Finally there was nothing to do except plunge the partially burned shovel into the ground, as a kind of headstone, and walk away. He got some blankets out of his backpack and settled into Tocco’s Cadillac. The windows and tires were shot out, but the vehicle still offered the most comfortable seat around and the best view of Valhalla as well as of the driveway and the blacktop. He needlessly checked his pistol again and then bundled up as warmly as he could, hoping not to catch cold.
Consciously, he tried not to think of Eve. He did not like to imagine her as she was, across the lake with the rest of them looking for a haven that probably did not exist. And as he sat there, it occurred to him that, other than her leaving, the thing he regretted most about their relationship was that he had never had her. In whatever harsh and bloody days lay ahead for both of them, he realized now how differently he might have felt about it all if he had possessed her sexually, even just once. It would have been something he could have carried with him, he felt, almost a piece of her being, flesh made memory. Without it, he felt oddly incomplete and alone.
But then he remembered his resolve not to think about her. It was a resolve that the Mau Mau helped him keep, for they had turned Valhalla into a blazing cynosure in the blackness, with every light on and every machine roaring.
The sound system was still turned all the way up, playing over and over an Aretha Franklin album that made Stone’s throat feel sore just to hear it. Many of the Mau Mau were running around outside as if the month were July instead of November, and indeed it may have felt so for them, because he saw a bottle of liquor or wine in almost every hand. Through his binoculars he watched as three youths—two black, one white—tied a black girl to one of the lampposts and proceeded to pull off her clothes and assault her. Incredibly, the girl appeared to be going along with them, enjoying herself.
The lake evidently had impressed them all as a perfect dumping ground, and anything that was used up or not wanted was being pitched over the side. Empty bottles and glasses and cans as well as guns apparently out of ammunition—all of it was thrown down into the lake. And finally the Mau Mau did the same with one of their own, a drunken boy in a cowboy suit who came weaving out to the parapet to sit down and gaze at the darkness while he killed the last of a dark green bottle. Just as he was draining it, two of his playmates came jiving up behind him and pushed him over the edge, laughing about it, having a great time as he went tumbling and screaming down the steep rock incline all the way to the lake, where he plunged into the water and disappeared. Up above, the two pranksters slapped hands. Aretha Franklin wailed. And Stone tried not to fall asleep.
He also tried not to think or feel, just as he had done in St. Louis. But now as then, he could not control the aversion welling up in him, an aversion of the spirit, beyond all mending. He simply could not understand how any human beings, no matter how deprived and brutal their lives may have been, could be so devoid of compassion. Oh,
he knew all the explanations—once so much more popular than now—of why ghetto youth were the way they were, the quick and easy liberal catechism about the social effects of squalor and joblessness, of generation after generation of welfare mothers spawning children and raising them alone in hopelessness and despair, all as a result of racism, the blacks’ sad heritage of slavery and discrimination. But somehow, for Stone, none of that quite explained the black boy who had just plunged to his death, or the white boy who had preceded him an hour earlier.
And finally it did not explain Valhalla, the fact that Stone found himself sitting alone at night in the freezing shell of a Cadillac staring up at the floodlit spectacle of a small band of ghetto youth casually plundering the life’s work of some anonymous St. Louis junkman. Stone thought of all the wine and liquor they had to choose from. He thought of the walk-in refrigerators Smiley had talked of, filled with meats and cheeses and every other kind of “vittle.” He thought of the sauna and the beds and the baths and the centrally heated air, and the books and phonograph records and films. And somehow he could not help thinking of it all as his,
his
world as much as the junkman’s that the Mau Mau were plundering. In his mind, they were the Visigoths in Rome, they were Pizarro’s men in the golden halls of Machu Picchu. They did not belong.
All this, however, was only tangential to his real concern, which was for the junkman’s daughters. He accepted it that their little brother was dead, that he had been the tiny figure thrown over the side with his father and grandfather, and possibly his mother too. But Stone believed that the girls themselves were still alive, still prisoners, fair game for rape and mutilation and other hobbies of
the General and his gang. He knew that he could not save them from what they already had endured, but the idea that he should do something, try to rescue them, while they still
could
be rescued, began to feed on him. It worked down to the softness at his center, however, and he told himself that he could not do it, not just one man with a puny thirty-eight pistol. And even if he retrieved the rifle he had hidden in the dead tree as well as Kelleher’s forty-five from the ruins of his cabin, he knew that it would make no difference. Even with three guns, and even if he struck in the middle of the night, when most of them would be drunk and asleep, the outcome would still be the same. He might be able to take a few more of them with him, but ultimately he would be killed, and the girls would be right where they were now. He was only one man. Nothing was going to change that fact.
And yet he began to realize that he had no real choice in the matter, that just as he was unable to go up there and free the sisters, so was he unable just to pick up and leave. Though he had told Eve and Eddie and Tocco that he planned on staying near the Point for only a day before moving on, he really had not known what his plans were. As Tocco said, he did want to go after Eve. But even more, he wanted to get straight with himself again, he wanted a measure of control over his life, and that meant going on alone. But somehow both of those choices seemed strangely empty now. There was only one place he truly wanted to be. And that was Valhalla.
Only he knew he could do nothing about it now. At the same time, he knew that if anything in life was true, it was that things had a way of changing. Nothing remained as it was for very long—not even on Valhalla. So he would stay in the area. He would use one of the abandoned lake
front cottages up the beach from the Point. He would watch and wait. And eventually he would make his move. It was only a matter of time.
At one in the morning, barely able to keep his eyes open, he went back to the lodge and wakened Tocco. The big Italian groaned and grumbled as he struggled out of his “bed”—two sofas that he had pushed together for himself and Annabelle.
“What the hell time is it?” he asked. “Ten o’clock?”
“After one.”
“I don’t believe it. I feel like I dropped off for a couple of minutes, that’s all.”
“Stay alert out there,” Stone said.
“Don’t worry about it.” Tocco finished checking the Sten gun and gave Stone an odd look, half salacious, half threatening. “I guess I can trust you in here with my girl, huh? You gotta be dead on your feet. Question is, will you be dead in the sack?”
Annabelle sighed wearily. “Jesus—even now. Don’t you ever quit, Paul?”
“So far you ain’t given me much reason to.”
She waved her hand at him. “Get out of here, okay? I promise, if he touches me, I’ll scream. I’ll bite off his ear.”
Tocco smiled at Stone. “And I’ll bite off his head.”
Ignoring them both, Stone lowered himself onto a studio couch across the room. He had been awake for over forty hours and he felt as tired as he ever had in his life. His body felt weighted, as if he might sink down through the couch and just keep on going. It occurred to him that if the Mau Mau came bursting through the door, he probably would not do a thing about it, other than beg them to let him sleep.
“You okay?” It was Annabelle, looking at him over the back of her sofa. Tocco was gone.
“Tired,” he told her. “I’ve got to sleep.”
“Come with us,” she said. “Please. You could help us. We could help you.”
Her voice sounded thin and strained, as if she were about to cry. But he could not raise his head to look.
“No, I’ve decided to stay here,” he got out.
“But you can’t, Stone! Not with the Mau Mau so close.”
“I’ll get by.”
“The hell you will! It’s crazy!”
“Maybe. But I’m not leaving.”
Annabelle sighed. “We’ll never make it, not on the road, in the winter. No food or anything. And you won’t make it here. Not alone. Come with us. Please.”
If she said anything more, Stone did not hear it. For he was falling now, plunging through the stillness toward the dark green bottom of his mind. During the hours that followed he remembered only one of the dreams that by morning had his clothing damp with sweat. He was on the lake in a rowboat under Valhalla and bodies were raining down upon him, roiling the water all around, making it hard for him to stand in the boat. He was shouting up at the General and Jagger and Newman to stop the slaughter, and then he saw the junkman’s daughters being dragged nude up onto the parapet. He shouted even louder, but Jagger and the General casually went ahead and tossed the girls over the edge. And Stone watched as the young bodies came plummeting toward him, until, just as they were about to strike the water, they extended their arms like wings and began to fly, to glide and roll and soar just above the surface of the lake. Time and again they passed
over him so closely that he tried to reach up and catch them. And when he succeeded in getting one finally, she turned to paper in his hands, a paper airplane which he ripped open to find the message inside.
Save us
, it said.
Tocco woke him and Annabelle at first light. After using the bathroom, Stone went outside to see how things were on Valhalla, and he was not surprised to find them unchanged, with all the lights still on and the stereo still blasting away. Stone went on out to the dock and threw a couple of pebbles into the lake mist. Above it, the bluffs on the other side were already catching the sun. It struck him how beautiful the world still was, how spectacularly indifferent nature remained to the travails of men.
Sitting down on the dock, he watched as Tocco came toward him from the lodge.
“You gonna have breakfast with us?”
“Corn and beans?”
“What would you prefer—eggs Benedict?”
“Now that you mention it.”
Tocco smiled, but he looked troubled. “Annabelle,” he said, “she really wants you to come with us. I guess she don’t figure me much of a Boy Scout.”
“I already told her—I’m gonna stay around here. There are things I want to do.”
“Like what?”
“Personal things.”
Tocco wagged his head in pity. “You poor sap—I knew it. The second we’re out of sight, you’re gonna hotfoot it around the lake and try to find her, right? What I can’t figure is why you didn’t just go with her last night. It would’ve saved you a lot of trouble.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I just can’t figure you,” Tocco said. “I never could. What are you—crazy? How the hell can you stay here, with all them spades breathing down your neck?”
Stone decided to change the subject. “Listen, how would you like a real meal before you take off? How would you like some steak?”
Tocco laughed. “What’re you talking about?”
Over the next hour, Stone showed him. After chasing away a couple of scrawny dogs feeding on the half-frozen carcasses of the two dead cows, he used his hatchet and hunting knife to cut off sizable portions of the animals’ shoulders. Then he and Tocco built a fire on the lakeshore about a hundred yards north of the lodge, at a point just beyond an outcropping of rocks that he knew would shield them from Valhalla’s view. Because there was still smoke rising from the ruins of the cabins, Stone did not worry about the fire, and anyway he doubted that the new owners of Valhalla would be sufficiently awake and sober to care about much of anything. So he cut some green branches off one of the cedars surrounding the area, threaded the beef onto them, and proceeded to roast it.
The meat was stringy and tough, but Stone nevertheless found it delicious. And though Annabelle and Tocco obviously enjoyed it too, it was not enough to lift their spirits. Annabelle still seemed terrified at the idea of traveling alone with Tocco and she kept making remarks about their general incompetence, for instance that the two of them never would have suspected one could find beef on a cow. She said this with her customary attitude of ironic amusement, but Stone could see that it was only a pose now. For the first time since he had known her, she
appeared vulnerable and even helpless. And this seemed to anger Tocco more than anything else, probably because he knew there was nothing he could do about it.
“What do you think of this character?” he asked her now. “Gonna stay around here and keep tabs on the Mau Mau—how’s that for ambition, huh?”
Annabelle looked straight at Stone. “Well, I’m not sure I believe it. Could be the minute we’re out of sight, he’ll take off in the opposite direction.”
Tocco pretended to be shocked at the idea. “What a thing to say! And about an old friend.” He looked at Stone. “She’s not right, is she, old buddy?”
Stone downed the last of a jar of tomato juice, furnished by Tocco. “All you got to do is come back and check on me. I don’t mind.”
“But why?”
Annabelle was angry now. “What can you be thinking of? You just want to commit suicide, is that it?”
“No, I figure I’ll be better off than you two. Here, I got food—a corn crib full of it. And I got water and firewood and shelter.” He nodded toward the cluster of abandoned cottages about a quarter mile up the beach from the lodge.
“And what about
them?”
Annabelle asked. “The Mau Mau.”
“They’re why I’m staying.”
Tocco laughed and shook his head. In frustration, Annabelle repeated his words.