by Robert Stone
“I don’t see it myself,” Danskin said.
“Do it anyway,” Antheil said. “What could we do, leave him up in the city pissing his pants? I want the principals in one place.”
He glanced in at Converse again and smiled at him.
“He’s fun, huh?”
Danskin looked sour.
“Sure. Let’s get going.”
When they started the car and pulled out, Antheil walked after them.
“Any mishaps—get out of it by first light. I’m not kidding—we’ll be all over cops.”
Antheil and Angel watched sadly as they pulled back onto the road.
“He’s not pissed off,” Converse said, when they were on their way. “He’s scared.”
Danskin stopped the car at the side of the road.
“You just shut the fuck up,” he told Converse.
“From now on, keep your mouth shut.” He was turned around in the driver’s seat, in a rage. “You don’t say a word, not one word. When you’re supposed to talk, I’ll tell you.”
“O.K.,” Converse said.
In a few minutes they were driving by the houses which Antheil had described. People looked up scowling from their Bibles. The men stood together without speaking.
“I don’t see no lettuce,” Smitty said.
They parked near the pit where the ruined tepee stood. A few yards away was a dusty Land-Rover with California plates. Smitty and Danskin got out of the car and walked over to it.
“That’s gotta be theirs,” Smitty said.
They looked inside, peering under the seats and into the back.
Danskin laughed bitterly.
“Look at it. It’s all over the place.”
The chatter of playing children drifted over from the tent village beside the rows of parked trucks. People were singing in one of the clapboard houses. Five men in brown suits sat beside each other on a bench in front of the largest structure. Smitty sauntered toward them, nodding his head to the junkie beat, projecting deranged menace at anyone within sight of him.
“They’re all dressed up,” he told Danskin.
“Maybe it’s a wedding.”
“Christ,” Smitty said. “I thought we’d have a bunch of twisted wetbacks over here.”
A small Willys jeep pulled up on the road behind them, and they turned toward the sound. Behind the wheel, a Mexican in a Stetson sat watching them. There was a rifle in a gun rack in the seat behind him.
When they walked toward him, he put the jeep in gear.
“Wait a minute, señor,” Danskin said.
The Mexican turned his engine off and waited for them to come up. He was looking at their car, and at Converse, who had stayed in the rear seat.
“You live here?” Danskin asked.
Smitty took the rifle from the rack and inspected it.
The man nodded.
“Up the hill there—there’s some freaks living up there, am I right?
“Freaks,” Danskin insisted when the man was silent. “Hippies. Long-hairs.”
The man stared as though he had never heard of such ones.
“Hey man, there’s a house up there. There’s people living in it, right?”
“A house,” the Mexican said. “Somebody there—I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know whose vehicle that is?”
The Mexican shrugged.
“Hippies,” he said.
“This fuckin’ guy,” Smitty began.
Danskin silenced him with a gesture.
“How can we get up there?”
The man looked up the hill as though he were pondering it.
“We don’t go there,” he said.
“But you know the way, don’t you, señor?”
“I don’t go there.”
“Look,” Danskin said, “there are these hippies up there. They have dope. Drugs.”
“You police?”
“They have something of ours. They stole it.”
The Mexican nodded. Danskin opened the jeep door and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.
“You help us get up there and we’ll take care of you.”
The Mexican climbed out. Danskin took twenty dollars from his wallet and put it in the man’s hand. The Mexican looked at it for a moment and put it in his pocket. They got into the station wagon, Danskin and the Mexican in the front seat and Smitty in the back with Converse.
“Other guys here,” the Mexican said. “In a truck.”
“They’re our friends. They’re gonna wait for us while we get our stuff back. They want to see we get back all right, because the hippies up there are very bad, you know what I mean?”
“O.K.,” the Mexican said.
“O.K. is right.”
They drove round the edge of the pit and up an ascending track that ran through groves of aspen. The Mexican stared straight ahead. Before long the woods were so thick that they could no longer see the houses or the hills around them.
When the road ended in underbrush, Danskin turned to the Mexican with a patient sigh.
“This must be where we get out, huh?”
He climbed from behind the wheel and leaned against the door. Smitty opened the trunk and took out a Mossberg rifle. The Mexican watched him load it, expressionless. Danskin looked up the steep hillside with a dyspeptic grin.
“We ought to tell him to shove it,” he said.
Smitty opened the rear door and pulled Converse out on his feet.
“Who,” he asked, “Antheil? How we gonna tell Antheil to shove it?”
“I don’t know how,” Danskin said. “I’ll think about it.”
Moving through the trees they came to a limestone bridge over a Whitewater stream. On the far side of it the foot trail rose very steeply into birches.
The Mexican walked in front, then Danskin, then Converse with Smitty behind.
From the moment they began to climb, Converse began to experience a curious elation. As they struggled up through the birches, he felt it more and more strongly.
The wind was cool. The birch leaves were delicately pale, almost lemon-colored. When he looked up, the perfect patterns of leaf and branch calmed, yet excited him in a way he could not understand at all. A mindless optimism rose in him like adrenalin—perhaps, he thought, it was adrenalin—no more than that. Utterly without designs, equipment, opportunities, he felt incapable of despair. It occurred to him that his inability to despair might be just another accommodation.
When they rose above the birches, Converse missed them overhead. There were pines now, the ground was rocky and without cover except for the resinous stalk trunks. The trail was steep as ever, with slippery planes of dark rock that slowed them. Ferns grew beside it.
They were all sweating hard. Danskin’s tortured breathing marked time. Converse grew increasingly excited.
Within fifteen minutes, Danskin had them stop for a rest. They sprawled panting on the ground, resting their weight against the rocks. The grassy valley was spread out before their feet; the slope on which they rested seemed so perpendicular that one might drop a stone and hit the hamlet below.
Converse watched Danskin close his eyes and breathe carefully. He felt a certain indulgence; in a few hours, he would be either dead or away from them.
His thoughts raced. Within the same second, he was immersed in speculations of the hereafter and the efficacy of contrition—and the question of whether they had brought another pair of handcuffs up the hill. Marge was supposed to be somewhere on the same mountain, but he could not bring himself to believe it, and the thought merely confused him. He felt intensely aware and alive, the way he had felt in the moment when he decided to buy the dope for Charmian.
When they started up again, he was thinking of Ken Grimes. Ken Grimes was a medic with the 101st. Jill Percy had discovered him in her obsessive pursuit of moral reference points, and Converse had looked him up in Danang.
Grimes had fled to Canada and then returned to be inducted as a nonco
mbatant. He carried candy to give people when his morphine ran out.
They had spend an afternoon drinking beer in an EM club and, when drunk, Grimes had several times amused Converse by remarking that man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither. He said it was his motto. Converse said it was a hell of a motto for somebody who was twenty years old.
Sometime later, Converse learned from Jill that Ken Grimes had died in the la Drang Valley, reading Steppenwolf. His death was one of the things Jill cried about. She regretted meeting him, she said. It made her tired of living, and that was a dangerous way to feel.
Converse felt differently. Grimes had provided him a solitary link with an attitude which he publicly pretended to share—but which he had not experienced for years and never thoroughly understood. It was the attitude in which people acted on coherent ethical apprehensions that seemed real to them. He had observed that people in the grip of this attitude did things which were quite as confused and ultimately ineffectual as the things other people did; nevertheless he held them in a certain—perhaps merely superstitious—esteem.
After the fact, he had written a feature story about Grimes in which he had conveyed grief and rage at the waste of a life. The grief and rage conveyed were entirely professional, assumed. At the core of Converse’s reaction to Grimes’ life and death were a series of emotions which were not grief or rage and did not make him tired of living—they were compounded of love, self-pity, even pride in humanity. But his story as written was false, facile, a vulgarization—that was, after all, his business. He had considered destroying the story as an act of homage, but he had filed it in the end, spent it as moral coin, so that Grimes’ moral explorations in the face of mass murder and young oblivion had served him for a moment’s satisfying warmth, like a hot towel in a barbershop.
As he followed Danskin’s faltering heels, the notion struck him that it was the writing of that story he was paying for. The idea of such justice both comforted him and terrified him.
Man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither; the words were repeated in his mind until their meaning faded. The manic exhilaration he was feeling made him wonder if a victim frozen before the predator’s eyes did not experience some profound dumb animal illumination just before the strike. He moved like a sleepwalker, almost beyond fear, invoking Grimes’ memory.
Further up, they came on hardwood forest and the angle of the slope grew gentler. Danskin called for a rest and lumbered past the Mexican to occupy the highest ground. Angry-eyed, he waved his air marshal’s thirty-eight, sportively sighting it at Converse.
“Put those manacles on him.”
The Mexican did not seem surprised to see his weapon.
“The cuffs?” Smitty said. “I left them down there.”
Danskin shrugged expansively, with a tragic smile.
“Don’t give it another thought. What the fuck? Happy-go-lucky, that’s us. We don’t give a shit.”
“Oh, man,” Smitty said. “I’m sorry.”
“Just keep fucking up. See what it gets you.”
Smitty pouted.
“You know,” he said, “I’m thinking maybe you’re right, you know. About we tell him to shove it.”
It would be soon, Converse thought; he felt the diver’s fascination for the deeper down. He was glad to be alive.
Danskin stared moodily down at his own boots.
“How far, señor? To the house.”
The Mexican indicated the ridge just above them.
“What, just up there?”
“A mile,” the Mexican said.
“How many people up there?”
The man pursed his lips and showed his palms.
Danskin took the thirty-eight, held it in both hands, and pointed it in the Mexican’s face.
“I’m sorry. I have no time for fucking around. Answer the question.”
“Always different,” the man said. “Maybe not so many.”
“They have weapons?”
“I think some of them.”
“Hicks is a gun freak,” Smitty said. “He’ll have heat.”
“You like it?” Danskin asked. “I don’t like it.”
Smitty shook his head.
Danskin stood and looked up the slope.
“I ain’t going in just us. I want at least that big motherfucker up here.” He waved them to their feet with the pistol. “We’ll go up and have a look.”
Converse and the Mexican went in front. At the top of the ridge was a barbed-wire fence with a metal swing gate leading through it. They went through the gate across a meadow of yellow grass. As they cleared the rise, they came in sight of a rock pinnacle looming over the trees on the far side of the field. Smitty looked up at it through his binoculars and shrugged.
They went two abreast across the meadow and stopped at the edge of the wood on the far side. Danskin tried his radio.
“Max one,” he said into the speaker. “Max one, over.”
They got what sounded like Wolfman Jack, extremely faint.
“Maybe we ought to try it from lower down,” Smitty said.
Danskin slapped the antenna down into the box.
“He must buy this stuff on Times Square. If he used government equipment it might work for a change.” He turned to the Mexican and did an impression of cheerful briskness. “Where’s the house, señor?”
The man pointed into the woods with his chin. His legs were trembling. Danskin looked at him with suspicion, took the glasses from Smitty, and surveyed everything within view.
“Anybody see us from here?”
“It’s down,” the Mexican said. “We go down now.”
They followed him into the woods, Smitty cradling his rifle across a forearm, Danskin carrying the handgun pointed at the ground.
At a turn in the trail, Smitty froze and crouched. Danskin went down with him.
“There’s some fuckin’ thing in the tree, man. Look at it.”
“It’s a mirror,” Converse said. He walked up to the tree and looked up at it. The next tree was garlanded with angel’s hair, a third with black rosary beads.
“There’s another one,” Danskin said. He and Smitty stood up. The Mexican stood stock-still. Converse saw him swallow.
“What’s all this jive in the trees?” Smitty demanded. “What is that about?”
“Decorations,” the Mexican said.
Danskin was standing under a tree on which a small speaker was mounted; its wires trailed down the trunk and led off into deeper wood.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said.
Smitty looked up apprehensively.
“You think they can see us with that stuff? Or hear us?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Danskin said.
They walked warily under the decorations; lengths of insulated wire from the tree-mounted speakers ran beside the trail and snaked over an outcropping of rock which the trail dipped to circumvent. As they walked in the rock’s shadow, Converse heard the Mexican draw breath and saw him spring into the bushes just ahead of them. Danskin swung at him with the pistol, then shoved Converse aside in pursuit. There was a furious beating of the brush.
Cursing, Smitty swung his rifle up and peered down into the thick green. In a moment, they could see the Mexican run across a rocky clearing. He ran in a comic manner, lifting his knees high, his elbows pumping furiously. Smitty fired at him, deafening them both. The bullet rang against rock. The man was gone.
“There’s a trail down here,” Danskin called to them. “He took off on it.” They climbed down the slope to where Danskin stood and saw that there was indeed another trail, much narrower and oppressed with undergrowth.
“How come you couldn’t shoot him?” Danskin asked.
“I don’t know,” Smitty said sadly. “First I didn’t want to make the noise, and then I couldn’t see him.”
“Goddamn it,” Danskin said, “I knew he wanted to run. I didn’t think he’d get it on.”
“Maybe he didn’t
go to the house,” Smitty said. “He didn’t follow the wires. They go the other way.”
“Let’s see where he went,” Danskin said. “We know the way out. We’re not gonna get lost.”
The brush was much thicker and it was difficult to see ahead. Smitty went first, forcing his way through the branches that closed in on the trail. At the first turn he shouldered his way through a brake shielding his eyes with his elbow, and abruptly disappeared from sight. They heard him call out in fright.
Suddenly there was a ledge before them, a deadfall. Smitty was rolling down a grassy slope just below where they stood; the slope ended in a drop to the canyon below. Across perhaps five hundred yards of space, on another edge of what might be the same mountain, was a stone building like a church. There was a corral beside it, in which a horse grazed.
Smitty stopped rolling about five feet short of the edge. He stood on his hands and knees, his face blanched, staring down into space.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Did you see that? Did you see it?”
“Yeah,” Danskin said. He nudged Converse down onto the slope and climbed down himself.
They were on the edge of the mountain. The cliff wiih the slope above it ran along it as far as they could see in both directions.
“So where the fuck did he go?” Smitty asked. “There’s no trail.”
They spent a few minutes trying to find a track which the Mexican might have taken, but they found nothing except sheer drop.
“That’s it,” Danskin said, looking across at the stone building. “Let’s get off of here before we get shot at.”
They climbed up into the brush and lay down in a spot where they could look across the canyon.
“Well, we’re fucked,” Smitty said. “We can’t do anything from here.”
“What do you think of that?” Danskin asked Converse.
“I don’t know,” Converse said.
Danskin smiled at him.
“Looks like we might not need you, friend. Looks like maybe the play’s over.”
“I hope not,” Converse said.
“Ask the man,” Smitty said. “See if you can get him.”
Danskin set the radio in front of him and pulled up the antenna.