Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“He ought to be.”

“You said he was writing a book about it?”

“Yeah, he wants to write about it. A book or a play or something. That’s why he went.”

“Boy, if that isn’t crazy,” Mrs. Diaz said. “I’m sorry but it’s so crazy when he could be here. There’s plenty here to write about.”

“He’s a funny guy,” Marge said.

When Mrs. Diaz was gone, Marge went back to Janey’s room and listened to the child’s breathing for a while. Then she went back into the living room and sat in front of the television set without turning it on.

She lit a cigarette and dialed her father’s number in Atherton.

Her father’s friend Frances answered — Frances with the silicone tits.

“Six oh nine nine,” Frances said. “And three a.m.”

Marge had known that they would still be up, and she knew also that her father had picked up on the other extension.

“Hello, Frances. Hello, Elmer.”

“Hi,” Frances said and hung up.

“You’re all right?” Elmer Bender inquired.

Marge put another dilaudid capsule in her mouth and washed it down with coffee. “I just took a pill,” she told her father.

“How nice for you.”

She waited and in a moment he asked, “Are you suicidal?”

“No, I’m just fucking around. I feel kind of deranged.”

“Come and see me tomorrow. I’d like to hear about New York.”

“Is that why you called me?”

“I wanted to know how you are. Why don’t you go see Lerner if you’re deranged?”

“Lerner,” Marge said, “is a senile Viennese asshole. And he’s a lech.”

“At least he’s clean,” Elmer Bender said.

“I’ll come see you. If not tomorrow — soon.”

“Are you still getting intimidation from that guy in Santa Rosa?”

“No,” Marge said. “He went away.”

“What’s your situation?”

“How can I tell you? Your phone is tapped.”

“Of course,” Elmer said, “so what?”

“I’m off sex. Sex is just a room full of mooches jerking off in their pants.”

Elmer Bender was silent for a moment. In the course of one of their conversations, Marge had discovered that he had a horror of lesbianism and that he worried that she might begin sleeping with women. It seemed that her mother had been known to.

“Don’t you think it’s time John came back?”

“That’s gonna be strange,” Marge said. “Really strange.”

“I think the whole thing has gone on long enough. It was nuts, you know? What good is coming from it?”

Marge felt herself sinking into the chair she sat in. She felt as though she were sinking into its blue fabric in the most literal way. She held the phone to her ear with her left hand and stretched her right arm with the fingers extended toward the bay window that overlooked the street. It was satisfying to hold her arm that way. The shape the window viewed from her chair began to suggest a Larger World.

“How about a larger world?” she asked her father.

Elmer sighed.

“Marge, go to sleep, my baby. Be sure and see me tomorrow.”

Some kind of wind had risen outside and was whistling through the rotten window casement and the ill-fitted panes. Marge sat facing the window, listening to the wind until it faded into a greater stillness. Her father’s voice was still with her and she felt as though some essence of him remained in the room — a dry, abrasive, maddeningly reasonable essence. Points of light struck her eye as though reflected from his rimless spectacles.

“You would shit, wouldn’t you?” she said to him.

She stayed in the chair surrounded by immensities of silent time. At the core of it, within her, a righteous satisfaction was rising. She sensed the outer world as an infinite series of windowed rooms and she felt a clear confidence that it contained nothing which she could not overcome to her satisfaction.

It was very unlike Marge to sit so long without fidgeting, even when she was alone. There was a noise in the street outside and although she could not identify it, she used it as a handle and made herself stand up. Upright, she was weary but unafraid. Not since she was much younger had she felt so satisfying a commitment as she felt to the caper and to the dope that would be on the water. High, she was party to it, in communion.

“All right,” she said. It was all right.

When she saw herself in the mirror, she smiled and raised a hand to her mouth. She advanced on herself cautiously but with dignity, turning round before her turning image. When she examined her eyes she saw that the pupils were tiny and surrounded by what seemed enormous areas of gray.

Dilated. Dilaudid. Praise dilaudid.

“We are not afraid today,” she said. Old song.

Us against them, she thought. Me against them. Not unlike sexual desire. The quickening of that sense brought her into other rooms and she flashed the mooches’ fingers laboring over their damp half-erections, burrowing in the moldy subsoil of their trousers like arachnids on a decomposing log.

It made her laugh and shudder.

On the redwood table nearby there was a letter from him but she kept her hands away from it. He would be in Saigon, twelve hours removed — certainly alive somehow, probably afraid.

When she thought about him, she often wondered if there was a proper way to punish him for being there without her, or instead of her. But she felt at peace with him now.

She closed on the mirror and looked in her own eyes again.

Diluted.

When she felt herself leaning backward she turned and partly sat on the edge of the table where his letter was; she could see herself in profile now, her body bent at the buttocks which the last mooch had been so concerned to see.

“Your ass is on the line,” Marge told herself aloud.

And it did seem to her that she looked vulnerable.

Deluded. Dilaudid.

She straightened up and walked from one light to another, turning them out. When the room was darkened she was aware of a glow from the street. It seemed the wind had stopped, and going to the window she saw that the street was hushed with fog and the street lights ringed with rainbows. It was all fine.

In the bedroom she passed Janey’s crib and heard the troubled breathing. Vulnerable.

But it’s righteous, she thought.

She straightened the child’s blankets and undressed with pleasure. Lying in bed, she thought of him without wanting to hurt him at all. Us against them would be best.

And when she closed her eyes it was wonderful. She passed into a part of the sea where there was infinite space, where she could breathe and swim without effort through limitless vaults. She fancied that she could hear voices, and that the voices might belong to creatures like herself.

IT WAS A NICE CROSSING, EXCEPT FOR THE AGENTS aboard. The trade winds were soft and the nights were starry and Hicks found time each morning, while the breakfast rolls and corn muffins were cooling, to do his exercises on the flight deck.

When they tied up at Subic and the liberty sections made for the lights of Olongapo, Hicks stayed aboard to observe the agents. There were three or four, disguised as hippies; they offered joints, giggled, and prowled the rows of dis abled aircraft looking for stashes.

His own first stash had been in the mangled tail section of a Seasprite helicopter but he had moved it after a day, to lie under moldering naval heraldry in a disused flag locker. When they cleared Subic, he moved it again, stuffing the package in a flag bag and immersing it in a marked sack of cornmeal which he had set aside for the purpose. With it, he secreted two pairs of binoculars which he had stolen on the trip out and a Sunday Services pennant for a souvenir.