Free Valhalla by Newton Thornburg Page A

world. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep.
    At first light, he woke and went outside, using the back door. He intended only to stretch his legs and to urinate, but a sudden pressure in his bowels led him on toward the decrepit outhouse. The morning was a carbon of the day before, both misty and sunny, with the tall grass so wet his pants were soaked by the time he reached the tiny structure. Dank and dirty inside, it smelled more of mold than of excrement. Nevertheless it served his needs, and when he emerged from it he was feeling unexpectedly good, almost as if he had spent the long night not alone on a hard floor but in bed with a woman. And then just as quickly the feeling was gone, as he saw beyond the house, legless in the ground fog, an armed young black man leaning against the broken-down rail fence.
    Crouching, Stone moved to his right, until the house blocked the man’s view of him. Then he sprinted for theback door, throwing it open and charging through the kitchen and into the living room, where he found the others huddled timidly under the guns of two white men who were standing just inside the front door. The older one, a redneck farmer type, grinned amiably at him.
    “Come on in, boy,” he said. “No need to be bashful.”

Three
    Once the strangers realized that Stone and the others posed no threat to them, they lowered their weapons and called outside for the black man to come on in. The older one, the leader, even went so far as to shake hands all around.
    “Name’s Smiley Baggs, and this here’s Oral O’Brien,” he said, introducing the other white man, a lean long-haired youth wearing a buckskin jacket and cowboy boots and hat. Cold-eyed and expressionless, he barely nodded.
    When the old man came to Jagger, he kidded him for not responding to his outstretched hand. “What’s the matter, boy—you don’t like hillbillies?”
    “He can’t see,” Eve explained. “He was blinded a couple of days ago. Our plane went down.”
    Baggs looked genuinely chagrined. He patted Jagger on the shoulder and apologized, saying how sorry he was and that he hadn’t meant any harm but was just a dumb Okie with his foot in his mouth most of the time.
    The third man had come in from outside and Stone sawthat he was Mexican or Puerto Rican, not black. Like the other youth, his attitude was one of glum hostility. He did not even nod as Baggs introduced him.
    “And this here’s Spider. Don’t ask me his last name, ’cause I cain’t pernounce it.”
    “Dominguez,” the youth hissed. “Dome-een-gez.”
    “That’s it, all right,” Baggs laughed.
    Eddie then did the honors for the four of them, describing Stone as “our rescuer, our shepherd. He just came along two days ago, and he’s been looking after us ever since.”
    With each introduction, Baggs smiled and said, “Pleased to meetcha.” His partners said nothing. Finally he took off his hat and sagged onto the davenport, grunting and sighing.
    “Yessir, this is purty damn all right up here. It’s jist a bit more like home, that’s what it is. We was camped out down below on the crick last night and we seen smoke up here, jist comin’ outen the trees. So we decided to have a gander this mornin’. And goldang if we don’t find sumpin I didn’t even know existed. Been livin’ in these parts all my life, and I didn’t know there was a house up here. Don’t that beat all?”
    As the old man rambled on, Jagger kept asking what was going on and Eddie tried to fill him in, describing the three men and trying to reassure him. But Baggs was oblivious of them, busy now explaining what mission the three of them were on. “Some consarned pilgrim” had stolen a five-hundred-pound calf and six laying hens from the lodge, he said, and of course that wasn’t something to be sneezed at, not these days, when a full belly was harder to come by then a milkshake in Hades.
    “And of course we’re scavengin’ too,” he went on. “With all them mouths