Valhalla (23 page)

He gazed at Stone with sad, bleary eyes. Yet, even at this squalid nadir of his life, the man managed somehow still to look the part of the successful middle-aged businessman. The steel-gray hair was no longer modishly cut and there was a stubble of gray beard on his face, but it made no difference, diminished not at all the aura of old prosperity and easy authority that clung to him like the fragrance of bay rum. Perhaps it was the beautiful wool glen-plaid robe he was wearing or the background behind him—wood-paneled and leathery, more like the interior of a yacht than a motor home—Stone did not know or really care. He did know, however, that he was going to have some listening to do, so he put the gun on safety, slipped it into his coat pocket, and edged onto a stool at the end of the tiny bar. Across from them, near the door, stood another of Smiley’s ubiquitous woodburning stoves, the only homely touch in the place, as well as the only source of heat.

“I guess you think you know what all this is about,” Kelleher said.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Rich, huh?” the father said. “Guess he’s spreading it all around. All the lies.”

Stone shook his head. “No. Not a word from him.”

“Well, who then? Those old hens at the meeting?”

“Nobody in particular. It’s just obvious, that’s all.”

Kelleher looked at him with unfocused scorn. “It is, huh? Well, you got a candy ass, my friend. Me do that to my own daughter?” He snorted at the idea. “Love her,
sure. And take care of her. But what they say? That’s disgusting and sick. And ridiculous.”

“Then why the gun?” Stone asked.

“Because I got pride. I figure, when you lose respect, you might as well lose your life. Guess I’m a samurai at heart.” He pronounced it
shamurai
.

“But what about Tracy? Like she said, you’d be leaving her alone.”

Kelleher sighed and nodded. “Okay, all right—it’s past now. I won’t do it now. You don’t have to worry about us. If you want to leave, it’s okay. We’ll be all right.”

Stone looked at the scotch. “Oh, a couple more fingers of this couldn’t hurt me, could it?”

Kelleher reached for some glasses at the end of the bar and poured a few ounces of the whiskey into them. “Cheers,” he said.

Stone took a drink. “I’m surprised you’ve still got stuff like this. And the gun too.”

“You mean Jagger and his pals? Hell, they didn’t really search. They just asked for the weapons they already knew about.” Kelleher leaned across the bar toward Stone. “And I got plenty of ammo for it too.”

“Really?”

“Just between you and me.”

“Understood.”

Kelleher chuckled at the thought of his subterfuge and took another drink. Then, looking down the hall toward the bedroom where Tracy was, he shook his head. “God, I hope she sleeps.” Tears had formed in his eyes and when he spoke again, his voice broke. “Poor kid—what we’ve all done to her.”

Stone was not really interested in Kelleher or his story, but it seemed now that he had no choice except to remain
there and listen to the man and drink his whiskey. It crossed his mind that there might also be some cigarettes stashed somewhere, but he never found the right moment to ask about them as Kelleher droned on, “spilling his depraved guts,” as he himself called it.

In the telling, however, there was not much that sounded depraved to Stone. A widower for the last three years, Kelleher had held on in Kansas City as long as he had been able to, in fact long after his business had dried up and even after the gangs had begun regular routes, making weekly calls for “protection” payments—valuables, food, bluebacks—without which one’s house was likely to be burned down or one’s children raped and stomped. So, after gathering all the food he could, all the supplies and valuables, and after installing an extra gas tank in the motor home, which he had used only occasionally before, he and Tracy and Rich had headed south, hoping to find some peaceful little town in Arkansas or Louisiana where they could sit out the rest of the bad times, the months or years it would take for the government—
some
government—to reestablish order.

As with Tocco and the Dawsons, it was gasoline that had brought them to Baggs’ Point, and the subsequent lack of it that had forced them to stay. At first, it had seemed almost perfect, Kelleher said. But as the weeks wore on, their sense of isolation and alienation deepened. Both Tracy and Rich became quiet and depressed, and Tracy cried often, in fact cried herself to sleep almost every night. And because she and Kelleher had always been close, especially since her mother’s death three years before, he had developed the habit of holding her on his lap each night until she was ready for bed. The intimacy of it had meant as much to him as it did to her, he said, for he had always
loved the girl unreasonably. She was “so cute, so beautiful, so perfect.”

“And that’s all this whole thing is about,” he went on. “Me holding her on my lap, and the two of us kissing now and then, like any father and daughter. That’s all there was, and that’s all Rich saw.”

“That’s
all?
”

“Yeah, that’s all,” Kelleher insisted. “And you can tell that to those goddamn prigs over in the lodge too.”

Stone took another drink, and Kelleher just sat there glaring at him, obviously aware that Stone was not persuaded.

“You don’t believe me, I don’t give a damn,” he said. “Who the hell are you? You don’t mean a thing to me, or to Tracy either.”

“It’s Rich I can’t figure,” Stone said. “Why would he fight you if that’s all that happened?”

“How would I know?!” Kelleher yelled it in Stone’s face. “Who know what goes on in a kid’s head? Maybe he dreamed it all! How the hell do I know?”

Stone got up, preparing to leave. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”

“The hell it doesn’t! Your kid attacks you and drags you out of your home and starts punching you in front of your friends and neighbors—and you say it doesn’t matter!”

“Well, maybe he thought he had his reasons.”

“And what do
you
think?”

Stone did not answer for a few moments. He took one last pull on the bottle of scotch and set it down. He was through with Kelleher. He did not even want to look at him. But finally he had to, for there was still the man’s question.

“I think Rich had his reasons,” he said.

Before leaving, he walked down the short hallway to Tracy’s room and found her lying awake in bed, on her back, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes and face shone with tears that, unlike her father’s, touched Stone. Diffidently, he sat down on the edge of the bed.

“You want to come to my cabin and stay with Annabelle?” he asked. “Eddie could come over here. Or I could.”

She shook her head. Her voice was almost inaudible. “No. I’ll be all right here.”

“You sure?”

“He loves me. I love him.”

“He’s your
father
, Tracy.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“What you said to him. The way you said it. Everybody will. And he’s a good man. He’s an important man.”

Suddenly Stone did not know what he was doing in the Kellehers’ motor home. The father’s remorse was obviously just as spurious as his threatened suicide had been. And the daughter’s chief regret seemed to be the tarnishing of Daddy’s image—all of which left Stone with little to do except mourn the hour of sleep he had lost and try to make sure that he lost no more. He said goodnight to the girl and headed for the door. Kelleher, still at the bar, asked him for the forty-five.

“It’s mine,” he said. “I want it back. You can trust me with it.”

As he left, Stone slammed the door behind him.

When he reached his cabin, he wrapped a handkerchief around the forty-five and hid it under the porch, on top of one of the corner posts that supported the floor. Going
inside then, he found Annabelle sitting in a rocker near the stove, bundled in blankets. She asked him how it had gone and he told her that it had been a false alarm, that all the man had wanted to do was talk. Annabelle said that she had been worried and had gone out to the barn.

“Rich Kelleher’s on watch there,” she said. “I told him what was happening, but he barely said a word. I could’ve been commenting on the weather.”

Stone groaned, not really caring if he woke Eddie. “What are you saying?” he asked her. “You want me to go out there and tell him everything’s all right now?”

“One of us should.”

“One of us, sure. You go warm up the bed, all right?”

Outside, Stone trudged through the light snow back past the cabins and down the path to the farmyard and the small assemblage of buildings there: a barn, a chicken house, and a corn crib, all glowing pale orange in the light of a fire burning in a steel barrel situated at the corner of the open side of the barn, which extended out about thirty feet from the main part of the structure and served as a storage area for hay. The bales had been piled in such a way as to shield on two sides the person on watch. The shed wall formed the third side, and the fire barrel sat in the last, and open, side. A window in the shed wall permitted the guard to look out over the farmyard and the fields beyond, from which it was presumed any threat would come.

Stone found Rich Kelleher sitting in this fragrant little burrow on an upended bale of hay, looking out the window at the firelight and the darkness.

“Don’t shoot,” Stone cautioned. “I’m a friendly.”

Rich said nothing.

Stone told him what he had told Annabelle, that it had been a false alarm, that all his father had wanted to do was talk.

Saying nothing, Rich continued to look out the open window at the farmyard. He had a large face, with a small nose and a small mouth and a strong chin. His pale blue eyes were cold and humorless.

“Well, I thought you ought to know,” Stone said.

Finally the youth spoke. “Why?”

“Why not?”

Rich looked out the window again, his jaw a prow. “They’re not my family,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Well, that’s between you and them.”

Rich made no response. Stone started to say goodnight and then gave it up. He had had enough of the Kellehers for one night.

He did not wake up until midmorning, and then only because Eddie was shaking him.

“Come on, wake up, killer,” the little man said. “Wake up. You missed it.”

“Missed what—breakfast? Big deal.”

Eddie grinned. “Not hardly. No, you missed the
message
, that’s what. The word from the great beyond.”

Stone was sitting up now, yawning. “What message?”

“An S.O.S. Some poor bastard. He didn’t say where he was.”

“What are you talking about?”

“On the radio—this little transistor Pam has. She thought it was dead. Not a sound out of it for months. But last night she gets up and turns it on—why, I don’t know—maybe she was pining for me. Anyway, she turns it on,
and
whammo
—on comes this voice, this guy. She couldn’t tell what he was, a ham operator or disk jockey or what. Must’ve had his own generator, though.”

Stone started to get up.

“There’s no hurry,” Eddie told him. “You’re too late. The batteries went dead after a few minutes.”

Stone felt as if he had been kicked in the groin. He sat back on the edge of the bed. “Great. When Kelleher’s crying in his scotch, I’m right there. When we get word from the outside, I’m asleep.”

“You didn’t miss much.”

“Why? What’d the man say?”

“I told you—an S.O.S. He’s holed up in a high-rise somewhere, maybe St. Louis—he didn’t say. He kept crying and he said they’d run out of food and he was the last one alive and he was afraid to die—neat stuff like that. And he just kept repeating it all.”

“Beautiful.”

“Ain’t it, though?”

Dressed now, Stone went over to the marble-top dresser and wet his face with freezing water and lathered his beard with the harsh soap Flossie and her crew had made from beef tallow. He began to shave.

“How’d everyone take it?” he asked.

“Well, how do you think? It was a downer. A real downer.”

The day turned out sunny and warm, melting the snow and transforming the frozen ground into a grassy muck. Stone had nothing to do until guard duty at four that afternoon, so he found himself wandering about the Point like a man on vacation. He lay in the sun on the pier and
he skipped stones into the lake and in the chicken house he pilfered four eggs from under their creators and ate them raw. Finally, feeling somewhat like a country pastor visiting the sick, he paid a call on Awesome Dawson.

The big man was alone with his little girl, Cynthia, the two of them sitting near the front window of the cabin playing checkers. Dawson greeted him warmly but did not get up from his chair. He looked thinner and weaker. His face was still discolored and swollen, but he seemed able to see all right out of the injured eye. He asked Stone to sit down and watch for a minute, he had to give “this little monster a lesson in championship checkers.”

Instead he let her win and she giggled happily.

“Boy, is he stupid,” she said to Stone.

Awesome blustered. “Hey, is that any way to talk about your old man?”

She giggled again and he patted her backside as she skipped off to play at something else in the back room. Dawson winked at Stone.

“My buddy,” he said. “She been looking after me for about a week now. Mama and Ruby, they over at the lodge getting lunch ready.”

“Whatever it is, I’ll eat it. I missed breakfast.” Stone had forgotten about the eggs.

“You didn’t hear the radio, then?”

“No, I slept through it.”

Dawson shook his head in exasperation. “I was awake, but Ruby don’t want me up and around yet. So I just sat here. That dawgone Tocco—I been in plenty fights before, especially when I was a kid, but he did more damage in a shorter time than I would’ve believed possible.”

“He paid for it, though. Jagger turned into a lion for a few seconds.”

“So I heard. But I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know nothing.”

Stone asked him about his back.

“Well, let’s just say it’s mending. In the beginning, when I knew a rib was broke there, I kept breathing deep, testing it, like sticking your tongue in a cavity, you know? Now I just breathe shallow. There ain’t much pain.”