Valhalla Page 7

  The second horse was Baggs’, a big sorrel that he evidently rode while the younger men traveled on foot. But now he led it over to Eve and helped her up into the saddle. Then he and Eddie repeated the operation with Jagger, placing him behind Eve. Baggs joked that he wouldn’t mind being blind himself if it meant he could hold Eve in his arms all day long, and Jagger told him that he had a great sense of humor and would go far in the world. Baggs looked over at Stone and made a face, that of a man who had just dropped a book in a library.

  “Well, let’s get started,” he said. “We ain’t gonna get no smarter here.”

  The old man led off, with Stone at his side and Spider and Oral coming after, each leading one of the horses. Next to the one that carried Eve and Jagger, Eddie dutifully trotted alongside, stumbling occasionally, watching his master more carefully than he did the road.

  As the column moved on down the two-rutted lane, past the cedar woods where Stone had hunted the day before, he found himself wondering if his only kill, the pitiful groundhog, was still hanging where he had left it or whether the vultures and other scavengers had already done their zestful work. He would never know now, not that it mattered. The lane led to a dirt road, which in turn came to a blacktop that Baggs was not at all wary of, promptly turning onto it. And indeed there seemed to be no reason not to take the road. They passed a number of small Ozark farms, none of which looked abandoned, and no one fired at them. And while they were on the road, two cars, one a late model LTD and the other an ancient Volkswagen Beetle, came shooting past. Stone tried to wave down the LTD, hoping to get Jagger to a doctor sooner, but the car almost ran him down. Baggs laughed at him.

  “Boy, don’t you know where you at? This may be a road we’re on, but what it’s runnin’ through is pure jungle. Strickly dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost.”

  As they walked on, Baggs told Stone more about his lodge and its inhabitants. Fifteen years ago he “jist fell into it” when the army engineers put a dam on Big Sweet creek. Till then all he had was four hundred acres of Ozark rock and scrub on which he raised a few calves and chickens just so he could pretend he was a farmer. In reality he made his living—“if you could call it that”—with a Case backhoe, digging septic tanks and graves at the Spalding cemetery. But when the army put in the dam—well, suddenly he had about a mile of lakefront property, of which he promptly sold half for the money to put up his fishing lodge. And it “did right well too” for almost ten years, he said, until gas and everything else got so expensive people had to cut down on their vacations. Even so, he figured he was “sittin’ relative purty compared to most folks these days, what with plenty of water, plenty of bass and firewood and enough land to raise a fair size garden and keep a few horses, cows, and chickens.” In addition, there was the building, he said, the main one plus the six cabins, all made out of logs, all “solid as Gibraltar.”

  “And there you got it,” he went on, “—the guts of the problem. You find yourself with all that—in the middle of a jungle. The trick is, how do you hang on to it? Do you and the missus jist load up the shotguns and sit at the windows day and night, ready to blow away any stranger comes amblin’ by? Do you carry on like some starvin’ dog buryin’ ever’ bone it finds?”

  “I don’t know,” Stone said. “You tell me.”

  “I sure will. No sir, what you do is share the wealth—and the responsibility for holdin’ on to it.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “You bet it does. So instead of me and the missus tremblin’ in our boots day and night, sittin’ there countin’ our eggs and firewood, I got me a damn little colony all my own, and all of ’em dedicated to preservin’ and protectin’ what’s mine. How about that, huh?”

  Baggs chuckled at the thought, as if he were putting something over on the whole wide world. And as they went on, Stone had to admit to himself that he found the old man more than a little impressive. Not only did he maintain a quick and steady pace uphill and down, but he was able to do so almost without a break in his rambling monologue, no slight achievement for anyone of any age, and especially for one who had to be in his sixties. And despite the hokey, hillbilly persona he was at such pains to foster, Stone did not for a minute think he was anything but shrewd and smart, an assessment the old man only reinforced as he expanded on the people who made up his personal little “colony.” Among their number was Awesome Dawson, he said, a black ex-professional football player, along with his wife, his mother, his daughter, and Spider, who had been traveling with them. Their car had broken down near the lodge and, while Baggs had made it a point in normal times never to rent a cabin to a black—“my reg’lars just wouldn’t of stood for it”—he was more than happy to take them in now.

  “I hear most of these outlaw gangs burnin’ everybody out is black,” he said. “So I figured, what the hell, I’d get me a black of my own to deal with ’em. And it don’t hurt none either that he’s big as a Angus bull and twice as ornery. Any gang member with half his marbles will think twice about stealin’ Awesome Dawson’s chickens, let me tell you that.” The old man’s smile suddenly faded and he shook his head. “Only problem is his mama, a little old monkey of a lady you wouldn’t think could’ve give birth to a elf, let alone a monster like Awesome. And all that woman does, night and day, is talk to Jesus. One holy pain in the butt, let me tell you. If I could get away with it, I’d put the old bitch in a pot and tell everyone we was havin’ missionary stew.”

  And the list went on. There was “a young Hebe perfessor from New York.” When the crash hit he had been living in Spalding, doing some kind of sociological study on incest in the Ozarks. And for some reason he had hung on too long. When the blacks hit the town he had fled across the lake and wound up at the lodge, and Baggs had let him stay—why, he still couldn’t figure out. “Absolutely good for nothin’, that boy Newman. Cain’t fish, cain’t work, big nose always stuck in a book. And I don’t think I ever seen him smile yet. Maybe that’s why I keep him on, waitin’ to see if he ever will.”

  There also were the O’Brien boys and their two girlfriends, “the cutest little heifers you ever wanted to breed.” And there were ex-guests, a few more friends from Spalding, two or three more refugees like Awesome Dawson. And everybody contributed in some way. Some had weapons and others had coins or food—“the Kellehers had that monstrous R.V. of theirs just loaded down with freeze-dried stuff”—while still others were good with the animals, good at hunting or fishing, or good in the kitchen.

  “Nineteen in all,” Baggs said. “Which is already too many, more than we can handle actually. So all we can do for you and your friends is put you up for the night and then send you on your way tomorrow. And don’t think I like the idea either. I wouldn’t mind one bit havin’ her around to rest these weary old eyes on.” He had glanced back at Eve on the horse behind them. “Yessir, she is one disturbin’ handsome woman, all right. When she comes waltzin’ through the door, you can bet the ladies is all gonna start sharpenin’ their knives.” He shook his head wonderingly at the thought.

  At the same time, Spider, leading Eve’s horse, had come abreast of Stone and the old man.

  “I’m gettin’ purty pissed,” he said.

  “At what?” Baggs asked.

  “Him. The blind guy. She may only be his woman, but no man got a right to talk to anybody that way. And I mean no man, blind or not.”

  Baggs told him to mind his own business.

  “Women is my business,” Spider said.

  “Sure, and you don’t talk mean to ’em, do you? You jist punch ’em around a little to keep ’em in shape, right?”

  “You got no right to talk to me like that, Smiley.”

  Baggs waved him off, and the young man fell back, sulking.

  “Spider’s okay,” Baggs said to Stone. “For a Mex anyway. He steals and you cain’t trust him and he thinks all pussy belongs rightly to him. And he bitches and moans a lot.”

  “But otherwise he’s okay, huh?”

/>   Baggs laughed again. “Yep, a real prince of a fella.”

  Into their second hour on the road, they came to a crest that offered a spectacular view of a valley below and the lake that lay at its center like an enormous scimitar carelessly dropped there, and carelessly blazing now in the October sun. Beyond the lake the Ozark hills looked more like mountains, a broad golden range of rock and turning trees, somehow wild looking compared to the lower and flatter land on this side, which rose from the water’s edge in gently rolling hills up to the spot where Stone and the others walked now. And oddly, the trees everywhere—on the crest the same as those beyond the distant lake—all suddenly seemed more colorful, more touched with red and yellow in addition to the sere tans of the fading oaks, which were dying without benefit of a killing frost.

  Stone asked Baggs if the lake was his.

  “That’s it, all right. And ain’t she a jewel?”

  “How about the lodge? Can we see it from here?”

  “Nope. It’s in the trees, on this side, jist past that monster rock. You see that, dontcha?”

  Indeed Stone did. In contrast to the low shoreline everywhere else on the near side, the rock sat at the edge of the lake like some great stone battleship absentmindedly moored there and left. Wide at the bottom, it appeared to be girded by a road or path climbing as the rock narrowed at the top, into the ship’s superstructure. A small cove separated it from the wooded point where Baggs said his lodge was located.

  “You see anything up there?” Baggs asked.

  Stone raised his binoculars and looked, surprised to pick out the orange tile roofs of some buildings almost on top of the rock, actually growing right out of a wall of stone, in a niche, near the pinnacle.

  “What is it?”

  Baggs grinned. “Why, hell, man—dontcha recognize Vel-heller when you see it?”

  “Valhalla?”

  “Yep, that’s what the new owner calls it. A junk dealer from St. Louis—Greek or Armenian, some kind of foreigner anyway. Used to come down weekends, but now he’s there full time. Gonna wait out the bad times, I guess.”

  “Well, I wish him luck.”

  “Not me.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll find out.” Baggs moved on to more of the rock’s lore. “Monks put up the first building on it. They called it Mount Refuge. Then the university had it for a few years, for conferences and the like. But they found out jist what the monks did.”

  “What’s that?”

  “People jump off. Place gets ’em to broodin’, and they jist up and take a dive. Splat.” He looked over at Stone, twinkling, about to smile again. “You know what I call it?”

  “No—what?”

  “Why, Velheller, of course—that’s its name.” For some reason, this amused the old man and he laughed heartily as they continued down the long incline.

  Halfway down they took a water break and gave their feet a rest. Jagger fell silent during this period, but the minute they got under way again Stone could hear him asking questions of Eve and Eddie—what was happening? where they were? how much farther to go?—and then quickly dumping on them as soon as he had their answers. He kept asking Eddie which of the “three hicks” Eve was probably going to lay that night, and was she sitting on the saddle horn yet. Twice, when Stone looked back at them he saw Jagger holding her by her breasts. She kept pushing his hands away, but they immediately sprang back into place. For Eddie he reserved other indignities, making him scratch his back and his rump and once even his crotch, complaining that he couldn’t do it for himself now, because he was afraid that if he let go of Eve he would fall off the horse. When Eddie finished the last scratching, this one of the royal groin, Jagger smiled and told him to walk behind the horse from then on, that it was “a more fitting place for such an accomplished shiteater.”

  Eddie did fall back then, but not behind the horse. He looked pale and whipped, like a kid about to bawl.

  Baggs meanwhile was explaining to Stone what he didn’t like about Valhalla. It seemed there was a spring halfway up the rock on the lake side, and it was so productive it once fell in a waterfall to the lake below—until “the junkman” diverted it for his own use. And there was also a natural gas well, which the junkman had been smart enough to pipe to the house, where it ran the generators which in turn produced electricity.

  “Enough ’lectricity for a goldang town,” Baggs complained. “Lights on all night long. And music comin’ out over the water night and day—opery and rock and roll and all that junk, but no country, damn his ass, never any country music. And then you hear that damn divin’ board rattlin’ next to the swimmin’ pool. And you hear laughin’, women laughin’, girls laughin’. And you know why, too. My cousin Ray’s been up there a number of times. He’s a ’lectrician and handyman and he used to get these calls from the junkman—come on up and fix this and fix that. And Ray just couldn’t believe it. They got meat lockers as big as a living room, and loaded, let me tell ya. They got rooms that is nothin’ but wall-to-wall food. Jist hunnerts of cases of beer and hootch and wine, plus every kind of vittle you could think of. And they got jukeboxes and tennis courts and movie rooms and saunas—and all of it works, you see, ’cause he’s got the power. He’s got his gas and he’s got his ’lectricity and water and his women and I guess everythin’ else a man could want—and he’s jist wallowin’ in all of it, thumbin’ his nose at us and watchin’ the world go by.”

  “Not like you and your missus,” Stone said. “How come he isn’t worried about losing it all?”

  Baggs made a face—everyone knew the answer to that one. “’Cause he’s also got guns. And walls. It take a hunnert men to storm that rock and half of ’em would never make it.”

  As they continued on the blacktop down to the lake and then turned, following it along the shore, Stone saw what the old man meant about the rock, or butte, that it did have an impregnable look to it. And close up—from the road, about a hundred yards distant—he could see that it was not all rock, that thin shelves of earth clung here and there to the sprawling limestone strata, growing weeds and spindly cedars. Though the butte was surrounded by water, on the landward side the water amounted to no more than a narrow channel that appeared quite shallow at one end, with an archipelago of small rocks protruding above the surface. Stone imagined that the owner used this strip as a ford, probably for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Across the channel, an unpaved road started at the water’s edge and rose almost a hundred feet before it disappeared around the far end, from which point it undoubtedly kept climbing the rest of the way to the buildings on top, which Stone could not see now, from below. He judged the butte to be about three hundred feet high and twice that long; how thick he could not tell. Through his binoculars he studied the heavy iron gate on the other side of the channel. In one of the concrete pillars from which the gate hung, he made out the word Valhalla cut in intaglio. Over it other words had been spray-painted: V SUCKS; KILL NEGERS; CLASS OF 81; and DT + BD inside a heart design. Stone did not hear any music.

  “Well, what do you think?” Baggs asked him. “How you like my little lake?”

  “Looks great,” Stone said. “Nice and wet.”

  Baggs would not accept that. “Now, come on, it’s more’n that. Big Sweet is pure and simple the world’s most beautiful body of water. Nothin’ more, nothin’ less.”

  Smiling, Stone went along with him. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  And in truth the lake did look beautiful in the bright fall sunshine. It appeared no more than a half mile across, and the steep rock cliffs on the other side evidently had prevented development of the usual tight little row of tacky cottages that crowded most lakeshores. Rocky and wild, it was not difficult to see the far shore and Valhalla as having been contiguous at one time, and separated over the millennia by either running water or the even less resistible forces of the Army Corps of Engineers. Going on past Valhalla, the road followed the lakeshore around a small cove beyond which Stone now could
see some log buildings crowding the wooded point.

  “That your lodge out on the point?” he asked Baggs.

  The old man grinned. “You bet it is. And it’s gonna stay mine too, come hell or high water.”

  The small column went on around the inlet, still following the blacktop. They passed one small house and two mobile homes set back from the road. If they were occupied, Stone saw no evidence of it. Finally they came to a gravel lane leading into Baggs’ Point, but the old man stopped and had Stone look in the other direction, across the blacktop at a crumbling rock farmhouse with a few sheds behind it and a burned-down barn.

  “That’s the old homestead,” he said. “That’s me about nineteen-seventy. Poor as a cockroach, and sittin’ up there on that porch scratchin’ my butt and wonderin’ how the devil I ever missed the boat, a smart, handsome, modest feller like me.” He whooped with laughter.

  “Then along came the army.”

  “Right. And all I had to do was cross over the road, and there was my boat after all.” Grinning, Baggs led the way off the blacktop onto the gravel road.

  Behind Stone, Jagger was demanding to know what was happening, where they were. Eddie tried to tell him, but Spider broke in.

  “Baggs’ Point,” he said. “And be glad you can’t see it, man. It ain’t no El Paso, I tell you that.”

  It was an assessment Stone did not understand, for in reality the place was quite attractive. The woods along the road, cedar mostly, had been left wild and looked almost impenetrable. But up ahead, at the point, only the taller trees had been left standing, and they had been trimmed up high, which allowed Stone to see clearly the lodge and the six small cabins set behind it in a semicircle. All the buildings were of log construction, with tan shake roofs and dark gold trim, and altogether looked almost too perfect, too picturesque set against the sweep of sun-dappled water. The trees on the other side of the drive had been thinned out too, so one could look out across the cove at Valhalla.