Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

  “You’re going on the road, fellas,” the agent said. “You know all about it.”

  “That’s right,” Mr. Danskin said.

  Antheil clapped his hands.

  “O.K. So do it.”

  “How long will we be away for?” Converse asked. “Should I bring some stuff?”

  He had hesitated to ask, fearing that the question might produce silence or even levity.

  A brief silence did in fact ensue.

  “Sure,” Antheil said. “Bring whatever you want.”

  Mr. Smith came into the other bedroom with him to watch him pack. Mr. Smith was the younger, blond one. He picked out some shirts and a sweater. Everything was still in his suitcase; he put the clothes in a cardboard shirt box. When they went back to Janey’s room, Antheil was admiring the drawing on the wall.

  “That’s your counterculture right there,” he said.

  No one disagreed with him.

  “Converse,” he declared, “I’ve enjoyed talking to you. You just confirmed a whole lot of ideas I’ve had about the way things are going. I’m really glad to have met you.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  Antheil shook his head.

  “You got nothing to worry about. You’ll be in good hands.” A thought seemed to strike him on the way out.

  “You know I have a kid,” he told Danskin, “he’s twelve now. He lives with my lately wife. Last summer I sent him to survival school. Toughen him up for the big shit storm.”

  “What do they do there?” Mr. Smith asked.

  “What do they do there? They survive.”

  Everyone smiled politely.

  Mr. Danskin was looking at Converse.

  “You never went to survival school.”

  “No,” Converse admitted. “I don’t think they had them.”

  HICKS DROVE ON SPEED. HIS FATIGUE HUNG THE desert grass with hallucinatory blossoms, filled ravines with luminous coral and phantoms. The land was flat and the roads dead straight; at night, headlights swung for hours in space, steady as a landfall—and then rushed past in streaks of color, explosions of engine roar and hot wind. Every passing truck left in its screaming wake the specter of a desert head-on—mammoth tires spinning in the air, dead truck drivers burning in ditches until dawn.

  Marge nodded in the back seat. Now and then she spoke and Hicks could not understand her. She scratched in her sleep.

  The state did not seem like sleep to Marge. She had turned inward from the chaos of motion outside. Her head was filled with freakery—that she was turning to rubber, that her mind had been replaced by a cassette.

  Security was fled. Sometimes she simply set the bag on the seat beside her. There was so much that she was profligate; the seat was sticky with it, grains of it glistened on the rubber matting of the floor. After doing up, she would sit beside him in the front for a while, but they did not speak very much, there was nothing that would bear exchange.

  They stopped at night—so that Hicks could sleep for three hours or so, drop more speed, and put them on the road again. They avoided the Interstates, the military reserves, the Indian reservations, trying for roads that were obscure but not deserted.

  Late in the second day, they passed miles and miles of spinach fields watered with sprinklers. Roads met at perfect right angles; the white farmhouses had groves of pale aspen surrounding them. A town called Moroni had a plaster angel in its dusty main square and they stopped there for gas and bought lunch meat and whole-wheat bread at a Japanese grocery.

  By the time night fell, their road led upward over the slopes of half-fallen mountains where broken boulders were piled on each other’s backs. In the twilight, the great rocks came to look like statues and the scrub pine growing from the crevices beneath them like offering flowers.

  They drove all night to climb the ridge. A few hours before dawn, Hicks pulled over to sleep.

  “Who’s up here?” she asked him.

  “My alma mater’s up here,” he said with his eyes closed. “My freaked-out old roshi. They have writing doctors—this guy is a writing roshi.”

  “You mean he deals?”

  “Deals isn’t the word.”

  While he slept, Marge listened to owls.

  Late the next morning, Hicks was laughing to himself as he drove. The sky was obscene in its brightness, the crimson rocks a bad joke. Then, gradually the route wound downward, switchback after switchback. Trees were thicker, there were wildflowers beside the road. Abruptly they were driving between clapboard buildings on a street of sorts, in a kind of town at the base of a sheer cliff that kept half the place in welcome shadow.

  As they followed the road, Marge became aware that there were people among the unpainted buildings. The first group she saw were children—little girls in frilly white blouses with patent leather shoes. Then, before the next shack, a group of men in beige suits and dark ties. Some of the men carried books under their arms. Farther along, a young black haired woman in a pink blouse nursed a baby in the shade.

  The road ended with a curving flourish over a sandy pit in which lay a few car skeletons and the rotting remnants of a tepee. To one side of the pit was a cluster of orange and blue tents; beside the tents fifteen or so International Harvester trucks were lined up. The trucks were painted in bright colors, Mexican pastels. They were open in the back; each truck had benches across its van with lengths of knotted rope along the sides for hand grips. They were the sort of trucks which one saw carrying braceros in Mexico and southern California.

  A group of silent people gathered slowly near the place where they stopped the Land-Rover. They were Mexicans, Marge saw, dressed with a curious formality. All the men wore the same cut of beige suit with wide lapels and thick stitching. Their dark ties were held in place with cheap tin tie clasps. Waves of lacquer black hair curved above their brown faces. There were little boys among them, small replicas of the men down to the tin tie clasps. Instead of shoes, they wore plastic sandals over socks; their feet were covered with dust. Marge stared at them through the insect-spattered windshield. They returned her stare without hostility and without greeting.

  “Are those people really out there?” she asked Hicks.

  Hicks turned over the engine and looked at her.

  “I don’t know what’s really out there.”

  He sat rubbing his temples, laughing at something.

  Marge climbed out and faced the group. Hicks came around from the other side of the car.

  “Oh you mean these folks,” he said. “Yeah, these folks are really out here.”

  “Hello, brothers,” he told them. “Hola, muchachos.”

  They stepped aside for them. Hicks put his arm over Marge’s shoulder.

  “Caballeros,” he said clasping her tightly, “caballeros, muy formal.”

  More people in the roadway between the shacks, all watching them as they walked holding each other.

  “Do they like us?” Marge asked. “Do they want us to go away?”

  “As long as we’re not the cops,” Hicks said. “Or the ASPCA, they couldn’t care less.”

  He stopped for a moment, looked up and down the street and then moved her toward the largest of the several buildings. There were people huddled in the doorway, facing the interior. Hicks moved her between two low broad backs and into a large whitewashed room.

  The room was crowded with men; there were no women among them, although a line of small boys sat with black books in their hands along one wall. Some of the men had chairs to sit in, others stood or squatted on the floor. Everyone was facing a raised platform at the far end of the room where a small brown-skinned man in a dark rayon suit read aloud from a book he held in his right hand. Beside him on the platform was a banner strung on a brass flagpole. The banner showed a curled shepherd’s staff and beneath it a haloed lamb, hoof raised. A sanctified aura of gold cloth surrounded the lamb’s white body.

  The man read in a voice which started low in his throat and rose almost to falsetto and then
fell again at the conclusion of each phrase. What he read was like verse or the words of a song and he seemed to begin every stanza at a slightly different pitch so that the sound built a tension which coiled farther and farther back on itself without breaking. His voice did not suit him at all.

  The men in the room listened with closed eyes.

  Next to the platform, closest to the reader of anyone in the room, was a fair-haired boy of about twelve, the only person there beside themselves who was not Mexican. The boy looked up at the speaker with a wide smile, but it was a spectator’s smile, not a communicant’s.

  As Marge watched, the boy turned to them, smiled wider in surprise, and rose to pick his way toward them among the crowd.

  The attention of the people in the room followed him as he came up to them. Marge imagined that the people there could see the drug on her or sense it.

  The boy led them outside into the sun. He was carrying a faded cowboy hat in his hand and when they were outside he jammed it on the back of his head.

  “How are you, you little shit?” Hicks asked him.

  “Last time I saw you,” the boy said, “you were fishing for steelheads.”

  “I was too,” Hicks told Marge. “Where’s your old man?”

  “Up the hill.”

  Hicks looked around him.

  “I see the folks are here.”

  “That’s right,” the boy said. “You’ll be in time for the fiesta.”

  They walked to the jeep and Hicks took out the pack and the bag in which he had put his machine gun. He strapped the pack on his back and slung the seabag over his shoulder.

  “This is K-jell,” he told Marge. “K-jell, this is Marge.”

  She was tired of the boy’s smile; it had something of the formal beatitude of hippie greeting, mindless acceptance soul to soul. It annoyed her to see those things on a child’s face.

  “Let’s go see the old man,” Hicks said.

  They walked along the dirt road toward the foot of the mountain, past the car skeletons and the tepee to a patch of soil where rows of blackened vegetable leaf withered in the company of thorny weeds and broom. The patch was enclosed with chicken wire.

  “Christ,” Hicks said, “Sally’s garden.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kjell said.

  “They strung that wire underneath the whole bed,” Hicks told Marge. “To keep the gophers out.”

  Marge nodded wearily.

  “Most people poison gophers. But it was the time of peace and love and all that lives is holy.” He turned to the boy. “You remember that time?”

  “I don’t know,” Kjell said.

  “In the end somebody got drunk—I don’t remember who—and came down here with a shotgun and blasted all the gophers they could find.”

  “That was a reaction,” Kjell said. “Because it was so much work putting in the chicken wire.”

  A narrow trail led along the foot of the mountain, turning at length into a narrow windless passage between walls of red rock that widened into a pine glade. The deep shade and the smell of the pines in the heat gave promise of rest. They could hear fast water not far away. Beyond the glade was a grassy field with a stand of cottonwood trees beside a stream. The stream had been dammed with blocks of concrete to form a pool, where bubbles rose from an unseen bottom marring the reflected image of the sheer mountain over them.

  “You want a bath?” the boy asked. “The creek’s nice and warm right here.”

  Hicks was looking at the rock face.

  “Where the hell’s the cable lift?”

  “He dismantled it,” Kjell said. “Tore it up just the other day.”

  “All the way here I been waiting to ride that cable. What the hell possessed him?”

  A small black and white quarter horse was nibbling grass among the trees. The boy walked up to it and pulled its head up with the bridle, leading it out of the trees. A length of red cotton cloth trailed from one of its hind feet.

  “What have you got on him?” Hicks asked.

  The boy swung into the saddle and brushed the horse’s neck.

  “I was trying to make a gypsy hobble. He didn’t go for it.”

  “You’ll get your teeth kicked out. How come he took the lift down?”

  “Well, Gibbs was here last week. He took it down when Gibbs split.”

  The good humor drained from Hicks’ face.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Gibbs was here?”

  “Yeah,” the boy said, “he was here. Sorry I can’t take you up behind me but the track’s too steep for anybody riding behind.”

  “We’ll walk,” Hicks told him.

  Kjell kicked the horse’s flank and trotted off up the stream.

  Hicks took the canteen from Marge’s carry bag and stooped at the waterside to fill it.

  “Gibbs was here,” he told her, “and I missed him.”

  “Is that pretty bad?”

  “Well, it’s cruel, that’s what it is. It’s ironical.”

  It was a three-hour climb to the top and shade was the only comfort. At every rounding turn they sprawled against the rock to take some water and some salt from a zuzu-stand shaker bag. Step over step, Marge followed his tracks upward; by the time they were under the crest she was cramped and weeping.

  Around the last bend was another stand of forest, cedar and pine. Under the sound of wind in the trees were strange soft noises—tinklings and faint bells. Whenever Marge turned after a sound, she caught a small flash of unnatural color, a glint of bright metal or glass. As they walked she saw that some of the branches hid wind chimes and mirrors, bells of Sarna, painted dolls.

  “He’s got all the woods around here done this way.” Hicks told her. “He’s got speakers out here too. And lights.”

  “Doesn’t he like trees?”

  “Not him. He’s a pioneer.”

  The forest ended at a wall made from the mountain’s stone. They followed it up the slope for about a quarter mile until they came to an arched doorway, large enough for a crouching man to walk through. Above the doorway were inscribed the letters A.M.D.G.

  A paved stone path led up from the gate, rising to a clearing that was bordered on two sides by the top of the forest. It seemed at first to be the crest of the mountain—but there was higher ground above, a scrub-grown bluff from which a narrow stream descended. The fourth side of the clearing was sheer cliff drop, attended by a barrier of split rails. From the cliff edge one could see the narrow valley below and the lower ridge across it, beyond that another ridge and another beyond that. At a great distance, the ghostly frost of a snow peak seemed suspended from the clear sky.

  At the edge of the clearing farthest from the cliff was a corral from which Kjell’s pony, unhobbled, watched them come up. Near it, within the trees, was a cabin with wires leading in several directions from its roof. A low businesslike hum sounded from inside it.

  The purpose of the place was a vaulted whitewashed building with a tall bell tower. It was a severe building of simple construction—except for the decorated facade around its entryway, approached by three low worn steps. The facade was small but ingeniously worked; scrolls and biblical scenes appeared beside swastikas and rain patterns. A figure in soutane and biretta looked down on martyrs who carried their own heads in one hand and ceremonial gourds in the other. The serpent tempting Eve bore a set of carefully rendered rattles. The upper most figure was Christ in Judgment, wearing the feathered headdress of a cacique.

  Marge looked up from the facade to the bell tower and saw that it supported a set of loudspeakers on either side. She shaded her eyes and shivered in the bright sunlight.

  A balding red-faced man walked down the steps from the doorway. The first thing about his face that Marge noticed was the mouth. He was bearded and the dark brown hair of his whiskers and mustache outlined the thickness and pinkness of his lips. A breeze stirred the short hairs on his rosy scalp.

  “Look,” the man said, “we’ve found you again.”

  Hicks nodd
ed to him with a smile that was affectionate and contemptuous.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be here. Just took a flyer.”

  “We stayed,” the balding man said, “in case everything might begin all over.” He had a very slight accent, Dutch or German.

  “The last time I was here,” Hicks said to him, “I was fishing for steelheads. K-jell just reminded me.” He let the seabag fall.

  “You should have stayed with us,” the man said.

  Holding the same ironic smile, Hicks bent and touched the top of the man’s Mexican sandal. The man had stooped to intercept his gesture.

  “What’s the matter, Dieter? Can’t a man loose your sandal these days?”

  “These days a man can do what he likes.”

  He turned to look at Marge.

  “You’re tired?”

  She nodded. His smile, she thought, was the same as his son’s, a bit too serene for her liking.

  “Is there something we can get you?”

  “Who, me? Not a thing.”

  “C’mon,” Hicks said, “we just climbed your goddamn mountain. Give us a beer at least.”

  They followed Dieter through the ornate entrance and into a large cool room with an enormous stone fireplace facing the door. There was a single narrow window opening on a shaded garden and when the door was closed it was difficult to see. She made out the letters A.M.D.G. over the lintel.

  Near the fireplace was a refrigerator; Dieter opened it to shelves piled with Mexican beer and several pitchers of tea-colored liquid. He opened them each a beer and filled his own glass from one of the pitchers.

  Hicks took Dieter’s glass from his hand and sniffed the contents.

  “What kind of piss is that?”

  “Rose-hip wine,” Dieter said.

  “Is that a more enlightening drink?”

  “Yes,” Dieter said. “The taste of Zen and the taste of rose-hip wine are the same.”

  Across from the straight-backed refectory chair in which Marge sat was an altar on which stood a crucifix hung with Christmas balls and gift-wrapping paper. Behind it was a large reproduction of Ilya Repin’s portrait of the dying Moussorgsky.

  “So he drinks about twenty pitchers a day of it,” someone said. It was Kjell, sprawled on a mattress in a confusion of electronic equipment—microphones, headphones, speaker tubes, and a labyrinth of insulated wires. A copy of Treasure Island lay face down across them.