Valhalla (21 page)

“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.

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 keep 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.