Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“Paranoia,” Eddie told Marge.

“Why not?” Marge said.

“I don’t have an enemy in the world,” Eddie Peace said. “If you want, I’ll put you in touch.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? You must be desperate.”

“I don’t see why we should procrastinate. Why not tomorrow?”

Eddie Peace stood up.

“Call my answering service — tell them you’re Gerson Walter, that’ll impress them. I’ll have word for you.”

He enjoined them to keep the faith and went back to the bar. When they were out in the parking lot, Hicks disappeared into the shadows to piss while Marge waited by the car. It was a street of small secretive houses with tiled roofs. No sound at all came from Quasi’s; the music and the uneasy laughter were contained inside.

Hicks came back walking wearily and they got in. “He’s a snitch, I know he is. He’ll burn me or turn me for sure. It’s a circus.”

“Actually,” Marge said, “I think it’s very clever of you to have come up with him.”

“If I were really clever,” Hicks said, as they pulled out, “I wouldn’t even know Eddie Peace.”

They rolled uphill to the Strip, past the Whiskey à Go-Go, the Chateau Marmont, the revolving moose. At a stop light, Marge found herself exchanging stares with a man in a Luftwaffe officer’s hat.

“Why do you think he made me for a schoolteacher?” Marge asked when the light had changed.

“Because that’s what you look like,” Hicks said.

CONVERSE WOKE IN THE MORNING ABOUT SEVEN. Sun-light lit the Venetian blinds and glittered on plastic desk tops; for a moment he thought that he had awakened in the offices of MACV.

He took off his shirt and soaped himself in Elmer’s washroom. He needed a shave. His Saigon khaki pants were clean. He had a long-sleeved blue shirt into which he had changed when arriving from the airport — and in which he had just slept — and a gray windbreaker. Relative invisibility, should it be required.

The machines in the factory floors were already turned on as he went downstairs and he passed hard-eyed black girls on their way to the stitching tables. Outside, the Bay wind, the California taste of the air, startled him again. Al though the day was clear, it seemed very cold to him. He stopped when he reached the first corner and looked over his shoulder but he saw no tan car and no one on Mission Street seemed at all concerned with him. He walked in the direction of the Civic Center and stopped at the Foster’s on the corner of Geary and Van Ness for Danish and coffee. The food, the briskness of the day, the availability of a lawyer led him toward optimism. It was possible that they had not connected him with anything directly. It was possible that all might yet be well. He strolled the Tenderloin streets for a while, almost enjoying the city and his return. When he was tired of walking, he went into a Catholic church on Taylor street and sat before the plaster image of St. Anthony of Padua. He even considered lighting a candle.

It was the church and the proximity of St. Anthony that put Converse in mind of his mother. One of St. Anthony’s spiritual attributes was his willingness to assist in the recovery of lost articles, and in the declining years of her life, Mrs. Converse had conceived a particular devotion to him. More and more things were missing.

She had lived for seven years in a deteriorating hotel on Turk Street and Converse visited her about twice a year. At least once — usually around the time of her birthday — they dined out together. Converse had always taken particular pleasure in announcing that he was having dinner with her. It seemed to him to conjure up an image of deliriously respectable sophistication which, as Converse well knew, was quite different from the actuality of the event.

Sitting before St. Anthony, waiting to see his lawyer, Con verse thought of her and it occurred to him that other young men on the wrong side of the law — perhaps other importers of heroin waiting to see their lawyers — might at the same moment be sitting at the feet of St. Anthony and thinking of their mothers. Since there was so much time to lose and he was in the neighborhood, Converse decided to take her to lunch. It would be kind and it would keep him busy until three o’clock.

His mother’s hotel was called the Montalvo. The desk clerk was a black man with a Masonic tie clasp; when Con verse asked for his mother the clerk pointed to a corner of the lobby where the television set was.

“That lady,” the man said in stiff British colonial tones, “will be a problem to us all shortly.”

The lobby smelled, very faintly, of garbage. They had taken most of the furniture out. Such of it as remained was arranged before a television set in a corner alcove where it decayed, splinter by thread, under the old parties who infested it.

Halfway across the stained floor, Converse caught sight of his mother, and stopped for a moment to watch her. She was absorbed in the entertainment on the box — something that sounded like a celebrity game show. Her false teeth were encompassed in a loose smile and her glasses were low on the bridge of her nose. There in the Montalvo lobby, Converse felt himself slide into some moment nearly thirty years vanished — he was beside her in a darkened movie theater, turning to look up at her as she watched the film on the screen. She was smiling over her glasses at the bitter wit of Dan Duryea or the suavity of Zachary Scott, unaware of the child beside her who was looking up at her in — in love, as Converse recalled. It seemed very strange to him as he watched her before the Montalvo’s television set.

Suddenly her contented expression vanished. An old man had occupied the lipstick-red lounge chair beside her. He was quite well turned out, the sort of old boy, who, like Douglas Dalton, owned a couple of suits and a whisk broom. Converse’s mother stared at him in hatred and terror. She began mouthing words in venomous silence; she clenched her fists in rage. The old man paid absolutely no attention to her.

Converse came around the set and stood above her trying to smile. It was several moments before she looked up at him and the smile she gave him was as joyless as his own.

“Is it you?” she asked. It was not a rhetorical question.

“Sure,” Converse said. “Of course it’s me.”

He bent to kiss her on the cheek. The flesh his lips touched was swollen and bruised nearly black from her constant picking at it. She smelled of death.

“It isn’t you,” she told him with curious conviction. For a moment, he thought she was being coy in some infantile fashion but he shortly realized that she was probably hallucinating.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s me. John.”

She stared at him. The reptile faces of the other viewers turned toward them. “Come on,” Converse said. He managed to keep smiling. “We’re going to lunch.”

“Oh,” his mother said. “Lunch?”

He helped her up, and they walked slowly out of the lobby, past the stare of the clerk.

“You’re in Vietnam,” his mother said when they were out on the street.

“Not any more. I’m back now.”

After a few uncertain steps, he got her to take his arm and he led her across Turk Street. He had thought that he would take her to Joe’s Place where they had large martinis and good beef but it no longer seemed a very agreeable idea.

“How’s everything?”

She answered him with a snarl of disgust. She had always been good at dramatizing herself; the sound conveyed genuine and profound bitterness.

“… everything!” She shook her fist as she had at the old man in the lobby.

Joe’s Place had a maître d’hôtel who seemed quite pleased to see them until he had a closer look at Converse’s mother.