Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

  “Hurts?”

  Converse nodded. Danskin pursed his lips as though he would kiss him.

  “So I walk around the ladder. Suddenly this guy comes up to me. I see there’s a camera on me. He says Good afternoon, sir, I see you walked around the ladder could you tell me, please why you did that? Then I realize—aha—it’s Friday the thirteenth. It’s a television show. It’s the man in the street show. I’m on television!”

  Converse nodded.

  “So I say—Superstition!, heh heh—what a classy answer! What a clever dude I am! And the little fucker with the mike says could you tell us about your superstitions. What do you think happened?”

  Smitty began to giggle.

  “What?” Converse asked.

  “I couldn’t think of a fuckin’ thing to say. I froze. The little fucker looked at me like I was a dummy. I hated it.”

  He seemed enraged at the recollection and he forced Converse’s face down toward the burner again.

  Converse began to cry in his fear. “Please,” he said.

  They yanked his head back up by the hair.

  “So I got home,” Danskin said. “I turned on the set. What’s on? Wise cocksuckers talking about their superstitions and there’s me and I’m thinking of all the good funny shit I could say about my superstitions. I was so pissed.”

  “Please,” Converse said. His tears fell on the burner.

  “You say—the dope! Where is the dope?”

  “I swear I’ll tell you everything I know. I don’t know where it is. Everyone was gone when I got here.”

  It seemed to him that he fainted then. They pulled him upright.

  “That was his steak,” a girl on the television said.

  “What do you want me to do,” Cary Grant said, “have it stuffed?”

  “Give me nice simple answers,” Danskin said.

  “Anything.”

  “Your name is John Converse, am I right?”

  “Right,” Converse said.

  “Your father was a waiter, am I right?”

  “Right,” Converse said.

  “Was he a nice man?”

  “He was a very nice man.”

  “Was he a good waiter?”

  Converse swallowed.

  “He was a head waiter during the war. He made a lot of money.”

  Suddenly they were shouting at him.

  “Where do you think you are, fucker! Wake up!”

  “I don’t know where I am.”

  “Well you’re here,” Danskin said, “and I’m gonna burn your face! Tell me where the schmeck is!”

  “I swear I don’t know,” Converse screamed. “My wife has it! She was gone when I got here!”

  Danskin clapped him on the back.

  “You’re thirty-five years old. Your father was a waiter. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

  “Catholic.”

  “You go to church?”

  “No,” Converse said. “I don’t believe in it anymore.”

  “You believe in telling the truth?”

  “Yes,” Converse said. “Yes.”

  “Are you scared?” Danskin was fondling his ass as though he were a woman.

  “Of course,” Converse said.

  “Where’s your wife?”

  Converse turned to him in terror.

  “I swear . . . I swear . . . I don’t know. She’s gone.” The tears were running down his cheeks.

  Smitty seemed embarrassed.

  “We could fry your face all week, you cocksucker,” he said.

  Danskin appeared sympathetic.

  “You’re not lying, are you, John? You’re not lying to protect her ass?”

  “Do you think I am? I’m not. I couldn’t.”

  Danskin nodded.

  “Of course you couldn’t. And if we had a deal for you—if you could help us, you would, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Converse said.

  They let him go. He walked out of the kitchenette and back to where the towels were.

  Danskin shrugged. “Nothing there.”

  “You’re not gonna make it, kid,” the television set said.

  Converse was commencing another glide when Smitty went berserk. Smitty punched him repeatedly and he could not succeed in falling down. He found himself in the bathroom slipping over vomit; Smitty shoved him under the shower and began kicking him, the bathtub, and the walls. Smitty was upset about the lack of hot water.

  But it was hot enough for Converse. It scalded his burned hand. He scrambled out of the tub in the face of Smitty’s blows and collapsed on the fouled tile floor.

  After Smitty had gone out, Converse began to crawl toward the bathroom door. It was open, and he wanted to close it so that they would not notice him.

  “Our land is your land,” the television set said.

  Danskin turned it off. Smitty was on the phone. He handed the receiver to Jules.

  “Antheil,” he said.

  JUST BEFORE SUNRISE, HICKS HELD HIMSELF A STAND-TO. Hunkering close against the shack in the last darkness, he saw blue police flashers playing on the rimrock of the canyon’s far wall. He moved out of the shadows in a crouch so that he would not be visible against the lightening sky behind him. Dangling from a strap around his neck were a pair of the binoculars he had stolen from the Kora Sea.

  He settled himself beside a dwarf oak tree on a rise above the house, and poked at the ground around him to start snakes. Across the oak’s dry roots he could see the length and breadth of the canyon. Its upper reaches were filling with pale daylight, but it was still night in the deep defiles where the police were.

  At the canyon bottom, four cruisers were spinning blue light; there was an ambulance and four civilian cars, all balanced on the sloping shoulder of the lower canyon drive. A line of men with lights advanced across the bottom, their beams picking up beer cans and rusted fenders in the thorny brush. There was a handler with two dogs and a second line of men with rakes, hacking at the chaparral.

  Hicks rolled over and sprinted back to the shack. He found Marge still sleeping on the pile of blankets near the stove; he knelt down and tried to gentle her awake. Faint sleep lay on the weary angles of her face like thin snow on stone. She woke at once.

  “How’s your need?”

  She blinked and scratched herself; she had been scratching in her sleep most of the night.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  He held out two Ritalins and a sopor in the palm of his hand. She took the sopor and closed his hand on the Ritalin.

  “We got to run,” he said. “The canyon’s full of cops. They’ll be up here any old time.”

  “Oy.”

  He grabbed a spade and a clean rag from under the deep sink and ran outside to dig up the stash. It was a cold morning, and his breath frosted on the air. He had no proper clothes for the weather, but the digging warmed him and by the time he had the airline bag above ground the sun was over the ridge.

  He kept a Land-Rover, its distributor removed, parked under a tarpaulin in the brush behind the house. The airline bag went into the back of it, covered with a square of oilcloth. Security.

  For a few moments he rested, shielding his eyes from the sun, then took the spade and began to dig in the dry earth along the rear wall of the shack. Buried there, contained within a metal footlocker and immersed in grease, he had the complete parts of an M-16 semiautomatic rifle, together within an M-70 launcher attachment. Clips for M-16 and the deadly little five-inch M-70 cartridges he kept in a sealed plastic envelope just under the locker.

  He took a canvas seabag from the Land-Rover, wiped the weapon clean of grease, and dropped the lot into the seabag.

  Marge came out of the house with a box of Kleenex. He waved her away from the canyon.

  He went inside and secured. Whatever he thought they might need or might identify them, he stuffed into a backpack. There was no way to conceal recent occupation. When they came, they would know by the smell that the place had been inhabited. They woul
d find the dug ground where he had buried his contraband, and the puke-stained mattress out back.

  He loaded the Land-Rover and set about replacing its distributor. As he worked, he expected them to come up the road at any moment. Rat reflexes of flight. He struggled to keep his mind clear, his actions orderly.

  The Land-Rover started nicely. Marge sat beside him, her arms folded across her chest, her head turned from the sun.

  “Hang in, Marge.”

  He followed the road for a few hundred yards and then, gambling, turned down the first fire trail that wound down the seaward slope of the ridge.

  “I saw them,” Marge said. “What are they after?”

  “Bodies.” It was a pleasure to master the curves of the narrow fire trail. Four-wheel drive. “Sometimes they find a car off the road with nobody in it. They have to look for the driver.”

  Marge nodded.

  “Some of these freaks up here love to strip wrecks. They’ll see a drunk run his car into the canyon and they’ll creep out at night to take the guy’s wallet. They go for the credit cards.”

  “Christ.”

  “The big ones eat the little ones, up here,” he said. He flung his free arm toward the hanging gardens of the canyon householders.

  “All summer these people sweat fire, all winter they sweat the floods. Shit creeps out of the night under those sundecks, and they know it.” He was shouting at her over the wind and the engine. “Fucking L.A., man—go out for a Sunday spin, you’re a short hair from the dawn of creation.”

  “It’s those girls,” she said after a while. “That’s who they’re looking for.”

  “If it’s not them,” Hicks said, “it’s some other creature.”

  He glanced at her; she looked limp and weepy, coasting on sopors and deprivation.

  “Children,” he thought she said.

  “Yes. Children.”

  Less than a mile above Topanga Canyon Drive, they passed a man riding a brush-chopping machine. The man never glanced at them as they spun the Land-Rover around him, but looking in the rearview mirror, Hicks saw him staring after the license plate.

  The fire road led to a driveway connecting to Topanga Canyon Boulevard; the sign facing the highway read Official Vehicles Only. Hicks looked up and down for police cars and rammed the Land-Rover out into the westbound traffic. A helicopter shot across the ridges overhead and disappeared into the adjoining canyon.

  They followed the coast road as far as Carillo State Park. Just beyond the park entrance Hicks stopped the Land-Rover before a hot dog stand that had a dachshund in a chef’s cap over it. He bought three plain hot dogs and two cups of coffee. The young counterman thanked him and said Praise Jesus.

  “Can you eat?”

  She tried nibbling at the bulbous wad of meat and then at the toasted roll. She was holding the frankfurter near her eyes to blot out the morning sun; the ocean wind blew her tears across her cheekbones. She swallowed a little and took a breath.

  “I can’t eat it.”

  She thrust the hot dog away from her, an object of shame.

  “No blame,” Hicks said. He threw the thing in a litter basket. When he had swallowed his hot dogs and gulped the coffee, they were under way again.

  The wind off the beach was so powerful it was difficult to hold the Land-Rover in lane. Hicks drove for almost an hour, until they saw a shopping center where the stores were built in the style of log cabins, with a length of hitching post in front of the parking spaces. Across the road from it, on the ocean side, was a cluster of pastel bungalows centering on a ranch house with a flagpole before it. He eased the Land-Rover off the road and up to the ranch house.

  Marge stirred and shielded her eyes from the sun and wind.

  “What’s this?”

  “This is Clark’s.”

  They got out of the jeep and he looked her over.

  “How are you?”

  “Shitty,” Marge said. “Like I have a cold but I guess it’s not a cold. And . . .” she looked up at him and the very color of her eyes seemed faded; she looked as though she had been injured. “. . . my head is in a very bad place.”

  “Could be worse, right?”

  She ran her chambray sleeve across her nose.

  “I guess so.”

  The office was in a section of the ranch house. There was a tall, tanned man behind the desk who looked like a football player turned actor. He seemed to be deliberately not looking at them.

  “Like an ocean view?”

  “Certainly,” Hicks said.

  He gave them a key and Hicks gave him fifty dollars. They registered in the name of Powers with an address in Ojai and they carried their own bags. Marge opened the bungalow while Hicks parked the jeep in the appropriate space. When he went inside he found her huddled on the bed with the cotton spread wrapped around her.

  The ocean view was available through a wall-wide greasy window that admitted the ocean wind as well. It was very beautiful outside. There was a surf running and the breakers were creased with white wind drifts that sparkled in the sun.

  “It’s cold,” Marge said.

  He found a heater switch beside the bathroom door and forced it up to high. It was difficult for him to keep from staring at the waves.

  “My God,” she said, “that goddamn wind.”

  He sat down on the bed near her and rubbed her shoulders but her body stayed tense. There was no way for him to know how sick she really was. He had once smoked a great deal of opium but stopping had not been much of a problem to him. He knew nothing about dilaudid.

  “Listen to it,” she said. “It’s just cruelty.”

  When he took his hands away she settled back on the sheets, still clutching the spread. The pain in her eyes gave him pleasure. If he could make the pain leave her, he thought, and bring her edge and her life back, that would give him pleasure too. The notion came to him that he had been waiting years and years for her to come under his power. He shivered.

  “You got too much imagination for a dope fiend.”

  She turned her face away.

  From the backpack he took a bottle of Wild Turkey he had bought with Converse’s money and a bottle of sopors. He took two quick slugs of the bourbon and fed another sopor to Marge.

  “Want some whiskey with it?”

  “No.”

  “It helped me. I probably wasn’t as strung out as you.” She was facing the wall and he thought she was crying.

  “I can handle the rest of it,” she said. “But what’s in my head is really gruesome.”

  “It’s just nerves. It’ll stop.”

  “If there’s one word I’ve always hated,” Marge said, “it’s the word nerves. Do you know the picture I get from it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah, I know the picture.”

  Eventually, he thought, they would have to open the bag for her. He waited until the sopor dropped her into shallow sleep, then opened the door as quietly as possible and went outside.

  As soon as he felt the sun, the urge rose in his throat.

  Go.

  His jeep was ten feet away. He had the keys in his Wind-breaker.

  Go.

  He walked to the jeep and circled it, inspecting the treads. The treads were just fine.

  Hit the road, Jack. And don’t you come back no more.

  Dreams.

  In the end there were not many things worth wanting—for the serious man, the samurai. But there were some. In the end, if the serious man is still bound to illusion, he selects the worthiest illusion and takes a stand. The illusion might be of waiting for one woman to come under his hands. Of being with her and shivering in the same moment.

  If I walk away from this, he thought, I’ll be an old man—all ghosts and hangovers and mellow recollections. Fuck it, he thought, follow the blood. This is the one. This is the one to ride till it crashes.

  He watched the afternoon traffic, southbound.

  Go anyway! />
  Thinking it made him smile. Good Zen. Zen was for old men.

  There was a rust-colored slat fence connecting the walls of the bungalows, separating the patio from the beach. A stilted walkway led through a gate to the sand. Hicks walked toward the surf with his head down, to keep the blown grains from his eyes. For a while he stood on the soft sand, watching the waves break and the sandpipers scatter under them. He got cold very quickly.

  To warm himself, he turned toward the ocean and began the motions of t’ai chi. His thrusts at the ocean wind felt feeble and uncertain. His body was slack, and as he grew colder and more tired, he felt the force of his will diminish.

  Not a chance. There was not a chance.

  She was some junkie’s nod, a snare, a fool catcher.

  It was folly. It was losing.

  He planted a foot in the wind’s teeth and shouted.

  On our left, he thought, fucking L.A. On our right, the wind. The exercise is called riding it till it crashes.

  As he passed over the walkway leading to the court, he saw some gliders being towed above Point Mugu, and he stopped to watch them for a while. He was sweating; the t’ai chi had made him feel better after all.

  The choice was made, and there was nothing to be had from chickenshit speculation. The roshis were right: the mind is a monkey.

  Marge woke up as soon as he closed the door. She had lodged herself in the space between the edge of the mattress and the wall.

  “O.K.,” Hicks said. “Let’s get high.”

  She sat up with her hand shading her eyes.

  “Is that a joke?”

  He had taken the plastic-wrapped package from the airline bag and set it on a chair. “No, it ain’t a joke.”

  He set a sheet of white writing paper across the telephone book and lifted a white dab from the package with a picture postcard of Marine World. She watched him raise the postcard and shake the powder onto the sheet, flicking it with his finger to dislodge the first flakes. White on white.

  “We’ll need some works for you if you’re gonna be a righteous junkie. Maybe Eddie Peace bring us some.”

  He made a funnel from the back of a matchbook, took Marge by her damp and tremorous hand and led her to the desk.

  He pared away a tiny mound of the stuff with the cardboard funnel and eased it onto the postcard’s glossy blue sky.