Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

  “Antheil should have cooled them.”

  “If we get stopped and rousted,” Danskin said, “we take the fall and keep quiet. Antheil can take care of it after. That means you too,” he told Converse.

  They rounded curve after curve in the darkness. There were mule deer in the hills and several times Danskin had to halt the car and kill the lights to let them cross the road. Smitty went to sleep in the back.

  Converse was dozing when he felt Danskin nudge his elbow.

  “Talk,” Danskin said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m going to sleep here. Say something and piss me off.”

  Converse looked at him for a moment and then leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes.

  “Converse.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was locked up for nine years, you know that? In the madhouse. For a violent act.”

  “Maybe,” Converse suggested, “you’d rather not talk about it.”

  “You don’t want to hear?”

  Converse hesitated.

  “No,” he said.

  Having said it, he turned an anxious glance. He could see Danskin’s face dimly in the panel lights; he seemed to be smiling but one could never be sure. Converse shivered.

  “You’ve already impressed me,” he told Danskin. “Save it for the next guy.”

  “You ever locked up, Converse?”

  “Never.”

  “Then you’re a fucking virgin. You don’t know what anything’s about.”

  “Yes, I do,” Converse said.

  “Nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty-nine, I was inside.”

  “You missed a lot.”

  “You think so?” Danskin snorted with contempt. “I missed nothing. Anything was going on outside, man it was going on in there. Sometimes stuff started in there and hit the street later.”

  “That I can believe.”

  “When I got there, Converse, I was in a dungeon. There was a guy there—anything they put in with him, he’d eat it. A mattress. Your arm.”

  Converse nodded.

  “I learned to be a pussycat in there. They’d take me down to the shrink and he’d try to piss me off so the goons could bounce me off the wall. I’d smile.

  “Finally I got out into population and that was O.K. Nurses, all kinds of dope. I saw it all, Converse—everything you think I missed. We had civil rights assholes come in there. We had a guy who checked into a hotel in Mobile and lived on canned tortillas and tried to radiate love energy all over Alabama until the cops took him out and tied him up. We had a beatnik poet who wore salami patches on his tweed sport coat. The real Mr. Clean—he was there, he was gonna sue Procter and Gamble. A guy who said he was Fred Waring. Another guy, he took a shotgun and blasted four secretaries at Adelphi College. If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t be talking to you because it was dope and politics in that place, just like outside. But man, they did not want me out of there. I didn’t ever think I’d make it. It was kind of a famous case.”

  “All right,” Converse said. “What did you do?”

  Danskin nodded with satisfaction.

  “You know Brooklyn?”

  “Sure.”

  “Saturday night,” Danskin said. “The Loew’s Lido, East Flatbush. The Searchers is playing. John Wayne.

  “I was seventeen years old, I was a freshman at Brooklyn College. I was a virgin. I had never had a girl friend. So, it’s Saturday night and I’m going to the movies by myself.

  “Just as I’m about to buy the ticket, I see the ticket-taker walk into the John. So I ask the cashier for change of a bill and then—very nonchalant—I walk past the doors and into the movie house. I skip my usual bag of popcorn and I go and find my favorite seat. On the left side toward the front.

  “Very soon there’s a little commotion at the back and I figure—Fuck, man, I’m discovered. Down comes the usher with his light. Now the usher is a kid I know and his name is Bruce. Bruce and I were at Midwood together. We have a strong mutual contempt. Bruce stands there shining his light in my face and I become extremely upset.

  “Because Bruce is really very intelligent. Bruce has always had girlfriends and now he has a girlfriend, the sister of a guy I know, the most beautiful girl you could imagine. Bruce is a superb athlete. Bruce has a scholarship to Cornell.

  “So Bruce shines the light and he says—in his cultivated about-to-go-to-Cornell voice—‘O.K., Danskin, wise guy, where’s your stub?’”

  Danskin shrugged as he drove, and mocked himself in falsetto.

  “‘I don’t have a stub, Brucie. I lost it.’

  “So he laughs at me. He says, ‘You were with another guy, there’s two of you, where’s the other guy?’ So me—quick thinker—I say, ‘No, Bruce it was just me.’

  “The manager is there now, they’re both standing over me with the light, they’re both laughing. ‘Danskin,’ Bruce says, ‘come with me, please.’ They escort me up the aisle, past maybe twenty people I know or who know me and outside to the cashier’s box.

  “‘This is where you buy the tickets,’ Bruce says. And just before he went inside he gave me a look, a little expression, a little twinkle of the eyes which says, ‘Danskin, what a schmuck you are, what a contemptible idiot, what a fucking fool.”

  Danskin sighed.

  “Needless to say, I no longer felt like the movies. I walked home and all I could think about was how after the show Bruce is going to meet his girlfriend and he’ll tell her. They’ll laugh about the moron, the funny animal. She’ll tell Bruce how clever he is.

  “I got home and for a couple of hours I worked on my stamp collection. That almost always calmed me down. Only this time, it didn’t. I couldn’t get it out of my head, you understand. I realized . . .” He turned to Converse ferociously. Converse looked nervously at the road.

  “I realized this was it! There was nothing else for me to do. I had absolutely no choice.

  “First I took my whole stamp collection—I started it when I was about six—I took the whole thing to Prospect Park Lake and threw it in. I could have been mugged. A cop could have grabbed me. But they didn’t. Then I went in my father’s truck and I got a tire iron. I called up Bruce’s mother and she told me he was on a date. He wouldn’t be home until late.

  “New Utrecht Avenue, there’s a playground between the subway stop and where Bruce’s house was. I waited in the playground, I sat on a bench holding the tire iron in my lap. Must be four in the morning—out of the subway—here comes Bruce. He didn’t see me until I was right on top of him. I was careful because he knew karate. He would, right?

  “When he saw me, man, he knew! He knew then and there.

  “The first one is right across the face and he’s down. No karate. Not a sound. I just stood over him and bam! Bam, that’s for your girlfriend. Bam, that’s for your scholarship to Cornell. Bam, that’s for the little twinkle. Bam bam bam bam bam. Lots and lots of times and Bruce’s little twinkle and his scholarship to Cornell is just a lot of mucus on the asphalt. Every light in every building on the street is turned on, three hundred cops are there, and I’m still pounding crud into the street and the playground looks like a meat market.”

  “So they locked you up.”

  “So they locked me up,” Danskin said. “I feigned madness. I babbled, I recited Heine. Nine years. Here I am.”

  They rode in silence for a while.

  “But you’re still pissed off.”

  “Now more than ever.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “I’m sorry I got put away. I’m not sorry I wasted Brucie. The fucking guy would remember me all his life. He’d be a rich doctor or the Secretary of Interior and he’d have this picture in his mind of me being thrown out of Loew’s. I’d rather have done the time.”

  He seemed to be growing angry again. His jaw trembled.

  “He’d be married to Claire. She’d say, remember the great fuck we had the night you threw that schmuck whats-hisname out o
f the movies?”

  Danskin released an asthmatic sigh and relaxed.

  “That’s not the way I want to be remembered.”

  “When I went to school,” Converse said, “they used to tell us to offer our humiliations to the Holy Ghost.”

  “That’s sick,” Danskin said. He shuddered with revulsion. “That’s fucking repulsive. Why the Holy Ghost?”

  “I guess He likes to see people fuck up.”

  “He must get a kick out of you, huh?”

  “I think the idea was to make something balance.”

  Danskin shook his head.

  “People are so stupid,” he said, “it makes you cry.”

  “So what happened,” Converse asked, “after you got out?”

  “I came out of there with a Jones, that’s what happened. I was dicking this wiggy nurse and she turned me on. On grass. On acid. On screwing for that matter. She was queer for madmen.

  “We’d go down to the swimming pool and shoot dilaudid tabs, then morphine. It was really nice. The shrinks would try to get to me so I’d chew the rug and I’d just smile, man. Just—hello sunshine! They’d look me up and down, going hmmmm—you know what I mean? And I’m standing there so fucking loaded I think I’m in Rockaway. They wouldn’t go for that now, but in those days it never occurred to them.

  “Finally I hit the street and I know shit from nothing. I got a habit the size of Manhattan Island and no dealer will touch me. I appear and they run, right, because I’m incredibly naive and uncool—I grew up in the fucking madhouse. I run after them on the street—Please, please—they say Get lost, Lemme alone, Help—I get one guy who’s so far gone he’ll sell to me, and the fourth or fifth time out—slam! We’re both busted by a spade in an army coat and sneakers.

  “So my status was weird because I’m just out of the hatch. I got passed around from one guy to another and I end up in the Federal Building having a long talk with this Irishman. I can have a break if I’ll go out to this college on Long Island and hang with the radicals there. They have me by the balls. On account of the bust they can put me back in the madhouse for life. If I bitch anywhere I’m crazy. If I do what they want, I’ll get maintenance and stay out.

  “Well, I went out there, man, and after a while I really got interested. I played a couple of colleges in the East—the Feds passed me from one handler to another and I worked up some far-out shit. Chicks want to rob banks with me. I say Let’s go to Nyack and kill all the cops there, they say Great! I say Let’s blow up Orange Julius—they say Right On.

  “I knew some people in the movement,” Converse said. “I don’t think they would have gone for you.”

  “You can say that,” Danskin said, “but you never saw me work. I got their scene figured. You’re an American college kid—that means you get anything you want. You get the best of everything that’s in—think it up, you got it. So revolution is in—boots and cartridge belts and Chinese shit. All the rich suburban kids—their parents never bought them cap pistols, now they want to kick ass. Revolution—they gotta have that too.

  “The richest fuckin’ people in the richest country in the world—you gonna tell them some little guy in a hole in South America can have something they can’t? Like shit, man. If the little guy in the hole can be a revolutionary, they can be revolutionaries too.”

  “Did you get a lot of convictions?”

  “I did O.K. I was better in the field than in court, though. I turned some guns, some explosives. What I mostly got them was dope busts—that’s how I got to Antheil.”

  “Don’t you think sometimes,” Converse ventured . . . “don’t you think there ought to be more to life than that?”

  “You should talk,” Danskin said. “What have I got to learn from you about what there should be?”

  Converse was silent.

  “Anyway, it’s interesting. I’m like the Holy Ghost, man. I like to see shit heads fall on their ass.”

  “Tell me something,” Converse said after a while. “Did you put that drawing on my wall?”

  Danskin laughed, incredulous.

  “What do you think I am, a moron? Smitty did that. Did it scare you?”

  “Yes,” Converse said. “It did.”

  Danskin laughed and pounded on the wheel.

  “Why, you simple asshole!” he said. “Good for Smitty.”

  ANTHEIL WAS WAITING FOR THEM BESIDE A PICKUP truck at a turn in the road. He had parked at the edge of a pine forest; there was a Mexican with him, a somber squab-nosed man in a khaki shirt with a broad-brimmed beige fedora.

  Danskin eased the station wagon over the pine needles and parked it beside the truck.

  “He’s pissed off,” Smitty said.

  Antheil was dressed for an afternoon of outdoors-manship. In his Roos-Atkins collapsible hat and safari jacket, he might have stepped from the pages of Field and Stream. But he did appear anxious and depressed, red-eyed, pissed off.

  He had spent the previous evening on the south side of the border with his lone Mexican companion, whose name was Angel.

  When they pulled up, he walked over to their station wagon and looked in at Converse with resigned disgust, as one might inspect a consignment of spoiled meat. Danskin and Smitty got out and stood by apologetically; they seemed to despair of pleasing him.

  “What’s the matter with the radios?” he asked them sharply. “I had no idea where you were.”

  “They’re not much use,” Danskin said. “The hills are in the way.”

  Driving in, they had been trying to make contact on a battery transmitter over the citizen’s band; an elaborate code had been prepared to disguise the substance of their conversations. But there had been no contact, the hills had been in the way.

  “Well, I hope you’ll be able to use them going in,” Antheil said. “Otherwise things may get pretty fucked up.”

  Angel looked at Danskin and Smitty as though they aroused some dreadful appetite. He bent to the car window to look in at Converse. Converse nodded to him.

  Angel was a policeman in the adjoining Mexican state, and in the past he and Antheil had collaborated in matters relating to law enforcement. In the spirit of alianza para progreso, they had gone drinking and Antheil, who prided himself on the knowledgeable finesse with which he handled Latins, had found the evening trying and even dangerous. Sober, Angel was a public man of massive, somewhat grim, dignity. In liquor he became sullen and contentious. Simpatico as he was, Antheil’s Spanish was uneven. Several times in the course of their revels he had inadvertently given offense to Angel in matters which, to his own understanding, were trivial in the extreme. There had been a period during which it appeared that Angel—whom he was after all engaging as a bodyguard—might shoot him. Angel had recounted many stories illustrating his own prowess and cunning as a police officer, and Antheil had been compelled to simulate intense admiration.

  Angel was sober once again, but it had been ill preparation for the day’s business. When they arrived to find truckloads of people encamped at the derelict village, Antheil became even more uneasy.

  He paced up and down beside the cars, holding a Geological Survey map in one hand and fingering the corners of his mustache with the other.

  “You’re about two miles from the ranch property. There are two trails going up to the house, and you’ll find them marked on here.” He handed Danskin the map. “Can you read it?”

  Danskin looked at the map in sullen silence.

  Antheil cleared this throat and glanced at Angel.

  “There’s some kind of lettuce-pickers’ convention going on down the road where the trails start. There are a lot of Mexican people there. My friend here has indicated to me that they are members of a pentecostal church and that they come here every year. The houses they’re in are outside the ranch property, and so far as we know there’s no connection between them and Dieter Bechstein.”

  “Wait a minute,” Danskin said. “That changes things a lot, right?”

  “It doesn’
t change anything. If I understand the cultural pattern correctly, they should be more hostile to the people up the hill than to us. Angel and I just drove through. There are no phone wires on any of the houses, and nobody looked twice at us.” He stopped pacing and placed his hands on his hips. “In fact,” he said, “you might attempt to determine if these people are actively hostile to the creeps up there. You may be able to utilize their assistance. They may have specialized knowledge about access routes.”

  “You know,” Danskin said with a faint smile, “this is different from what we figured.”

  “That’s correct,” Antheil said. “And let me make one thing clear. By tomorrow afternoon we are going to act officially. There will be local police involvement. There will be regulation procedure and there will be arrests. There will be confiscations.”

  “So,” Danskin said. “We have until tomorrow afternoon to get it off them. Are you going in with us?”

  “To some extent.”

  “What the hell do you mean, to some extent?”

  “We’ll be here to back you up. We don’t want to get smeared all over this thing, you know.”

  Danskin moved closer to Antheil and fixed mad sorrowful eyes on him.

  “I thought you had this place cased, man. You said you had maps and shit.” He looked with distaste at the surrounding hills. “We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing down here. We don’t know how many people they got up there, for Christ’s sake.”

  Antheil met his eyes resolutely.

  “We’re almost sure there are no more than two or three.” He looked at Converse in the station wagon. “His wife, Hicks and Bechstein.”

  Danskin nodded sulkily.

  Antheil strolled over to the station wagon and leaned his arm on the window.

  “Hi there, fella. Gonna help us out?”

  “Sure thing,” Converse said.

  “How?” Danskin asked. “How’s he gonna help us out?”

  “He’s gonna have a word with his old lady. You’re going to arrange a reunion.”

  “She’ll tell him to fuck off,” Smitty said.

  “I don’t think so. You send him ahead of you—keep him where you can see him, and see what it gets you. Personally, I think it should have some psychological effect.”