Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“I see how it works. You have it or you don’t. You have it — everything’s O.K. You don’t, everything’s shit. It’s yes or no. On or off. Stop or go.”

“Write a poem about it,” Hicks said.

She stood up and went back to the desk. She turned to him with a glance of quick mischief. “Please, sir — can I have some more?”

He made a gesture of abundance.

She set about separating another high from the dope on the sheet of paper.

“This one is for jollity,” she said. “Purely recreational.”

He checked the size of the dose and let her wail.

“It’s its own poem,” she said, when the lift came. “Very serious elegant poem.”

“It’s just like everything else,” Hicks said.

She found one of his cigarettes by the backpack and lit it.

He had never seen her smoke before. For a long time she stood looking out at the beach. Hicks watched her, wishing that she would speak to him again — but she was silent now, smiling, blowing smoke at the picture window.

“Remember the night we ran the freaks out?” Hicks asked her. “We made it after. You remember?”

She turned her lofty empty smile on him and he felt, again, a dart of loneliness.

“I remember everything. With absolute clarity. Since you walked in on me.” Her elbow slid from the windowsill where she had been resting it and she almost lost her balance. “Every twitch. Every bead of sweat. Every shiver. Believe me.”

“What can I do,” Hicks said. “I gotta believe you.”

“I’m just a little slip of a thing,” Marge said, “but I’m all primary process. I live the examined life. Not one funny little thing gets by me.”

He got up and went to the desk where the leavings of Marge’s measure lay across the Los Angeles telephone book.

“You would have come in handy. Where you been?”

“I’ve been maintaining an establishment. That’s where I’ve been.”

The matchbook cover Marge had used was wet. He ripped off another one.

“You talking about your old man? That’s an establishment?”

Marge let herself slide down to the floor beneath the window.

“Don’t you put my old man down,” she said. “My old man is a subtle fella. He’s a can of worms.”

Hicks sniffed his dope and shook his head violently.

“The next fucking time he calls me a psychopath — I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

He sat waiting to go off; in a moment he was in the bathroom vomiting bourbon residue from the bottom of his guts. When the vomiting stopped, he brushed his teeth.

Back in the bedroom, he surmised that he was high. The room was all easy lines and soft light, his steps were cushioned. He turned on the television set but he could not get it to work. There were some nice color bands, so he watched those for a while and then turned it off.

“Did you think I left you?” Marge asked him. “Is that why you did up?”

Hicks shrugged.

“Just for old times’ sake.”

He lay down on the bed beside her and watched dust columns spin before the window.

“Yes, it’s easy,” he said, laughing foolishly. “Yes, it’s good.”

“It is good, isn’t it?” Marge said. “I mean high quality.”

“So they tell me.” He leaned into the pillows and breathed deeply. “This is a different ball game,” he said.

Marge was staring at the ceiling with an expression like reverence.

“It really had me there,” she said. “I had cramps. My nose wouldn’t stop running. I was genuinely sick.”

“Maybe it was all in your head.”

“Not all of it.”

He moved closer to her and put his hand under the back of her neck. “What a goof you are! Don’t brag about it. It’s not such a tough condition. It’s not what you want.”

“Maybe it is,” she said. “It’s simpler than life.”

“Come on.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “It’s just like everything else. This is life.”

“Where springs fail not,” Marge said.

“Springs?”

She arched her back, letting her weight fall on the bed, making the frame creak.

“Springs fail not,” she said. “It’s a Polish toast. It means ‘to life.’”

Hicks laughed weakly. “Jesus.” He turned over on his stomach and folded his hands between her breasts. “It’s a poem, you cooze. I read it. It’s a poem.”

She put her face close to his and laughed with her mouth open as if in surprise.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s a smack poem.”

Looking into her eyes, he suddenly felt a perfect confidence. The payoff, whatever it was, would take care of itself. There was no stopping him.

He got up quickly and went to the telephone table. It was littered with dope and debris, the smack in its plastic bag lying beside the phone.

“This is ignorance,” he said, and set about packing it away. “This is what they call in the trade ‘plain view.’” When the table was clear and the dope secured, he sat down by the phone with his forehead resting on his palm. “I don’t know what our chances are. I don’t think they’re too great. But I’m gonna call Eddie Peace.”

“Whatever’s right,” Marge said.

CONVERSE HAD LITTLE SATISFACTION FROM THE LAWYER. A plantation of fine gray hair hung to shoulder length from the lawyer’s bald crown, giving him the look of a mad pinko professor in a vintage Hearst cartoon. When Con verse described his adventures in the motel kitchenette, the lawyer shrugged and smiled in an irritating manner. Con verse had the impression that the lawyer did not like him and did not sympathize with his distress.

“This is common,” the lawyer said. “This is the way they operate.”

The lawyer said that if Converse wanted to approach the authorities with a statement he might indeed do so but that an attorney with better contracts in the district attorney’s office might render more valuable assistance. He said that, obviously, Converse should be extremely careful — should not agree to private meetings with anyone unknown to him and should take whatever steps he was capable of to safeguard his residence and person. If arrested, the lawyer reminded him, he was entitled to a phone call.

Apparently, the lawyer remarked, Converse believed in rugged individualism, and this was just as well because it would require some very rugged individualism indeed to keep him afloat.

The lawyer used the term “afloat.”

Converse had salved his ear in Vaseline and bandaged it with cotton and gauze. He walked along Van Ness Street, avoiding eye contact. He had spent part of the night on the floor of the motel and the rest in Berkeley, asleep under the devil drawing in Janey’s room. In the morning he had gone to the Pacific office and borrowed some of the Thorazine that Douglas Dalton kept handy for delirium tremens. He assumed it helped some.

Thus tranquil, Converse followed the street like a sleep walker to Aquatic Park and sat on a bench among exercising bouncers and topless dancers with sun reflectors at their chins. Some of the girls aroused him and arousal made him think first of Charmian, then of Marge. The urgency of desire surprised him. After a while, he began to feel a peculiar kind of contempt for his own lust and for the women who inspired it — but anger eluded him. He had no anger to bring to bear. In time, he supposed he would lose even fear. He found fearlessness an extremely difficult state to conceive, like the hereafter.

When he had rested for an hour or so, he decided to go and have a talk with June.

The San Frenciscan was a structure of pastel metal blocks built in the form of a wedge so that both grids of its mini mal windows faced the harbor. The view from one angle was of Alcatraz, from the other of Coit Tower and the Bay Bridge. The attendants in the lobby were costumed as Santa Ana’s hussars and many were actually Mexican.