Valhalla Read online

  In the Great Depression—which now would have to be renamed, he reflected, if anyone was still in the naming business—then, America still had been a rural nation, with most of her citizens living on farms and in small towns. They had gardens and chickens and pigs and milk cows. Their water came from hand-pumped wells and they defecated into holes under outhouses and fed their garbage to their animals. They lived among relatives and friends, and thus were able to help each other. And above all, they lived under the rule of law, fearing the ministrations of both an Old Testament God and local police departments unencumbered by the strictures of modern civil rights legislation. And so they had gotten by, somehow had muddled through until Hitler put them all back to work.

  But things were different this time. So very different. Now, when the world’s holders of dollars finally panicked and began dumping them, rightly concluding that Washington could no longer control its spending, they had started a calamity apparently without end, a collapse that simply went on and on. In the beginning there had been the predictable runs on banks, followed by the predictable closings and timid reopenings as the government quickly bowed to public pressure. But even then, the people got nothing out of the banks except paper, hastily printed dollars losing value at a rate even the Washington bureaucrats could no longer calculate, for suddenly there was almost no one who would trade a thing of value for them. Suddenly everyone saw them for what they were: rag paper and green ink, and nothing more. And the store owners began locking their doors to preserve what assets they had left, farmers decided to hold on to their crops, and workers stopped going to work—why waste time earning something of no value? Only the welfare constituency—the poor, the old, the handicapped—clung to their faith in the government, specifically in the millions of spiffy blue-green computerized checks printed and mailed by the Treasury twice a month. But when the people found that even these miraculous instruments had no more value, could no longer be converted into the things they needed in order to live—it was then the rioting began. Supermarkets were the first to go, followed by the fast food outlets, then stores of any kind, and finally private homes and apartments. Suddenly all was at risk: one’s wallet, one’s house and car, one’s life.

  Stone would not soon forget those first long months after the crash. His apartment had been on the fifth floor of a hilltop building west of the park, so he had had a grand view of the city’s demise, whole blocks and neighborhoods in it going up in flames night after night. He kept thinking of himself as a character in an old black-and-white World War II movie, a lone refugee sitting through the bombing of Britain.

  It was a time when everyone still expected the federal government to regain control of the situation, and in truth Washington did try in every way possible, at all its myriad levels. The National Guard was promptly moved into the city to quell the rioting and restore order, as in other large cities across the nation. And army truck convoys from Fort Leonard Wood streamed into town loaded with food—canned meats and vegetables and flour and beans—which was distributed free at points all around the city. The government outlawed the buying and selling of gold and silver, and after a time the Treasury issued uncountable billions of “bluebacks,” new dollars printed in a purplish blue ink instead of green and pegged at the December 1979 purchasing power of the old dollar. Unfortunately there was nothing behind the bluebacks except a sense of desperation and hope, and the colorful currency soon went the way of its green predecessor, rapidly becoming only paper again, wheelbarrows of it.

  Early on, the government had decreed martial law. And it enjoined the great mining companies to maintain coal shipments to the nation’s utilities, which in turn were enjoined to continue supplying power to their customers—whether or not those customers were able to pay for the service. And it was the same for water and gasoline and natural gas, as well as for garbage collection and police and fire protection—all the essential delivery systems were to remain intact. But governmental fiat somehow did not function as smoothly as the profit motive, and interruptions and breakdowns in service soon were epidemic. Mountains of garbage formed in the streets and in time were set afire, creating a smoldering whitish acrid smoke fouler even than that spewed out by the area’s vast chemical plants when they still had been operating. The air was all but unbreathable. The old and the sick died. The living spilled their sewage out of windows and drank foul water that dribbled intermittently from the city’s taps. And throughout the day they scurried through the smoky streets carrying precious containers of water and kerosene and what food they could find or barter for.

  In midwinter the army’s food shipments dwindled and then dried up altogether—just as the black market began to reach into every corner of the economy. And it was a seller’s market: your Cadillac for my carton of cigarettes, your kingdom for my steak. And the rumors—the truths—began. Whole companies of National Guard and army troops had deserted and set up shop in various sections of the city as privateer forces dedicated to their own enrichment by any means possible, including pillage and blackmail and murder. In a little over three months the city lost half its population, as the upper classes fled to mountain resorts or Canada or overseas while those with less money simply tried to make it into the country, to the farm or small-town home of some relative or friend.

  Rural sections of the country, including most of Appalachia and the Ozarks and the Great Plains, as well as most areas in the Rocky Mountain states, were reputed to be in comparatively good order, suffering none of the tumult afflicting the urban areas. But as Stone understood it, from rumor and intermittent radiocasts, no large city or suburban area had escaped the plague. From the drab row houses of Boston to the opulent estates of Beverly Hills, the story everywhere was the same—the nation had gone mad. And some cities apparently had suffered even more than St. Louis. In Detroit the combination of gale force winds and rampant arson had unleashed a firestorm in which thousands died. Elsewhere, in New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, the situation evidently was identical to that in St. Louis: fire, hunger, race war, terror.

  Day after day, alone or with Miller, Stone sat in his cramped apartment looking out over the dying city, over the grim cemeterylike treestumps of the once luxuriant park at distant fires lighting up the graceful catenary curve of the arch downtown. Beyond it, he knew, the great river ran in tranquil mockery, reflecting more fires still, as East St. Louis burned brightest of all. And Stone thought about the phenomenon, not just the crash, but why it had been sufficient to devastate the nation so totally, almost like a nuclear strike. He knew that part of the answer lay in the very nature of the modern metropolis, that as the necessities of life came to rest more on technology and the consensual efforts of others, to that degree was the city inhabitant—and the city itself—vulnerable to breakdown. But Europe, which economically was supposed to come down with pneumonia every time America sneezed—Europe apparently was weathering this same financial collapse without suffering anything like the civil disorders in America. So the problem went deeper than the crash alone. And he wondered if the good old American Way did not figure in somewhere, that heritage of personal freedom which more and more in recent years had seemed to border on license—the right to demand and take what one wanted seemingly as inalienable as the right to bear arms, to own and carry and use the most murderous arsenal in the history of civil populations.

  But during the long nights he spent drinking and talking with Miller, he heard a very different rationale. Miller conceded that there was something to what Stone said—both factors certainly had contributed to the breakdown—but they were not the root cause. No, that honor, he insisted, could be laid nowhere else than at the feet of the black man, as the one great lump of alien humanity the republic had not been able to digest and assimilate.

  Stone toasted him as “my friend, the racist,” and Miller laughed.

  “You poor sap,” he said. “You poor, suicidal, nigger-lovin’ liberal sap.”

  Stone shook his head. “Not true
. I don’t love anybody.”

  “And don’t hate either.”

  “That’s right.”

  Miller told him to try to be objective for once in his life, that chances were it wouldn’t cause him undue pain or hurt his tender sensibilities. “Just look around you,” he said. “Look at what’s happening every day. And keep in mind that this burg was a wasteland even before the crash—thanks to black crime, black indolence, black hatred.”

  “Black magic?”

  “They’re the catalyst, my friend, the one key element that’s made this whole simmering melting pot come blowing apart.”

  Miller’s attitude was invariably cool, almost professorial, as if he were discussing aspects of the Minoan civilization instead of his own. The racist’s usual vindictiveness was absent, or at least undetectable, as he would sit there drinking, calmly outlining his brief against the black man.

  Whatever the reason for their failure—poverty, discrimination, racism—he said no reasonable man could deny that the Negro had turned America’s cities into virtual battlegrounds where cowed white citizens tolerated levels of crime and filth and violence unmatched anywhere in the modern industrial world. And it was equally apparent, he said, that no matter how many billions of dollars in welfare and housing and “affirmative action” programs a generation of Washington liberals had lavished on the problem, it had only grown worse.

  “So when the crash finally came and the welfare checks suddenly turned up paper, your ghetto buddies were more than ready for the challenge. Here, finally, was an environment they understood, a battleground pure and simple, uncomplicated by HEW busybodies with their little bags of goodies ready to hand out in return for feigned docility.”

  “You do carry on,” Stone said.

  “Now was the time, in their own classy idiom, to let it all hang out. To run up the true colors. To take whatever they could get, however they could get it. And best of all, most important, now was the time to get Whitey.”

  Stone had laughed finally, shaking his head at the outrageousness of it all, at its oversimplicity, its heresy even. And he had pointed out that historically it was the poor and the hopeless who pillaged, and that in St. Louis most of those hopeless poor were black. Also, he said, there were plenty of whites out in the streets too, taking whatever they could get any way they could get it. They were simply less visible because they were fewer and worked alone or, at most, in pairs. But they were no less violent, he said.

  Miller gave him a look of drowsy disgust. “There you go, picking up the torch from Walter. After all these years the tube mercifully goes dead, and I figure I’m finally free, I don’t have to digest all that daily liberal swill anymore. But alas, here he is again, in the flesh—Cronkite reborn!”

  Stone would protest again, trying as best he could to defend himself as well as the blacks. Yet, after his friend would leave, returning to his own cheerless apartment, Stone would look out his window at the random fires burning in the night and he would think about what was actually going on out there, what had been going on, for weeks and months. And the reality was straight out of Miller: gangs of young blacks moving through the city like locusts through a cornfield. The whites even had a name for them—the Mau Mau—after an infamous late-Seventies gang in New York that had appropriated the old Kenyan name and had terrorized the city by requiring of its initiates that they each kill and mutilate a white.

  In St. Louis, while the few remaining police and firemen tried to control the vast daily conflagrations, the gangs would seek out likely neighborhoods and move in, hitting one house after another, breaking in, beating and killing the inhabitants and taking whatever they wanted, sometimes staying on for a day or two if the place was luxurious enough and had enough food and booze to keep them happy. Often they took “slaves,” whites whom they forced to serve them in one capacity or another, usually sexual. Predictably—to Miller anyway—the whites of the city made almost no resistance. It was his belief that the same monotonous decades of eastern liberal media propaganda that had conditioned the black man to believe he could rob and rape and kill with impunity had conditioned the whites to confusion, impotence, and—even now—guilt. And frustratingly, Stone could not argue the point.

  Occasionally, in the beginning, he would hear of various pitched battles between the gangs and the National Guard, but as time went on the Guard just seemed to disappear, along with the army and everyone else who had the wherewithal to get away. Yet a surprising number, like Miller and Stone himself, tried to hold on, going to work occasionally, drawing their bluebacks and spending them in bars and restaurants just as if the sky had not fallen. But whatever they did, they were careful to do it in groups, pooling cars, gasoline, and weapons. The rule was never to be out alone or unarmed, and while it worked most of the time, there had been exceptions.

  Huddled in his blanket on the earthen floor, still trying to fall asleep, Stone could not forget his own personal encounters with the Mau Mau. On those increasingly rare days when they tried to make it to the office, he and Miller, in Miller’s car, would run into roadblocks thrown up by the gangs at various points close to the downtown. And like everyone else being stopped, they would dig down and pay the ransom—cigarettes, bluebacks, whatever they had—just to pass on safely. The young blacks, all having a great time, often would spit on the cars or piss on them or stove in a window with a rifle butt if the mood struck. And sometimes, if the victim complained or tried to drive on through, they would riddle the car with gunfire and drag him out and beat him.

  And there were other adventures too. Twice Stone was mugged on the street in broad daylight, once by a gang of young white kids. Another time he was attacked in his apartment stairwell by a black couple, a man and a woman, and he managed to get off one shot—into the air—from his twenty-two pistol, before they broke and ran. And he remembered, would never forget, a noon lunch at Flannery’s bar and grill. Renamed the Blueback, it was a popular place because middle-class blacks working downtown also favored it, and the assumption was that their presence would give it a degree of immunity from the Mau Mau. But the assumption proved wrong, as on this particular day a score of gang members swaggered in and proceeded to eat and drink whatever they wanted, from any table, any plate, until Flannery himself finally lost his Irish temper and tried to herd them out with a shotgun. Instead he was the one shot dead, along with two of his patrons. Others were beaten and raped. All were robbed. Finally the place was set afire. Lunchtime in Old St. Louis.

  Often at night Stone would hear people crying out for help, and he would do nothing. During the day he would see people being assaulted, and he would just keep walking like everyone else. Once he stood among a downtown crowd watching a pair of policemen who in turn were watching an old couple being stomped by three armed young black men. No one did a thing. Self-loathing became like a disease.

  Then, with the arrival of spring, things began to change. As the few remaining trees indifferently bloomed, the violence for some reason began to decline. Later Stone would learn that the gangs had moved on into the suburbs and the countryside, evidently figuring that they already had picked the city clean. But Stone stayed on, sitting at his window night after night looking out over the burgeoning greenery at the city’s fires, smaller now that there was so little left to burn. He had no electricity or heat. Water ran at odd hours, at a maddening trickle. Miller finally decided to close the office, and when he invited Stone to go along to his lake cabin, Stone agreed. He had no idea what lay ahead of him or what the countryside might be like, and in truth he did not much care. He felt as he imagined dying men felt in a blizzard, an almost erotic apathy. So he gathered up his few belongings and joined Miller in the heavily loaded Volvo, almost nodding off as they crept out of the city and started southwest on I-44.

  When they came upon the barricade Stone was not particularly alarmed because it looked pretty much like those he had encountered almost every day in the city: six or seven young blacks leaning across the hoods of
their cars and pickups while two of their leaders stood out in front, flagging down the traffic with their weapons and collecting the “toll” before waving the cars on through. Then Stone noticed the great piles of booty next to the road and in the beds of the pickups and he realized that the roadblock was not the common city variety after all. He realized that in exchange for safe passage these youths were not demanding cigarettes and small change but everything, everything one owned.

  It was a price Miller chose not to pay.

  “Goddamn, we should’ve turned around while we still could,” he said.

  The cars behind them were slowing down too, forming a line. Grimacing, he looked over at Stone.

  “You better duck.”

  Before Stone could say a word, the old man’s skinny leg stiffened on the accelerator and the Volvo leaped ahead, smacking one of the blacks out in front a millisecond before it roared on into the barricade, in an ear-stunning crash that sent two of the parked cars spinning sideways onto the youths draped over them. But still the Volvo kept moving, clattering now, limping, losing fenders and rubber and glass. And it was then Stone looked over and saw Miller slumped across the wheel, all but headless, his face and brains being scattered across the dashboard by the same shot that had taken out the window next to him. Even as Stone looked, the body began to slump toward the open door next to it, and he reached out and held it steady for a moment, during which the car began to slow and a burst of automatic fire ripped into the trunk from behind. He realized the decision had already been made for him—all he had to do was let go. And he did, watching as his friend slumped out of the car onto the pavement like a messy sack of litter. Then Stone was into the driver’s seat, jamming his foot to the floorboard just as Miller had done. And he was crying. He was raging. He was pounding his fist against the blood-slick dash. His apathy was gone.