Within a few minutes Stone found the object of the birds’ desire—a once-scenic little village consisting of a cinder block general store, a small white frame church and four houses, all gathered at the point where a gravel road crossed a bubbling rock-strewn stream. Everywhere there was litter—empty cans and bottles and animal remains, feathers and skins and bones, dead cows and calves and dogs with only the hind legs and haunches missing. And if the birds did not come down and feed upon it all, the reason was that it had a guardian—a crippled black boy stumbling around eyeless in all the litter, flailing with a baseball bat at anything he could hit. Through his binoculars Stone could see the hideous, empty eye sockets, the dried blood covering the lower half of the boy’s face. His mouth worked silently, tongueless. And below his groin, his jeans were blood-drenched in testament to yet another mutilation.
Stone’s mouth was very dry and he was sweating heavily. Feeling as if he might vomit, he handed the binoculars to Eddie, who looked through them for only a few seconds before handing them back. He repeated his refrain.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They were only about a hundred yards away, crouched on a low ridge among some rocks and cedars.
“We should kill him,” Stone said. “We should put him out of his misery. Or we should try to take him with us.”
Eddie looked at Stone with disbelief. “There could be others in those buildings, for Christ’s sake! Or the whole bunch could come back at any moment! You want to be down there when that happens?”
Stone was looking through his binoculars again. He could not help himself. The boy was pounding the bat against a wooden sign, shredding it: The Baptist Church of Jesus.
“You go down there and I’m cutting out,” Eddie said. “Alone. I mean it.”
When Stone finally lowered the binoculars, he saw that Eddie had already started off, hurrying along the rim of the hill. Still Stone could not move. He was desperately scanning the windows in the buildings for a face, some sign of life, something to lift from him the awful burden of freely walking on. But there was nothing, no one. He thought of what it would be like to try to guide the creature safely through this countryside teeming with Mau Mau and other dangers, and he doubted that it could be done. He did not know what he would do with the boy even if they were able to reach the Point, mutilated as he was. Keeping him alive would have seemed an almost eccentric cruelty. And yet shooting him, risking a shot, here, now—it was out of the question. That was what Stone was telling himself, even as he released the safety on his thirty-thirty, even as he stretched out on the rocky ground and aimed, putting the gun’s crosshairs high on the chest of the boy. Then he squeezed the trigger and the youth leaped awkwardly toward the ground, already limp, dying.
Stone did not even hear the roar of the gun. But Eddie did. And he stood transfixed in the path, his eyes bugged, staring at Stone as if he were a unicorn. Stone quickly reached him and pulled him on.
“We’ll have to stay in the trees as much as we can. And go slow.”
“You idiot!” Eddie cried. “You stupid, motherfucking idiot!”
“Come on, we’ll make it.” Then Stone told him the truth. “I had no choice.”
They had covered over half the distance back to the blacktop when they suddenly found what they had been looking for—the new camp of the Mau Mau. At first Stone thought it was simply a large handsome farm with the owners still living on it, because he could see figures in the farmyard—workers, he thought, until his binoculars brought them up close. And then more figures began to appear, some coming out onto the porch of the fine old colonial house while others went inside and others still milled aimlessly about the yard.
“Okay, we know where they are,” Eddie said. “Let’s get moving.”
“A couple more seconds,” Stone told him. “I want to see how many there are. And what weapons they have.”
Eddie shook his head in resignation and sat down on the ground, refusing even to look at the scene that presented itself across the road. Stone was surprised to see three Chicanos among the blacks, as well as a half-dozen whites. Of this number four were girls and two were boys, the latter smallish, hangdog teenagers who obviously survived only as servants, or more probably, slaves. The girls, however, appeared like the other female members of the band, subservient to the men but relaxed and easy about it, somehow content with their lot, possibly because it included the wearing of fancy clothing. One girl had on a black velvet evening dress under a mink coat. Some combined flamboyant Sunday hats with motorcyclists’ jackets, though a majority—the men included—had acquired a surprising array of cowboy outfits, some of them sequined and ornate, down to Tony Lama type boots, while others settled for a more buckskin look. As he continued to study them, a quite different uniform suddenly appeared, as a man dressed in a skier’s outfit came out of the house onto the porch. A youth jumped up out of his chair for him, but the man waved him back to it. From that, and just by the way the man stood there, Stone did not doubt that he was the leader of the gang.
Stone handed the binoculars to Eddie. “The cat on the porch,” he said. “In the skier’s outfit.”
Looking, Eddie made a soft whistling sound. “It’s him, all right. One of the two.”
“The one who raped Eve.”
Eddie gave the binoculars back. “You should’ve shot him,” he said.
Stone did not respond. He tried hard to think only of the business at hand, and once again checked every weapon he could see. Then he lowered the binoculars again and picked up his rifle.
“Okay, let’s fly,” he said. “I’ve got a count.”
It was only after they reached the blacktop and were close to home that Stone allowed himself to think of the boy he had shot. All his life he had seen the act committed, ersatz versions of it on television and in the movies and only recently the real thing in St. Louis. But somehow even the shock and horror of those occurrences—the killing of Miller, the shootings in the Blueback—seemed different totally from what he had just experienced. And he was afraid he knew the reason: because here the death had begun in his own head, as thought. The boy had died not because a bullet had torn into his chest but because Stone had chosen to fire that bullet. Stone had killed him, Stone personally, no one else, nothing else.
The fact that he had done it as an act of mercy did not alter his conviction that he had stepped over some ultimate line and now was a different man in a different world. He felt it in his chest, in his heart, almost as if the bullet had exploded in him instead of in the black boy. In taking a life, he wondered if he had not lost his own.
Eddie, however, had no such reservations. Feeling safe now, he could talk about nothing else.
“Jesus, that was something. I’ve never seen anyone gunned down before. When it hit him he just seemed to dance in the air for a few seconds, you know? That was some shot. Scared the shit out of me then, I’ll admit. But I can’t blame you, man. No one could. That kid was better off dead. Anybody could see that. And you sure took care of him. Just one shot. Whammo.”
“Yeah, I’m a regular Dan’l Boone.”
Eddie slapped him on the back. “Come on, don’t feel bad. It was an act of mercy. And to do it you put our asses in jeopardy—you bastard.”
Stone asked him not to make a big thing of it back at the Point.
“Why the hell not? It was something.”
“In fact, I don’t think we even ought to mention it. It’ll scare the hell out of everybody, him being mutilated that way. It might cause a panic.”
Eddie shrugged. “I don’t know—I think they got a right to know. Maybe the Mau Mau ain’t moving toward us, but they ain’t moving away either.”
“Maybe around us.”
“And maybe not.”
“Okay. But don’t make a big thing out of the shooting, all right? The Dawsons just might not see it the way we did.”
“Well, fuck them—they weren’t there.”
“Anyway, let’s k
eep it quiet.”
“Whatever you say.”
As they neared the Point, Stone left the road for a few moments and hid his rifle in a cleft in the trunk of a dead oak tree. When he came back, he told Eddie that he had lost the gun. He had been crossing a stream, he said, and he had dropped the rifle into the water.
Eddie looked at him as if he had lost his senses. “What’re you talking about? I just saw you take it back in those bushes.”
“The water was too deep and cold to go after it,” Stone said. “And we were running. So we had to leave it.”
“No shit.”
Stone grinned. “No shit. Will you back me up? Even to your old buddy?”
“Old buddy, hell!” Eddie exploded. “Jag acts like he don’t even know me.”
Stone persisted. “Will you back me up, Eddie?”
“Well, hell yes, I will. That’ll be one more gun they won’t have, right?”
“That’s the general idea.”
When they reached the lane and saw the lodge and the lake through the trees, Stone felt a sharp sense of relief and even pleasure, almost as if he had come home. And he began to understand how a prisoner could learn to love his prison.
Because of the constant anxiety about the Mau Mau, Stone had expected a number of people to come out and question him and Eddie as they made their way to the cabin. Instead he found most of the colony already out of doors, crowding near the Kellehers’ motor home. Only as he worked closer did Stone see the two men fighting on the ground, Kelleher and his son, wrestling, panting, flailing away like a couple of twelve-year-olds. In no way was the brawl anything like the precise, swift surgery Jagger had performed on Tocco. And it was Tocco, finally up and around, who now performed the same service for Kelleher that Stone had done for him—he pulled the son off the father, only more roughly, throwing young Kelleher to the ground.
“Jesus Christ—father and son!” he lamented. “You two carry on like a couple of spics.”
At the edge of the crowd Stone saw Spider Dominguez’s black eyes flare with resentment at the epithet. But he did nothing, just stood there watching even though he was the only armed man in the crowd besides Eddie.
Seeing Stone, Annabelle came over.
“You’re back,” she said.
“Just now.”
She had taken hold of his hand and he could see that she would have kissed him too, right there in the crowd, like a wife, if he had not held her off with a touch of coolness. He was not sure why this was important to him. He asked her what was going on and she shrugged.
“A family squabble, I guess.”
“How can you tell?”
She smiled. “Yeah. I’m real sharp today.”
Young Tracy Kelleher had watched the fight from the doorway of the motor home. Wearing a beautiful floorlength scarlet housecoat, she had stood there crying and biting her fist. But the moment Tocco had pulled her brother off, she ran to her father and tried to help him up. And as she bent down, the housecoat opened and Stone was surprised to see that she was wearing nothing under it, a most unusual garb for a frosty November afternoon. Watching as she helped her father back to the motor home, Stone was reminded of his initial reaction to them on his first night at the Point. He had sensed something unnatural or at least uncommon in their relationship then, and this only confirmed it. At the same time he could not forget that in the context of the day he had just spent and of the weeks he saw ahead for all of them, the Kellehers and their little problem mattered not at all.
As Smiley Baggs tried to calm things down, dusting off Rich Kelleher and telling him to come with him to the lodge, Spider walked over to Stone.
“Where’s you gun?” he asked.
“What gun?”
“You gun! The one we issue you.”
Stone smiled coldly. “At the report, Spider. You’ll hear it then.”
The report took place a half hour later, in the main room of the lodge, where Jagger had set up a kind of office, a sofa and desk cozily arranged close to the fireplace. That way, Stone figured, he could lie in comfort and think up new rules and regulations which he would then try to enforce from his seat at the desk, much as he was doing now, after Stone had told him and Newman that he had lost his rifle. Spider, like a vigilant Doberman, stood twitching off to one side, clutching his Sten gun with both hands.
“And you want to stick with that?” Jagger asked. “You lost it?”
“Just like I said,” Stone insisted. “We’d seen their camp. We were in a hurry. And crossing this stream, I dropped it in the water—which was deep and very cold.” He spoke precisely, as if he were reciting the story. He did not even want Jagger to believe him. “I couldn’t see it, so we came on home.”
Jagger was smiling. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He looked at Eddie. “And what about you, old buddy? Is that the way you saw it?”
“Just like he said—old buddy.”
Jagger did not miss the sarcasm. “Guess he’s your new hero now.”
“I don’t need any heroes. And anyway, there ain’t any. There never was.”
“No kidding.” Jagger acted as if he were greatly impressed by this last bit of information. He nodded sagely and turned to Newman. “What do you think, Kevin? You think we ought to buy this incredible, stinking piece of shit they’re handing us? Or should we just send them packing?”
Newman was predictably judicious. “I don’t know. I think Walt never has understood the importance of not having the guns out there, handy for any kind of mischief anyone wants to dream up. That way lies anarchy.”
“For Christ’s sake, he stashed the gun!” Spider broke in, obviously disgusted with Newman’s homilies. “He knows it, and he knows we know it.”
“One thing I know is, it was my gun,” Stone put in. “I brought it here. That’s why I’m mad I lost it. Probably even madder than you are.”
Jagger got up and went over to the fire to warm his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, I sure as hell do! He stashed it!” Spider insisted. “I know goddamn well he stashed it.”
For thirty or forty seconds Jagger continued to stand there warming his hands, occasionally shaking his head. And when he finally turned around, he looked oddly rattled.
“Oh yeah—that,” he said. “Of course he took it. We all know that. No, it’s his attitude I don’t know about, this hostility I just can’t figure.” He looked from Stone to Eddie and back again. “Explain it to me, will you? Why are you two and Tocco and so many of the others so hostile to us? And especially to me? What do you think we’re involved in here, some kind of silly power game? You think we get off on all this, working twice as hard as the rest of you?” His voice had begun to rise. “Doesn’t it ever dawn on you that if we don’t knock heads together here, if we don’t streamline this operation and keep control of things, we’re probably gonna starve this winter! You hear me? Starve!”
Suddenly there were tears in his eyes and his hands were shaking.
“We’re gonna wind up eating each other like a fucking pack of dogs! Is that what you want, huh? Is that what all of you want? Tell me!” He looked at Eddie, who was staring down at the floor. Eddie shrugged.
“’Course not, Jag. We’re doing our best.”
“Your best?” He turned back to Stone. “Is that what you were doing when you stashed our gun, Stone? Was that your best?”
Stone calmly repeated that he had lost the gun. The tears still stood in Jagger’s eyes. He seemed unaware of them.
“Look, all we’re trying to do is get as many of us as possible through the winter, without turning into cannibals or getting slaughtered by the Mau Mau. Is that so hard to understand? By spring, things are bound to change. The government will get control again. Power will be back on.” He looked at Eddie. “And there’ll be tennis again, I just know it. And there’ll be money. It’ll be like before, like it always was—you thought of that?”
Eddie nodded. “Sure, Jag.�
�
“All we gotta do is get through this stinking winter and we’ll make it. We really will.” For emphasis he kicked over a chair, and suddenly he seemed to realize that he was crying and shaking. Hugging himself like a freezing man, he turned back to the fire. He pawed at his face, smearing tears. “What do you think, Kevin?” he got out. “Do we kick him out? Or do we let him stay?”
Newman gave Stone a reassuring look. “Well, I think we gotta keep in mind what Walt contributes, like finding the Mau Mau today. If worse comes to worse, we’re gonna need men like him.”
“Spider?”
The spindly Mexican would not look at Stone. “Maybe if he brought the gun back—maybe I’d say okay. Otherwise I say he walks.”
Jagger still would not turn away from the fire, and Stone wondered why the others continued to let him lead. Certainly they could see just as clearly as he did how close to a breakdown the man was. On his second day out of St. Louis Stone had stumbled on a rabbit that became so frightened it ran in a circular course in front of him, faster and faster until he finally clubbed it. That was how he perceived Jagger now, so unremittingly terrified that he did not know what he was doing, only that he had to keep doing something, had to keep moving, had to keep running, all the time.
For himself, Stone had had enough of the man. “Well, that’s my report,” he said. “If you want me for anything else, I’ll be in my cabin.”
“Hey, we ain’t decided about you yet!” Spider complained.
But Stone kept on moving, with Eddie close behind him. As they neared the doorway Stone glanced across the room into the kitchen and saw Eve standing at a table chopping up some food. She looked up at him with no expression at all, almost as if she were on drugs. But he knew better. He knew she was only on fear, like her lover.
Valhalla Page 17
