Valhalla (14 page)

“How about the others?” Stone asked.

“He means Eve,” Tocco said to Baggs.

The old man shrugged. “Well, I’m not so sure about them. They’d jist be mouths to feed, I figure.”

Tocco was sadly shaking his head. “Come on now, Smiley. You know it ain’t up to you. It’s General Dawson who’ll decide.”

“General Dawson, my royal pitoot!” Baggs exploded. “This is my place and I’m still the boss around here!”

“Sure you are. And I’m Princess Grace.”

Baggs dismissed him with a swipe of his hand. “Don’t pay no attention to this one,” he said to Stone. “He’s got a paper ass and he knows it. Jist think about what I said, that’s all. Think about stayin’, okay?”

For a time, Stone said nothing. He noticed the blood, his own, on the corn he had just shelled. Finally he looked back at Baggs. “Okay, I’ll think about it,” he said.

After he and Tocco changed places with two of the pickers, Stone ended up working one of the corn rows with Annabelle. The weather once again was warm and clear, and she had tied her shirt up under her breasts, leaving her midriff bare to the sun. As the two of them worked, Stone more and more found his gaze drifting to that patch of skin and especially her navel, dimpling the intriguing flatness of her belly. This only seemed to deepen her look of private amusement, and more than once Stone had to smile in embarrassment as she caught him gazing at her.

“You and the jet-setters leaving soon?” she asked.

“I don’t know about them. Smiley just asked me to stay on awhile.”

“You going to?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Kind of depends on her, doesn’t it?”

“Who?”

Annabelle gestured at Eve working in the next row. “That one. The ice maiden.”

Stone ignored the description. “No, it kind of depends on me.”

“You could’ve fooled me.” She was smiling at him as if he were a likable but hopelessly backward teenager.

“What are you—the Rona Barrett of Baggs’ Point?”

“No, I’m the scarlet woman—didn’t you know? I share the Italian stallion’s cabin without benefit of clergy, so to speak.”

“Scandalous.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“How about the O’Briens and their girls?”

“Different standard. They’re younger, and they’re hillbillies. It’s only expected. You see, Flossie knows that they’ll be pregnant soon. And married. And big on church.”

“But not you?”

“Not hardly. For me, Tocco’s what you might call making do. Getting by.”

“Until something else comes along?”

“It’s a thought, isn’t it.” Her smile was bold, ironic.

“I’m disappointed,” Stone said. “I figured you for a one-man woman.”

She laughed out loud, a laugh that brought Tocco ambling toward them.

“What’s all the noise?” he asked. “She bending your ear?”

“What are you—my keeper?” she asked him.

Tocco was grinning. “Don’t listen to her,” he said to Stone. “She just likes to talk. She likes to come on like a slut, but deep down she’s just like any other broad. At night, she cries. She begs me to hold her, and then she cries.”

Annabelle threw an ear of corn at him and he covered
his head with his arms. Laughing, he ran back down the corn row, still covering himself as another ear bounced off his shoulder. Stone looked at Annabelle. She was not smiling now. And for once, she spoke without irony.

“Like I said before, I’m just making do.”

That night, as was their custom, almost everyone congregated in the main room after supper. Edna Goff told Stone that while the stated purpose of these meetings was not evangelical religion, that was what they usually developed into, if for no other reason than that Awesome Dawson and his mother were the most effective speakers there. At the outset, however, the subject this night was official business—the care and feeding of the colony. But even that made no difference—it was Dawson, not Smiley Baggs, who took the floor and led the discussion. He said that he and Newman had been going over their figures, projections on food and fuel availability for the months ahead, and once again those projections were having to be scaled downward. All of which meant, he pointed out, that the colony was either going to have to produce more or consume less. Baggs, standing off to one side, questioned their figures.

“Everyone’s been workin’ real hard and cooperatin’ to the fullest,” he said. “I jist cain’t understand how we could come up short.”

Newman, next to Dawson, gave the old man a look of benign exasperation. “Figures don’t lie, Smiley. Our problem here is the same one the nation had—we’re living beyond our means.”

There was a murmur of protest at that, but no one else disputed Newman’s figures. Tocco asked Dawson what the bottom line was, and the huge Negro shrugged.

“We find more food and cut more wood—or we cut our numbers. One or the other. It’s that simple.”

“Well, we can jist forgit about that,” Baggs drawled. “We ain’t drivin’ nobody out of here like they was dogs. No sir, the only answer is we produce more. And I think one way to do that is add a man like Walt Stone here. He’s got guns and he’s fit and—”

“Smiley, you just aren’t listening,” Newman broke in. “We’re not talking about
adding
people. We’re talking about cutting them.”

Baggs’ face reddened. “And I jist want to remind you this is
my
place, sonny, and I’m the one says what happens here.”

Dawson smiled indulgently. “Of course we know that, Smiley. But we also know we’re a community here, just like you’ve been saying all along. A community of equal partners, not slaves or employees.”

“I know all that,” Baggs snorted.

Stone thought it time to speak up. “There’s no problem. I’ll be leaving tomorrow or the day after, at the latest.”

“You don’t have to,” Baggs told him.

“It’d be a good idea, though,” Dawson said. “And we appreciate it, Mister Stone. Nothing personal against you, of course.”

Across the room Stone saw Eve getting to her feet. Next to her, on the same couch where Eddie had slept the night
before, Jagger sat as if he were trying to draw himself up into a ball. He looked frightened and embarrassed and somehow smaller, as if a timid little stranger had invaded his hitherto flamboyant skin.

“I’d like to ask about us,” Eve said to Dawson. “If it’s possible for Jag and me to stay on awhile—a week maybe—we’d appreciate it. He needs the time to recover. To get over what happened.”

To Stone, she did not seem like herself either, sounding more like some timorous beggar than the Eve he was used to. And now Dawson joined this odd conspiracy, suddenly becoming an inquisitor instead of the warm, easy leader of a few moments before.

“Well, I just don’t know about that,” he said. “I mean, you’d think a big world-class athlete like Jag wouldn’t have any trouble cutting it out there in the world.”

“Just a week,” Eve persisted. “We can pay.”

Dawson was shaking his head. “It just don’t make sense. I mean, a man that can make himself see again—just by his own sweet self—you wouldn’t think he’d need the help of a bunch of people like us, who come in all sizes and colors.”

“Of course you can stay!” Baggs broke in, obviously as surprised and puzzled by Dawson’s attitude as Stone was.

Remembering the scene from the night before as well as the way Dawson had shown Jagger around earlier in the day, practically sweeping the ground in front of him, Stone could not understand what he had just seen and heard, especially the part about Jagger making himself see again. Once more he looked over at Jagger and Eve on the couch, hoping for some clue as to what was going on. But they were just as before—Jagger a frightened child and Eve his worried guardian. Incredibly, they both seemed to accept
with perfect equanimity what Dawson had said. Stone looked at Eddie on the floor, but all the little man could do was shake his head in bewilderment—he did not understand either. Stone had hoped that Eve would stay on her feet and give Dawson a sample of that articulate contentiousness he himself knew only too well. But after Smiley’s statement that they could stay on, she had sat down, looking pale and humiliated, and the meeting had moved on to other matters.

Dawson explained that Newman was drawing up work schedules and quotas, an idea that no one liked very much. Tocco said that if Newman would cut a little firewood himself, there might be no need for quotas—a statement that Newman did not like. He proclaimed heatedly that the work he did was needed and he would gladly change places with any of the wood cutters.

“You got it,” Tocco told him.

But Dawson did not agree. “No, Kevin stays right where he is. I need him there.”

Tocco piously raised his eyes to the ceiling. “The Lord has spoken,” he said.

Mister Kelleher then brought up the matter of the grocer Evans’ visit the day before and what he had told them all about the Mau Mau being in the area. It was as if the firelight suddenly had dimmed in the room and organ music had come up. Everyone grew almost reverent with fear. Heads began to bow; hands clasped; brows furrowed. The subject obviously was paramount in their minds, right up there with hunger.

“There’s nothing to say about the matter,” Awesome said to Kelleher. “We don’t even know they’re in the area. We haven’t seen them. And we have people out hunting every day.”

Hearing this, both O’Brien brothers gave each other a look Stone could not read from where he sat.

“Yeah, but what if they
are
out there?” Kelleher pressed. “And what if they come here?”

“We cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“The hell you say! We’d better face this thing now and be prepared for it.”

Newman came to Awesome’s aid. “We are prepared, John. In addition to guns, we have food and firewood and—I hope—some small sense of hospitality. If they were to come to this area, there’s no reason we couldn’t set up a dialogue with them. Awesome and Spider would be perfect for the job. And then we just work things out—the Mau Mau and us working together. If they want some particular items we have, well, so be it. We accommodate them. And survive.”

Throughout this short homily, Tocco was shaking his head in disbelief. “See what I mean?” he said to Stone. “You’ve stumbled into Wonderland.”

“Reality would be to fight them, is that it?” Newman snapped. “Kill and be killed?”

“Now you got it.”

“Well, I say negotiate and live.”

“You ever tried to negotiate with a wild animal?”

Dawson did not like the term. “What
wild animals
, I’d like to know. These so-called Mau Mau you’re all so scared of, you know what they are?
Kids!
Ghetto kids! White and brown as well as black! And all they’re trying to do is survive.”

“Sure,” Tocco agreed. “Survive by slaughter and thievery. Just a bunch of Sunday school kids, right?”

Everyone seemed to jump into the argument then and Stone was amazed at the amount of rancor directed at
Tocco, almost as if most of them considered him personally responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau. But he took it all in stride and patiently worked the discussion around to Valhalla, to no one’s surprise.

“Oh, not again,” Newman lamented.

But Tocco went on as if he had not heard him. “You go outside right now and you’ll hear his damn music—like he was
inviting
us, for Christ’s sake. Just think of it, here we are, twenty-some people worried about starving to death or getting butchered by Mau Mau, and there he sits up on that rock of his—the junkman—with
everything.”

“We’ve already been over this.”

“And we’ll keep going over it too. Because we got all the people and he’s got all the goodies. And considering the times we’re living in—that gangs of murderers are roaming everywhere in this godforsaken country of ours—I see no reason not to be practical. We got the men and the guns, so why not use them? We just go up there and
talk
him into sharing the wealth, so to speak.”

Flossie and Ruby Dawson were exchanging bored looks, as if to say
Here we go again
. But some of the men—Richie Kelleher and the O’Briens—were not at all bored by the idea.

“The man’s right,” young Kelleher said. “What do we do, just go on like this forever?”

“Yeah, like we was gooks or something,” Harlan O’Brien added. “Like we don’t mind starving.”

“That’s exactly it,” Tocco concurred. “I mind starving.”

Newman tried to be scathing. “Oh, this is beautiful. Just beautiful. You are so wonderfully consistent, Tocco. We have some guns, so why not use them, huh? Why not get a bunch of people killed, just so we can have hot baths again, and listen to records and watch videotape movies?”

Tocco smiled at him. “You forgot to mention electric toothbrushes and hairdryers.”

“Consider them mentioned.”

“And one other thing, Mister Pinko—
food
. We don’t want to overlook that little item now, do we? Especially since we ain’t gonna be thinking about much else in a couple of months
except food
. But of course I realize that don’t interest any certified bleeding heart liberal like you. Self-preservation’s just too practical for your kind.”

That brought Smiley Baggs into the fray, not on Newman’s side so much as on his own. He vehemently disputed Tocco’s statement that the food supply might not be adequate for the winter, and that seemed to be his only reason for disapproving of an assault on Valhalla. The prospect of death and pillage did not trouble him half so much as the idea that someone might doubt the adequacy of his provenance.

And so it went. Ruby Dawson and Flossie joined in, naturally siding against Tocco. Newman settled back into his seat, satisfied with his new allies. But Tocco belligerently held his ground, content to stand alone. He was, if nothing else, a fighter. Unfortunately he was also boring, with the result that Stone soon found himself not even listening, just sitting where he was, on the edge of a table, observing Baggs’ unlikely colony of pilgrims scattered about the large room. More and more, Stone was coming to appreciate what a comfortable place it was, with its sturdy rustic furniture and its log walls and plank floors and the huge fieldstone fireplace. Nevertheless, as the evening dragged on, he became increasingly tired and bored. And when Awesome and his mama inevitably nudged the meeting from secular matters to those involving Jesus Christ, Stone began to look for a way out. But this night
not even Tocco defected, possibly because the temperature outside was close to the freezing point. So Stone finally made the move on his own, slipping through the small congregation and out the door as unobtrusively as he could, like any other hopeless pagan.