Valhalla Page 8

  “You see what I mean?” Baggs said to Stone.

  “About what?”

  “Havin’ somethin’ to pertect. Somethin’ to perserve. Any way I can.”

  As they followed the road around to the front of the lodge, Stone saw some figures coming from the cabins, others walking out of the lodge onto the wide front porch. He saw the huge black man, Awesome Dawson, and his tiny mother. He saw a young man who could have been a clone of Oral, cowboy outfit and all. And there was a distinguished-looking gray-haired man standing with his arm around a cute teenaged girl, as if he feared someone might take her from him. And there were others, all of whom parted like sheep for the last person to emerge from the lodge. Tall and rawboned, with a hawklike face and jetblack bouffant hair, she moved imperiously to the porch railing.

  “Four more?” she said. “And jist how in the name of the Lord Jesus H. Christ do you spect us to bed ’em and feed ’em?”

  Baggs held up one finger. “Jist one night, pet. Man on my horse there’s sick. Tomorrow they gonna take him to a doctor.”

  “He don’t look sick to me,” she said.

  “He’s blind.”

  “That ain’t sick.”

  “It ain’t well.”

  Making a face of utter disgust, she turned and went back into the lodge.

  Baggs smiled at Stone and the others. “Well, let’s go inside,” he said. “And don’t pay her no mind. Down deep, old Flossie’s happy to have you. She jist don’t show it.”

  After a meager supper, Stone joined most of Baggs’ little community in the main room of the lodge for what he had thought was to be a business meeting of some sort. But within a few minutes, as Awesome Dawson took the floor following Baggs’ report on his trip—“Jist couldn’t find hide nor hair of them rascals nowhere”—it became obvious that the meeting was to be a religious one. Contrary to what Baggs had said of the huge black man, he was no more ornery than he was an ex-pro football player. Rather, he was a high school football coach and lay preacher who had been an early victim of the Seventies’ tennis craze, learning to play the game and avidly following its heroes on television. And surprisingly, his favorite player had not been Arthur Ashe but rather the sullen and sinewy golden boy who sat before him now, blind and silent, in a place of honor.

  All that afternoon Dawson had been a kind of unofficial host for Jagger, making him and Eve comfortable, getting whatever he could for them, describing the place and people for Jagger, and introducing the other guests to him, never sparing the praise.

  “Aw, some of the other greats might’ve had better records—like that machine Borg or a wild man like Connors—but no one was better than Jag here, no one ever owned that old court like he did. I tell you, when he moved, when he stroked, it was pure poetry. It was music. It was Stevie Wonder on clay.”

  Eve had flinched at that. But neither Dawson or Jagger seemed troubled by the comparison, evidently forgetting that Wonder too was blind.

  In another man such raw sycophancy might have been offensive, but coming from Dawson it seemed only spontaneous and honest. He had a big easy smile and a voice like the boom of a bass drum. And he used that voice to effect now, as Baggs’ small company of survivors crowded the handsome, rustic room, the lucky ones sitting on the chairs and couches while others stood or sat on the floor. He spoke to them about their new guests, saying that Smiley supposedly had just happened on them in a tiny cabin up above Little Sweet Creek, but as they all well knew, there wasn’t anything that ever happened anywhere, without “the man upstairs” knowing about it.

  “These wayfarers had a terrible accident two days before, a plane crash that killed one man and for the time being anyway has cost this great athlete here his sight.” One of the Negro’s beefy hands reached down and touched Jagger, and he jumped. Next to him, Eve looked uneasily about her, until her eyes found Stone’s. He raised his eyebrows, as if to say he shared her discomfort, but she quickly looked away, as though even his compassion might contaminate her.

  Dawson meanwhile was sweeping on. Not a sparrow could fall without the Lord knowing about it, so of course He knew what had happened “to these poor people, these poor victims, like all of us here, of the madness now abroad in the land. And so He had sent, first, a good Samaritan—”

  Me, Stone thought. The man is referring to me. He felt embarrassed. He wanted to dispute the designation.

  “—who succored them and guided them to that point where Brother Smiley could find them, so he could bring them here—but for what purpose?” Pausing, he filled his great chest with air. And he repeated the question. “For what purpose? Not to stay, as we know, because we are probably already too many here. It is said they have come to find a doctor, and of course we’ll do all we can to help them find one. But I got to wonder if there wasn’t some other purpose in the Lord leading them here. A bigger purpose. A purpose all His own.”

  At that point Dawson looked down to his left, where his mother sat on an ottoman, nodding and saying Amen. Observing her from the back of the room, Stone found that he could only agree with Baggs: it was preposterous that the huge and robust black man standing above her could have issued from her wizened little body. He was dark, but she was darker, almost coal black, with loose pachydermal skin worn gray at places and deeply lined. Her hair was short and white and sticking out from her head as if she were in a perpetual state of electrotherapy. Her face was that of a mummy, sunken, dominated by a pair of powerful rimless spectacles and a mouth that never seemed to stop chewing, despite the fact that it held but two teeth, which somehow managed to look like fangs even though they were flat and stumpy. She could have been sixty or ninety—Stone would not have cared to guess.

  And now, as Dawson helped the frail figure to her feet, Stone had no idea what the two of them were about. Was the old lady going to preach, or sing, or what? Dawson explained:

  “Now I know that not everyone here believes the power of faith, that faith can actually move mountains. I believe it can. ’Fact, I know it can—’cause I seen it happen. I seen the faith pour down from this little lady’s soul, down through her arms and into these hands,” he said, holding up the tiny woman’s knobby, pink-palmed hands. She grinned with her two teeth as her son went on: “And I seen her lay these hands on someone dying with pneumonia, barely able to draw a breath, and I seen that person start to get well right then and there. I seen him cough and hack and spit up—and then start to breathe again, better than before. I seen my mama lay them hands on the swollen belly of a girl about to have a breech baby, and screaming in pain, screaming like she was about to die. And Mama laid them hands on that belly and within a few minutes that baby come, alive and healthy! And that young mama—she smiled!”

  Dawson paused dramatically again, looking out over his small congregation for a few moments before his black eyes zeroed in on Jagger. “So I want to ask this of you. I know many of you don’t believe in faith healing. I know Mister Jagger and his friends don’t. But I ask you—I ask them—what can you lose? Haden Jagger, this world-famous athlete, has already told me okay. Naturally he wants to try any way he can to get back the sight the good Lord gave him. But we will need you too, all of you. We gonna need your faith and love backing up the faith and love of my mama here. She gotta have that. Otherwise it’s like trying to grow food without sunshine or rain. I know the Lord wants Jag to have his sight back—in my heart I just know it—but it’s gotta be done His way, in His own time, and in His own house. So I beg you—any of you don’t believe, any of you here just to be entertained—would you leave us? Would that be all right? I beg you, and I know Jag does. It ain’t that we don’t love you and need you. It’s just a question of what we used to call negative vibes—you remember them, don’t you? Well, we just don’t need ’em here, tonight. Mama’s faith needs the faith of others behind her, praying for her, and praying for Jag. So please—you know who you are, you know if you should stay or leave. For just a few minutes, okay? Jag and Mama and me—we’ll all love
you for it. Jesus will love you for it.”

  Stone looked about him at the others spread around the large room. Baggs himself was obviously filled with “negative vibes,” but he had the look of a man who was not going to budge an inch from where he stood, with his back to the fire crackling in the huge fieldstone fireplace. And there were others too who looked as if they were going to stay only out of simple curiosity, the old hunger for entertainment conditioned by all the years of television and now left unsatisfied. Kelleher, for instance, in the past would probably have preferred being found dead rather than sit through a faith-healing service. And yet there he sat, flanked by his son and his cheerleader-pretty daughter. A wealthy, widowed Kansas City plumbing contractor, Kelleher like so many other people had simply run out of gas on his way south, fleeing the battleground that Kansas City had become—or at least, so the liquor salesman Tocco had told Stone.

  Through much of the afternoon Tocco had bent Stone’s ear about the other members of the “colony.” And Stone looked over at him now, standing at the back with a wry sneer on his rough dark Sicilian face. He too looked as if he should have been heading for the door, but he remained where he was, as did the O’Brien brothers and their girlfriends Pam and Kim, a pair of cute small-town live wires who seemed unaware that there had been a crash, that sex, marriage, music, and hairstyles were not still the only orders of the day. Sitting near them was an elderly couple Stone knew only as the Goffs, and they seemed too well mannered to betray either position, faith or skepticism.

  Among the faithful, Stone imagined that Dawson could count on the formidable Flossie Baggs, who sat grandly in the room’s only recliner, calmly crocheting an afghan. Her rock-faced equanimity somehow proclaimed an absolute faith in the powers of Mama. Similarly, Dawson’s pretty wife Ruby and their little girl watched Mama with rapt and believing eyes. Spider Dominguez, Tocco’s girlfriend Annabelle, and Newman, the “New York perfessor”—all were elsewhere in the compound. That left only Eve and Eddie, who were sitting on folding chairs. They both kept squirming and casting uneasy glances at each other, and Stone did not doubt that they already would have left if the subject of the faith healing had been anyone except Jagger.

  Stone himself was anxious to get out of there, and was only waiting for someone else to make the first move. He after all was a newcomer, he told himself, a guest. It was not his place to lead.

  Dawson raised his arms in sudden benediction. “So be it, my friends—God bless you for your faith and prayers.” He turned to his mother, who was still nodding and chanting Amen. “All right, Mama, and may God be with you. May He make His face to shine upon you, and may He give you the power, the healing power of the Almighty.”

  “Amen to that,” she said. “Yes, blessed Jesus, amen to that.”

  Stone had to admit there was a certain drama in the scene, as the withered little black woman shuffled forward and reached out her hands toward the golden-haired Jagger. But if it was dramatic it was also macabre and ludicrous—Stone halfway expected to hear laughter at any moment. But instead there was only the old woman’s voice, surprisingly clear and strong for someone so old and decrepit, as once again she called on Jesus to use her as His vessel, to let His “almighty healing power flow through these ugly old hands of mine.” And as she touched them to the blind man’s eyes, the thing that struck Stone as strangest of all was Jagger’s docility, how he could sit there like some poor crippled peasant at Lourdes waiting for the droplets of holy water to work their fabled magic. Admittedly Stone had known him for only a few days, but in that time he had not detected in the man any slightest hint of piety or for that matter even patience. In fact of all the people he had ever met, he would have thought Jagger just about the last to sit still for such a performance. And he doubted that Dawson’s long afternoon of flattery and hero worship explained his attitude, as a quid pro quo. No, he imagined that the only explanation lay in the man’s blindness, that unless one had experienced its terrors himself, he would never know to what desperate and foolish lengths a man might go to try to see again.

  As much as he disliked Jagger, Stone felt a numbing sorrow for him now, sitting there with his face all but covered by the knobby hands of the old woman as she continued beseeching her Lord’s help in a voice that soared and plunged and fluttered like a wild bird caught in the room. Stone felt tears start in his own eyes and he angrily squeezed them back. At the same moment he heard a snort of derision and disgust, and looking up, he saw the liquor salesman Tocco heading out the door. Eagerly Stone got up from the floor himself and followed, ignoring the disapproving looks Flossie Baggs and a few others cast his way.

  Outside, he saw that he and Tocco were not alone. Newman, the young sociologist, was already there, leaning against the porch railing.

  “What’s the matter?” Tocco asked Stone. “That jungle circus too much for you too?”

  “I guess so.” In the scant light coming from the fire inside, Stone caught Newman’s expression of disdain. He appeared to be in his late twenties, a slight, pale, balding man with darting eyes and jerky movements and a look that somehow managed to convey both fright and pugnacity at the same time.

  “Mister Tocco has to characterize everything in racial terms,” he said. “Preferably racial slurs.”

  “You met our boy here?” Tocco asked Stone. “Our resident commie fag.”

  “You forgot nigger-loving kike,” Newman said.

  “That’s right, I did.”

  “And just what didn’t you like in there? Faith healing? A good old Catholic altar boy like you? That hardly makes sense.”

  Tocco shook his head and grinned, looking again at Stone. “You know, maybe it wasn’t so bad inside after all. Fresher air anyway.”

  Newman affected a look of intense boredom. “Why don’t you go find Annabelle? She’s on watch, I believe.”

  “Why don’t you go play with yourself?”

  Stone smiled wearily. “You two always carry on like this?”

  “It sucks, I know,” Tocco said. “But if you knew the guy, you’d understand. For some reason, he’s got Awesome’s ear, and Awesome’s got Baggs’. With the result that we sit here starving and stewing about the Mau Mau instead of doing something about it.”

  “Like what?” Stone asked.

  Tocco looked across the cove at the lights of Valhalla, burning like a beacon in the darkness. “Like that. Like going up there and taking over. Have a fortress of our goddamn own, with heat and electric lights and all the food and booze and hot water a man could want.”

  Newman was shaking his head. “Tocco’s our own little Marine Corps,” he said. “If you lack something, just go take it from someone else.”

  “You got a better way?” Tocco asked him.

  “And then lose your life trying to hold on to it.”

  The husky Italian laughed with scorn. “Our boy’s got a thing about the Mau Mau. If he thought someday they might want the air he breathes, he’d stop sucking it in right now. Wouldn’t you, Kevin baby?”

  Newman had had enough. “What’s the use?” he said to Stone. Shaking his head, he went down the porch stairs and headed back around the lodge, toward the cabins.

  Tocco was happy. “Ta ta, Kev.”

  “That’s quite an act you two put on,” Stone told him.

  “Act, my ass. I don’t like the creep, and he don’t like me.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  Stone was not able to break away from the liquor salesman for another five minutes. In that time, Tocco carried on zestfully about poor Newman, claiming that the only reason “the little pervert stayed on in this godforsaken backwater” was because he saw the whole thing—Baggs’ collection of misfits—as a kind of commune.

  “I’ve actually heard him use the word,” he said. “It’s how he gets off, I think. He sees all of us as a little band of guinea pigs he’s just dying to organize along nice, neat commie lines.”

  “Sounds sinister,” Stone said.

  “List
en, friend, I’ve actually heard him use the old war cry, right out of Karl Marx—From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

  Stone said something to the effect that the cold war was not very relevant anymore. “And anyway,” he added, “capitalism hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory these last years, has it?”

  Tocco laughed at him. “You’re full of it too,” he said. “The fault wasn’t capitalism, for Christ’s sake. It was the fucking bureaucracy in Washington, all the goddamn little busybodies like Newman, the social engineers taking income away from the producers and dumping it on the non-producers, pounding it down rat holes, giving it away, losing it. That wasn’t capitalism, man, any more than Newman is a Marine.”

  “But you were.”

  “You heard the boy.”

  And a good one, Stone imagined. Still he was relieved when he was able to pull away from the man. For a time he walked around the perimeter of the lodge grounds, which he imagined had been kept neatly mowed in the past but now was more like a meadow, a field of beaten-down weeds and sere foot-high grass running from behind the cabins, on past the lodge, to the breakfront and the dock. It was on the dock that he stopped finally, sitting on a bench at the far end of it. The slight waves rolling in slapped against the rocks on the shore and made the rowboats creak and grind against the wooden pilings. It was a restful sound, one he had always loved. Though there was still a moon, it was hidden so totally behind a cloud cover that the only lights anywhere were those across the cove, on top of Valhalla. Occasionally Stone would hear a strain of music, a note or two skipping like pebbles across the water, and he would wonder if it was because someone there had opened a door, coming outside or going in, for the moment letting free that haunting sound of the past. He thought of the junkman up there enjoying such riches less than a half mile from where he sat on the Point, and that in turn led him to wonder about some other things Tocco had said about Baggs and his motley band of refugees.