by Robert Stone
“What are you doing?”
Hicks rummaged through the bag for clips.
“Look at your friend,” Dieter said to Marge. “The Furor Americanus.”
“She wants to take it to them,” Hicks said.
“She can try it,” Dieter said.
“That’s our buddy John they got over there,” Hicks said with a blank smile. “We want to help him out.”
“Now it’s guns and sacrifices,” Dieter told them. “The whole number.”
“Well,” Hicks said, “it can’t all be trout fishing and funny lights. We got some old dues coming up.”
“We’re already dead,” Dieter said. “It’s all manifestation.”
“Speak for yourself, Dieter. I’m not dead.”
“Go ahead and play it out with each other then,” Dieter said. He went to the refrigerator for another jar of wine. “You’re all one.”
Hicks took the jar from him and drank with a grimace.
“Some of us are more one than others.”
“I’m taking it down,” Marge said. She opened the flap of the backpack and looked inside; then snapped it closed, and held it against her body. The denim jacket she wore was slack over her shoulders, damp hair was pasted against her temples. She looked pale and sickly, fatal.
“We did this—John and I. I won’t have anybody else fucked up over it.”
“Since when do you give junk away? You need it.”
She slung the pack over her shoulder and went quickly through the front door. Hicks made no move to stop her.
She took the pack toward the cliff edge. Twenty yards from the house, she set it down in front of her and shouted into the valley.
“Here it is! Meet us in the village and we’ll let you have it!”
“Say again,” someone called.
“I have it here. Meet us in the village and let him go.”
When she turned in the direction of their voices, she saw the horse.
Converse, with Smitty close beside him, stared at the figure of Marge on the opposite hill.
“Look at her,” Smitty said to him. “I could put a shell through that stuff.”
“Tell her it’s agreeable,” Antheil said.
“It’s agreeable!” Danskin called amiably. He turned back toward Antheil. “It’s agreeable?”
“Sure,” Antheil said.
Danskin looked at him sullenly.
“Where’s Hicks?” He shook his head. “They’re getting foxy. It’s getting dark and they’re getting foxy.”
“She’s not being foxy,” Converse said. “She means it.”
“This is one of those times when you have to be optimistic,” Antheil told them. He pulled up his transmitter antenna and told Angel to move the truck up.
“Better be careful,” Danskin said. “That Hicks’ll kill you . . . Hey,” he called across to Marge, “where’s your buddy?”
“He’s hiding.”
“Hurry up,” Danskin shouted. “Carry a light.”
When she went back inside, he was sitting on the altar steps fitting the M-70 attachment to his rifle. Beside him were a few of the little five-inch cartridges.
“You handle it any way you want to,” he told her. “I’ll cover you.”
“I don’t want you to cover me,” she said. “I need a light,” she told Dieter. Dieter turned to Hicks.
“Give her a light,” Hicks said.
Dieter took a hurricane lamp from beneath his console and tried it and handed it to Marge.
“Keep it on while you’re going down. When you reach even ground turn it out.”
Marge was trembling. He avoided her eye.
“Just one bad flash after another,” she said. “It has to stop.”
“Do what you feel the need of.”
“What are you laughing at?” she demanded of him. “What are you always laughing at?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“When you get to the dirt road,” Dieter told her, “run. Make sure the light’s out.”
Going out the door, she looked back at Hicks. He was securing the M-70 grenade launcher to his weapon.
Hicks and Dieter moved to the doorway and watched her walk to the top of the trail.
“She didn’t even say goodbye,” Hicks said. “How about her?”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
Hicks laughed at him.
“You think so, do you?”
He looked out into the gathering shadows.
“Man, are they ever out there. Their ears were picking up. You can feel the spit on their teeth.” He turned to Dieter, smiling bitterly. “You just don’t care, do you? You just want her out of here.”
“I do care,” Dieter said. “What she says is right.”
“She’s hysterical. She’s tired of living.”
He went back to the bedroom and carried the new package he had made into the front room. A backpack of Kjell’s was slung on a hook over the console wires—Hicks shoved the package inside it.
“We’re doing this your style,” he said. “Where things aren’t what they seem. She’s carrying sand down there.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Did you see her walk out, Dieter? You dig her walking to her fate thataway? Nothing but class.”
“You’re not going to beat those people, Hicks. They don’t care about your games.”
“She’s the love of my life, no shit,” Hicks said. “Beats hell out of Etsuko. Out of all of them.”
“Hicks,” Dieter said, “be warned. They’re smarter than you.”
“Now I don’t believe that for a minute,” Hicks said. He put the pack on his back and set the automatic fire. “The trails still the same as they were?”
Dieter nodded.
“Well, I’m gonna give it a shot. Down through the shelter the way your man came up.”
“It’s absurd,” Dieter said. “You’ll get everyone killed for nothing. You can’t do it.”
“Oh man, don’t go and piss me off. Of course I can. Why can’t I?”
Dieter shivered.
“Your woods still light up all nice?” Hicks asked him.
“They haven’t been lit for a long time. Most of them work, I think.”
“When you hear a round, light them up. Get on the mikes—I want a real deluge of weirdness. I want an opera.”
“Yes,” Dieter said, “I can see that. But in real life, you can’t pull it off.”
“Well then, fuck real life. Real life don’t cut no ice with me.” He transferred a couple of clips from the seabag to his pockets.
“Do you think they’d do something like this for you?”
“Come on,” Hicks said. “What kind of a question is that.” He went around to the rear door and listened for a moment.
“Watch this, Dieter,” he said, “this is gonna be the revolution until the revolution comes along.”
Sheltered, as he hoped, from the opposite pinnacle, he ran along the dammed stream with the rifle slung over his shoulder. He held the barrel pointing downward with one hand and in the other clutched his dope and a light.
The trail dipped steeply into darkness, a barely visible vein among the rock and root. There was no wind at all in the forest; he was sweating, short of breath. For a minute or two he could see Marge’s light below him.
Shapes came out of the darkness at his eyes.
Not that I was ever any good at this, he thought, a lover is what I am. The something in everybody’s hole, everybody’s shift and stir, everybody’s handler. An easy man to walk away from.
A half mile down was the entrance to the Indian shelter. The rocks that concealed it were clear in his recollection, but in the almost total darkness it took him nearly twenty minutes of feeling along packed earth at the bottom of the bluff before he found the right tunnel. The trouble made him angry and despairing. He tossed the bag and his light into the chest-high opening and struggled up into it, lashing out with his foot at the spider webs. He wriggled into it, f
eet foremost, lying on his back, clutching the slung rifle and shoving the bag and light along with his heels until he heard them fall. Another push and he was able to sit up; the tunnel opened into a chamber. He found the light and turned it on.
The walls were the solid stone of the mountain, rising to a vault forty feet above and covered to an improbable height with a Day-Glo detritus of old highs.
There Are No Metaphors, it said—in violet—on one wall. Everywhere he turned the light there were fossilized acid hits, a riot of shattered cerebration, entombed. The floor was littered with filter tips and aluminum film cans, there were mattresses reverting to the slime, spools of tape and plastic pill bottles. A few light brackets and speakers were strung with rusted copper wire over supporting pegs set in the stone. The unnatural colors had hardly faded at all.
He walked across the chamber and into a smaller area separated from the first by a partial wall of factory brick. The ceiling there was lower, supported by an oak pole that rose, through a brick-lined hole in the dirt floor, from a lower story. He tried the pole, dropped the lighted lamp and the sack into the hole, and eased down along the pole.
The hole was the mouth of a brick chimney which widened to form a buttress for the upper story. The place into which he had descended was the Dick Tracy Room; the lamp shone on Dick’s neat rep tie and on the base of his mighty chin. Next to him there were portraits of Flyface and Flattop and Vitamin Flintheart. A girl named Lightning Webb had painted them there years before because it was the center of a hollowed-out hill, a Dick Tracy sort of place.
He left the heroin there. The walls of the Dick Tracy room narrowed into a tunnel, through which he had to move in a crouch. As he remembered it, there were tarantulas in the tunnel; he walked heavily, trying not to touch the walls. It was a long way before he got a taste of the outside air. When he did, he turned the light out and went more slowly, trying the invisible ground ahead. When he felt the breeze, he knelt down and felt for the edge of the drop he knew would be ahead.
He lay on his belly, his head and shoulders overhanging the bluff, trying to see into the black woods. It seemed to him that he heard women singing far off. Now and then, a patch of purple glistened in the darkness before him, a little flash from his mushroom.
There were people who claimed to have gone into the line on acid but he had never believed them.
He was not very high, not high at all, it seemed to him—but prone to small marginal hallucinations. He felt at home in the darkness.
After lying still for a while it occurred to him that he was losing time; he felt along the edge of the rock face for the handholds that were carved there and when he felt two of them, swung himself over the edge and started down. He lowered himself very slowly, his feet scurrying over the rock to find the next foothold. It was awkward and he was off balance. With each descending step, his weight more oppressed his grip.
He was three quarters of the way down when, he heard the first flutter—a second later a solid weight crashed into his chest, closing off breath and knocking him from his handhold. He landed with his ankles together and rolled over on his shoulder, lying still until his breath came back. When it came, he felt the wounds on his chest—there was blood on his shirt. A black shape whistled close over his head and disappeared into the trees; a bat he thought at first, then realized that it must have been an owl or a night-hawk, panicked bird, a freak, to the Japanese the worst of omens.
There was no trail where he was and he saw no light. He stumbled downward, making an unconscionable amount of noise.
He would be below them now. They would come down the trail to his left, Marge from the right. Acting on instinct, they would be able to intercept her where her trail joined the dirt road at a point he reckoned to be almost directly below him. He struck off through the woods again, wary of the drops and deadfalls he knew were all around him.
The women’s voices came to him again—they were faint but real enough. The Brotherhood’s women—singing in the village.
A little farther down, he saw a shape below him that made no sense. He slowed and stalked it, bringing his weapon up—when he saw what it was, he ducked and hurried off to the left, easing into steep hollow grown with ferns which he had made out just in time.
It was the pickup truck and through its window he could see the lighted end of a cigarette burning. Covered in ferns, he sought higher ground, then sat listening as hard as his concentration allowed. His frame arched from the fall but he was beginning to enjoy himself. The folly and complacency of the smoker in the truck were a great comfort to him.
I’m the little man in the boonies now, he thought.
The thing would be to have one of their Sg mortars. He was conceiving a passionate hatred for the truck—its bulk and mass—and for the man who sat inside it.
The right side for a change.
Marge tried to make it like walking into the ocean, picturing herself a swimmer on a beach stepping into the tide. The image of ocean kept her almost calm; she clung to it.
All it could do, she assured herself was kill—there would be no need to talk to it. At intervals she shifted the package from arm to arm.
Where the grade of the trail eased, she switched off her light. The sky was moonlit but the moon itself invisible, sealed off by close hills. There was light enough for her to make out tree shapes and rocks along the trail. She heard singing but she had forgotten whether the voices were real or imaginary.
A sound in the woods on her right caused her to stop; the sound was like a shod footstep on metal with the creak of a steel hinge. She could smell gasoline. Turning round slowly, she saw against the dark trees the figure of a man in a broad-brimmed hat above on the trail. Oceanic comforts shattered; her body ached with fear.
A little farther on, she was certain that she had passed a second man who was standing just beside the trail. The man followed her, moving through the brush, level with her descent.
“Stop,” a voice whispered. She stopped.
“I have it,” she said softly.
“Shut up,” the voice whispered back. A whisper of authority, clearly enunciated.
The three of them stood in the darkness; for what seemed several full minutes neither of the men moved or spoke.
Hands took the package from her.
“Where is he?” she asked.
The figures before her swayed as the package passed between them.
“Right over there.” a man said.
“Where?”
“Just right down there,” the man’s voice told her. “Just ahead. Turn your light on.”
She moved away from them and switched on the flashlight; its beam probed among rocks and ferns. There was no one.
One of the men who had intercepted her stepped off the trail and a few moments later headlights flashed out of the darkness into which he had gone. He had set the package on the fender grid of a truck and was unwrapping the tape that bound it. The man in the Stetson was coming behind her, about ten paces back.
Ahead on the trail, in a clearing where it intersected the dirt road on which the truck was parked, she saw someone move out of the shadows. She hurried toward them.
“John?” she called.
In spongy darkness among ferns, they watched her light.
“It could turn out O.K.,” Smitty told Converse. His arm was thrown loosely, in a comradely fashion, around Converse’s neck; in his other hand he held a large square pistol. He had passed the rifle to Danskin who was waiting in the brush behind them.
“I hope so,” Converse said.
The fear of death had come back for him with darkness, a mindless craving for light.
Danskin moved down with them, crouching on one knee.
“Here she comes. They got it.”
He stood up and went quickly across the trail.
“She brought it,” Converse said. “Don’t hurt her.”
“No, no,” Smitty told him earnestly. “No need, man.”
Marge’s l
ight grew larger; he could see her bare legs and recognize the Ensenada sandals she wore. Smitty rose slowly, his hand resting on Converse’s shoulder. He had released the safety on his pistol and was leveling the weapon in Marge’s direction.
Converse heard her call to him.
He leaned back on his heels and prepared to jump. There was no force to uncoil, he would have to go on nerves, as always.
Antheil called up from the truck.
“Whoa now, folks! Just a minute here!”
Smitty paused in what Converse realized was the act of taking aim. Converse dived for where the gun might be seized and the hand that held it.
“Go, Marge,” he shouted.
“Go, Marge,” a laughing voice called. It was Danskin across the road. There was a rifle shot close by.
Smitty’s arm was like iron; he could not bend it. He looped his leg between Smitty’s legs, bent his knees, and hung on. The pistol went off twice as he turned his face from Smitty’s left-hand blows. As they wrestled, Converse heard to his astonishment a sound which he was certain might be heard in Vietnam and nowhere else—a pwock, like a steel cork popping from an empty metal drum, the sound of an M-70 grenade launcher firing its cartridge. In a moment a monstrous ball of fire swelled up under the trees down the hill from them.
He had been used to thinking of Smitty as a weak link and the man’s strength surprised him. His own was ground down—Smitty’s hand was shortly free. He turned to stare over his shoulder at the fire and then adjusted his grip on the gun while Converse, turtled on the ground, scurried backward in a panicking flail of arms and legs. Clawing at pine needles, trembling in every muscle, he covered up awaiting the shell—when the forest around them burst into pure white light, then darkened and glowed white again. Smitty froze, his eyes wild. Converse turned over, landed a kick below his knee, and lunged for the gun a second time. Desperately, they searched out each other’s hands—there was only skin.
They rolled on the floor of the flashing forest and around them erupted what sounded like an artillery barrage. Smitty was struggling for freedom now; Converse clung to him afraid to let go. Marge and her light had disappeared.