Valhalla (27 page)

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, let me ask you—if you lived there would you keep the lights on and the music turned up so loud
unless
you had the firepower? No way.” Newman looked confident, unconcerned. “No, they’ll be fine, the junkman and his family. It’s the Mau Mau who are gonna get bloodied, and then they’re gonna come back down here—and find us gone.”

“Right on!” Kelleher cheered, joined by others.

Stone looked at Dawson. “You’d be a party to this?”

Awesome looked uneasily at his wife and daughter, then down at the floor. “It’d be up to them,” he shrugged. “Your dreaded Mau Mau. It’d be their choice. They wouldn’t have to go up there. And anyway—”

“Yeah, I know,” Stone broke in, feeling angry now, angry and alone. “I know—those women and children will just chew up the Mau Mau.”

“We’re wasting time,” Kelleher said. “We’d better get ready.”

Dawson raised his hand for silence. “I got one more question. To tell them about Valhalla, we’re gonna have to parley, right? So who’s it gonna be? Who’s going out there to talk with them?”

Newman looked over at Jagger, who promptly fixed his gaze on the floor. Newman smiled weakly and turned back to Dawson.

“Well—me, I guess. Since it was our idea.”

Dawson was staring at him. “And who else?”

“You, I would think,” Newman told him. “I think you’d be best.”

Awesome nodded. “I was afraid of that.”

Ruby objected, begging that someone else be chosen, someone without a wife and child. But Newman said nothing. Nor did Dawson, or anyone else.

Over the next hour the group continued to make preparations for the Mau Mau. Stone and Tocco went out and got the O’Briens, who then were briefed on the group’s plans. Both brothers seemed puzzled by the change in direction again, but in the end they went along with Newman. The group next settled on which food items and weapons would be given up. The food chosen was mostly canned goods, sugary items like applesauce and candied sweet potatoes and jellies, which Dawson said the youths would find more to their liking than such vegetables as corn and green beans. As for the guns, a couple of twenty-two caliber pistols were selected, along with some single-shot and double-barrel shotguns and the twenty-five-aught-six rifle, for which there were only six bullets remaining anyway. That left the colony with all the better weapons, the larger pistols and pump shotguns and semiautomatic rifles, including Spider’s omnipresent Sten submachine gun, which Stone carried now.

Though Stone knew that he was not in charge of anything anymore, he was not about to put his own life in the
hands of Newman or Jagger, so he stepped forward and tried to organize the defenses. And no one objected. He posted the individuals he wanted at the various windows throughout the lodge, first making sure that the younger women smeared their faces with ashes and stuffed their hair up into stocking caps. He did not want the Mau Mau looking through binoculars and spotting any young and attractive females. He knew from experience that there were sharper hungers than that caused by an empty belly.

While Flossie and Ruby Dawson assembled the food to be given up, Newman found a large cardboard box and cut the sides off it for use as signboards. Then he employed a crayon to print out his message, the same for each sign:

ATTENTION

WE REGRET SHOOTING. IT WAS ACCIDENT.

WILL PAY FOR IT WITH FOOD AND GUNS.

IF INTERESTED, HOLD UP THIS SIGN.

WE’LL MEET YOU HALF WAY. TRUST US.

It had been decided that no mention would be made of Valhalla until the parley itself. And Stone imagined that it was this thought—the harrowing anticipation of ultimately having to walk out from the lodge toward the guns of the Mau Mau—that began to work on Newman. He started to shiver uncontrollably and soon was vomiting, over and over, until there was nothing left in him—nothing, Stone imagined, except the cold clot of fear that had congealed in his gut and which he could not bring up, no matter how hard he tried. He shook and retched and wept. Jagger and Baggs and the older women fretted over him, trying one thing and then another. Tocco laughed at
him. But most of the others suddenly looked as if they had lost everything, as if they believed that Newman’s failure meant the failure of his plan as well. And though Stone still wanted no part of that plan, he wanted even less to see everyone’s morale sinking out of sight. So he kept saying that they would all carry on just as before. Nothing had changed.

He got Tocco and Jagger—Jagger because he wanted to keep an eye on him—and took the signs out to the barnyard. Stone watched as the other two dug the shooting victim out from under the corn and carried him back to the corral fence next to the barn, where they draped him over the top rail. Using an old roll of plastic tape, Stone affixed the cardboard sign to the youth’s back. He and Jagger got some firewood and then he rekindled the blaze in the steel barrel, reasoning that it would draw the attention of the Mau Mau to the sign.

When the three men were finished there, they went to the other end of the Point and put the second sign on the windshield of Tocco’s Cadillac. In the driveway next to the Cadillac, they built another fire, and then they returned to the lodge.

The hours that followed, from around midnight to dawn, were the longest in Stone’s life. There were stars and a half moon to aid Valhalla in lighting the night, so the defenders stationed at the windows fortunately were able to see out into the darkness far enough to distinguish the cabins and the gray snow-flecked ground around them, leading back through the trees. At the same time, the clear sky made for a relentless, teeth-chattering cold, a cold that numbed the spirit just as it froze the water standing in the buckets. Mr. Goff kept breaking into tears and his wife
kept silencing him, finally by scolding him like a child. But little Cynthia Dawson cried too, as did Tracy Kelleher and even Flossie, and no one silenced them.

Stone kept moving from one person to the next, trying to keep up their spirits as well as check on their stations, gaze with them out into the moonlit darkness, always expecting suddenly to see movement there, shapes gliding like phantoms from tree to tree. When he would come to Jagger and Spider, who were stationed at the kitchen windows, they inevitably kicked up a fuss, complaining about the cold and the food, the bread-and-jam sandwiches that Flossie and Mama Dawson had made and passed around. And Jagger promised that if they came through “this goddamn thing” alive, he was going to settle with Stone. He was going to “pull his chain.” Then he was going to give Rich Kelleher “a dose of his own medicine—say, a shotgun blast right in
his
belly.”

Young Kelleher was not very popular with anyone else either. Tocco kept referring to him as Old Itchy Fingers and Newman, feeling better for a short time, openly and pompously theorized that Rich’s shooting of the Mau Mau was simply an act of displaced patricide, that he had not had the guts to kill his father for “taking Rich’s fantasized place in his sister’s bed,” and had shot the thief instead, knowing that in killing him he ultimately would be killing his father as well. Hearing all this, Rich did not respond at all, just sat where he was, unarmed, looking out the lodge window over Smiley Baggs’ shoulder. And, oddly, his father’s only reaction to all this was to join the pack, calling Rich a “screw-up” and a failure at anything he had ever tried.

“Whenever I took him hunting, he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. Never. Not until tonight.”

Stone icily told Kelleher to shut up. And he cautioned the others too. He said they had to
listen
for an attack as well as watch for it, and the next person to “sound off” he personally was going to usher out of the lodge.

“You can go off by yourself and jabber all you like,” he said. “You can contend with the Mau Mau alone. Understand?”

Evidently they did, for there was no quarreling after that, at least none he could hear. And in time the silence became almost palpable, as if a lake fog had edged into the lodge. Toward morning a tearing scream somewhere out in the darkness brought them all to quivering attention until Smiley informed them that it was only a screech owl. Stone was standing close to Eve at the time and had watched her look of intense, momentary anxiety give way to a slight, almost pained smile of relief. He smiled back at her. He reached out and touched her shoulder, her hair, and she did not pull away.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll come out of this.”

She nodded wryly. “Thanks. Now I don’t have to worry.”

As he moved on, he saw that Annabelle had been watching them. And the look she gave him seemed somehow only a parody of that on his first night at the Point: not quite so amused, not quite so sexy. He walked out onto the porch, where the O’Briens were posted, looking out in opposite directions over the wood parapet that enclosed the porch except for the stairway. Stone had reasoned that if there was an attack, the Mau Mau would try to circle the lodge and come in even from this, the lake side. And that was why he had posted the O’Briens there, country boys who were good shots and hopefully tough enough to hold their ground, even in such an exposed position.

“See anything?” he asked.

Harlan nodded. “Sure—the dark and Valhalla.” Vella, he pronounced it.

“Remember—don’t shoot until they do.” It was Stone’s catechism, something he repeated at every station.

“If you say so,” Harlan drawled.

“Be light soon, huh?”

“What time is it?”

“Five.”

“Then it be light soon.”

At another time Stone might have been more amused by the youth’s hillbilly truculence. Now he did not even give it a thought, but simply moved on to have a similar colloquy with Oral before going back inside. He crossed the main room and went down the short hallway to the Baggses’ bedroom, which was situated at the rear of the lodge, in the corner. Eddie was crouched at one of the room’s windows. At the other, Awesome Dawson appeared to be dozing. Stone nudged him.

“You better stay awake.”

Dawson bristled. “I was, damn it! I was awake!”

Stone did not argue the point. He looked at Eddie. “See anything?”

The little man was slow to answer as he continued to crouch there, squinting out through the open window. Finally he nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think I do.”

Three hours later the Mau Mau still had not made their move. In the beginning, when Eddie first spotted them, they had seemed few in number and more like apparitions than an enemy, black ghosts moving in the blackness. But
then, as dawn came and the day brightened, Stone and the others at the windows were able to see them clearly out beyond the barn and in the trees. And it was obvious that the gang was there in full strength, at least twenty of them, and possibly more. For a long time Stone could not figure out what they were doing, because they just seemed to dart from tree to tree and across the open spaces in the barnyard almost as if they were playing a game, seeing which of them could expose himself to fire the longest without being shot. Stone meanwhile had cautioned everyone again not to shoot until he gave the word, so the game, if that was what it was, petered out in time and was followed by a lull that had everyone in the lodge gulping water and licking his lips and running to the bathroom.

Stone had done everything he knew to do, and yet it obviously was not enough. His ragtag little army did not even seem adequate to the task of waiting. Those who were not crying or shaking looked as if they were about to explode, and he did not doubt that he was one of them himself. Then, mercifully, there was some shooting out at the barn, followed by the sounds of chickens squalling and cows bellowing in fear. After a time, Stone saw smoke begin to rise from a fire behind the barn and it crossed his mind that the gang might already be butchering the cows and plucking hen feathers, settling in for a long morning’s feast.

But a short time later there was the sound of windows crashing and doors being splintered as members of the gang began to break into the cabins from the rear. Everyone expected the shooting to start then—between the cabins and lodge—but it did not. Instead, all they heard were the continuing sounds of the cabins being ransacked:
doors banging, more glass breaking, drawers being pulled out and dumped. Occasionally they would see a figure moving past a window, other times a face peering out at them. But there was no shooting—not until the middle of the morning, when the sunny stillness was rent by a burst of automatic gunfire coming from behind Kelleher’s motor home and ripping into the roof and attic of the lodge. Stone read the gunfire as a test of their will and quickly answered it, joining Eddie and Dawson in sending a prolonged volley into the motor home, blowing out the front windows and grille and tires. Then he broke it off, calling on the others still not to fire until he gave the word. And once again there was silence and waiting—almost an hour of it.

During that time it was decided not to risk a parley with the Mau Mau but to inform them of the Valhalla alternative by a note instead. So Dawson gave up his post in the corner bedroom to John Kelleher and joined a briefly recovered Newman in trying to write the note, which was to be put in one of the blanket bundles with the food and guns. When the two men were finished, Newman immediately doubled over with cramps and began to moan again. Dawson took the note from him, read it over himself, and then read it aloud to the group.

“Attention—Commander. Here are the food and guns we promised as payment for the accidental shooting of your soldier. If you would like to have all the food and guns you could use—plus liquor, hot and cold running water, heat, electric lights, music, and even movies—the place where you’ll find it all is directly north of us, across the small bay. It’s that castle-like building on top of that small
mountain. It is NOT heavily fortified. There are iron gates and the owner will defend it. But there’s only him and his family (2 men, 3 girls, 1 boy). Be careful, and good luck.—Your friends.”