Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

  She looked into the shadowy brush.

  “Hide where?”

  Shadows moved against the lighted windows; Marge felt cold. She stayed where she was, waiting for him to direct her. But he kept looking down at the house.

  “Belay that. Come on with me.”

  She followed him into a dirt yard littered with tire tubes and car parts. A number of vehicles were parked in the darkness behind the house but they could not see how many.

  Hicks had a gun in his hand. As they neared the windows, she saw him slip it into his back pocket; the stock was visible against his belt. She pulled on his arm.

  “It shows,” she said.

  Hicks only nodded. He moved into the shadow of the house and close alongside the window.

  From where he stood, he could see most of the shack’s single room. There was a hot fire in the potbellied stove and an oil lamp burning high on a table in the corner. Two blond girls in jeans and patches were kneeling on a mattress in the middle of the floor. They looked very much alike and neither of them appeared to be over sixteen.

  Against the wall behind them sat two smiling young men in denim jackets. Their smiles were steady and vacant and they leaned against each other’s shoulder. One of them Hicks knew as Shoshone; it was how he introduced himself. He was slight and copper-colored, an Indian or a pachuco who spoke unsullied L.A. The second man was a tall longhair with pouchy eyes who was perhaps twenty years older than the two girls. From the play of shadows, Hicks reckoned that there were two more people inside who were beyond his scan. He felt they were female.

  He found Marge hunkering in the darkness near the door and he pulled her to her feet.

  “This is your house,” he told her. “You better be stoned cool.”

  Now I’ll see who I got with me, he thought. He knocked loudly on the door. He did not want to surprise them too much. Then he pushed it open and walked into the room.

  The men in the denim jackets gaped. One of the teenagers on the mat uttered a stifled scream. Across the room, a fat beetle-browed girl in a dirty serape stared at him in anger. There was a fourth girl too, a skinny redhead with prominent teeth and a corpselike complexion who was playing with a dark wig.

  They watched him as he picked up the cassette tape recorder and shut it off. Trouble, as he suspected it would, came first from the lady with the eyebrows.

  “What the fuck are you doin’? Who are you man?”

  “If I weren’t big and easy,” Hicks said, “I’d ask you the same question.”

  The blondes on the mattress looked up at him with fearful, addled eyes. Shoshone climbed to his feet and came toward him.

  “I didn’t see who it was for a minute,” he said. He was laughing, his voice slurred with reds.

  The beetle-browed girl was beside herself with moronic indignation.

  “What is this shit? Who is he?”

  “He lives here,” Shoshone said. He staggered backward and rested a lean brown hand on the top of his companion’s head. “He lives here, right?”

  Shoshone’s friend watched Hicks with even, sleepy eyes.

  “Well, I mean, where you been?” Shoshone asked. In the course of the sentence his emotional valence seemed to swing from chemical good nature to unnatural fury and at least part of the way back.

  “At sea,” Hicks said. He noticed that the people in the room were looking toward the door behind him where Marge stood. He glanced at her quickly and to his satisfaction saw her looking cool and arrogant. He had been something of the same look about her when she was denying him his money. It had made him not trust her at first.

  “You’re a sailor. He’s a sailor,” Shoshone said to his friend. “I know this guy.”

  Shoshone’s friend was looking at the pistol in Hicks’ pocket.

  “What kinda piece you got there?” he asked in a slow Okie drawl.

  “Thirty-eight Special” Hicks said.

  The Okie permitted himself a single weary guffaw.

  “Like to look at some groovy weapons?”

  Hicks shrugged.

  “You might come see me before I split.”

  “Are you a sailor?” the redhead with the wig asked.

  “That’s right,” Hicks said.

  One of the teen-agers began to vomit quietly on the mattress. The fat girl was on her like a bacchante, folds of tie-dyed cloth billowing from under her serape.

  “Lookitcha, you dumb cunt. Look watcha doin’.” She had a willow switch in her hand and she whipped the girl across the shoulder with it. The blonde collapsed across her own watery vomit.

  “Take us home,” she wailed.

  “Aren’t they from around here?” Hicks heard Marge ask. She was still cool, half smiling. When she looked at him, he smiled back at her, trying to warn her off the issue. But he said nothing.

  “I live,” the second girl said, “at twenty-two thirty-one Sepulveda Boulevard.”

  The girl who had been hit moaned.

  “Don’t tell me where you live.”

  “Pick them up hitchhiking?” Marge asked.

  “What’s it to you?” the fat girl began to say, but she broke the sentence off with a shrug as if she were asking herself a question.

  “They wanted a party,” the Okie said.

  “Yeah,” Shoshone said. “We thought they were hip but you know they’re uptight boojwa.”

  Hicks looked down at the mattress.

  “They took a lot pills, huh?”

  “They didn’t have much choice,” the redhead with the wig said.

  “Lookatcha your mattress,” the fat girl said. “Looka what those dumb cunts did.”

  Hicks grabbed a chair and sat down on it backward, facing his guests.

  “I was gonna air it out anyway.” He looked around the room and addressed himself to the Okie.

  “I may have some heavy company pretty soon. I wish you’d take the party down the canyon.”

  The man nodded slowly. Everyone in the room watched him. He stood up lazily and shook himself in a little dance.

  “I can dig it.”

  The fat girl stood over the teenagers until they stood up.

  “You probably ought to lose those two down in the park,” Hicks said cheerfully. “They’re jailbait for sure.”

  Shoshone patted one of the girls on the ass.

  “We take care of ’em.”

  The fat girl whooped, covered her hand with her mouth, and shrugged.

  When the others had filed outside, the Okie stood in the doorway looking at Marge, then at Hicks.

  “I’ll come back in a couple of days like you said. Got some things you might want to look at.”

  “Sure enough,” Hicks said.

  Hicks stayed in his chair as they listened to an engine start up outside the house. Marge paced up and down. When Shoshone’s truck was under way and the engine noise growing fainter, Hicks stood up and dragged the soiled mattress outside. He stood for a while watching the headlights coil down the canyon road. When he went in, he found Marge sitting in his chair with her head in her hands.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Welcome to L.A.” He touched her face as he walked past. He had taken a key from his pocket and opened a cabinet above a dry sink in the back of the cabin. In the cabinet were a bottle of blended whiskey and a car distributor; Hicks set them out beside the sink.

  “That’s just folks up here. This is where the canyon consciousness prevails.”

  “What happens to those kids?”

  “You’re thinking like a mother.”

  She stared at him; he saw her searching for the psychopath.

  “Have a drink.”

  She looked doubtful. She had been fiddling through her carry bag for something and she seemed reluctant to let it go.

  “O.K.,” she said, setting the bag down.

  He dusted out two fruit jars and poured whiskey into them.

  “No water up here.”

  She drank, grimacing.

  “You
understand,” Hicks said, “that we’re not in a position to make a big thing over something like those kids. You walk around these canyons enough you’ll come across a sleeping bag full of bones. I’ve seen a number, I’m not kidding. Fuck up a little bit once and the next bag of bones is you.” He drank his whiskey. “We’re everybody’s meat. What’s in that bag is what it all boils down to.”

  “What does?”

  “Everything,” Hicks said.

  “How come you went for this?” he asked her. “Was it your idea?”

  “He thought it up. My idea was to really do it.”

  He poured himself another shot. Marge declined.

  “No. You were right this morning,” she said. It sucks. I’d like to give it back.” She shivered. “To wherever the hell it emanates from.”

  “It doesn’t emanate. People make it.”

  Marge moved closer to the stove.

  “He’ll be back before long. I wonder what he’ll think.”

  Hicks laughed.

  “I don’t know what your scene is but I’d say he’ll think you did him. He’ll think that at first anyway. Until he’s hassled.”

  Marge bit her nails.

  “We should have let them have it. If I’d been there alone I would have.”

  “It isn’t yours anymore,” he said. He regretted it immediately. She was not without courage, capable certainly of spite and there was no point in asking for trouble.

  She seemed more troubled than angry, as though the problem were a moral one.

  “Whose is it?”

  He felt that he would have to explain it philosophically or she would refuse to understand.

  “It belongs to whoever controls it.”

  “So is it yours now?”

  He went back to the sink for more whiskey.

  “I been juicing ever since I hit this beach. I gotta stop tomorrow, you remind me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me in Berkeley about who controls it?”

  “I had other things on my mind.”

  “What am I supposed to do,” she asked with a thin smile, “go home and forget about it? Because it doesn’t look like I can do that now.”

  On the drive down, he had given some thought to using her as a decoy. Set in motion, she would soon be traced and while they ran her down he might sell out and get clear. But he could not simply turn her loose because there was a chance that she would crumble and go to law. He had devised false errands for her and rendezvous, all of them plausible.

  “If you wanted to rip us off,” she said, “you should have done it before. You should never have turned up with it.”

  He brought the bottle over to the stove and poured himself another shot.

  “I can see where you could be a real pain in the ass,” he told her.

  It was pathetic, he thought, the satisfaction they took in being logical.

  “I mean what are you saying? That you want your rights? Sue me.”

  She watched him in self-righteous silence. Arrogance.

  “All right—it’s your dope. You want it back? Take it and get on the road with it. Run it over to East L.A. and sell it to the pachucos. C’mon, man, you fucked up—that’s all. You can’t do nothing with that shit.”

  “Why bring me all the way down here to tell me that?” she asked.

  “Why’d you come down?”

  “To tell the truth,” Marge said, “I was just following you.”

  He stood up and walked over to the small single window and saw his own reflection in the lamplight.

  “We ought to shitcan it and run.”

  “Now you’re really scaring me,” Marge said.

  “That’s the truth.” He began to pace back and forth from the sink to the stove. “I got hardly any time. I never moved smack in my life. I can’t move it without making myself known and when I do it’s wide open city.”

  “What about our friends from this morning?” she said after a minute. “Do you think we could sell to them after all? They offered you a deal. Maybe we could make one.”

  “Who’s we?” he said. He sat down again beside her, laughing a little. “If I hadn’t been so hung over and pissed off this morning this shit wouldn’t ever have come about.”

  She moved away slightly, contentious.

  “What about them?”

  “Right. I thought about that. First thing, I don’t know who they are.”

  “John must know. We could call him and maybe set something up.”

  Hicks shook his head.

  “You gotta figure intangibles. They know what fuck-ups we are. They got their pride. I don’t think we could pull it off.”

  “I think they’re fuck-ups too,” Marge said.

  Hicks nodded. “They’re animals. I wonder who the hell they are.”

  “John knows.”

  He smiled.

  “You don’t respect him very much, do you?”

  “Sure,” Hicks said.

  “Why did you carry for him?”

  “Why do you have to have it all figured out? I don’t always have a reason for the shit I do.” He picked up the jar she had been drinking from. “Drink with me.”

  She let him fill the jar. When she raised it to drink, he saw that she was clutching something in her other hand. He took the hand and spread the fingers and took a Percodan from her cold palm.

  “How come you’re taking Percodan?”

  She sat stiffly back against the wall.

  “Pain.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. I asked you if you were a junkie. You can’t fake it.”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of dilaudid. I wanted to quit. So I’m taking Percodan.

  He gave her back the pill and she swallowed it with whiskey, gagging slightly.

  “How much dilaudid?”

  She turned away. He set his drink down and stretched out on the floor. He had taken the thirty-eight out of his pocket and set it down on the floor between them and as he lay beside her he became intensely aware of it. She was holding her hand out stiffly seeming to measure its steadiness. The hand hovered over his chest and he thought she must be about to touch him, but it was the pistol she took hold of. She turned it round in her hands, inspecting it. He watched her from the corners of his eyes until she set it down.

  The wood stove was burning down, the oil in the lamp almost gone. Hicks moved closer to the stove, partly turning his back on her.

  He had no rest there. When he turned toward her again, she was staring at him wide-eyed. Her stare made him lonely; it was utterly without warmth, without recognition—he might have been a snake.

  “What are you doing?” he asked her, ashamed of the lame trivial question. Her gray eyes looked paler in the dim light. He wanted to ask her what it was she saw.

  She laughed and he shivered, and at the same moment so did she.

  The instant remained. He held his breath. Cold Zen.

  He wondered if she had been aware of it.

  As they undressed, their throats were close together, guarded. When she pressed herself against him, he held her away for a moment wanting to see her, the light on her breasts, the gray eyes, wanting to know the life under his hands that he could draw up from her mouth and breathe back inside her.

  On the army blankets, she bent to his penis, a resolute harakiri, self-avenging; he could feel the abnegation, the death. He did not pull back or intimate any warning when he came. Withdrawn, he pulled her up to himself—she drew breath hard and he knew she must have paused between need and revulsion and the knowledge inflamed him again.

  Because of his nature and circumstances, the most satisfying part of Hicks’ sexual life had come to be masturbation—he preferred it to prostitutes because it was more sanitary and took less time. He did not take it lightly when, rarely, one woman pleased him, and his deepest pleasures were intellectual and emotional. He became a hoarder, careful and slow to the point of obsessiveness, a thinker.

  He eased her toward the light, his strength in his tongue, strok
ing the sweet-sour depths and surfaces. When he was ready he went in, striking for the deepest darkest part of her the limits of himself could reach, then eased up, stirring, stroking from inside. She came and spoke to him; he thought she said, “Find thee.”

  And again—and he spent himself again—less thoughtfully, in lubricious happy chaos.

  Lying beside her, he was at peace. He propped his head on his elbow, lights flashing in his brain, his spinal column denuded of sacred vital fluids, and inclined his head in gratitude. He was bound. He felt strong and in complicity with fortune.

  When the lamp failed, he missed her eyes, although she clung to him.

  He tried to make himself believe she had been with him in the shivering moment from which they had begun; there were no words to ask with. Not knowing caused him a stab of loneliness before he slept.

  Much later, he woke up in darkness, thinking he heard footsteps outside. He rose quickly, stepped over her and prowled the windows. She was awake when he came back.

  “What happens tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Dig it.” He put his finger against her belly and moved it downward until the tip pressed her labia. His lips were close against her ear. “We’re dead.”

  SOMEONE HAD DRAWN A DEVIL ON THE WALL ABOVE Janey’s crib. It had horns and bat wings and a huge erect phallus; there was enough characterization in the details of the face to make it distinctly-frightening.

  Converse sat Janey’s bedroom with his back to the thing. He had found the refrigerator working but the meat in it had blackened and the milk soured. There had also been a bottle of cassis inside and Converse drank some with the idea that it might keep him awake while he decided what to do. He was nearly too tired to sit upright.

  When she had not turned up at the airport and no one had answered the phone, he had taken a taxi from Oakland which had cost him over twenty-five dollars.

  Through the back-door windows he could watch evening drawing over the hills. From time to time he would turn on the drawing, acting out the thought that it might disappear, a hallucination of his fatigue. But it did not disappear and before long he could not stop looking at it. Sometimes he thought he recognized people he had seen somewhere, and he searched the features for some sort of clue.

  Things were funnier over here.

  After sitting for an hour, Converse decided to have a word with Mr. Roche, his landlord. Mr. Roche was a tiny man who lived in a bungalow behind the apartment building. As Converse walked across Mr. Roche’s lawn, the unfamiliar wind, cold and sour, chilled him and added to his fear.