Valhalla Read online

  During the night Stone woke briefly at the sound of Jagger crying again and Eve attempting to console him, whispering and cooing like a mother with a sick child. The experience of waking into blackness evidently had shaken the tennis star. But as he got control of his voice, he said to her that though he was terrified now—“at being here, blind in this pigsty”—he wasn’t worried about the future, about living blind, because that would never happen, he would kill himself if his sight didn’t return.

  Eve put her fingers to his lips and kissed him on the eyes and mouth and neck. Under the blanket her hand moved to his groin, and her blond hair suddenly spilled in the moonlight, a shower of ice disappearing into his lap. Jagger threw back his head and sighed.

  Across the room, Stone’s eyes closed and his hands tightened into fists. He wanted to hit something: the wall, Eddie, Jagger. Most especially Jagger. He longed for daylight.

  Two

  The morning dawned wet and wondrous, with the sun rising in red shards beyond a heavy ground fog. But it was a beauty Stone and the others did not appreciate, for it had left them wet to the skin under sodden blankets. Quiet and sullen, they all got up and began moving about, changing into drier clothes and hopefully stretching their blankets out in the sun. Eddie and Eve fussed over Jagger, dressing him and helping him every way they could, only to get shoved and vilified for their trouble. Stone doled out a breakfast of two olives and a quarter cup of nuts for each of them, and Jagger called him their Boy Scout sadist.

  “He’s getting off on all this,” he said to the others. “He digs it, can’t you see that? I’m blind, but I can see it. Freezing and starving and wet underwear crawling up your ass—he digs it, I tell you, the fucking Boy Scout sadist.”

  Nobody responded and he went on, demanding to know where they were headed.

  “Southwest,” Stone told him. “Farther into the Ozarks. We should be getting into calmer country within a day or so. First town with a doctor, or first place you can stay, I’ll drop you off.”

  “Big of you.”

  “I think so.”

  “And how the hell do I walk?”

  “You follow Eddie. Keep a hand on his shoulder and just keep walking.”

  “Which leaves you and Eve nice and free, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Jagger turned in Eve’s direction, as though he were going to say something to her. Then he gave it up, swiping the air in a gesture of futility and contempt.

  Stone rigged one suitcase into a kind of backpack for Eve, gave the second one to Eddie, and took the third himself, in addition to his backpack and rifle. Then he led off, telling the others to move as quietly as they could, in case they came upon any game. He wanted as good a shot as he could get, he said.

  But Jagger and Eddie soon commenced a steady litany of complaint as they stumbled along, struggling to keep up. Stone tried to select an easy route, sometimes even chancing country roads, but the trail still proved difficult for the others. Within an hour Eve’s fashion boots began to blister her feet, and she too joined the complaining chorus. So it was not surprising that as the morning wore on, Stone saw no game at all except for small birds and a distant pack of four dogs scouting them as they walked. It struck him that within another day, if he found no additional food, he would have to settle for one of the mangy creatures—a thought he kept to himself, remembering Eve’s reaction of the night before.

  Once they came over the crest of a hill and almost into the front yard of a small unburned farm, actually just a mobile home and one long quonset-type chicken house. A pair of German shepherds began barking at them, and within seconds a bullet whined over their heads, followed by the crack of the rifle. Eve went running back down the hill, thrashing at her hair as if a swarm of bees were attacking her. Stone shepherded the men to safety and then caught up with her, cowering and crying on the ground behind a tree.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” he said to her. “They were just scaring us off.”

  “And that’s all right?”

  He did not have time to answer. Jagger, belatedly reacting to the incident, compounded by his blindness, had just knocked Eddie down, and he was still flailing away, standing in the tall brown fescue grass throwing roundhouse punches at an invisible hostility. Stone caught his hands, briefly, unable to hold on to the thick wrist of his surprisingly strong right arm. He moved behind him then and clasped him around the chest, trying to calm him with inane assurances that everything was all right now, no one was hurt, it had been a warning shot, that was all. And finally Jagger calmed, still breathing hard, almost crying, but in control enough for Stone to let go of him.

  After a while, they got under way again, silent now, sobered by the knowledge that they had been fired on, probably the first time in their lives. To Stone, survivor of the barricades of St. Louis, it seemed almost a benign gesture. And yet he did not miss its other, more sinister, meaning: that they still had not reached that “calmer country” he was hoping for. It seemed incredible to him that the city’s cancer could have spread this far out, but then he imagined he was overestimating the peacefulness and altruism of country folk. In a time of zero expectations, it stood to reason that they would be every bit as paranoid and murderous as their urban cousins, only better armed, better equipped to carry out that murderousness.

  So he continued to choose their trail carefully. They came to a clear, rock-bottomed stream, and he decided to follow it, to see where it led. The path bordering it was rough in places and the others were soon after him to find an easier, more level trail. Stone held to the path, however, reasoning that such a healthy stream would sooner or later empty into an even larger one, a river perhaps, which might mean a town of some sort, hopefully a haven where he could dump his three charges and set out again, alone, for Table Rock. But as the sun passed its zenith and the air grew steadily hotter, he began to accept it that the day’s trek was over. Eve was limping badly; Eddie swung at every flying insect as if it were his personal enemy; and Jagger had begun to cry again.

  “Where are we? I can’t see!” he kept saying. “You know I can’t see.”

  All three complained how hungry they were, how they couldn’t walk another step without food. So he gave in finally, setting up camp at a bend in the creek. Eve took off her boots and slipped her feet into the fast-running water while Eddie and Jagger stretched out in the grassy shade, all urging him to hurry with the food, such as it was. And Stone went along, knowing he did not have a prayer of making them ration the stuff anymore—they had traveled too quickly from the luxuries of Lake Geneva to this deceptively beautiful battleground to adjust to its privations. That would come in time, he knew. So he passed the olives and the nuts around, taking a full share himself. They ate all the olives and asked him to open the second jar of cashews, and he gave them half of that one too, but only half. The rest went back into his knapsack. The saltiness of the nuts made the creek water taste all the sweeter, and he rinsed and filled his two canteens with it.

  “Well, what happens now?” Eve asked. “My feet are all blisters.”

  “And I ain’t moving,” Jagger said. “No more today. I’m staying right where I am.”

  Eddie was of the same opinion. “Right on, Jag. This is fucking far enough.”

  “All right, we stay,” Stone agreed. “But I’ll scout ahead and see what I can find.”

  “A steer will do nicely,” Eddie said. “Or a couple of plump chickens.”

  Eve sighed. “I’ve never cooked outside. I’ve never even cleaned a chicken.”

  Eddie gave Stone a cynical look. “How do we know you’re even coming back?”

  Stone was smoking one of Eve’s cigarettes. He took one last drag and ground it out under his foot. “I guess you don’t,” he said.

  Jagger disagreed. “The hell we don’t. As long as we got Evelyn Sweetcheeks here, he’ll be back. He’s got the scent now.”

  Stone ignored the comment. “I was wondering about your eyes,” he asked. “I
noticed you were just shielding them. From the sun?”

  “Why not? It’s bright.”

  “Brighter than yesterday?”

  “Could be. I don’t know.”

  Eve looked at Jagger. “Is it better, Jag? Can you see more light? Oh I know Eddie’s right—you’re going to see again. I just know it.”

  She tried to kiss him and he pulled back, frightened by her sudden movement.

  “What the hell do you think I am, a baby? Someone you can slobber on any goddamn time you feel like it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting.”

  Stone looked away from them, tired of their bickering. Beyond the creek the ground rose up in a layered limestone bluff sixty or seventy feet in height and heavily wooded on top, mostly with cedar. Looking downstream, he could see almost a mile, to another wooded ridge that ran in a broad easterly arc, ultimately joining the bluff directly across from him. It all looked wild, a natural home for deer and other game.

  He got the twenty-two pistol out of his backpack and gave it to Eddie. “In case anything comes up while I’m gone,” he told him.

  Eddie spun the cylinder, grinning like a kid with a toy. “Eddie Gardner, desperado,” he said.

  Jagger asked what was happening and Eve told him.

  “Beautiful,” he sneered. “We’d be safer with the thing in my hands.”

  Stone finished checking his rifle and swung into the backpack. Eve was watching him.

  “I wouldn’t think you’d want to carry all that,” she said. “If you’re coming back.”

  “It’s my life support system. Where I go, it goes.”

  “You don’t exactly trust us, do you?”

  He was about to protest the accusation but her level gaze stopped him. “I guess not,” he admitted. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “I can’t say I blame you.”

  “Sweet nothings,” Jagger said. “The cooing of lovebirds.”

  Eve made a face. “Oh, bullshit, Jag. Will you come off it!”

  Eddie asked Stone how long he would be gone and he said a few hours, possibly three or four. And he told them not to move on to some other place while he was gone but to stay right there at the bend, because he wasn’t a woodsman and wouldn’t be able to find them.

  “We’ll be here,” Eve said.

  Stone left then, crossing the creek at a rocky ford a few hundred yards from the bend. He found a way up the bluff and started through the woods on top, surprised at its thickness. For October, the day was unusually hot and uncomfortable. Flies buzzed him as if it were still midsummer and spiderwebs wafted on every breeze, catching on his face and in his hair. Though he moved in a zigzag pattern, he failed to find a path through the woods and had to pick his way, slowly, trying to be as quiet as he could. Above the trees he saw an occasional hawk or vulture stunting in the cobalt sky, as if in challenge to his markmanship, which he knew would have been inadequate to the task. Rather, he wanted to sight a deer or rabbit, preferably stationary, because he did not like the idea of wasting a shot, a bullet he might never be able to replace. Also he was leery of having any strangers—locals or Mau Mau—hear the shot and decide that they had to have the gun that had fired it. As a result, he made a very cautious hunter, and a very unsuccessful one too, at least for the first hour.

  But finally, around the middle of the afternoon, his luck changed and he saw about a hundred feet ahead of him some sort of creature clinging to a tree trunk like a koala bear in one of the old Quantas commercials, a cuddly ball of dark brown fur staring at him through a pair of raisinlike eyes. He quickly lifted the thirty-thirty and fired, blowing the creature out of the hedge tree like a clay pigeon out of the sky. Only as he approached his kill did he realize what it was—a groundhog, looking up at him with the same bland gaze as before, as if it were unaware that the lower half of its body had been mangled. Stone’s gorge rose and his first impulse was to run from the animal, to leave its all too bloody reality behind him. But his stomach growled a contrary message, and he stayed. He was not even sure that groundhog was edible, but he saw no reason not to find out. Using some twine, he hung the animal from a limb to let it bleed dry while he went on to reconnoiter the area. He imagined that the vultures, among other creatures, would soon be after it; but hanging as it did from the tree, he doubted that they would be able to get the necessary footing for any prolonged or effective feeding. Then too, he reasoned that when he returned he might well find something feeding on it that would be more to his taste.

  The animal was not much in the way of game, he knew. But it was a kill. It was food. So he was feeling better about himself and his chances as he started out again. He planned to move in a circular direction, keeping in view a lone sycamore that soared above the trees near the point where he had hung the animal. Within a few minutes, however, he came upon a road, a twin-rutted lane curving through the woods. A quarter mile farther on, the lane doglegged sharply and he found himself facing a small old Ozark stone house sitting in a clearing bordered by a run-down rail fence. Behind the house was an unpainted pole barn and an outhouse that leaned precariously against a tree. The grass was overgrown everywhere and piles of leaves stretched across the front porch of the house, blocking the doorway. So he approached the place openly, with his rifle still on safety. Kicking the leaves away from the door, he went on inside, into a living room that was fetid and dust covered. A lacework of spiderwebs linked the furnishings, which consisted of a broken-down sofa, a bed without a mattress, a couple of chairs, and an old potbellied stove. On the wall hung a 1978 calendar, a broken mirror, and a framed photograph of a smiling Richard Nixon. A second room was empty, but the third, the kitchen, was a virtual treasure trove, with a dinette set, a few dishes and silverware, and an old glass butter churn—in addition to a sink with a hand pump.

  Stone tried the pump but got nothing until he primed it with water from his canteen, and then he heard the welcome sucking sound as the piston caught water and lifted it. A clear fount spilled into the sink. Stone cupped his hand and drank, not surprised to find the water cold and sweet. Continuing his winner’s streak, he went out the back way and tried a pair of hatchlike doors leading to the cellar. As he stooped to enter, an effluvium of rot rose from the tiny room and he turned on his flashlight, immediately picking out the cause of the odor—two bushel baskets full of moldy potatoes. Above them, hidden under dust and cobwebs, he saw three shelves of Mason jars. Only after he began rubbing the dust off them did he realize what they contained—tomatoes and tomato juice, applesauce and corn. He almost yelped with joy, and indeed did bump his head as he hurried out of the low-ceilinged room carrying some of his find, which he quickly opened and scarfed, the best corn and applesauce he had ever eaten. He washed it down with tomato juice and then recapped all three jars and left them in the kitchen, for later, when he returned with the others.

  Feeling now like a Columbus, a Coronado, he went on outside and looked through the barn, but turned up nothing except dust and old hay. He checked out the privy and found it dirty but serviceable. Then he wandered out to the ridge at the back of the property, drawn there because he could see nothing beyond it except sky. He came to the edge of the ridge and saw below him a creek meandering back in the direction he had come. And suddenly he knew exactly where he was—on the top of that far bluff which he had seen from the creek bend, where Eve and Jagger and Eddie still were. Even as this occurred to him, he realized he was looking right at the bend now, and picking out the figures there, all three of them. Then it struck him that the colors were wrong, the movements were wrong. He raised his binoculars and frantically adjusted the lenses, until the figures leaped up at him—Eve lying on her back on the ground, holding up one hand as though to fend off the man leaning over her, a young black dude dressed like a skier in a Day-Glo red jacket and stocking cap, and shaking his hand at her, as if he were scolding or threatening her. Behind him, a second youth, lighter, with an Afro hairstyle, was crouched over one of Eve’s suitcases,
throwing the contents every which way. Jagger and Eddie were not in sight.

  Stone was over a mile from the bend, far beyond the range of his rifle. And he knew that a warning shot from so far away would barely be heard, probably not even be understood as such. So he did the only thing he could think of, which was to run, to head back for the bend as rapidly as he could get there. Leaving his backpack on the porch, he sprinted down the lane and into the woods, cutting sharply left this time, so he could reach the creek sooner and possibly have a shot at the blacks before they finished their predations and left.

  The going was rough and he stumbled a number of times, once ripping his pants and bloodying his knee. But within four or five minutes he reached the creek and the rough path that ran alongside it. He was still a good half mile from the bend and blocked from its view by a hill jutting into the course of the creek. And it was this hill he sprinted for, this long low extension of rock and cedar, because he knew that it would give him the vantage point he needed, the shot he wanted.

  Reaching the hill, he scrambled, half-crawling, half-running, up its rocky flank until he gained the top. His heart was leaping in his chest and he was gulping air, sobbing as much as breathing as he crashed to one knee, raising the rifle and sighting through its scope at the bend. But what he saw now was different, close up and different. Eve was lying as before, only naked except for her shirt, which was unbuttoned and pulled back. The young black man in the ski outfit was still standing over her, but he was pulling up his pants now, belting them. And he was saying something. He was laughing and smiling. Stone put the crosshairs on him, high on his chest, but the youth suddenly raised his hand and blew a kiss down at Eve, and for some reason the gesture froze Stone’s finger on the trigger. In his mind he saw the groundhog splattering out of the tree and he thought of the black taking a kindred mass of steel into his body, just as he finished blowing a kiss. And Stone told himself to wait, just a moment or two, wait until the man tried something more, wait until he raised his hand against her or the others. Then Stone remembered the second youth and he swiveled the scope onto him, finding him squatted on his heels like an African or a hillbilly, finished with the luggage now, just sitting there, smoking a cigarette. The black looked so incredibly calm and patient, so somehow childlike, even with a rifle slung across his knees, that Stone found he could not fire at him either, not yet anyway. He swung the rifle back onto the first one then, just as the youth bent over and picked up the twenty-two pistol Stone had left with Eddie. Immediately Stone’s body jumped taut, all his being coiling with his finger around the trigger, ready now to squeeze, to kill. But the black only tucked the pistol into his belt and moved away from Eve, gesturing for his partner to follow. And they started off, taking the path that had brought Stone and the others to the bend earlier. The one with the rifle also carried a suitcase, one of Eve’s. The other walked free.