by Robert Stone
“At the moment,” Dieter said, with a faint smile, “they’re lost. Elpidio took them up and left them.”
“What the hell kind of cops are they? Ask him what they look like.”
“One has a beard,” Dieter said when he had spoken with Galindez. “One has bleached hair like a maricon. One is ordinary.”
Hicks examined the portrait of Moussorgsky.
“You know what?” he said. “They may not be cops at all.”
THEY WAITED IN A GRASSY HOLLOW CONCEALED FROM the house across the canyon by an outcropping of blueblack rock. Smitty was leaning over the ledge spitting, watching his spittle whip on the wind and sail into the tree-tops below.
“Lost In Space is right,” he said. “Weird stuff in the woods. Walkin’ everywhere.”
Converse watched him spit with fascination. His thick lips puckered as he sought secretions to disgorge. The pink point of his tongue slid between his lips conveying gathered saliva, a homely little entity in the cosmos.
On the climb, Converse had fallen back on the Long View. It came to him that Smitty, in some respects, bore a physical resemblance to Ken Grimes. What a ruffianly sense of humor things had, he reflected, to compose themselves now into a Grimes, then into a Smitty.
He glanced at Danskin and saw that he too was watching Smitty spit. There was a fond possessive smile on his face.
Danskin extended a leg and kicked Smitty on the elbow, causing him to lose his balance for a moment.
“Whoa,” Smitty cried, and seized firm ground.
“What are you thinking about, dipstick?”
Smitty pulled himself away from the ledge.
“A dream,” he said.
Danskin nudged Converse covertly.
“I know all about that shit,” he told Smitty. “Tell me, I’ll interpret.”
Smitty blushed and bared his gums.
“I got this guy,” Smitty told them, “it’s like him.” He pointed to Converse. “I kidnaped him, right? But suddenly he’s gone. I want the bread from his folks. But I don’t have him. I’m gonna be like the dudes up in Canada, I’m gonna cut off his ear like and send it to them. Pay up or I slice more. But he’s gone. I got to cut my own ear off and mail it.”
Danskin clapped his hands in delight.
“Wait, wait,” Smitty said. “It doesn’t work. I got to cut more of myself off. They still don’t pay up. I got to cut myself all into strips and mail it all to his folks.”
Danskin rolled over on his back, his belly heaving.
He waved his hands, fingers splayed, like a Salvationist.
“You wonder,” he asked Converse, “why he’s my buddy? Who else could have such a dream?”
When he had finished laughing, he stared at Converse.
“How about you? What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking, ‘Why me?’” Converse said.
“Ha!” Danskin said.
“You did wrong,” Smitty informed him, licking the spittle from his lips. “You gotta admit it. You’re a crook.”
“I’m not a crook at heart,” Converse said.
Smitty was staring into the brush above them. They turned suddenly and saw Antheil climbing down to their cover.
“I surprised you completely,” he said. “I could have been anybody.” He looked down at them peevishly. “What are you doing lying around up here?”
“We had a guy bringing us up,” Danskin told him, “but he cut out on us. I don’t know where he went or how he did it.”
“You shot at him?”
“Of course,” Danskin said.
“Well he’s up in the house now—Angel saw him. He must have got up there some way.”
“We looked,” Danskin said. “We can’t find it.”
“How about these wires. Did you follow them?”
“The wires run down the cliff and into the woods. There’s no trail.”
Antheil leaned against the rock and peered over at the house for a moment.
“I’ve been following wires all day. They’re strung up and down sheer drops.” He sat down on the short grass beside them and took another Geological Survey map from inside his safari jacket. “According to this thing, there are two trails up there. Neither of them exists. The trails I’ve found aren’t on here and none of them goes anywhere.”
“So,” Smitty said, “they’re not so dumb.”
“I don’t get it,” Danskin said. “I thought you had this place doped out. Don’t you have any information? Isn’t there a file on these people?”
“Look,” Antheil said, “every cornpone cop down here knows the way in. All these wetbacks know the way. Of course there’s a file.” He put his map away. “We had to be discreet. We didn’t want to make it official until certain things were taken care of. I thought we could improvise a little. It seemed reasonable enough.”
Smitty looked patiently from Danskin’s face to Antheil’s.
“Maybe it’s a bummer,” he suggested finally. “Maybe we should just drop it.”
Everyone turned to look at Converse.
“No,” Antheil said.
“It’s getting dark. While we’re fucking around looking for a trail, they’ll come down here and zap us.”
“I’ll back you up,” Antheil told him.
“Yeah?” He looked at Antheil with something close to contempt. “You really went for this one, huh?”
Antheil stared back at him, stony-faced.
“If they can’t get to a car, they can’t get out. Angel’s got the road covered and he’s as good as they come. They can’t leave the house without being seen. If they try to walk out we’ll run them down.”
Danskin gnawed his finger in silence.
“You get yourselves where you have a clear shot at the house. Talk to them. Tell them you’ll waste Asshole here.”
“Oh, man,” Danskin said, “what do they care? They’ll laugh at us.”
“Tell them you’ve got the little girl.”
“They know fucking well we got no little girl.”
“Try it, I’m telling you.” He turned on Converse in fury. “You talk, Asshole. Use your influence with your wife.”
Smitty laughed.
“Because goddamn it,” Antheil told Converse, “I’m gonna kill you if you don’t produce.”
“I think he realizes that,” Danskin said.
They watched Antheil climb quickly up the bank and walk into the woods looking over his shoulder. Danskin’s dark eyes were bright with anger.
“He’s uncomfortable turning his back, you notice that? He’s got a bad conscience.”
“He’s flipping,” Converse told them. “He’s obsessed.”
“He flips,” Smitty said, “and our balls get busted.”
Danskin took Converse by the sleeve and pushed him against the bank. “Up,” he said. “One thing at a time.”
They went back into the woods and wandered among the trees for a while, trying to find where the Mexican had gone. After a few minutes, they gave up and followed a trail that led through the edge of the woods, following the line of the bluff.
“Let’s try it here,” Danskin said, when they had gone a short way. “It’s gonna get dark on us.”
They went crouching through the brush; Danskin kept one hand on Converse’s arm and carried his air marshal’s pistol in the other. Smitty came behind with the rifle.
Just below them was another ledge with a rise of dark rock behind which they could shelter. The stone house was directly across the way and from their new point of vantage they could see the top of its bell tower and a corral against its wall in which a white horse stood.
“Now we play the game,” Danskin said when they were lying in the rocks’ shelter. “Now we play The Lady or the Tiger.” He still held Converse by the arm; he tightened his grip. “What do you think, Converse? You think she’ll come through for you?”
“I don’t know,” Converse said.
Smitty watched the opposite mesa with his binoculars for a
while and broke into laughter.
“Hey, man,” he said. “I’m gonna shoot that horse.” He turned to Danskin, excited and pleading. “Can I?”
Danskin chuckled tolerantly. “What an idiot,” he said to Converse.
“Sure,” he told Smitty, “go ahead.”
There were three shots, one following another, dogged, obsessive. After the second they heard a grunt and after the third a deep bellow, loud and explosive as the shot itself. Kjell screamed in the bell tower.
Marge jumped to her feet.
Hicks was already on the ladder when Kjell came stumbling down. His eyes were wild and he was so pale that Hicks thought at first that he had been shot. He pressed past Hicks and started for the front door. Marge and Galindez intercepted him.
Peering through the slot, Hicks saw the dappled horse on its side in the corral, striking the ground before it with a forehoof like a circus horse counting to music. The horse’s teeth were bared and its nostrils bloody, its flank was awash with bright arterial blood.
“For shit’s sake,” Hicks said.
He had a look through the glasses and noted that the pickup had moved out of sight. There were no signs of life on the opposite hillside but it was plain that the shots had come from that direction. The sun was almost gone behind the pinnacle to the west, shadows moved up the higher slopes. He set the glasses on the rail and went below.
“Would you believe they shot the horse?”
“I believe it,” Kjell shouted at him. “I saw it.”
“They’re crazy,” Hicks said disgustedly. “They’ll be shooting out the windows next. We ought to put mattresses up.”
“Are we going to stay here?” Marge asked. “Won’t they come up?”
“If they knew how,” Dieter said, “they’d be here.”
“How’d you lose them?” Hicks asked Galindez.
Galindez answered him in Spanish, something about a galería.
“Through the Indian shelter,” Dieter said. “It’s right under them.”
“I was thinking,” Kjell said, “we could hide out in there. That’s what it’s for.”
“Might be the place for you, K-jell. I don’t care for holes much myself.”
“Look,” Dieter said, “it isn’t necessary. We can get to Elpidio’s place without even crossing the road. There are other people there.”
“Maybe we’re better off up here, Dieter. Down in the valley they got us in their pocket. It’s kind of our game up here.”
“But there are all these people down there,” Marge said. “They’re your friends, aren’t they? Won’t they help us?”
“Yes and no,” Dieter said. “Their heads are in a curious place. If they see there’s trouble they’ll go away. They’re pacifists. And they have a very detached view of the world.”
A man’s voice echoed over the valley.
“Hello,” the voice wailed. “Hello.”
“Hello, yourself,” Hicks said.
The voice called again.
“Marge! It’s John!”
She stared at Hicks in panic.
“It is,” she said. “It’s him.”
Hicks went up the ladder, picked up the glasses, and scanned the opposite hillside. Their heads were visible over a rock ledge—Converse, and beside him a blond man squinting down the sight of a hunting rifle. Hicks looked at the rifle barrel long enough to remember that the corner of sun to the left of the pinnacle was strong enough to reflect the lenses of his binoculars. He ducked before the shot and the bullet hit the rail and ricocheted dreadfully against the bell.
“It tolls for thee, motherfucker,” someone cried, and there was echoing, half-hysterical laughter.
Hicks ducked back through the trap and went below
“Yes, it is,” he told Marge. “They got him.”
“Oh my God,” Marge said. She started toward the ladder.
“Stay off there,” Hicks told her. “Listen through the door, they don’t have a shot at it.”
He opened the front door and stood by it.
“Marge!” Converse called to them. “Let them have it!”
“I can’t stand it,” she said.
“Marge! They have Janey!”
She put her hands to her ears.
“That’s a lie, Marge,” Hicks said. He took her by the wrists. “If they had they’d have her in sight.”
“They have Janey!” Converse shouted.
“Who’s Janey?” Kjell asked.
“How do I know they haven’t?” Marge asked desperately. “How?”
Hicks shook his head.
“Tell them to produce her.”
“Produce her?” Marge cried. “Produce her? They’ll burn her with cigarettes.”
“For Christ’s sake, man, they haven’t got her. She’s with your father.”
“Marge!” Converse called.
Marge knelt on the stone floor.
“How can he do it?”
“You know who they are. I’d do it too, if it was me.”
“Marge!”
Galindez asked who the man was that shouted.
“Her husband,” Dieter told him.
On the far hill, Converse clung to his rock, shouting into fantasy.
“Give it to them!”
“Clear,” Danskin instructed him. “So they understand you.”
“Give it to them! They’ll let us go. If they don’t get it—they’ll kill me.”
“Us!” Danskin said.
“Kill us!” Converse shouted.
“How’s anybody gonna know what he’s talkin’ about?” Smitty asked irritably.
“Yell it again, shithead. Louder.”
“Give it to them,” Converse called. “Or they’ll kill me. And you. They’ll kill everybody. But if you give it to them . . .” he stopped and drew breath . . . “they won’t!”
“You think it’s funny?” Danskin asked.
“Not at all,” Converse said.
Marge stood in the doorway with her eyes closed.
“What was it? What did he say?”
Hicks shuddered. “He’s out of his head. What he says is to give it to them. What else would he say?”
“Suppose we do?”
“What do you think? You think they’ll let us walk?”
He went round to the rear door that opened to the stream and looked outside.
“Dieter, let your man take the boy down to his place. You can go too if you like. Keep yourselves at this angle to the building,” he told them, making a wedge of his hand and pointing south. “I don’t think they’ll have a shot at you that way. But go quick.”
“I have to think,” Dieter said. He nodded to Galindez; Galindez and the boy started out the back door.
“While they’re going,” Hicks told Marge taking her by the arm and leading her toward the front door, “you tell them O.K. Say,’O.K. Please let us go. We have to dig it up.’”
Marge went to the front door and leaned against the carved doorway.
“O.K.,” she shouted. “Please let us go. We have to dig it up!”
“Get your ass down here,” one of the men on the hillside called. “Make it fast!”
“I’m sorry about your horse, K-jell,” Hicks said. Kjell and Galindez were already running across the stream toward the shadowed woods.
“What are you gonna do, Dieter? You staying?”
“Why are you staying, Ray? What is it you’re going to do?”
“We could call the cops,” Hicks said. “That would fake them out.”
“That’s all right with me,” Marge said. “Letting them have it is all right too.” She turned her back to the open door and buttoned her jacket. “It was my goddamn thing. Mine and his. We ought to pay our own way.”
“What are you talking about?” Hicks said to her. “Who you gonna pay?”
“I’ve had it,” she told him. “I’m through—it isn’t worth it.”
“I guess it depends on how you think,” Hicks said. Marge wept.
“That’s stupid.”
“Look,” she shouted, “there are a million people down there. They can’t kill us all in front of all those people. I can bring it down there and hand it over.”
“You’d never make it.”
He went into the room in which he had slept. It was a narrow room like a monk’s cell; the single window was small and square, set in a brick casement. At one time it had been blue with flowering trees in each corner but Dieter had whitewashed the walls since then.
His seabag and the backpack lay on the bare mattress. From one he took the cellophane bag in which he kept his toothbrush and razor and shook the contents out onto the floor. From the other, he took the packet in which the drug was wrapped and removed its outer covering of newspaper. Then, he went quietly across the corridor and out the back door into fading twilight. It was a clear tranquil evening, squirrels chattered in the pines, sparrows chanted.
“I’m bringing it down,” Marge shouted from the front door. “I’m bringing it!”
He could not understand what they shouted back.
Kneeling beside the pool where the stream was dammed, he took fistfuls of the fine dry sand between the stones and flung them into the cellophane bag. Finally, he set the bag down and held its end open and shoveled earth in, sand, small stones and all. He took the bag of sand inside and wrapped the newspaper and oil cloth around it and put it in the backpack where the dope had been. Before he tucked the heroin under his mattress he took a pinch of it and sprinkled it in the layer between the newspaper and the oil cloth on the package of sand. He dragged the backpack and seabag into the front room.
“I’m taking it down,” Marge declared. “I told them.”
“The minute they get it in their hands, they’ll blow your head off.”
“Not in front of all those people they won’t. I’ll give it to them in the village. I can get down the way we came up.”
Hicks took the trigger housing and the stock of his M-16 from the seabag and started to assemble it.
“Do we have to have more of this stuff with guns?”
“Talk to them about that.”
Dieter came in from the tower and watched Hicks assemble his weapon.
