two cabins, Awesome and Ruby in one and Mama and her granddaughter in the other; then the O’Brien brothers and Pam and Kim all in a single cabin, followed by Spider and Newman in the next, then the Goffs, and finally Tocco and Annabelle in the last cabin in line—the one Stone and Eddie entered now.

  Like the other cabins, it was divided into two rooms, the back one for sleeping and the front one for cooking, eating, and watching the fire. Smiley Baggs, in a coup even he could not have appreciated at the time, had bought old used wood stoves for each of the cabins back when they had been considered valueless, not yet even antiques. Perfect for cooking as well as for heating the small structures, they were placed in the kitchen area, near the doorway to the bedroom. And like the log walls and rustic furniture, they made for a feeling of coziness and permanence, artifacts of a society that would endure regardless of supplies of gas and electricity and other ephemera.

  As they entered, the meeting was already in progress, with Tocco presiding from a perch on the corner of his kitchen table. Grouped in front of
him, some standing, some sitting, were Annabelle, Richard Kelleher, the O’Brien brothers, and—surprisingly—Eve and Jagger. On seeing the O’Briens, Eddie tried to smile nonchalantly but succeeded only in looking as if he were about to turn and sprint out the door. He fairly scooted across the room and squeezed in next to Jagger and Eve on a wicker couch. Stone decided to stay where he was, standing just inside the door. He stared at Eve for a time, but she failed to look his way. From Annabelle, however, he got a warm smile and her usual look of salacious invitation. He smiled back at her.

  Tocco looked at Stone. “I was just telling the others that I figure it’s time we stopped playing Boy Scouts, like we’re on some kind of fucking jamboree. I happen to know things are a lot worse than Dawson and his fag sidekick are telling us. I know how we’re already burning firewood in this little dump we’re in, and it ain’t even cold yet. And you multiply our use of wood by five more cabins and the lodge—there just ain’t no way to keep up, not without chainsaws. Oh, maybe we could make it if that’s all we did—become a bunch of full-time wood gatherers. Unfortunately, we got one other problem—food. And like the O’Briens were just saying, this whole countryside is hunted out. There ain’t nothin’ anywhere except wild dogs and cats, and I don’t figure we’ve sunk quite that low yet. The fishing is about played out—another month and the lake’ll be a sheet of ice. Which leaves us with what? A store of canned fruits and vegetables that will last about a month or maybe two if we go on starvation rations. And our daily milk and eggs, which could always fall off to zero—cows and chickens are temperamental too, right?”

  “We already know all this,” Harlan O’Brien said.

  “Maybe so. But I just want to spell it out. For everyone.”

  Harlan told him to feel free and Tocco grinned at him.

  “I’ll remember that. Where were we? Cows and chickens, right? Well, they may not be much, but they’re about all we’ve got. They’re our protein—our lives, actually—and don’t think that thought ain’t gonna cross some other people’s minds during the winter. Yesterday the O’Briens came across three bodies hanging in a barn, and this morning they see a gang of Mau Mau—probably the same gang that did it—not two miles from here.”

  Stone was not the only one who hadn’t heard this last item before. Jagger and Eve both looked alarmed and young Kelleher shook his head in dismay.

  “They coming this way?” Jagger asked.

  Harlan O’Brien shrugged. “No way of telling. They was just camped. About twenty of ’em, mostly kids, mostly black.”

  “And all armed to the teeth,” Tocco went on. “Now if they do come this way—if they see our cows and chickens, and yeah, our women—then we got troubles, my friends. Defending this place would be next to impossible. They could come from anywhere, all sides at once. And besides—what’s to defend?”

  “But now up on Valhalla,” Annabelle playfully interjected.

  “You’re goddamn right!” Tocco snapped at her. “Up on Valhalla we could hold off an army. And in the meantime we’d live just like we used to—like fucking kings.”

  Stone had a question. “If we could hold off an army there, why can’t the junkman? Why can’t he hold us off?”

  “Because as far as we know, there’s only seven of him—him and his old man and his wife and three kids, plus a male handyman. And we’re—what? Nine right here. And with John Kelleher and Baggs and maybe Dawson and Spider, we could be four more, plus all the women. They could help too. And what’s more, we’ve got the firepower. I’ve been making a list of all the guns we’ve got here on the Point—all I’ve seen—and believe me, we’ve got the firepower.”

  As Tocco spoke, Stone had been watching Jagger, and he was surprised at how much the man had changed from the night before, appearing not timid and frightened now so much as angry and impatient. His eyes kept darting from one person to the next. His hands moved restlessly. He seemed tight as a drawn bow.

  Now he spoke to Tocco. “Yeah, maybe we could make it. And maybe we’d all get killed trying.”

  “Against a junkman?” Tocco scoffed. “Against three old men, a woman, and a couple of kids?”

  Eve asked how they even knew the place would be defended. “Maybe it’s not a fortress at all,” she went on. “Maybe they’d welcome us.”

  Tocco grinned at her. “You know, you could be right. Maybe they would. And as for it being a fortress, we really don’t know that. All we know is it could be one. That is, we could make it into one. Smiley’s got this handyman cousin lives somewhere around here, and the guy used to do plumbing and electrical work up there. Worked on the generators and the freezer room and all that. And according to him, the only really fortified thing he saw was the iron gate at the top. It’s electrically operated and stout enough to stop a tank, he said. But I say you can always go over a gate, no matter how stout it is.”

  Jagger was openly scornful. “And you want us to try. You say attack the place without even knowing what the hell we’d be getting into.”

  “Better than sitting here waiting for some gang of kiddie Mau Mau to slaughter us and rape our women.”

  Stone looked over at Eve. She had winced at Tocco’s words. And now she looked down at her hands taloned in her lap. He wondered if she would ever look at him again. He wondered if he cared.

  Over the next hour Tocco and the rest of them discussed the matter in such numbing detail and with so much heat that Stone considered walking out. Instead he sat down on the floor near the stove and contemplated Annabelle’s shapely ankles and what the rest of her legs, hidden under tight old jeans, might look like and feel like. Especially he thought of the inside of her thighs and how the soft white skin there would feel against his lips and ears. Occasionally he would look up at her and the smile would come again, subtle and knowing, easy as sunshine. And he would wonder if Eve had noticed, then just as quickly he would despise himself for caring what she thought.

  Basically the discussion of Valhalla divided along lines adamantly pro and con, with Tocco and the O’Briens arguing for the assault and Jagger and Kelleher throwing up objections. The women, like Stone, seemed neutral, probably believing as he did that nothing would come of the discussion anyway. He had told them all what he had seen from the boat that morning, how the road at the top of Valhalla appeared to pass between sheer steep walls for thirty or forty feet, with the iron gate at the end of the passage, which made it a virtual pit, a rain barrel for plinking fish. But because he did not want to give encouragement to an enterprise that might imperil the junkman’s children, he neglected to add that the area immediately preceding the pit looked climbable. Instead he said that an attacking force could easily be wiped out on Valhalla—a conclusion that Tocco ridiculed. The place was an old monastery, he argued, and an egghead conference site after that. Sure, the junkman might put up some resistance, but what it came down to finally was men and guns. It always did. He himself was a Vietnam veteran, had got his share of slopes, and what it always came down to was firepower. Once the junkman and his family realized they were actually being shot at, that real bullets were coming at them, they would all fold like ARVNs. The gate would swing wide and the junkman would be popping champagne corks and “welcoming us like long-lost cousins.”

  Jagger and young Kelleher countered that the road up to Valhalla might well be mined, that the junkman could have automatic weapons, and that even if they did succeed in taking the place, they might find nothing of real value there, not enough food for the twenty-some persons who would be needing it. In answer, Oral O’Brien laconically suggested that there was only one argument for taking the place, and it was camped two miles down the road.

  “One look at them hungry black dudes and you ain’t gonna want to be holed up in no little log cabin.”

  And so it went. Nothing was resolved, except for everyone to think the matter over and meet again in a few days.

  “If we’re gonna do it, we gotta do it soon,” Tocco said. “Time is of the essence.”

>   That was the last word on the subject. As the conferees filed out of the cabin, their hosts went along with them, Tocco falling in with the O’Briens and Annabelle with Stone.

  “They’re probably gonna check out their guns,” she said to him. “Count their bullets.”

  “You serious?”

  She made a face: not that serious. “But he’ll probably do it,” she said. “Attack Valhalla, I mean. Paul’s crazy enough. Once he sets his mind on something, that’s it. He’ll do it.”

  “But you’re not like that?”

  “In a way, yeah. Only it’s when I set my mind on somebody.”

  “An admirable trait.”

  “I think so.” Looking at Tocco walking ahead of them, she spoke more softly now. “You know the Cadillac parked next to the driveway?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, that’s one of the guard stations. You just sit inside the damn thing for four hours and watch the driveway, see if anybody wanders in. It’s very lonely work. Very cold.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And that’s where I’ll be tonight, eight to twelve. I’m on watch.”