Valhalla

by Newton Thornburg

  “Interesting.”

  “It could be,” she said. “It just could be.”

  There were times when Stone thought eight o’clock would never come. Like a child waiting for Christmas morning, he suffered the hours one by one until the magic moment finally arrived, and even then he made himself wait another twenty minutes so the others gathered in the lodge—especially Tocco—would not automatically guess his destination. But then he was on his way, moving quickly around the lodge and up the gravel lane to the point where the Cadillac was parked, facing the blacktop a few hundred feet beyond. Seeing her in the back seat, he opened the door and got in, and wordlessly it began.

  Even as they were kissing, she worked out of her heavy coat and jeans and sweaters, naked underneath it all. He asked her if she wouldn’t freeze to death in the cold night air and she said it depended on him and anyway she had a couple of blankets to pull around them. Within a few seconds he was out of his clothes too and she was going down on him, avidly, making him feel as shining hard as a saber. Then, straddling him, she eased herself onto him with her eyes closed and her head thrown back and her teeth bared. Her breasts seemed to rise up to him, unforbidden fruit that tasted as sweet as any he had ever known. And when she sagged against him finally he could feel through those same ripe breasts the slackening sprint of her heart. Raising her head, she looked at him and laughed.

  “Well, it’s a beginning,” she said.

  “It is that.”

  Cold now, they pulled the blankets tightly around them, tucking in the sides wherever they could. On the car windows their breathing was already condensing and turning to frost, which seemed to glow from the lights of Valhalla. The Cadillac was one of the last full-size models, a Fleetwood, with a back seat that seemed expressly designed for the use to which Stone and Annabelle had put it. In fact it was so capacious that Stone imagined he could have stretched out his five-eleven frame—if he had wanted to, which he did not, not with Annabelle still sitting on his lap.

  “Walter—that’s your name, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re not a Walter.”

  “Call me Stone, then.”

  “Okay—Stone. I like you, Stone.”

  “And I like you, Annabelle.”

  She smiled and kissed him again. “I’ve been planning this for days.”

  “What happens if Tocco pays us a visit?”

  “People will say you died happy.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m just kidding. He wouldn’t fool with you. And me, I’m used to the back of his hand. But fuck him. He always says marriage is for jerks. Well then, I say so’s fidelity.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “My one talent.”

  “No, your second one.”

  She laughed again. “I guess you’re right. Better at it than the ice maiden anyway.”

  “Forget her, will you?”

  “It ain’t easy. Anyone looks like that, other women don’t just forget her.”

  “Well, I have.”

  “Sure you have.”

  “About five minutes ago. I forgot everyone but you.”

  Stone could feel himself getting hard again. So did Annabelle.

  “This time, let’s make it last,” she said.

  “I’m for that.”

  Next to them on the seat was a rifle, which she eased onto the floor. Then she slipped down where the rifle had been, drawing him with her, on top of her.

  “What happens if the Mau Mau come along?” he asked, grinning.

  “No problem. I’ve always wanted to be ravaged by a black army.”

  He kissed her lightly on the lips. “Can you settle for this, then?”

  “Just watch me.”

  In time they put most of their clothes back on, but loosely, so they were both still available to each other’s caresses. To keep warm she again sat on his lap and they drew the blankets around them, making Stone feel a little like an Eskimo doing what Eskimos did during the course of their long winters. But mostly he and Annabelle were content just to talk now, and as the minutes of her watch grew to hours he learned a good deal more about her and her paramour. Contrary to his first impression of her as a type that might have run a massage parlor, it turned out that she was better educated than he, owning a Masters degree in English literature from Northwestern University. After teaching for a few years in suburban Chicago high schools she had found her way into public relations just as he had, only with more success, rising to a vice presidency and partnership before she was thirty. It was then her path had crossed Tocco’s, she said, as the company appointed her executive on his account, which essentially involved publicity for two Old Town nightclubs that he owned.

  He had never really been a liquor salesman, she explained, except in the sense that he dealt in stolen liquor, just as he dealt in stolen cigarettes and televisions and other items, usually by the semitruck load. He was, in short, a member of the mob, a lower echelon mafioso who made his living as a fence, a smuggler, and a loan shark. The nightclubs were just a front for him, places where he and his buddies could eat pasta and swill stolen booze and lay the help. Still, he was a rich man, Annabelle said. When they finally left Chicago he had a suitcase full of fifty-dollar bills with him—it “sat right in the trunk of this car.” And when he found he couldn’t buy anything with the money, he buried it in a forest preserve south of Springfield. It might be of value again someday, he had said. And then he’d go dig it up. Meanwhile they were on their way to Vegas, where he said he had some gold in a safe deposit box. They had not counted on gasoline running out altogether. They had not counted on “all this.”

  Stone asked her the obvious question: why she, a college educated executive, would take up with a hoodlum, and all she could give him was a helpless shrug.

  “I don’t know. I guess because I’m a flake too. Compared to the other men I knew, he was a lot more exciting. A lot more honest, in his way. And not afraid of anything. I think that was the big thing, that nothing scared him. Everyone else I knew seemed to be on tranqs or alcohol or head-trips. They couldn’t cope these last years. But he could.”

  That left one other question. “So what’s happened now—you two have a fight?”

  “You mean why this?”

  He nodded.

  She gave him a cryptic smile. “You mean because I like him I can’t like you?”

  “A lot of women pay lip service to that philosophy, but not many live by it.”

  “Well, Paul and I are very sophisticated. We have this agreement that we can both play around. Only when I do it, I get beat up for it.”

  “What about now? Aren’t you worried?”

  She shook her head. “I told him last time—if he ever hits me again, I’d kill him in his sleep.”

  “You’re a tough one, aren’t you?”

  She sat there looking at him, trying to smile. Then she gave it up. “Sometimes it dawns on me, where I am, and all that’s happened. And I can’t believe it. I wonder what will happen next. To me. To all of us.”

  “It’s the same with everyone, Annabelle,” he told her. “We’re all scared.”

  She shook her head disconsolately. “God, I always loved this country so much. My grandfather was Irish, just a kid on a boat with seven dollars in his pocket. And by thirty he was a master mechanic in a steel mill in Chicago Heights. He owned his own home. And my father went to college, the first in the family. He fought all over the South Pacific and then came home and became a lawyer. Every Memorial Day, every Fourth and Veterans Day, the old flags would go up at our house and my grandpa’s, and on Veterans Day the two of them always took me along to this big cemetery up in Chicago, with all the crosses, just a great field of crosses. And they’d both cry. God, how they loved this country. The freedom and opportunity. All it had given them. They really loved it, and I did too.”

  She turned on his lap and looked at him, her eyes suddenly shattered with tears. “What happened, Stone? Can yo
u tell me that? What happened? Just what the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess freedom wasn’t enough. We all wanted to be rich too. We all wanted big houses and two cars and boats and leisure—but we didn’t want to earn it. We didn’t want to pay for it. I guess that’s what happened.”

  He hugged her closer to him, to kiss her again. But their lips had barely touched when the sound of shouting suddenly reached them. Because the car’s windows were power-operated, Stone had to open the door slightly to see what the problem was. He made out a number of figures—eight or ten, one of them with a flashlight—gathered in front of the cabins. It appeared that if they were not already fighting, they soon would be. Annabelle slipped off his lap.

  “It’s Tocco, isn’t it?” she said. “I hear him.”

  “Maybe I’d better get over there.” Stone had already buttoned his pants and zipped up his jacket. Now he kissed her once more and slipped out of the opposite door.

  “I’m coming too,” she said, and followed him through the darkness toward the cabins.

  They came upon the women first, three or four of them watching the confrontation between Tocco on one side and Dawson and Smiley Baggs on the other, backed up by Spider and Newman, each of whom was carrying an armful of weapons, most of them rifles. Surprisingly Stone saw that Jagger also was part of this group, and in fact had moved out in front, next to Smiley, who was carrying the flashlight.

  Tocco was standing just off the porch of his cabin, blocking the entrance to it. And he too was holding a rifle, but in both hands, by the butt and stock, making clear that he was not about to surrender it to anyone.

  “I don’t care about any fucking consensus!” he yelled at Dawson. “This is my gun and you ain’t getting it, and this is my cabin and you ain’t searching it!”

  “You’re wrong, Paul,” Dawson said, calmly, almost instructively. “The gun is Smiley’s. He loaned it to you. And the cabin is his too.”

  “Yeah? Well, then just try to take it, motherfucker!”

  Smiley tried to step in between them. “Now come on, Paul—everyone else is goin’ along. We jist don’t want a bunch of you goin’ up there to Velheller and gittin’ yourself killed and leavin’ us without pertection.”

  “He already knows that,” Jagger said. “We’re gonna have to take it from him.”

  Tocco turned to look at him. “Ah, the pretty-boy traitor,” he sneered. “The snake in the grass. I just might snuff you and put a dead canary in your teeth.”

  It was then Dawson inexplicably moved forward, calmly reaching out for the gun as though he were dealing with some delinquent youngster in Kansas City. His attitude, the almost bored nonchalance, seemed to infuriate Tocco as much as the move itself, and the burly Italian responded savagely, driving the stock of his rifle up into the black man’s face. Dawson just stood there for a moment, stunned, reaching for his pain, and Tocco hit him again with the rifle, two more quick brutal blows, one on the side of his head and the other across his back as he fell. In that moment Ruby was screaming, Newman was edging backwards, and Baggs was looking dazed, as if he too had been struck by the rifle. And suddenly Tocco was moving toward Jagger, raising the weapon, preparing to strike with it again. But instead of pulling back, Jagger lunged forward, like a tennis pro going for a cross court passing shot, and he got it too, connecting with a looping forehand to Tocco’s jaw. At that same moment, Tocco managed to bring the rifle down against the side of Jagger’s head. And Eve screamed, voicing the same fear that raced through Stone’s mind too. He half expected to see Jagger stop and raise his hands sightlessly in front of him. But he did not. Instead he kept coming, hitting Tocco twice more, once in the body and again in the face, both times with his right hand, his tennis hand. And Tocco went down, sagging onto his knees, while Jagger kept crowding in over him, as if he were going to pummel him some more. It was then Stone stepped in, seizing Jagger from behind and pulling him back.

  Later Stone would remember it all almost as a ceremony of rebirth in which Jagger became not “himself” again so much as someone, something, wholly new, much as a young predator might discover a radical new sense of itself after its first true and solitary kill. Stone would remember the brief panic that had filled Jagger’s eyes as he too expected his sight to fail, and then the wild look of triumph when it did not. And Stone would remember the hatred he saw when he finally set the man free. Contemptuously Jagger had picked up Tocco’s gun and tossed it to Newman.

  “Here,” he said. “This should be the last. Now they do what we say.”

  Seven

  Beginning the next morning, a week of rain and sleet brought an end to Indian summer, all the warm golden days Stone had lived through since St. Louis without ever giving them a thought. Now he did. As the trees grew heavy with ice, and as snow began to powder the freezing slush on the ground, he wished he had not waited so long to leave. And yet he knew that he had no real choice in the matter anymore, because much more than the weather had changed, and almost all those changes pointed to his leaving, in fact to his having to leave. The reason was Jagger.

  With Dawson down, Stone had thought that Smiley would simply have gone on as before, as the man at least nominally in charge of affairs. But just as on the night when the guns were confiscated, it was Jagger who stepped to the front and took charge. Newman, ever the opportunist, had moved quickly to his side, with Spider Dominguez unexpectedly joining them. And because the three of them had all the guns, they also had the power. Anyone who tried to dispute that power—and Stone was probably the leader in this regard—quickly learned the impotence of words arrayed against killing steel. Finally he began to hold his tongue. He began to wait for a break in the weather.

  The prospect of leaving was not a pleasant one, though. At the Point, he at least had food and shelter. And he was not alone, a fact that impressed itself upon him every time he thought of the Mau Mau camped a few miles down the road. The irony was that even with that danger ever present, Jagger and his cohorts did not deem it necessary to return the weapons they had confiscated. Except for the guns they carried themselves and those which were issued daily to the persons assigned to guard and hunting duties, the weapons were kept under lock and key in a storage room in the basement of the lodge. And Stone could not understand this stupidity any more than he did the seizing of the guns in the first place. There, about all he had been able to come up with was motive, which seemed to have been different for each of the men involved. Smiley, he imagined, had gone along with the idea simply because he had not wanted to lose any members of his colony, no matter in what cause. His credo evidently was that any man who diminished his kingdom diminished him. And since most of the guns that would have been used in an assault on Valhalla were his—rifles and shotguns he had acquired over the years, and had lent to members of the colony—he had gone along with the seizure.

  Dawson’s reasons seemed equally clear to Stone. Unusual for a Christian, he apparently did not hold with killing and violence, even in the cause of theoretical self-preservation. He undoubtedly had considered the confiscation a moral act. Also he secretly may have resented any undertaking that could have resulted in the paring of his “flock.” And something close to this probably had been Newman’s motive too, Stone judged. From what he knew of the slender sociologist, he could not imagine him favoring any move that might have broken up the colony and reduced that “social organism” with which he so dearly yearned to tinker.

  That left Jagger. The catalyst in the operation, it was he who had gone to Baggs and told him about the Valhalla meeting. Tocco was of the opinion that he had been planted in the meeting by Dawson or Newman, but Stone did not believe it. Rather he saw Jagger’s treachery as simply another manifestation of the fear which apparently had come to dominate his life. Dreading the prospect of leaving the colony and venturing again out into that uncertain world where he had been blinded and tormented, he had tried to curry favor with Baggs and Dawson by telling them of the Va
lhalla meeting, undoubtedly in the hope that they would then let him and Eve stay on. No more than anyone else, could he have anticipated the irony to come, that his act of betrayal would lead not to his finding some coward’s asylum but rather his own true manhood again, or at least a dark and vicious side of it. Ever since that night he had swaggered like a Manhattan pimp. He had moved in. He had taken charge. He had become the man.

  This turn of events meant little to Dawson, who lay in his cabin for days afterward in a state of semiconsciousness, probably suffering from a fractured skull or at best a severe concussion. In addition, he had a crushed cheekbone and a closed eye and a broken rib in his back that made him wince in pain with every breath he took. Smiley Baggs, however, was very much aware of what had happened, as day by day he haplessly surrendered more power to Jagger and his two lieutenants—Newman offering the tennis star advice at one elbow while Spider ran errands from the other. On occasion Smiley would grin happily about all this, as if nothing substantial had changed. At meetings he would clap Jagger on the back and stand close to him, trying to show everyone that he still shared some of the power, on a level with Newman and Spider anyway. But most of the time he sulked. He looked puzzled and bereft. He would sleep till noon and go to bed at dark and spend his waking hours wandering the Point like a pensioner in exile. To Stone he would complain that none of this was as he had planned it. His colony had been turned into a Nazi camp, he would say, before adding illogically that it was “that commie Jew Newman” behind it all, filling Jagger’s head with ideas he would not have thought of otherwise.

  In truth, Stone recognized that the brutal change in the weather would have forced anyone in charge to make concomitant changes in the running of the colony. Suddenly milk and egg production had fallen off and the men assigned to hunting and fishing details usually returned empty-handed. In addition, the scavenging and cutting of firewood had dropped off, and it became increasingly difficult to keep the cords of wood they already had from getting wet and frozen. But the reaction of Jagger and his lieutenants to this was hardly predictable or even believable. At one of the meetings after the storm, Jagger came down hard on the “non-producers” in the colony, whom he was not at all bashful about naming. Kelleher and his daughter, Tracy, Mr. and Mrs. Goff, Mama Dawson and the Dawson child, even the injured—Tocco and Awesome himself—none was carrying his own weight, Jagger said. Without working, they were enjoying food and fuel and shelter, and this state of affairs would no longer be tolerated. Either they would become productive or their rations would be cut, deducted from the shares of some willing relative or friend. And if they could not find any such generous person, then they would simply be banished from the colony as undesirable leeches. It all sounded harsh, Jagger conceded. But it was a matter of survival.