Valhalla

by Newton Thornburg

  Stone turned to Annabelle, who looked as if she were about to pass out.

  “You’re not up to this?” he said.

  “I’m no nurse.”

  “Sure you are. Have the girls show you where the first aid supplies are. Put antiseptic on the wound and bandage it. And if there’s any antibiotics, use them. I’ll get back to you.”

  He got up then and checked the second Mau Mau, who was lying face-down now. Like the one near the davenport, he had multiple wounds, all in his abdomen. Behind him the glass wall had been similarly shattered.

  Stone walked over to the surviving three. “It’s done,” he told them. “It’s all over now. We’re gonna give you some clothes and food, and you hit the road, understand?”

  They nodded eagerly, welcoming the chance to go on living.

  “What about the other one?” Eddie asked. “That stoned little blonde upstairs?”

  “You think she can travel?”

  “No way.”

  “Then she’ll have to stay.”

  Stone caught one of the black girls looking at him with a scalding hatred. At his glance, she lowered her eyes.

  “What about the General?” she asked.

  Stone told her that he was staying too.

  Over the next hour Stone and the others worked hard to create a semblance of order out of the chaos of their victory. While Eddie got food for those who were departing, Stone took them upstairs and had them dress. Then the two men walked the Chicano and the two black girls out to the top gate and watched them leave, in fact watched them all the way out of sight around the first curve at the far end of the mountain. Stone then checked back with Annabelle and found that she and the two girls had moved Tocco onto the davenport, the same one from which the Mau Mau had shot him. The girls had located bandages and penicillin ointment and finally even had taken over the bandaging of the wound. Tocco, under three blankets, was conscious but doleful. Softly, he told Stone that there was no exit wound.

  “The bullet just stayed in me, bouncing around. I’m all torn up inside. I’m bleeding to death in there.”

  “You don’t know that,” Stone said. “It was only a twenty-two. Plenty of men live with bigger slugs than that in them.”

  “Should’ve killed the bastard right off.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Take care of Annabelle for me, okay?”

  “That’s your job, Paul.”

  But Tocco was serious. “If I kick, goddamnit!”

  Stone went along with him. “Sure. Of course I will.”

  Accepting that, Tocco closed his eyes. Stone felt his pulse and found it strong and regular. Leaving him and Annabelle, he motioned for the girls to follow him into the living room. To make himself less forbidding to them, he sat down on the arm of a sofa, but even then he was at eye-level with them. Standing together, facing him, they both looked like the youngest wives in an Arab harem: dark and pretty and nubile.

  “We’ll have more time to talk later,” he told them. “But I just wanted you to understand a few things now. We were down at the Point—Baggs’ Point, you know it?” Neither girl responded. “Anyway, the Mau Mau came through—the same people who took over here. They killed one of our young men and destroyed our food supply. Most of the people left after that. But a few of us—”

  “Annabelle already told us this,” the older one said.

  The younger one nodded. “She said it was your idea—to rescue us.”

  “That was the main thing, yes. You remember that day you threw the paper airplanes down? Well, that was me in the boat.”

  “Of course we remember.”

  Stone was at a loss. He felt confused and embarrassed. He told them his name and asked them theirs.

  “Molly,” the older one said. “And she’s Mitzi.”

  They both stood there looking at him with unblinking eyes, frightened eyes, condemning eyes. He felt more their conqueror than their liberator.

  “We also came for food,” he blurted. “And I had this score to settle. With the General.”

  They both just stared.

  “Can we go now?” Molly asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “Anytime. You’re free now.”

  They turned and went back into the rec room to be with Annabelle, who had killed no one.

  Stone already had decided that he and Eddie were not going to carry the bodies out to the parapet and pitch them over the side, as the Mau Mau had done. And yet he knew that the task of burying them in the rocky, frozen ground on the mountain would have been formidable. The answer to the problem turned up in the garage, where he found an old Mercedes, a Jeep pickup, and a Chevrolet Citation. It occurred to him that there was no reason why the Citation—the easiest of the three to push—could not be used as a coffin for burial in the lake. So he and Eddie brought the bodies one by one out to the garage and put them into the car.

  Stone had halfway expected to find the junkman’s wife somewhere in the house, but both girls insisted that she had died in the attack and they had not seen her since. So Stone closed the car doors on its grisly cargo and went back into the house. Later, when it was light, and after he and Eddie had slept, they would push the car out to the road and steer it off the edge and watch it fall to the lake below. It would not be a very civilized burial, but then there was not much else anymore that was civilized either. Stone would be able to live with it.

  Meanwhile, he and Eddie and Annabelle had all been drinking, more to keep themselves going than out of any sense of celebration. In checking the wine cellar, Stone found it still amply stocked despite the predations of the last few days. There were cases of Blue Nun and Mogen David and lesser amounts of Mumm’s champagne and Sebastiani Mountain, both Chablis and rosé. There were also a half-dozen cases of vodka and scotch. So Stone had no trouble finding something to his taste, settling finally on a bottle of champagne which he laced with vodka, an abomination, he knew, but effective nevertheless. Checking the room-size meat locker and pantry, he found treasure even beyond his dreams. There were hundreds of packages of frozen meat, in addition to hams and chickens and packages of wieners. And there were dozens of cases of canned fruits and vegetables, as well as sacks of dried foods and flour and sugar and salt.

  Stone asked Eddie to stand first guard out at the Jeep. It would be for only a short time, he told him, an hour perhaps, and then Stone would take over for the rest of the night.

  “I’ve got to talk with Eve,” he said. “We’ve got things to settle.”

  “Right now?” Eddie was surprised.

  “Right now.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs somewhere.”

  Eddie picked up the thirty-thirty and his own bottle of painkiller. “Well, good luck,” he said. “I hope you get things settled.”

  Stone did not miss the sarcasm, nor did he mind it much, coming from Eddie. He watched as the little man headed out for the Jeep and then he turned and went upstairs.

  He found Eve in a small bedroom around the corner from the one the General had used. Evidently empty since the break in the Mau Mau’s ranks, it was still a mess, with bottles and bedding and plates of rotting food on the floor. The Currier and Ives wallpaper had been annotated with an orange crayon, messages running the gamut from this horse sucks to blak snow is beter.

  Still dressed, Eve was lying in bed with a blanket pulled carelessly over her, not even covering her still-booted feet. Stone sat down on the edge of the bed and took another pull on the bottle of laced champagne. By now he was feeling it strongly.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I guess so.”

  Stone told her that he was sorry for what he had done, and she smiled bleakly.

  “Sorry about what? Showing me what a phony I am?”

  “Well, you really did a job on me. I felt castrated. I guess I had to let you find out what it’s like—I mean with a gun, and your target just standing there.”

  “Sitting, in this case.”

  �
��The same thing.”

  “Not for you, it wasn’t.”

  “Well, no—this time I knew what he was. A murderer. I came here to kill him.”

  “So you win,” she said. “You are strong and right. And I am weak and stupid.”

  Stone was shaking his head. “Without you, I don’t win anything, ever.”

  “Then you lose, Stone. Because it can’t be now. And it can’t be here. Not in this bloody butcher shop.”

  Stone looked at her, almost regretfully. “Sure it can,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Here and now. It has to be.”

  She shook her head in denial. Then, seeing that he meant it, she closed her eyes and put her fist to her mouth.

  “Oh God, Stone. Please don’t. Not now. It will ruin it for us later. For good.”

  He was already taking off his clothes. “No, it’s the other way around. It has to be now. Or it will be never.”

  “But tonight! After all—”

  She could not finish, but he of course knew what she meant. And he agreed. It was absurd. It was obscene. It was worse than dancing on your victims’ graves, for the victims here were not even buried. And you were not dancing, you were fornicating in their beds. You were mixing blood and semen. You were a barbarian.

  Yet Stone refused to back off. Ever since he hit the outside guard, his blood had been running like pure adrenalin. He had never felt so alive, so much in command of his life, so right about all things. So he did not question the imperatives here. It was what he wanted and what he thought was right. And that was enough.

  He finished taking off his own clothes and then he took hers off. He had no idea where his erection had come from, since he did not feel erotic in any way, only powerful and angry. But he sustained it, and he entered her. He embraced her with all his strength, with no thought of pain or pleasure but only release. And when it came, he could feel the thing beginning in him, everything suddenly coming loose, all the jerry-built little compartments, all the makeshift walls and brittle barricades, all the slapdash wiring and tying and nailing. And he began to cry, he began to sob. He lay on Eve like some great dying beast unable to articulate anything except the pain of its death. And only then did she begin to respond to him. Only then did the lovely arms and legs curl around him and hold him tight.

  “Oh, Stone, I am so sorry,” he heard. “So sorry for all this, all you had to do. Someday—”

  But she was crying now too. And they went on that way, lying in each other’s arms and letting the pain and the fear and the loneliness run out of them.

  When he felt empty finally, he sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled her onto his lap, facing him. He buried his face in her neck and breasts, and he kissed her on the eyes and on the mouth, deeply. When he tried to speak, he cried again.

  It was after five o’clock when he was ready to relieve Eddie. Before going outside he got the General’s grease gun and his own forty-five, plus the bottle of champagne, which was almost empty now. Opening the front door, he saw that the sky had cleared and the moon was out, so he turned off the outdoor lights. As he started across the stone patio in front of the house, he experienced a momentary feeling of weakness, almost as if his heart had reverted to pumping blood instead of adrenalin. And for a few seconds he stopped and braced himself against the back of a redwood recliner. Then he went on, walking more carefully now, heading toward the Jeep beyond the pool, at the far corner of the courtyard. He felt no pain, just this sudden drop in energy, combined with a growing sense of fear, a cold, inchoate fear that slowly began to reveal itself.

  Soon it would be light. Soon they would all see each other in daylight. They would see with a new and terrible clarity what they had done and where they were. They would see that Valhalla was as much a prison as it was a citadel. Above all, Eve would see him. And he could not help wondering if in the pitiless reality of light and time she would not retreat behind her wall again and be lost to him. But then he reminded himself that all this was something he already knew, one of the few things he had learned beyond all forgetting in his thirty-four years. In life, victories tended to be brief. Time was more generous with failure.

  When he reached the Jeep, Eddie asked him what had happened with the lights.

  “I turned them off,” he said. “Maybe for good. No sense advertising we’re here.”

  “You got a point.” Standing, Eddie finished off his own bottle and tossed it over the parapet. “How’d it go with Eve?”

  “Well enough.”

  “That’s all?”

  Stone changed the subject. “Any sign of Jagger yet?”

  Eddie shook his head. “Naw. It’d take him a day to waddle up here, the shape he’s in. But don’t sweat it, he’ll make it. With bells on.”

  “Yeah, I imagine so.”

  Turning, Eddie looked back at the house and grinned. “You know, I can’t figure what to do first—take a hot bath, eat a T-bone steak, try to score with one of the girls, or just go to bed.”

  Stone smiled too. “It’s gonna be a problem.”

  “Kind of like the tennis tour. Incidentally, just how big is the field?”

  “You mean, your field as against mine?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Mine is Eve. That’s all.”

  Eddie looked surprised. “Really?”

  Stone stood there by the Jeep waiting for the little man to leave. But Eddie had something more to say, something not as easy. Finally he got it out.

  “Tell me—does it bother you much? What you had to do? The killing, I mean?”

  Stone did not want to talk about it, not yet anyway. So he lied. “No. I figure it was necessary.”

  “Me too.” Eddie slapped him on the arm and headed back toward the house.

  Alone finally, Stone found that he could not just sit in the Jeep and wait for the hours to pass. Still unable to relax, he walked back and forth along the parapet, stopping finally at that point where he had first seen the junkman’s daughters. Even though it was still dark out, he could see Baggs’ Point clearly. He could make out the blocky shape of the lodge and he could see wisps of smoke rising through the trees. It crossed his mind that in time he probably would see other people down there, other faces gazing up at him, wanting what he had. But the prospect did not frighten him. Like the junkman, he would fight to keep what he had. And if he lost, so be it. No one lived forever.

  Because of the moon, he was able to see the other side of the lake and the high dark ridge running north to Spalding. But he saw it all only as varying shades of darkness. There were no lights anywhere. In fact, wherever he looked over the great bowl of the lake valley, there was darkness. And it made him wonder if there would ever come a time when he would be standing where he was now, looking out upon the night—and the lights would come on again, not just down at the Point and on the other side of the lake, but all across the country.

  Strangely, even as he was thinking this, a faint gray haze of light began to form in the east, along the rim of hills above the blacktop. It took him a moment to realize that it was only the dawn.

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