Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

Marge stood up in terror.

“No,” Eddie said. “You crazy cocksucker… !”

Jody took a step toward the bathroom and vomited on the tile. She was trying to scream.

Eddie Peace stared down at Gerald and then at Hicks. The smile had not completely disappeared even then and it seemed that at the core of his amazed stare there was some grain of admiration. Eddie was a true joker.

Slumped in the bathroom doorway, Jody was trying to make sense of what she saw.

“Please,” she said to Eddie Peace.

Marge sprang forward and bent over Gerald. She could not tell if he was alive or not. It would be shock at the very least. She remembered something about salt.

“Salt,” she said. “What about salt?”

She looked up and saw that Hicks had thrown Eddie against the window. That had been the signal, the meaning of the smile.

“Hustle now, creep,” Hicks told Eddie. “Let me see you hustle now.”

Jody kept saying “please,” and retching.

“What have you done?” Eddie asked sadly. “What have you done?”

Marge started for the door with an idea of obtaining salt. Borrowing it from a neighbor. A cup of salt for an OD.

Hicks grabbed her. He was holding the backpack.

“There ain’t no salt,” he said. “Get your gear.”

She could not get past him.

“Why?” she asked him in a whisper. “Why in the name of God?”

“Get your gear,” he told her and stepped around her. He was pointing the gun at Eddie Peace.

“Look what you done to him,” Eddie said. “Look at him.”

Jody, deathly pale, knelt over her husband, rocking on her knees.

“You’re too vain, Eddie,” Hicks said. “You’re too small to take a joke.”

“No,” Eddie said, “you’re wrong. I can dig it.”

“I liked the look on your face when I hit him.”

“I liked the look on his face,” Eddie said.

“What are you gonna do, hustler?”

Eddie shook his head, vexedly.

“I don’t know, Raymond.”

“You understand, don’t you, buddy? It was unacceptable.”

Eddie smiled faintly and shrugged.

“What can I say, Raymond?”

Marge stopped gathering her things and looked down at Gerald. There was foam or mucus around his mouth.

“Isn’t anybody going to try…”

“C’mon,” Hicks said. “Hurry it up.”

Jody still knelt, gagging, beside her husband. She looked up at them in stoned terror and tried to stand.

“Is there salt?” she asked.

“Not today,” Eddie said. She made an ineffectual lunge toward the door; Eddie caught her easily and pulled her to him.

Hicks looked straight ahead as they walked to the Land-Rover. Marge trailed behind him with an armful of hastily gathered clothing. The football player was at his desk in the motel office and it seemed to Marge that he must have heard their carrying on — but as they passed he never turned his head or looked up from whatever he was reading. The house had been paid in advance.

As they climbed into the Land-Rover, the door of the bungalow opened and Jody’s struggling silhouette appeared for a moment in the doorway. Eddie pulled her back in side.

“It’s gonna be a long night for Eddie Peace,” he said, when they were on the road. His face looked as bloodless as his hands. As he drove, his cold gray eyes roamed the night outside, their scanning was like some process from the ocean floor.

Marge was crying again.

“I can’t hack it,” she explained. “It’s too much.”

“You’re doing fine.”

They followed the coast highway south past Santa Monica and the arcades of Venice. “So why Gerald?”

“Because he’s a Martian. They’re all Martians.”

“What are you?”

“I’m a Christian American who fought for my flag. I don’t take shit from Martians.”

“My God,” Marge said, trying to keep the tears out of her voice, “you killed the man.”

“Maybe.”

“He was just a jerk with a dumb idea.” She stared at the merciless eyes, trying to see him again, trying to make him be there. “The same as us.”

“Peace was fucking me. He was fucking me bad.”

“Last week we were ready to throw the shit away.”

“He hit me,” Hicks said.

Marge wiped away her tears and touched her forehead.

“He hit you?” Her voice rose to an incredulous whine she could not control. “Are you three years old?”

“I was drunk. It seemed like a good idea.”

Marge tried to experience Gerald’s overdose as a good idea. It was not the way she was used to looking at things.

“So fuck Gerald?”

“That’s right,” Hicks said. “Fuck Gerald.”

“For all the obvious reasons.”

“Fuck all the obvious reasons.”

Feeling indifferent to Gerald made Marge cold. She put her sweater on.

“I should have done up when I had the chance,” she said. “I bet I get sick now.”

“Hue City,” Hicks said. “We had guys who were dead the day they hit that place. In the morning they were in Hawaii,” in the afternoon they were dead. I had six buddies shot to shit in Hue City in one morning.”

“I quit,” Marge said. “Fuck Gerald.”

They did the freeways and Marge tried to map-read in the haphazard light. Near Ontario, a highway patrol car tailgated them for several miles. Sometimes people they could not see followed them from lane to lane, flicking brights.

Twice Marge routed them into wrong turns; they had to stop and reverse in an empty shopping center, in a weed-grown cul-de-sac between two illuminated lengths of wire fencing. Hicks said: “I want to get out of this city.” They drove east toward San Bernardino.

“Now what I do that for?” he asked after a while.

“Revenge?” she suggested. “Honor?”

He said nothing.

“Manhood? Justice? Christianity? Hue?”

“I knocked the fucker loose of his hold.”

Marge turned up the knitted collar of her sweater.

“He didn’t like his hold,” she said. “He felt guilty about it… It’s a political thing. Maybe you don’t know about that.”

Hicks laughed silently.

“What I do know… we’re fucked now.”

“Well,” Marge said, “you know me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“O.K.,” he said.

“Maybe we should split up?”

“No,” he told her, “we ain’t gonna split up.”

She did not look at him when he said it and she did not answer. It seemed to her that if she thought about pulling out even for a minute, she would be done for.

Please, can I go home now? Craven, chickenshit, and bourgeoisie.

Better stay. If you can’t hack it straight up — be a shadow.

Somewhere on 15, in the desert, she had him pull up.

He held her for a while; he was exhausted.

“Want me to drive?”

He took a canteen from the back seat and poured water over his hand and slapped it on his face.

“You don’t want to drive, you want to do up. Anyway I know where we’re going now. I know where we can stop.”

It was grossly uncool doing up. Warm canteen water in the canteen cap, the bag open on the floor, a propane lighter too hot to hold. Marge was being a shadow.

“What we need,” she said, popping in her thigh, “is some commitment.”

When she was stoned it was all terrific. The sun came up over the desert — there was tumbleweed and silence.

“You are what you eat,” she said.

CONVERSE FOUND THE BUS TRIP BACK TO BERKELEY wearing. On the way to his house he paused on Telegraph Avenue to look over the machines in a used-car lot. What ever became of him, he reasoned, it was after all California and everything from suicide to civil insurrection required a car to be done properly. Inspecting the price cards, he recalled that he had only what remained of Elmer’s two hundred dollars. In order to cadge more he would be morally bound to write some Nightbeat stories — in order to produce the stories he would have to spend several hours sit ting around smoking dope. He decided it was out of the question.