“You don’t have a case.”
“But I do. At least in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Like Billy’s got a case on Sally.”
She looked at him and shook her head wonderingly. “I can’t figure you. How can you be so fucking silly, so romantic—here, now, with the world gone to hell? The question for all of us is survival, not romance.” Her voice scorned the word.
Stone shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know I want you.”
“Want me! Like what? Like you want a steak or a martini?”
“Not like that.”
“Why not Annabelle? She seems hot for you.”
Stone had no reasonable answer for her. Yet, out of a kind of perversity, he tried to give her one. He told her that it was a subject—sexual attraction, sexual choice—that he had given some thought to. And he had toyed with the theory that it all came down to utility, that the beautiful were essentially the healthiest and strongest as well, the most likely to bear children easily and to be of help on the hunt and in the field. But nature masked its purposes and made one think he was choosing a woman for the romantic reasons of beauty and sexual attraction when in fact he was unconsciously selecting her on the same utilitarian bases his forebears had used.
“Beauty as utility,” Eve said. “That’s a new one.”
“It’s just a theory. Gave it up a long time ago.”
“And you have a new one now?”
“About us?”
“Us? I didn’t know there was an us.”
“Of course there is. But I’m not sure I have a theory. Maybe egotism. Maybe I feel I’d value myself more if I were—” He wanted to say loved—“If I were esteemed by someone like you.”
At that, she turned and looked at him, and he saw the old hardness, the carapace of ice, forming again. “Is this a line you’ve used before?” she asked.
“Why? Is it effective?”
“It might have been,” she said, almost sweetly, disarming him so she might thrust all the more deeply. “Yes, it might have been—if I didn’t know how calmly you watched me being raped.”
Stone was grateful for the dimness and the firelight, because he could feel his face flushing. For long moments he sat there meeting her implacable gaze, feeling the poisons of rage spreading in him. Finally he pulled the blanket off them and dropped it onto the floor. He seized the lapels of her robe and brutally whipped her across his body flat onto the couch, so that she was lying where he had lain earlier. Then he pinned her free arm, he split her legs with his own, he took her face in his hand as she opened her mouth to scream.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’d be afraid it’d freeze off. All I want is a taste, one last suck on an ice cube.”
With that, he kissed her on the mouth, deeply, fiercely, holding her there until she began to weaken, to give in. Then he got up and pulled her with him. He shoved her away, toward the hallway.
“Don’t come back,” he said.
Six
Stone was able to sleep only a few more hours before he was awakened again, this time by the gorilla-sized hand of Awesome Dawson shaking him.
“Wanna go fishing?” the big man asked, grinning in the firelight.
“Sure. I guess so.” Stone did not know what he was saying.
“Let’s get started, then. The early bird gets the worm.”
Stone stumbled through his bathroom duties and somehow made it out to the lake, where Dawson was loading rods and other equipment, including a rifle, into one of the aluminum rowboats next to the dock. The black man then settled onto the rower’s seat as Stone undid the plastic tether and pushed them off. The oars dipped into the water and the skiff surged ahead, out into the lake.
“Hey, this is the life, huh?” Dawson said. “Makes you almost feel like the good old days.”
Stone smiled, suddenly feeling not so bad himself about being up and around instead of sleeping. Though the sun had not risen yet, the sky was slowly brightening, turning opalescent as a few cirrus clouds caught sunlight high above them. The lake, warmer than the air, steamed as if it were some infernal lagoon. And across the cove Valhalla rose out of the mist like a frigate in a Turner seascape. There was sound too: the cry of a loon lost somewhere in the fog and a bobwhite on shore and one of Smiley’s roosters crowing arrogantly. Each seemed to think the world was the same as ever, altering not by a single note or decibel the comforting monotony of its call. So Stone decided to go along with the birds: for the next few hours he too would pretend. He was a free man living in a land of peace and plenty. And luckier than most, he was out fishing on a beautiful lake in the Ozarks. The sun would soon be up and he would be warm, and when he returned he would be carrying a stringer of bright bass.
“Did you hear about the bodies the O’Briens found yesterday?” Dawson asked.
Stone felt as if he had been hit by an oar. He shook his head. “No. What bodies?”
“Smiley and I told the O’Briens not to talk about it—no sense scaring the ladies. But they were out hunting yesterday afternoon about three miles north of here, and they came on this small farm that had been burned out. It was still smoldering. They found the bodies in the barn, a man and two boys, hanging from the rafters. They’d been shot.”
“Jesus Christ.” Stone looked back across the water at the Point, the picture postcard cabins looking so secure and peaceful amid the trees, with plumes of wood smoke rising from their chimneys. “Just three miles?” he said.
Dawson nodded. “That’s what Harlan told us. It’s an area they’d hunted before and they never saw any sign of trouble. They’d bagged a couple of rabbits and were cutting across a field when they saw the smoke. They checked it out, found the bodies, and then split for home.”
“But they didn’t see the gang itself, huh? No campsites or—?”
“We don’t even know it was a gang,” Dawson cut in. “It could’ve been a family member, or neighbors, or just some strangers passing through.”
“You said they were shot. And hanged.”
Dawson gave him an odd, knowing look, as if he had just remembered who Stone was. “And that means some gang of black kids, right?”
Stone said nothing for a few moments, because that was precisely what he had been thinking. Finally he nodded. “It could be, yeah. The element of overkill. In St. Louis we saw a lot of it anyway. People call them Mau Mau, after the gang in New York.”
“Yeah, I know all about them,” Dawson said. “Even us niggers hear the news now and then.”
Stone tried to sound matter-of-fact, even indifferent. “Well, that was the gang’s initiation rite, wasn’t it? Not just killing a white, but mutilating him too.”
Dawson looked at him. “And you believed it, didn’t you? Tell me, did you believe they ate the stuff too, like the originals, the Mau Mau in Kenya?”
“I heard the rumor, that’s all.”
Dawson was stroking powerfully, taking his anger out on the water. “Down south,” he said, “—in fact in this very country right here, the white man used to get his kicks castrating blacks—before hanging them or burning them.”
“You’re talking about the past. I’m talking about now.”
“So am I.”
But Stone found he could not back down. “You blacks still want a double standard,” he said. “Our malefactors should be punished. Yours should be understood.”
Dawson broke the powerful rhythm of his stroking and for a tense few moments sat there staring bleakly at Stone. Then suddenly he grinned.
“You know, you got a point,” he said.
Stone did not respond and Dawson wagged his head ruefully. “Being black can sure be a drag,” he went on. “You get so damn paranoid. Day in and day out you run into so many racists, both conscious and otherwise, that finally it just takes you over. You become a sort of racism monitor, with your guard always up. And first thing you know, everything else goes by the boards. You ain’t living—you’re monitoring.” He laughed richly at the idea.
Stone smiled an
d said something inane about whites probably never being able to understand what blacks endured, living in a white society. He had picked up one of the rods and Dawson told him to go ahead and troll with it while he rowed.
“That spinner will ride deep if you don’t reel in too fast,” he said. “And you gotta stay deep for bass this time of year. When we get to the good spot, past Valhalla there, we’ll try some of Smiley’s nightcrawlers.”
Stone expressed surprise that they had worms this late in the year, and Dawson explained that they came from Baggs’ “worm farm” in the basement of the lodge. Turning sideways on the stern seat, Stone drew back the rod and cast with it, dropping the lure into the water about a hundred feet behind the boat. Then he slowly drew the spinner in, not surprised at finding nothing snagged on its gleaming hooks. As he repeated the process, Dawson went on about his racial problems.
“I guess it’s Jagger that got me all uptight these last couple days. He’s a perfect example that I mean. I figured a world-class athlete like that, playing tennis all over the world—well, you just don’t figure that kind of guy for a bigot. So you let your guard down. You break your butt being nice to him, trying to make him feel at home. And I even talk Mama into trying her powers on him, which she don’t really like to do—it takes so much out of her, and when she fails she thinks it’s because the Lord is disappointed in her.”
Stone was listening carefully as he continued to cast and troll.
“Anyway,” Dawson said, “I talked her and Jagger into the thing. You were there. You saw what it was like—him sitting there blind and scared. And a couple hours later the veil is lifted and he can see again. So what happens? Does he cry and shout and praise the Lord? Does he get down on his knees and kiss Mama’s hand, the hand that cured him? No way. Instead, he just looks at her and says You’re black. Says it the same way he might say ‘You’re diseased’ or ‘You’re a leper.’ It wouldn’t have sounded any different. Just You’re black.”
Rowing fiercely again, the big Negro gave a dry laugh, a bark of contempt. “Can you beat that, huh? Mama didn’t even tell me about it until the next day. And then Jagger had the gall to come to me and volunteer—volunteer, mind you—that he only went through with the ceremony because he already knew his sight was coming back. He could feel it coming back, he said. I asked him why he was bothering to tell me this and he said he just didn’t want me getting any wrong ideas—he didn’t believe in voodoo, he said. Voodoo. How about that, huh?”
“Strange,” Stone said. “Passing strange.”
Dawson did not agree. “No, not strange at all. Not from where I sit anyway. Plain, simple, old star-spangled racism, that’s what it was. And that’s what I call it.”
Stone had stopped reeling in the spinner and now was just letting it drift along the bottom, in the hope that it might interest something down there. For some reason, Dawson’s tale of woe had not reached him, possibly because he seriously doubted that racism had been behind Jagger’s behavior. From what he knew of the man, it was self-interest that moved him, not matters of race or politics. And he said so now.
“You know, it could be true what Jagger said about his sight. The day we arrived here he was shielding his eyes more than he had before—as if he could sense more light.”
“He didn’t say nothing to me about it.”
“And as for what he said to your mother—that could have been simple shock. You’ll admit she looks different than she sounds.”
“You mean she sounds white.”
“Both of you do.”
Dawson looked at him dubiously. “I didn’t think you and Jagger was such hot friends.”
“We’re not. I’m just saying that maybe it wasn’t racial, what he did.”
A slow, almost sheepish smile began to spread on Dawson’s face. “That’s the second time you got me. And it makes me feel pretty damn stupid, if you want to know. I’m supposed to be the Christian here, not you. And yet here you are, the one who gives the man the benefit of a doubt, the one who shows him a little Christian charity.”
“Why Christian?”
“Why not?”
“Just the benefit of a doubt, like you said.”
Dawson’s smile went ironic. “Those words, Christian and charity, they’re not exactly your kind, are they?”
“Maybe because I’m not exactly a Christian.”
“I figured that—saw you leaving the service early. As a boy, were you a believer?”
“No.”
“Any other faith?”
“Never. An infidel all my life.”
Dawson shook his head sadly. “For some, faith comes hard.”
“It’s not a matter of faith for me, just common sense. If Jesus came walking across the water toward us right here and now, I still wouldn’t believe. I still couldn’t accept Christianity. Because it is absurd.”
Dawson continued to shake his head, but more in wonderment now than sadness. “I couldn’t get through life without it,” he sighed. “Without Him, I mean.”
Stone smiled coldly. “You might be surprised,” he said.
Stone had not by any means forgotten what Dawson had told him about the the three bodies the O’Briens had found. In fact everywhere he looked at the lovely, burgeoning morning he saw not the deepening blue of the sky or the lifting mists or the still-low sun dazzling the water but rather the three shot bodies hanging obscenely against it all, mocking it. He wanted to question Dawson more about the incident. He wanted to learn all he could about it. But the racial problem—the fact that he thought the gang was probably black—stood like a brick wall between the two of them. So he settled for silence, mulling over the incident in his own mind, wondering if the killers were indeed a gang of Mau Mau moving through the area, and if so, whether they were moving toward the lodge or away from it.
Soon, though, he found himself looking up at Valhalla as they rowed past it, under it. Close up, he saw that its lakeside face was not a sheer wall of rock as it appeared from the Point so much as a rough and craggy combination of layered earth and limestone, with forbidding overhangs and a great number of boulders at the base, rising above the surface of the water like a herd of dozing hippos. Stone noticed the road running along the side of the mountain, and how it narrowed and climbed at the upper end, passing through what amounted to a kind of pit, a defile with sheer walls on either side and no cover at all. At first Stone thought that anyone trying to gain the top would have to pass through that pit, which would have put him in a position not unlike that of a fish in a rain barrel. But then he saw that farther back on the road the mountain wall was not impossibly steep, and that it connected with the low parapet that bordered the courtyard. And it struck him how uneasy the junkman must be on his little mountain of plenty, surrounded by a cold and hungry world. Even as he was thinking this, he heard a rattling sound up on top, a sound very like the vibration of a swimming pool’s diving board.
He looked questioningly at Dawson, and the big Negro laughed and nodded.
“Yeah, you heard right,” he said. “It’s a diving board sure enough. Somebody up there’s swimming. And when you figure the air’s about forty-five degrees right now—well, you just know that pool’s gotta be heated, right?”
Stone again looked up at the summit. He had heard about the pool and the maddening sound of the diving board, but he had thought it related only to summertime and warm weather. It had not occurred to him that the man might have heated his pool, gone that far in his profligacy.
“Did you ever think of coming over here and begging?” he asked Dawson. “You know, rowing over with a bunch of bushel baskets and maybe a bell to ring?”
He had meant it as a joke, but Dawson seemed angered by the idea.
“Nothing up there I want,” he said. “I’ve got my family and I got Jesus, and that’s enough for me.”
Stone almost put his finger in his cheek and popped it, as the only fitting comment on such sanctimonious twaddle. But he let it pass.
They had rounded the bend at the base of Valhalla and entered an area of the lake in which the gray barren limbs of a number of dead trees rose out of the water, as if to mark the spot where they had drowned. Dawson quietly brought the oars into the boat and dropped anchor.
“This is the place,” he said. “Lotta big trees and logs down there. The bass love the cover.”
He got out the can of nightcrawlers and threaded three of the creatures onto the multiple hooks attached to his line. Then he dropped the line overboard and let it sink.
“If there’s any fish down there, they’re close to the bottom,” he said. “Where it’s nice and warm.”
Stone took the spinner off and rigged his line to match Dawson’s, figuring the black man knew more about fishing the lake than he did. But almost an hour passed before they even got a nibble—on Stone’s line as it turned out. But for Dawson the time was not wasted. First he tried to save Stone’s soul, going on about his own “conversion” and how he had never known an unhappy day since that blessed hour. And he painted a picture of the holy trinity sitting on tenterhooks right up above them, panting for Stone’s soul, so that he too might know the love of Christ and gain the peace that passed all understanding. Stone finally told him, somewhat dryly, that he appreciated all this concern for his soul, but that, as he had explained before, he didn’t have a religious bone in his body and would just as soon embrace astrology as he would evangelical Christianity. Dawson sighed in temporary defeat and moved on to what was obviously his second favorite subject: his life in racist America.
He had been born in Gary, Indiana, which he called the toughest and blackest town in America. His father had absconded when he was just a tot, and Mama had raised him and his four sisters all by herself, running a tiny grocery by day and an adjoining storefront True Faith church by night. In his teens Dawson had blackslid, forgetting Jesus in favor of the streets. School had been a laugh, a warehouse for superfluous black kids. But he had had something extra going for him—his size and strength—which ultimately landed him a football scholarship at Southern Illinois University. He had played there four years, hoping for a career in the pros. But he had been too slow and clumsy, so it was all downhill then for a while, the streets again, and drugs, and finally even crime, a holdup he’d got involved in only because he was drunk at the time. Returning home after receiving a suspended sentence, he reluctantly went along with his mama and sisters to Soldier Field to hear Billy Graham preach, and it was there he found the Lord again. He had cried like a baby, cried like the poor lost soul he was. And from that point on his life was lived for Jesus. He became an assistant football coach, he led youth groups, he met and married Ruby, he became a father, and finally he became a head coach, at the second largest high school in Kansas City. He helped Mama in her ministry and the government appointed him to various youth rescue programs in the ghetto. Boys like Spider were the ones he worked with, scores of delinquents he could proudly say he had rescued from living empty lives devoted to crime and pleasure.
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