No one seemed very enthusiastic about the note, undoubtedly realizing what a squalid point in their lives it represented. But none of them offered any changes or alternatives except Stone, who suggested that Newman crumple the sheet of paper and shove it up his ass.
“Maybe it’ll stop your diarrhea,” he said.
The note was thumbtacked to a piece of cardboard and put into one of the bundles, with the guns and food. Then, again, the waiting began.
Finally, at close to ten o’clock, a tiny figure emerged from behind Tocco’s car, a skinny black boy of twelve or thirteen carrying out in front of him one of the signs that Newman had made. He walked hesitantly, imploringly, as if he expected to be gunned down at any second. But he was not. Jagger and Spider, who saw him first from their position at the corner of the lodge, miraculously did not open fire on him. And Stone found himself almost wishing they had, for suddenly it struck him that if the conveniently incapacitated Newman could not go out there with Dawson and deliver the booty, someone else would have to do it for him—and just who would be a more likely candidate than Stone himself? He thought of bowing out because of the Valhalla ploy, reminding them all that he had fought the idea and wanted no part in furthering it. But in the end he said nothing. Dawson, a husband and father, was going out there. He would go too.
Reluctantly, he gave the Sten gun to Tocco and got his
thirty-eight pistol back from Flossie, to whom he had lent it earlier in the night. He stuffed the gun into his belt in back, making sure that his sweatshirt covered the handle. Then, picking up one of the bundles, he followed Dawson out onto the porch. On the way, he was careful not to look at Eve or Annabelle, for fear of what he might see in their eyes. He did not want them confirming how poor he felt his chances were. Unable to look at the O’Briens either, he crossed the porch and went down the stairs, on legs that seemed to be filling with cement. Then, incredibly, he heard himself say to Dawson:
“You got a family. You wait here. If they don’t shoot, then you follow.”
Dawson did not argue. Looking just as breathlessly scared as Stone felt, he nodded. Stone then went around to the corner of the lodge and peered down the driveway, where he saw the boy, his brother in suicide. Before moving further into view, he held out the heavy bundle, praying that it would draw fire and drive him back into the lodge. But nothing happened. So he had no choice finally except to step out into the open. Seeing him, the boy grinned with the joy of the reprieved, the living. Stone wet his lips and took a deep breath.
“You come toward me! Halfway! And I’ll give you this!”
The boy nodded, still smiling, and started forward. He seemed totally unafraid now, as if he were walking up the aisle of a storefront church. Stone motioned for Dawson to follow and the two men moved reluctantly out past the corner of the lodge, in full view of the cabins and their new inhabitants. As the boy approached, Stone and Dawson put their bundles down. The boy was still smiling.
“You got food for us? You got candy?” he asked.
Stone nodded. “You’ll see.”
Both men began to move back toward the lodge, but in a sideways motion, still keeping their eyes on the boy and the cabins. And suddenly from somewhere back in the trees came a shrilling scream that caused both men to jump. There was laughter then, the joy of kids.
Feeling both rage and humiliation, Stone trailed Dawson up onto the porch and into the lodge. Ruby, the only one there to greet them, dove into her husband’s arms. Everybody else was at the windows, watching the slow unfolding of their fate. Stone quickly went to the second bedroom and joined the spectators there. Through the window he saw the young black boy and an equally skinny girl waddling back to the cabins with the two bundles. As they disappeared around the back, a quiet optimism began to sweep through the lodge. It would work, they all said. Newman’s plan would work. The Mau Mau would eat what they wanted of the food and then they would probably test the guns—just a little shooting, most likely at the trees or at the lake—and then they would be on their way to Valhalla.
“And that’s when we get the hell out of here!” Eddie vowed. “That’s when we make ourselves long gone.”
“Amen to that.”
“We’re gonna make it.”
“We ain’t dead yet.”
Stone said nothing. He got the Sten gun back from Tocco and drifted into the kitchen, where Spider and Jagger were still stationed. Outside he saw the same black boy appear again at the rear of Tocco’s cabin. Only this time he was not carrying one of Newman’s signs, nor was he smiling. His hands were empty and held high above his head as he came slowly forward, moving stiffly again.
When he reached the halfway point, he still kept coming, all the way to the lodge.
Stone had moved closer to the windows. “What is it, boy?” he called. “What do you want now?”
The kid smiled wanly. “The General, he say he want a meeting. With your general.”
“Where? Halfway?”
“No, he say on the porch of that house.” The boy pointed at Tocco’s cabin.
Stone did not have to think about his answer. “Tell him to go to hell,” he said. “Tell him—”
But Dawson and Newman were already at Stone’s elbow, pushing past him, taking over.
“Tell your general okay,” Dawson said to the boy. “Tell him we’d be honored to meet with him.”
This time Stone refused to go. He said they already had given the Mau Mau too much and he would not take part in any further appeasement. In the end the gang would attack or not attack, he said, and no amount of truckling would change that outcome one bit. But again he was alone. He had thought that Tocco and the O’Briens would have stood with him, but they all seemed to have developed strong new pacifist tendencies—though not to the extent that they wanted to join Dawson in the impending parley. And they were not the only ones to decline. Once again Newman’s health began to fail him. And when Dawson turned to Jagger as an alternative, the huge Negro suddenly became all but invisible, an apparition Jagger seemed unable to see or even hear. Finally it was Spider Dominguez who stepped forward, as unexcited as ever, acting as if he were volunteering for an extra hour of kitchen duty. An almost sexual sense of relief swept through the
lodge then, undoubtedly because everyone figured that since neither of their emissaries was white, the Mau Mau would be more kindly disposed toward them. But they had not been with him and Eddie on scouting duty, Stone reminded himself. They had not seen the blinded and mutilated youth, one of the Mau Mau’s own, as black as any of them.
Stone got out his binoculars and watched through the kitchen window as the meeting took place. As he expected, the “General” did not come out onto the porch to meet Dawson and Spider but remained inside the cabin, speaking from the sanctuary of the darkened front room. Stone adjusted the lenses and suddenly found himself reliving that moment on the low hill looking down at the creek bend where Eve was being assaulted. The same ski outfit—the Day-Glo red stocking cap and jacket, the same insouciant black gaze and drowsy movements—all of it was there again. Next to the General, Stone saw the same light-skinned black who had been more interested in Eve’s suitcase than in her body. And behind them, he was able to pick out four other figures standing in the shadows, all carrying guns.
But he felt someone at his side now, someone touching his arm.
“Can I have a look?” Eve asked.
Rattled, he could not think of a sensible response. “Why?” he said.
Her look was calm, even grave. “Don’t worry, I already know it might be him. Eddie told me.”
Stone gave her the binoculars. “It
is
him,” he said.
She raised the field glasses and looked, and if there was any slightest change in her expression, Stone failed to catch it. She handed the binoculars back to him.
“Now do you wish you’d killed him?” she asked.
Stone did not answer her, not even when Dawson and Spider returned from the parley and reported what the new demand was.
“He wants Rich Kelleher,” Dawson said. “We’ve got one hour to decide.”
At first, Stone did not believe that there was a chance they would give up young Kelleher. Oh, he had expected Jagger and Newman to look favorably upon the idea, as a painless way to save their own skins. But certainly no one else would. Yet from the beginning, everyone pressed Dawson and Spider for the exact details of the Mau Mau proposal, and the two emissaries were more than willing to supply them. First, the “General” specifically had said that he wanted to
try
Rich, not execute him, Dawson explained. The slain youth had been a close friend of the General’s and he had left behind a “loving mama and many comrades.” So the General’s position was that he had no choice except to find out what actually had happened the night before—why Rich Kelleher had killed his friend and comrade.
In fact, Dawson went on, there had been no mention at all of an execution. Spider then added that the Mau Mau already knew what Rich looked like—“a big, blond honky about twenty years old,” as the surviving thief had described him. So the General said that they would be able to put him on trial ultimately anyway, either now or
after
“some shooting,” if that was how the people in the lodge wanted it. This last point had a telling effect on the group, convincing them that the real choice was not between giving up Rich Kelleher or not giving him up, but between living or dying.
Early on it was decided that Rich should not be a party to the deliberations, and he was locked up in the basement root cellar. Stone was so enraged by this added injustice that he had to concentrate on sounding calm and rational. Because most of the group still had to stay at their posts, the only way he could press Rich’s case was by going from one room to the other, like a missionary trying to peddle an idea to people who could think only of food. Newman, Jagger, and a few others followed along, countering his passion with quiet words about practicality and survival.
Stone soon realized that the only person on his side was Edna Goff and that everyone else either actively supported the “trial” or was keeping silent about it, preferring to let others do their killing for them. He had to listen to orgies of wishful thinking, to the point where even John Kelleher went on record that there was no reason to think that his son would be executed.
“What Rich did was stupid,” he said. “It was unforgivable. But he
was
on guard duty. They’ll take that into consideration. They’ve got to.”
At first Stone tried to shame them all, calling them everything from cowards to murderers to Judas goats. And when that got him nowhere, he tried sweet reason, telling them that sacrificing one of their own would buy nothing from the Mau Mau except the few minutes it would take them to torture and execute him—after which they would promptly present their next demand.
“Suppose they ask for women?” he said. “Ruby, Eve, Annabelle—what do we do, just give them up too?”
He called upon Eddie and the O’Briens to back him up, saying that they, like him, had seen the victims of the Mau Mau—the
mutilated
victims—but none of them said a word. He thought of telling everyone what had happened
to Eve at the hands of the General. But because she had not seen fit to mention the incident herself, he did not see how he could.
Finally he tried a simple appeal to the group’s humanity. “Let’s say you do save your skins here today—by sacrificing Rich Kelleher’s. How do you justify it? How do you go on living with yourselves?”
There was no shortage of persons to rebut him. This last point was the kind that Jagger and Tocco—suddenly and miraculously a team—would take on. They called him a fool and a dreamer, saying that he should come down out of the clouds and try the real world for a change. They were talking about survival, that was all. Just survival. Morality and decency didn’t compute when you were staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Rich shot that Mau Mau’s ass,” Tocco said. “So now I say let them shoot his ass—as long as it saves mine.”
Newman and Dawson predictably took the high road. Newman tried to dress up the whole matter as some kind of legitimate judicial proceeding in which due process would be observed. Rich Kelleher
had
killed one of the Mau Mau, he said, so it was only natural that he be tried for the crime in whatever court they chose. As for his execution being a foregone conclusion, Newman simply could not buy that.
“In their own style, they’ll give him due process,” he said. “Just you wait.”
Stone sneered at him. “Oh, you bet, you fucker.
‘In their own style.’”
Dawson at least was troubled by what they were doing. He did not pretend that the Mau Mau had any right to young Kelleher or that they would set up some sort of
legitimate court and slap the malefactor on the wrist. Instead he did something that infuriated Stone even more than Newman and his sophistries—he laid the problem in the lap of the Almighty, saying that God would not have “forced this heavy burden upon us except for good reason.” Dawson was big enough to admit that he personally didn’t know what the Lord wanted or what He was intending, nevertheless there was one possible interpretation which Awesome felt constrained to point out.
“The Lord may very well have put Rich here, and had him do what he did, for this very purpose—that is,
to save us
. Just as Jesus Himself laid down His life so that we might live in eternity, so the Lord may have caused young Rich to be here now, as a sacrifice for the rest of us.”
Mama Dawson and Flossie Baggs thought that was the God’s truth, and said so. But Stone’s one ally, frail old Edna Goff, had a contrary opinion. Facing Dawson, standing no higher than his collarbone, she called him a sanctimonious shit.
Desperate by now, Stone pleaded with the silent ones again, hoping for a break. But he got nowhere. Even Tracy Kelleher put him off, telling him that it was “up to Daddy.” Nor was Annabelle moved by young Kelleher’s plight.
“You heard what they said. They try him now or
afterwards
—after we’re all dead. Some choice.”