Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

Antheil and Angel watched sadly as they pulled back onto the road.

“He’s not pissed off,” Converse said, when they were on their way. “He’s scared.”

Danskin stopped the car at the side of the road.

“You just shut the fuck up,” he told Converse.

“From now on, keep your mouth shut.” He was turned around in the driver’s seat, in a rage. “You don’t say a word, not one word. When you’re supposed to talk, I’ll tell you.”

“O.K.,” Converse said.

In a few minutes they were driving by the houses which Antheil had described. People looked up scowling from their Bibles. The men stood together without speaking.

“I don’t see no lettuce,” Smitty said.

They parked near the pit where the ruined tepee stood. A few yards away was a dusty Land-Rover with California plates. Smitty and Danskin got out of the car and walked over to it.

“That’s gotta be theirs,” Smitty said.

They looked inside, peering under the seats and into the back.

Danskin laughed bitterly.

“Look at it. It’s all over the place.”

The chatter of playing children drifted over from the tent village beside the rows of parked trucks. People were singing in one of the clapboard houses. Five men in brown suits sat beside each other on a bench in front of the largest structure. Smitty sauntered toward them, nodding his head to the junkie beat, projecting deranged menace at anyone within sight of him.

“They’re all dressed up,” he told Danskin.

“Maybe it’s a wedding.”

“Christ,” Smitty said. “I thought we’d have a bunch of twisted wetbacks over here.”

A small Willys jeep pulled up on the road behind them, and they turned toward the sound. Behind the wheel, a Mexican in a Stetson sat watching them. There was a rifle in a gun rack in the seat behind him.

When they walked toward him, he put the jeep in gear.

“Wait a minute, señor ,” Danskin said.

The Mexican turned his engine off and waited for them to come up. He was looking at their car, and at Converse, who had stayed in the rear seat.

“You live here?” Danskin asked.

Smitty took the rifle from the rack and inspected it.

The man nodded.

“Up the hill there — there’s some freaks living up there, am I right?

“Freaks,” Danskin insisted when the man was silent.

“Hippies. Long-hairs.”

The man stared as though he had never heard of such ones.

“Hey man, there’s a house up there. There’s people living in it, right?”

“A house,” the Mexican said. “Somebody there — I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You don’t know whose vehicle that is?”

The Mexican shrugged.

“Hippies,” he said.

“This fuckin’ guy,” Smitty began.

Danskin silenced him with a gesture.

“How can we get up there?”

The man looked up the hill as though he were pondering it. “We don’t go there,” he said. “But you know the way, don’t you, señor ?”

“I don’t go there.”

“Look,” Danskin said, “there are these hippies up there. They have dope. Drugs.”

“You police?”

“They have something of ours. They stole it.”

The Mexican nodded. Danskin opened the jeep door and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“You help us get up there and we’ll take care of you.”

The Mexican climbed out. Danskin took twenty dollars from his wallet and put it in the man’s hand. The Mexican looked at it for a moment and put it in his pocket. They got into the station wagon, Danskin and the Mexican in the front seat and Smitty in the back with Converse.

“Other guys here,” the Mexican said. “In a truck.”

“They’re our friends. They’re gonna wait for us while we get our stuff back. They want to see we get back all right, because the hippies up there are very bad, you know what I mean?”

“O.K.,” the Mexican said.

“O.K. is right.”

They drove round the edge of the pit and up an ascending track that ran through groves of aspen. The Mexican stared straight ahead. Before long the woods were so thick that they could no longer see the houses or the hills around them.

When the road ended in underbrush, Danskin turned to the Mexican with a patient sigh.

“This must be where we get out, huh?”

He climbed from behind the wheel and leaned against the door. Smitty opened the trunk and took out a Moss-berg rifle. The Mexican watched him load it, expressionless. Danskin looked up the steep hillside with a dyspeptic grin.

“We ought to tell him to shove it,” he said.

Smitty opened the rear door and pulled Converse out on his feet.

“Who,” he asked, “Antheil? How we gonna tell Antheil to shove it?”

“I don’t know how,” Danskin said. “I’ll think about it.”

Moving through the trees they came to a limestone bridge over a Whitewater stream. On the far side of it the foot trail rose very steeply into birches. The Mexican walked in front, then Danskin, then Converse with Smitty behind.

From the moment they began to climb, Converse began to experience a curious elation. As they struggled up through the birches, he felt it more and more strongly.

The wind was cool. The birch leaves were delicately pale, almost lemon-colored. When he looked up, the perfect pat terns of leaf and branch calmed, yet excited him in a way he could not understand at all. A mindless optimism rose in him like adrenalin — perhaps, he thought, it was adrenalin — no more than that. Utterly without designs, equipment, opportunities, he felt incapable of despair. It occurred to him that his inability to despair might be just another accommodation.

When they rose above the birches, Converse missed them overhead. There were pines now, the ground was rocky and without cover except for the resinous stalk trunks. The trail was steep as ever, with slippery planes of dark rock that slowed them. Ferns grew beside it.

They were all sweating hard. Danskin’s tortured breathing marked time. Converse grew increasingly excited.

Within fifteen minutes, Danskin had them stop for a rest. They sprawled panting on the ground, resting their weight against the rocks. The grassy valley was spread out before their feet; the slope on which they rested seemed so perpendicular that one might drop a stone and hit the hamlet below.

Converse watched Danskin close his eyes and breathe carefully. He felt a certain indulgence; in a few hours, he would be either dead or away from them.

His thoughts raced. Within the same second, he was immersed in speculations of the hereafter and the efficacy of contrition — and the question of whether they had brought another pair of handcuffs up the hill. Marge was supposed to be somewhere on the same mountain, but he could not bring himself to believe it, and the thought merely confused him. He felt intensely aware and alive, the way he had felt in the moment when he decided to buy the dope for Charmian.

When they started up again, he was thinking of Ken Grimes. Ken Grimes was a medic with the 101 st. Jill Percy had discovered him in her obsessive pursuit of moral reference points, and Converse had looked him up in Danang.

Crimes had fled to Canada and then returned to be in ducted as a noncombatant. He carried candy to give people when his morphine ran out.

They had spent an afternoon drinking beer in an EM club and, when drunk, Grimes had several times amused Converse by remarking that man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither. He said it was his motto. Converse said it was a hell of a motto for somebody who was twenty years old.

Sometime later, Converse learned from Jill that Ken Grimes had died in the Ia Drang Valley, reading Steppenwolf . His death was one of the things Jill cried about. She regretted meeting him, she said. It made her tired of living, and that was a dangerous way to feel.