“Produce or perish, is that it?” Mrs. Goff asked from the floor.
Jagger, standing in front of the fireplace, gave her a look of amused indifference, as if a mouse had piped up. “Yeah, that’s about it,” he said.
“And you’re the arbiter of which one it’s going to be?”
“If you say so.”
Mrs. Goff was on her feet now, ignoring her husband, who was anxiously tugging at her dress, trying to pull her back down.
“May I ask who appointed you to such high office?” she asked.
“No appointment necessary.”
“One just takes over, is that it?”
“Whatever you say.” Jagger’s smile did not match the frost in his eyes. The fire behind him glowed in his hair like a halo, an anomaly that almost made Stone grin.
“Whatever I say?” Mrs. Goff repeated. “Good. I say let’s all vote on throwing you out.”
“And I say you’d better sit down, old woman. You heard what the new rule is—you don’t produce, you don’t eat. If I were you, I’d think about that and nothing else.”
Edna Goff slapped at her husband’s hand, still pulling at her dress. “Well, I prefer to think this,” she said. “I prefer to think it’s obscene for all of us to sit here taking orders from some tennis bum playing at dictator.”
Jagger regarded her almost sadly, as if she already had starved to death. “Congratulations—you just talked your way out of here.” He looked over at Spider, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with his Sten submachine gun cradled in his lap. “Make sure the old bitch and her husband are out of here by noon tomorrow.”
Spider nodded. “Right on.”
Stone was amazed at how restrained the protest was to this outrage. Later he would realize that probably half the people there approved of Jagger’s decision. Two less mouths to feed meant that much more for those who remained. And the sudden cold weather had brought this brutal fact home to everybody. Of those who protested, only the old black woman seemed roused by any true feelings of outrage. She pleaded and wept and finally grew angry, warning Jagger that if he sent “this old couple out into the snow” he would be signing their death warrants. He would be killing them. And “the Lord on High” punished killers.
“Just as He restored your sight, He can take it away, sonny. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”
Jagger dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Sit down, Mama, unless you want to go along with them. Remember, we got you down as a non-producer same as they are. Think about it.”
Awesome was still in his cabin, being nursed by his wife, so the old woman lacked her usual support. Weeping, she sat down. Stone was wondering why Flossie Baggs—the Goffs’ contemporary and supposed old friend—had not a word to say. In fact, she barely looked up from her crocheting.
Stone realized that left only himself to object, and possibly Eve, who at least had the decency to look shocked and miserable. But she did not say a word either, and he wondered if it was because she felt as he did, that there would be no changing Jagger’s mind in front of the group. If it could be done at all, it would be afterwards, alone, one on one.
So Stone bit his tongue and sat through the rest of the meeting, most of which was devoted to work and guard schedules. Jagger went over the last information they had on the Mau Mau—that with the coming of the sleet and snow, the group had moved on from their previous encampment and no one knew exactly where they were now. Because of this he was assigning Stone, Eddie, and the O’Briens to go out on scouting forays the next day. The Mau Mau had to be located, he said. The colony had to be prepared.
After the meeting, Stone hung back and watched as the others straggled out of the lodge into the cold night, heading for their cabins. Flossie and Baggs went off to bed too, leaving only Stone, Eve, and the new triumvirate in the main room. Jagger wasted no time. Dropping onto the couch nearest the fire, he folded his arms and looked over at Stone.
“Well, what are you still hanging around for?”
“You know why—the Goffs. You can’t just toss them out of here.”
“I can’t?”
“You’ll be killing them. Why not just execute them and be done with it?”
Jagger smiled. “Yeah—why not?”
In exasperation Stone turned to Eve. “For Christ’s sake, tell him. Tell him he can’t do this.”
She shrugged listlessly. “He knows how I feel.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “Tell me.”
“You should let them stay.” She said it quietly, as if to mitigate her apostasy.
“I should, huh? Why? If they were just non-producers, I’d say okay. You two bleeding hearts could share your rations with them. But the old woman’s also a troublemaker. A source of discontent. And that we don’t need, not here, not now.”
Stone felt ridiculous, begging the man for anything. But the thought of the Goffs out in the snow drove him on. “Just give her one more chance. She can take Ruby’s place in the kitchen—as a producer. And I guarantee you won’t hear any more complaints out of her.”
“You guarantee, huh?”
“That’s right. I’ll get her promise.”
Jagger looked over at Spider. “What do you say, man?”
“I say push ’em out into the snow. She’s a smart mouth. I always hated teachers.”
“Good enough.” Jagger turned to Newman. “And how about you, counselor?”
Newman spoke gruffly, trying hard to appear as tough and inhuman as Spider. “I don’t know. It could be bad for morale, kicking them out. Maybe if she gave Stone her word, like he says.”
Jagger got up and stretched, yawned. “Aw, let’s go to bed, Sweetcheeks. I feel the need.”
Eve, waiting by the doorway, looked lost and frightened to Stone. He had the feeling that this last transformation in Jagger had been one too many for her. She could not keep up. Her world was forever tipping under her.
“What about the Goffs?” Stone asked.
Jagger gestured with his hand: weariness and contempt.
“All right—one last chance,” he said. Then he roughly gathered Eve to him and half dragged her down the hall.
“Good night!” Newman piped after him.
There was no answer.
Stone went straight to the Goffs’ cabin and told the old couple of their reprieve, adding that Edna would have to take Ruby Dawson’s place in the kitchen, to free Ruby for more difficult labors. The old man wept with relief at the news, but his wife took it very calmly, almost indifferently, and Stone wondered why. He had not wanted to stay, but he pulled up a chair anyway.
“You don’t like kitchen work?” he asked.
Mrs. Goff and her husband were sitting together on an old leather loveseat, facing their woodburning stove and its open door as if it were a television set. Edna smiled wryly.
“That isn’t it,” she said. “I just don’t trust our friend Jagger. I think he’s psycho.”
Her husband began to squirm. “Now, now, Edna—you heard what Mister Jagger said about being a troublemaker. We better make do with what we have, and be grateful for it.”
Mrs. Goff patted him on the leg. “You can’t trust a psycho,” she said. “He may reprieve us tonight and banish us again tomorrow.”
“I don’t think he’s really psycho,” Stone said. “Just scared stiff, that’s all.”
Edna shrugged indifferently. “One look at him and you know he’s a total egotist. And when someone like that gets scared, you’ve got a psycho. Or worse.”
“Maybe he’ll ease off. Once he knows his sight is back to stay.”
Edna shook her head. “It doesn’t really matter anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Well, let’s just say I’m not an optimist.”
Mr. Goff looked as if he were about to cry. “Please, Edna. Don’t. Not now.”
“Why?” she asked. “Does not saying something make it any less true?”
Stone was curious. “Not saying
what, Edna?”
She looked at him with wintry eyes. “That the Mau Mau are down the road. That we’ll all soon be dead anyway.”
“You make it sound preordained,” Stone said.
“Isn’t it?”
“Not for me.”
She smiled at him. “Because you’re too young to see it. Don’t you have any idea what’s happened?”
“What? Tell me.”
“We’ve failed, that’s what. We’ve blown the great experiment. This vast melting pot of crooks and cripples—we failed to melt.”
Stone tried not to let on that he found her words shocking, especially coming from an old woman. “And that condemns us to die at the hands of the Mau Mau?”
Edna stared into the fire for a time, before looking up at him again. “Well, think about it. We have an economic depression, just as people have had all through history. But instead of muddling through it as they did—and as we did too, a half century ago—we destroy ourselves. We rise up and start killing each other like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Why is that, do you think? Why have we become so uniquely incompetent at survival? Can you tell me that?”
Stone wanted to hear her answer. “You tell me.”
“Oh, I don’t really know. I just know what the result will be.”
“The Mau Mau.”
She nodded.
“But why? If we outnumber them?”
“Because, to fight them, we’d have to cooperate. And who wants to cooperate with strangers. Which is what we’ve become, this great mobile society of ours. We’ve become a nation of strangers.”
Mr. Goff was shaking his head sorrowfully, obviously finding his wife’s opinions no more congenial than Stone did.
“What about this cabin?” Stone asked her. “And the food and the firewood? Somebody must be cooperating with someone.”
She smiled at him again, evidently liking him in spite of his innocence. “Just wait,” she said. “Wait till the Mau Mau come. Then you’ll see.”
For the last two days Stone and Eddie had had their own cabin. Previously Mama Dawson’s, the old woman and her granddaughter had vacated it a few days before and moved in with Awesome and Ruby. Like the other cabins, it was small and cold and offered little in the way of creature comforts. Nevertheless Stone considered it a vast improvement over the couch in the lodge, if for no other reason than that it was his—his and Eddie’s—a place to hang their hats and “get their heads on straight,” in the Sixties’ phrase that Eddie still used.
In any case, Stone was glad to be returning there this night, crunching through the thin snow past the other cabins, trying not to think too much about Edna Goff and her gloomy philosophy. Oddly, it was not what she said that unsettled him so much as that it had come from her, the fact that such a gentle, even frail, old woman could hold such a brutally hopeless view of things. It was like opening a tiny and delicate music box and hearing—Wagner.
When he reached the cabin he found Eddie already in bed, mummified in blankets on his cot near the stove.
“Where you been?” the little man asked.
Stone told him what had happened with the Goffs.
“Did they kiss your hand?”
“Not exactly.”
“Walter the Good,” Eddie said. “Someday you’ll have stars in your crown.”
“I sure hope so.”
Stone went into the back room and took off his coat and boots. Since the first wintry weather, most members of the colony had moved their beds and cots into their front rooms, nearer the stove. But Stone had kept his in the back, for the reason that came in through the front door now—Annabelle.
Stamping the snow off her boots and chafing her arms, she hurried over to the stove. “God, I’m freezing! Four hours in that car and your buns turn to solid ice.”
Once again she had been on watch, only this time from four in the afternoon till eight. Stone helped her off with her coat.
“Did you see the godfather?” he asked.
“Just now. Stopped off on my way here.”
“How is he?”
“Sulking, mainly. He could’ve gone to the meeting tonight. Oh, he’s still swollen, all right. All yellow and green and purple. But he could’ve gone. He said he doesn’t trust himself—he’d probably kill someone.”
“Me or Jagger?”
Annabelle laughed and said hello to Eddie.
“Remind him I’m the one who sleeps in the front room,” Eddie told her. “I wouldn’t want to get shotgunned by mistake. Even in the place of lover-boy here.”
“What shotgun?” Annabelle asked.
“Oh, I hear there are some guns around, a few they didn’t get.”
Stone’s interest perked at that, because he still had his own thirty-eight pistol packed away. But he had not even told Eddie about it.
“Or Tocco could come out to your watch,” Eddie was saying to Annabelle. “He could take your shotgun and come back here and blast away. And with good cause. After all, Stone did put the horns on him, didn’t he?”
Annabelle looked disgusted. “Horns? What horns? I keep telling you, Tocco and I are not married. And never were.”
“Common law,” Eddie said.
Annabelle shook her head. “Not even that. Not now anyway.” Sinking into a chair, she gave Stone a forlorn look. “I’m afraid we do have a problem, though.”
“Other than the obvious?”
“Other than that.”
“What?”
“Paul kicked me out just now. He said if I came over here, I couldn’t have any of my things. He wouldn’t let me take anything with me. He said it’s all his, clothes, toothpaste, everything.”
Eddie almost jumped out of bed. “You’ve still got toothpaste?”
She gave him an exaggerated smile. “Can’t you tell?”
Stone did not think she had much of a problem. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get the stuff tomorrow. Meanwhile you stay here, of course.”
“Where else?”
For a time the two of them made an effort to be sociable and sat there with Eddie discussing the meeting that night and what an All-American bastard his old tennis chum had become. Stone recounted his conversation with Jagger after the meeting and how casually the man had changed his mind about forcing the Goffs to leave. And he told them of Mrs. Goff’s reaction later, her statement that one could not trust a psycho—“He may reprieve us tonight and banish us again tomorrow.”
Eddie said nothing to that, just lay there staring bleakly at the open-beamed ceiling. Stone then mentioned their mission in the morning and how he wouldn’t mind it if they found that the Mau Mau had moved on—in the other direction.
“I especially wouldn’t care to come around some bend and find myself in the midst of them.”
Eddie yawned. “Me either.”
His yawn was all the excuse Stone and Annabelle needed. Getting up, they said their goodnights and went into the back room. Stone had brought the kettle of hot water with him, and they both used it to wash in a basin that sat on an old marble-topped dresser. Waiting for her in the freezing bed, Stone wondered if he would ever again be able to enjoy sex in a warm, well-lit room. The sight of her standing naked in the firelight, bending gracefully from her waist as she laved herself, filled him with the sweet pleasure of desire soon to be slaked. He could not think of any other place in all the world where he would rather have been, at least for now, this night.
As she finished drying herself and scurried back to him, practically diving into the bed, Eddie called out from the other room.
“Be a little quiet tonight, will you two? This is hard enough as it is.”
For a second, Stone wondered if his friend was punning. Then he no longer cared.
The next morning he and Eddie followed the lake blacktop for over two miles, moving cautiously, keeping to the high ground above it. Finding no trace of the Mau Mau, they left the road and headed away from the lake into the woodlands and small farms that bordered it on the west. Within
a half hour they came upon the spoor of the gang.
Stone was not sure which he noticed first—the barking of the wild dogs or the stench of putrescent flesh. Eddie kept saying “Let’s get out of here,” but Stone pushed on until, coming over a sharp rise, they almost stumbled into a farmyard—obviously the same farm that the O’Briens had found a week earlier. The blackened remains of a small house and two sheds lay to one side of the old barn, which was open-doored and listing in the screaming stillness. On its peak a grim choir of crows and vultures perched and fluttered, taking turns diving down through the open doorway to feed on one of the two bodies hanging from the rafters like mangled sides of beef. Blood and bone and shreds of flesh and clothing, that was all the bodies seemed under their feathery, writhing coats of birds. The third body evidently had fallen, its rope eaten through. There was no sign of it on the earthen floor, however, only the dogs, snapping at each other, sniffing and pacing, tracing endless patterns of hunger and rage in the roiling dust.
“I’m gonna puke,” Eddie said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Nodding, Stone led on, circling around the small farm. They passed other places, some burned, some only abandoned, but all picked clean, as if the birds had fed on them too. Eddie kept saying that it was time to start back and Stone did not bother to tell him that they were already moving in that direction—he did not want him becoming any more careless and noisy than he already was. And anyway Stone’s attention had fixed ahead of him on another gathering of the omnipresent turkey vultures, this one still airborne, circling in the indifferent sky.
Valhalla Page 16
