Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

  “Do you have anything to drink?”

  “I don’t drink. I can give you a hit off a joint.”

  Converse declined.

  “Did Owen ever mention Irvine Vibert?”

  “Could be. I heard the name somewhere.”

  Her pale foxy face displayed a shadow of weary amusement.

  “You look like you just figured out how and why.”

  “I just figured out how.”

  June had taken a joint from her pack of cigarettes. She lit it with seeming absentmindedness. When she passed it to him, he took it and smoked.

  “You never should have tried it, friend. Why did you?”

  “In the absence of anything else,” Converse said.

  The grass took him to Charmian. He had tried it in order to do something dangerous with her. The sex had been poorly because of his fear. When he spoke he could not make her listen; each time he had endeavored to engage her tripping Dixie fancy she had regarded him with such knowing calculation that he sometimes suspected she had the measure of his very soul. He had tried to extend, to surprise. As an act of communication.

  “You mean you were broke?”

  June had settled on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her. Her head rested on the sofa back so that her torso was thrust forward and her breasts swelled under the halter. The rosy skin between the base of her breasts and her shorn armpit was firm and trim, without a wrinkle.

  “No, I wasn’t broke.”

  His belly warmed, his prick rose—it was beyond perversity. He sat desiring the girl—a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray.

  What a feckless and disorderly person he was. How much at the mercy of events.

  “It was just a kick,” he explained. He was communicating again.

  And what events. What mercy.

  He reached over and took another toke of the joint she was smoking.

  “I can dig it. And oh boy, is that a bad way to be.”

  She took the joint back gently.

  “The way dealing is—scag for sure—you have to be ready to fuck people. You have to sort of like it. Somebody goes down on you, does you—you walk on their face.” She set her feet back on the floor and leaned against the arm as though something had made her suddenly sad. “Owen used to say that if you haven’t fought for your life for something you want, you don’t know what life’s all about.”

  “That must have been what I was after,” Converse said.

  “Well, I hope you’re getting off.”

  When she passed him the joint, he eased beside her and she did not move away. She was warm, firm, comfortable. He felt in need of comfort. She observed his move without expression.

  “You horny?”

  “Just going with the flow,” he said.

  “Shit, man. Don’t hurt your ear.”

  She uttered a little grunt and giggled wearily.

  “You see,” he communicated, “it’s like the oriental proverb. There’s a man hanging on the edge of a cliff. Above him there’s a tiger. Underneath there’s a raging river.”

  June seemed to be looking at the ceiling.

  “And on the side of the cliff,” she said, “there’s some honey. And the man licks it.”

  “Owen do that one too?”

  “Lemme tell you something,” she said. “I’ve listened to every manner of shit.”

  He put his hands under her breasts and breathed into the dry coarse hair behind her ear. When he kissed her neck, she shifted to give him a wasted smile.

  “You’re a funny little fucker.”

  Converse was over five feet, ten and a half inches tall. He was at least three inches taller than June. No one had ever called him a funny little fucker before. The phrase rattled the shards of his vanity but it also found him out on a level he could not at first identify. He paused with his mouth against the terry cloth over her nipple, the strings of her halter between his fingers. He had been a funny little fucker in the Red Field.

  He froze as he had then. He pressed against her as he had against the ground, stunned by the vividness of recall.

  “We must read different manuals,” she said.

  He sat up and stared at her. She laughed softly.

  “Lose the flow?”

  “I don’t know . . .” he began to say. He had wanted to take some comfort; he was tired of explanations.

  “That was about as fucked up a come-on as I ever sat still for,” she told him.

  “No offense.”

  She shook her head amiably, tied her halter back on and looked at her watch.

  “You don’t know your mind, that’s all. You don’t know what you want.”

  “No,” Converse said.

  As he left he thanked her for having Janey and for talking with him. She did not care to be thanked.

  “If you ever see Ray—tell him it was Owen that called Antheil. Tell him it wasn’t me.”

  Converse assured her that he would pass the message.

  “Take care,” she told him as he stepped out into the corridor. “Take a whole lot.”

  When his hand touched the elevator signal it touched off the tiniest spark of static electricity. He drew it back and clenched it.

  When the elevator came, he got on.

  The Red Field was in Cambodia, near a place called Krek. It had been about two o’clock in the afternoon in early May, the hottest time of year. Since dawn, Converse, a veteran wire-service man, and a young photographer had been on patrol with a Cambodian infantry company. The Khmers held hands as they advanced and sometimes picked flowers. They stopped often and when they did Converse would hunt out some shade and sit reading a paperback copy of Nicholas and Alexandra which he had bought in Long Binh PX.

  The Cambodians were impossible troops, they clustered and chattered and tried each other’s helmets on. Walking in front of Converse was a little man called the Caporal who carried a Browning automatic rifle decorated with hibiscus. The white hot sun and the empty hours dulled all caution. It seemed that the very innocence of their passage could charm all menace.

  When the silent jets streaked over the valley, they turned sweat-streaked faces toward the unbearable sky. They were surprised—but not alarmed. The aircraft were friendly. There was nothing else for them to be.

  At the same moment in which they heard the engine roar the things began going off.

  MACV called them Selective Ordnance; it made them sound like assorted salad or Selected Shorts.

  They were Elephant Feet, the most dreaded, the most awful things in the world.

  The Cambodians were still gawking skyward when bits of steel began to cut them up. Converse saw the wire-service man dive for the grass and did the same.

  After the first detonations there was the sparest moment of silent astonishment. The screams were ground down by the second strike. Men rolled in the road calling on Buddha or wandered about weeping, holding themselves together as though embarrassed at their own destructibility—until the things or the concussions knocked them down.

  A man was nailed Christlike to a tree beside the road, a shrine.

  Converse lay clinging to earth and life, his mouth full of sweet grass. Around him the screams, the bombs, the whistling splinters swelled their sickening volume until they blotted out sanity and light. It was then that he cried, although he had not realized it at the time.

  In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.

  One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.

  Another was that in the single m
oment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.

  He had lain there—a funny little fucker—a little stingless quiver on the earth. That was all there was of him, all there ever had been.

  He walked from the Red Field into the lobby and there was no place to sit.

  People passed him and he avoided their eyes. His desire to live was unendurable. It was impossible, not to be borne.

  He was the celebrated living dog, preferred over dead lions.

  Around him was the moronic lobby and outside the box-sided street where people hunted each other. Take it or leave it.

  I’ll take it, he thought. To take it was to begin again from nowhere, the funny little fucker would have to soldier on.

  Living dogs lived. It was all they knew.

  SHE WOKE TO MOONLIGHT, PHOSPHORESCENCE BEHIND HER eyes dimming to sparkles. There was the slamming of a car door. At first she could make no sense of the place.

  Hicks was asleep in a chair, his feet up on the writing desk. Moonlight lit half his face.

  Standing her knees trembled, a strange liquescence rippled under her skin. There was a tart chemical taste in her mouth. But it was not sickness, not unpleasant.

  Another door slammed, footsteps sounded on the cement patio. She moved the hanging blind and saw Eddie Peace with a red bandana at his throat. It seemed to her that figures moved behind him—but she stepped back when his eyes swept the window where she stood.

  Hicks was awake, rubbing his stiff legs.

  “It’s them,” she said. “It’s Eddie.”

  He went past her in shadow to crouch at the blind. There was a knock at the door. Over Hicks’ shoulder she saw Eddie Peace before the bungalow door; a blond couple stood behind him. The couple looked very much alike and they were both a head taller than Eddie Peace. They did not, in the odd seconds before Hicks let the blind fall, appear to be the sort of people who knew everyone’s weakness.

  “Hello,” Eddie Peace said.

  Hicks sped across the room toward the moonlit picture window.

  “Tell them wait.”

  “Just a minute,” Marge called.

  He peered into the moonlight, pressing his face against the glass.

  “Can’t see shit that way.”

  “Hey,” Eddie Peace said.

  “Don’t let them in yet.”

  “Coming,” Marge said.

  He seized the backpack from beside the bed, shook it, and disappeared into the bathroom.

  “O.K.,” she heard him say through the bathroom door.

  She opened to Eddie Peace’s thick-lipped smile.

  “Hello ’dere.”

  Eddie led his friends inside. The blonds nodded soberly as they passed.

  “Jesus Christ,” Eddie said, “could we have some light?”

  When she turned the lights on, Eddie looked around the room.

  “So where is he?”

  Marge had no answer. The blond couple watched Eddie Peace.

  “What’d he do? Take off on you?”

  When Hicks came out of the bathroom he held a pistol in either hand; he bore the weapons before his shoulders with the barrels raised like a movie-poster cowboy.

  Eddie drew himself and displayed empty hands.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Eddie said. “Look at this!”

  The woman looked at Hicks with a sensitive frown. Her companion moved in front of her.

  “Buffalo Bill,” Eddie said.

  Hicks stared at him and glanced about the room. He was looking for a place to put the pistols down.

  “You asshole,” Eddie said. “If I was the narks your ass would be dead.”

  “So would yours,” Hicks said.

  Marge went into the bathroom and brought the backpack out. Hicks put the pistols inside it and slung it around his shoulder by one strap. Then he went to the door and looked outside.

  “Don’t you love the guy?” Eddie asked his friends.

  The man nodded sadly as though Hicks represented a mode of behavior with which he was wearily familiar. He was a big soft man. He had steel-rimmed spectacles and dim blue priestly eyes. The woman was very like him, as bland to look at but perhaps a shade meaner. They were both wearing light-colored leather jackets and bell-bottom pants. The clothes appeared brand new.

  Hicks came back from the door and sat on the bed beside Marge. He set the backpack between them.

  “If these people are buying weight,” he told her softly, “things are really getting fucked up.”

  Eddie Peace had linked arms with the couple; he hauled them before Hicks’ blank stare.

  “These folks, Raymond, are the nicest folks you could ever want to meet. Gerald and Jody—this is Raymond.”

  Jody stooped to shake Hicks’ hand as though he were an Indian or a lettuce picker. Gerald saluted briskly.

  “Sit,” Hicks said.

  Jody spread herself cross-legged on the carpet. Gerald and Eddie Peace took the only chairs.

  “Gerry is a writer,” Eddie Peace explained, “and he’s one hell of a writer too. He wants to see the scene.”

  “What scene?”

  “Oh man, like the old Malibu scene. You know.”

  “Man,” Hicks said, “I don’t have a notion.”

  “He wants to look at some scag,” Eddie said. “For atmosphere.” He turned toward Gerry in coy apology. “I’m sorry, Gerry—I’m just teasing you. Why don’t you explain yourself to the man.”

  “That may not be easy,” Gerald said modestly. He did not like to be called Gerry. Everyone watched him.

  “I’m a writer,” he said.

  Eddie Peace joined the tips of his thumb and index finger like a billboard chef and blew him a kiss.

  “Now scag is a problem . . . or a phenomenon . . . that’s important. It’s a subject which has a lot of significance, particularly right now.”

  “Particularly right now,” said Eddie.

  “I mean,” Gerald told them, “I’ve done dope like a lot of people have. I’ve blown acres of pot in my time and I’ve had some beautiful things with acid. But in all honesty I’ve never been in a scag environment because it just wasn’t my scene.”

  “But now,” Marge suggested, “it’s your scene.”

  Gerald blushed slightly.

  “Not exactly. But it’s something I feel I should address. As a writer. Because of the significance it has.”

  “Particularly now,” Marge said.

  Eddie looked at her goodhumoredly, avoiding Hicks’s eyes.

  “Why don’t you shut up?” he asked.

  Gerald was looking thoughtfully at Hicks’s bottle of Wild Turkey which stood on the floor beneath the picture window.

  “My next project concerns . . .” he paused for the appropriate word . . . “drugs. I want to do something honest and real about the heroin scene.”

  Eddie Peace nodded approvingly.

  “I see it,” Gerald told them, “as a chain. People linked to each other through this incredible almost superhuman need. A chain of victims.”

  “Like our whole society,” Jody said.

  Eddie Peace sat straight up in his chair.

  “That would be a great title for a flick, right, Jody? Chain of Victims!” He winked at Hicks very quickly.

  “But somehow I don’t feel as though I have a right to it.” His hands orchestrated a moral balance. “I don’t think I can approach it as a project if I haven’t paid my dues.”

  “He wants to cop,” Eddie explained. “He wants you to turn him on. He’ll pay for it.”

  “It must strike you as weird,” Gerald said. “It strikes me as weird—but it’s a way of connecting with the p
roject. I mean whatever the risk is I’m prepared to take it. Experience is what makes work valid.” He fixed his earnest eyes on Hicks. “I hope I’m not making you paranoid.”

  Hicks stood up.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I want a word with your friend.” Eddie Peace rose slowly as though there were water at his feet.

  “Ain’t you gonna hear him out, Raymond?”

  Hicks went out the bungalow door and held it open. “He wants a little schmoozing,” Eddie Peace explained to his friends.

  Alone with Marge, Gerald and Jody looked at each other in silence.

  “Would you like a drink?” Marge asked them. The way in which she asked it set them slightly more at ease. She supposed that she had meant it to.

  “Please,” Gerald said quickly.

  Jody looked uncertain.

  “I don’t know. Would it go?”

  “I think we should have a drink,” Gerald said.

  Marge moved the backpack with the pistols in it to the far edge of the bed and brought Gerald the bottle of Wild Turkey.

  “I’m afraid there aren’t any glasses.”

  “That’s all right,” Gerald said. He held the bottle toward the light, examining the texture of the whiskey. “Very fine stuff.”

  He took three large swallows and passed the bottle to his wife. Jody drank from it grimly.

  “Do you?” she asked Marge inclining the bottle.

  Marge took it and drank. For some reason it tasted sweet to her, like sherry.

  “Are you an addict?” Jody asked.

  “Certainly,” Marge said.

  Jody smiled intelligently.

  “No. Really.”

  “I don’t know if I am or not.”

  “Doesn’t that usually mean you are?”

  Marge shrugged.

  “How about him,” Gerald asked. “Is he?”

  “No.”

  “Aren’t there some funny moral areas there?” Jody asked.

  “I guess it depends on your sense of humor,” Marge said.

  Gerald had another drink.

  “We’re not here to judge,” he said. “There’s such a thing as personal necessity. Maybe it’s beyond moral areas.”

  Marge found that the liquor made her eyes ache. She closed them against the light, and leaned back on the pillows. She had already been told to shut up.