Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“You stupid little bastard, I’m tired of your jailbird chess. You better learn to play.”

He turned to Converse, who was pouring another Bacardi.

“I hate jailbird chess,” he explained. “I hate the style. No foresight, no reasoning. Just like a little kid.” He pursed his lips and spoke mincingly, raising his voice for Smitty to hear. “Just like a little tweety bird! Oooh, here’s a move. Oooh, there’s a move. It’s fucking degrading.”

Smitty came out of the bathroom holding a face towel to his lip, and sat down on the bed.

“You hit my fucking bridge, man,”

“Tough tit. Why don’t you read a chess book once in your life?”

“Plenty of guys will belt you when they lose,” Smitty said thickly. “Fuckin’ Danskin — he wins and he hits you.”

Danskin shrugged and lay down beside Smitty with a book of road maps of the national parks.

“Where do you think I learned the game, man?” Smitty demanded. “I learned it in the slams, I can’t help that.” He looked at the bloody face towel. “Fuck you, man, I ain’t playin’ no more chess with you.”

Danskin looked up at Converse.

“Play chess?”

“I’m very weak,” Converse said.

Danskin laughed.

“He’s very weak,” he told Smitty.

“I don’t think I have the cast of mind for it.”

“That’s odd,” Danskin said. “It can’t be that you’re stupid, can it?”

“No,” Converse said.

He went to sleep in his chair.

When he woke up, he had the sense that some hours had passed. It seemed to him that there had been sunlight on the drapes before and there was none now. His head ached, and he was thirsty; he was on the floor.

When he tried to stand, his legs would not respond. He twisted round and saw that there were handcuffs on his ankles.

One of the small table lamps was lit. Smitty sat beside it in a blond wood armchair giggling at him silently. Danskin was in bed with a pillow over his head.

“Where you going?” Smitty asked merrily.

“I’d like to get some water.”

“Go ahead,” Smitty said.

“For Christ’s sake,” Converse said. “I agreed to come out here. I don’t see the necessity for this kind of thing.”

“If you want water, get it. I’m not stopping you.”

He drew himself up and hopped to the bathroom.

“I’ll wake up the whole damn place this way,” he told Smitty.

“Fuck the whole damn place.”

Converse drank and washed his face under the tap. He held to the sink to keep from falling over. When he had finished, he hopped back into a chair across the room from Smitty.

There was a red binding mark around Smitty’s spindly arm; the skin in the crook of his elbow was black and blue. His undersea eyes were at peace.

“You from New York?” Smitty asked.

“Yes,” Converse said.

“You know Yorkville?”

“Yes.”

“You know Klavan’s?”

Converse knew Klavan’s well. It was a bar on Second Avenue in which he had drunk illegally when under the required age. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1955, he had been beaten up there and it was there he had attempted the seduction of Agnes Comerford, a nursing student at Lenox Hill Hospital. He had invested a considerable amount of his life’s energy in transporting himself as far from Klavan’s, in every respect, as he was capable.

“No,” he said.

The idea of being held prisoner in a California motel by a denizen of Klavan’s was profoundly distasteful to him.

“You know, I was in Vietnam too,” Smitty said. “I got fucked up there.”

“What happened?”

“I stepped on a pungi stick. Hurt? Jesus! It got me the fuck out of there, though.”

“Good,” Converse said. Smitty glanced over his shoulder at the bed, and listened with satisfaction to Danskin’s asthmatic breathing.

“Some nut, huh?”

Converse grunted.

“You know what his I.Q. is? One hundred and seventy. A rating of genius.”

“I’m not surprised,” Converse said.

“You’re riding with the guy and some classical music comes on the pipe — he says that’s Mozart. That’s Beethoven. What good does it do him?”

“How do you know each other?”

“Through Antheil. He introduced us.”

“Antheil’s quite a fella.”

“He’s the coolest,” Smitty said. “Fuckin’ guy’s got bread stashed away, a beautiful home, chicks coming and going. They say the system don’t work, man — don’t tell that to Antheil.”

“Does he pay you?”

“You think I’m out here for nothing? You think I’m a buff?” He tossed his head with self-satisfaction. “I got a crack at a job with the agency after this.”

“Don’t you have a record?”

“That don’t mean shit. If Antheil says you’re in, you’re in. And I could really go for that, man.”

“You could be a second Antheil.”

“You’re not kidding,” Smitty said. “How about Danskin? Does he want to work for the agency too?”

Smitty looked over his shoulder again and lowered his voice.

“He’s a brute, man, a psycho. A dude like that couldn’t deal with the public.”

Converse nodded thoughtfully and slid back onto the floor to sleep. After a few moments, he heard Smitty approach softly. He opened his eyes and turned over on his side.

“I was married,” Smitty said.

“Is that right?”

“I had enough of that, though. It’s stupid.”

“I suppose it’s a matter of personnel,” Converse said.

“Look at you,” Smitty told him. “Look at the grief you got.”

“It’s a funny situation.”

“You’re lucky we came along, man. We’ll give you some peace of mind.” Converse turned his back on Smitty and leaned on his elbow.

“I seen your old lady,” Smitty said. “She’s big.”

“Big?” Converse said. “She’s not big.”

“Yeah, she is. I seen her.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“Maybe so,” Smitty said.

Converse eased away from him. He had been drawing closer and he smelled.

“My wife’s in Staten Island,” he told Converse. “She got hot pants for this guy twice her age. A guy that owned a restaurant out there.”

“Maybe,” Converse suggested, “you shouldn’t talk about it.”

“When I was in the can,” Smitty said, “we did this thing. We’d talk about our old lady — like where they were, what they were doing.”

Converse pretended sleep.

“What they look like. How they like to fuck. Whether they were fucking somebody.” He put his hand on Con verse’s shoulder and shook him. “Right?”

“Right,” Converse said.

“Some guys couldn’t take it, they went batshit. It would drive you nuts.”

His hand slid from Converse’s shoulder, along his side, to the inside of his thigh. Converse rolled over convulsively and faced him.

“Keep your hands off me.”

Smitty was not discouraged.

“Your wife is fucking that guy, you know that.”

“Just keep your hands off me,” Converse said.

“Keep your hands off him,” Danskin said.

Smitty jumped as though he had been struck. Danskin was sitting up in bed staring at them with an expression of deep melancholy.

“Get in bed,” he told Smitty.

Smitty stood up quickly, brushing his hair.

“You didn’t take a shower,” Danskin said. “When you gonna take one?”

“In the morning.”

“Take one now.”

Smitty went into the bathroom to take a shower. Con verse huddled against the wall, with the feeling that Dan-skin was watching him from the bed.

In a few minutes, Smitty came out of the bathroom, turned out the table lamp, and climbed into bed with Danskin. It shortly became apparent to Converse, as he lay in the darkness, that Smitty and Danskin were having sex together. As they went at it, he eased silently across the car pet to where the Bacardi was and very carefully brought it down to the floor with him.