Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

Hicks looked into his eyes. They were nearly sky blue with touches of amphetamine pink at the corners and long dark lashes. When he spoke, he rubbed his jaw with his thumb so that his fingers covered his mouth. He was one of the worst-smelling people Hicks had ever encountered.

“He’s a Jew from television, a big faggot. We show him the blade, man, he’ll shit his pants.”

“You’re putting me on,” Hicks said.

It was almost funny. Maybe it was funny.

The kid took a cigarette from his shirt pocket without removing the pack. He was a museum of yardbird reflexes.

“I swear to God,” the kid said. “You want a piece of this?”

Hicks’ anger was broken. He stared at the kid in wonder.

“With two guys, man — what do you say?”

“Have a beer,” Hicks said.

The youth smiled. When he smiled his upper teeth settled on his lower lip, and he discharged air between them.

If he had smiled a moment sooner Hicks would have cracked his skull. But Hicks had no desire to strike him now. The kid was a whole trip, the whole arcana. You couldn’t just hit such people. They were holy.

“You the one with the blade?” Hicks asked.

The youth looked down at his own leg, and his eyes closed for a moment in sensuous anticipation.

Hicks kicked him in the shin. His foot struck a large object under the trouser cloth.

“What the fuck is that?”

The youth smiled modestly. “A bayonet.”

Hicks laughed and struck the bar with the palm of his hand.

“You’re not a self-respecting person.”

“The fuck I ain’t,” the kid said. “That’s why I got this man, because I’m a self-respecting person.”

“You have a name?”

“Joey,” the kid said. “This girl in Long Island used to call me Broadway Joe because I look a lot like Joe Namath.”

“That’s fine,” Hicks said. “You can just call me Cap. I like it.”

“Groovy,” Joey said. “What it is, I gotta telephone him. He’s set up in this motel over by the marina. I go up first, right? Then I let you in. See, the dude is a lush and we give him time to get mellow. Listen, you sure you’re up for this?”

“Sure,” Hicks said. “I hate the bastards. Give me his phone number. I’m gonna call him and I’ll ask for you. Like I got a message or something for you. You tell me on the phone I should make it another time, but I won’t hear of it. Tell him you’re sorry I have to come up, but you’ll get rid of me in a hurry. Play a role.”

Broadway Joe appeared to think about it. “Yeah,” he said. “O.K.” Hicks copied out the number on an envelope and had another drink while Joey telephoned.

“C’mon, Cap. Let’s go to work.”

“I wait here,” Hicks said. “I call you from here. I got a car. I can be over there in a couple of minutes.”

“No,” Joey said. “Run me over there. You can call from some joint over there.”

“I ain’t using my car for this. You get yourself over there, we put the stuff in his car. Anyway, I don’t want to hang around over there. I don’t like it there.”

“All right,” the kid said. He gave Hicks another smile and poked a finger at his testicles. “I’ll be seein’ you. You ain’t gonna let me down, right?”

“No way,” Hicks said.

When Broadway Joe was gone, Hicks went to the men’s room. In the process of returning to the bar, he was made to realize that it might be extremely difficult to make his way back to the Y. After a while, he got up again and dialed the number on the envelope. There was a firm businesslike hello.

“Hi, there,” Hicks said.

“Who’s this?”

“This is Cap, doll. Your boyfriend Broadway Joe has a bayonet. He’s gonna do you some nastiness with it tonight. He’s on his way right now to fuck you over.”

“Fuck me over?”

“It won’t be as nice as it sounds,” Hicks said.

After a thoughtful interval the man on the phone told Hicks that he was not exactly astonished. “Then there’s you,” the man said. “What’s your story?” Hicks was outraged.

“I’m a nice fella,” he said. “I’m a good citizen. That’s my story.”

“Tell me a little about yourself,” the man said. “Are you big?”

Hicks sighed. He was thoroughly drunk.

“I’m enormous,” he told the man. “I’m this huge motherfucker.”

“I know what would be fun,” the man said. “Turnabout is fair play. Why don’t you come over and we’ll put a little terror in Joey’s young life?”

Hicks hung up and went back to the bar. There was a sign over it he had not noticed before that said:

“That’s pretty good,” Hicks said to the bartender.

The bartender was a yellowing old man; he turned and looked at the sign with disapproval.

“I didn’t put it up. It was here.”

As Hicks went out, the old bartender reached up and took the sign down. There was no point in provoking people.

It was cold outside and the street was dimmed by fog.

“No place for me,” Hicks said.

He walked looking over his shoulder. A few doors down from the bar he caught sight of a city bus coming his way and he forced himself to sprint for the corner. Stepping aboard, it seemed to him that somewhere in the course of his short run he had seen Broadway Joe, in an alley or doorway or up a sidestreet. He was too drunk to be certain.

He stood beside the nervous driver, fumbling for change; by the time he had the money in hand, he realized that the bus had carried him all the way to Jack London Square, within a short walk of the Y. He put the change away, exchanged hostile stares with the driver, and climbed carefully down to the curb.

When he was upstairs in his room, he put a Band-aid over the spy-hole and loaded his thirty-eight with the ammunition he had purchased for it. Before filling all the chambers, he put in a single cartridge and spun the cylinder. He did it three times, and each time the shell came up flush with the barrel. He could not determine whether this was a good or a bad omen.

Waking the next morning, wretched and poisoned, he found the pistol lying on his lamp table among a litter of bullets, cellophane, and pieces of the cartridge box. He was deeply ashamed. It was Uncontrolled Folly.

All through the last hours before daylight, Marge dreamed. At the end of each dream she would be shocked awake by a curious neural explosion, stay conscious long enough to understand that her head ached, then slide

again into sleep. But it was hardly like sleeping at all.

And the dreams, one after another, were bad stuff in deed. Janey teetering on a ledge with a storm-gray New York cityscape behind her, water towers, sooty brick. Something about a mad friar and fruit with blood on it. Something terrible among trees. Each dream incorporated her headache.

Afoot, she was edgy, cramped, accident prone. Coffee burned. A saucer broke. There were two caps of dilaudid left to her but she took some Percodan instead.

She drank the burned coffee as she waited for the Percodan to take. When she felt well enough she read some nursery rhymes to Janey. The nursery-rhyme book had a glossy colored picture of the Old Woman Who Lived in A Shoe; The Old Woman’s many children balanced in the shoe’s eyelets, swung on the laces, swarmed into the margins in bright dirndl skirts and lederhosen. There must have been fifty. Fifty children. Janey wanted to know each one’s name.

“That’s Linda.

“That’s Janey like you.”

Fritz. Sam. Elizabeth.

Marge felt like weeping.

“I don’t know all their names, sweetheart. How could I know all their names?”

“Oh,” Janey said. When the downstairs bell rang, Marge stood up suddenly and the rhyme book dropped to the floor.