Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

Suddenly there was a ledge before them, a deadfall. Smitty was rolling down a grassy slope just below where they stood; the slope ended in a drop to the canyon below. Across perhaps five hundred yards of space, on another edge of what might be the same mountain, was a stone building like a church. There was a corral beside it, in which a horse grazed.

Smitty stopped rolling about five feet short of the edge. He stood on his hands and knees, his face blanched, staring down into space.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Did you see that? Did you see it?”

“Yeah,” Danskin said. He nudged Converse down onto the slope and climbed down himself.

They were on the edge of the mountain. The cliff with the slope above it ran along it as far as they could see in both directions.

“So where the fuck did he go?” Smitty asked. “There’s no trail.”

They spent a few minutes trying to find a track which the Mexican might have taken, but they found nothing except sheer drop.

“That’s it,” Danskin said, looking across at the stone building. “Let’s get off of here before we get shot at.”

They climbed up into the brush and lay down in a spot where they could look across the canyon.

“Well, we’re fucked,” Smitty said. “We can’t do anything from here.”

“What do you think of that?” Danskin asked Converse.

“I don’t know,” Converse said.

Danskin smiled at him.

“Looks like we might not need you, friend. Looks like maybe the play’s over.”

“I hope not,” Converse said.

“Ask the man,” Smitty said. “See if you can get him.”

Danskin set the radio in front of him and pulled up the antenna.

“Max one. Max one, over.”

“Hello, Max one,” Antheil’s voice replied. “You know I can see you?”

“No shit,” Smitty said, astonished.

“We need a hand, if you have a minute,” Danskin said.

“It’s getting late,” Antheil said. “How the hell did you get up there?”

“You follow the trail and climb.”

“Hang on,” Antheil said. “We’ll do what we can for you.”

Danskin replaced the antenna and turned over on his back.

“Lost in Space,” he told them.

MARGE LAY DOWN BESIDE HICKS, ON THE FLOOR between his mattress and the bag. When she woke up it was still light. Kjell was playing with his horse in the meadow across the warm stream; she sat on the bank and watched him for a while. She walked in the woods at the edge of the meadow and looked at the trinkets in the boughs.

Coming back to the house, the space and the distances began to oppress her. The space was comfortless, the time empty and without any promise of peace; she was at their intersection, and it was not a place she could occupy. It was desperation, nowhere.

She went back into the room and cleaned the spike with alcohol and cooked up in a stained silver tablespoon, making for the timeless vaults. The shot nearly knocked her cold; she went out and vomited beside the shower.

When it was all right, she went into the main room to lie down. Dieter was at his console, working with wires. Beside him, in a Mexican ceramic dish, were clusters of small gray mushrooms, flecked here and there with a curious chemical blue.

She eased herself on a Navaho rug in front of the empty fireplace.

“You want to get high?” Dieter asked her.

“I am.”

He turned from his work to look at her and took a delicate bite from one of the mushrooms.

“That’s not high — what you are.”

He brought the bowl to where she lay and held the mushrooms before her face.

“I used to go down for these myself during the season.

It’s a fantastic scene. Kids sell them.” He nibbled another portion. “The better they are, the more blue. Sometimes the kids who sell them take blue dye and color them.”

She shook her head.

“I’ve been sick.”

Dieter took the bowl away and went back to his console while she coasted among the ceiling rafters.

“What are you doing?” she asked him suddenly. “How can you concentrate if you’re stoned?”

“I can play polo stoned,” Dieter said.

From somewhere in the valley, a trumpet sounded four wavering notes. The striking of colors, an alarm.

Marge smiled when she heard it.

“It’s the trumpet of the Mexican infantry,” Dieter told her. “A very tragic sound. It calls huge numbers of Mexican soldiers into battle against tiny determined bands. The tiny bands hold them off for three months and kill half of them.”

“Does it mean someone’s coming?”

He put the wires aside, picked up a pitcher of wine from the stone floor, and sat down at the edge of her blanket.

“I don’t know what it means. It has something to do with the fiesta.”

“What’s the fiesta like? Is it nice?”

“They take a lamb up on the pinnacle and sacrifice it.”

She looked into his saintly long-lashed eyes. They were naked, comically blue. She laughed.

“To you?”

“Obviously,” Dieter said, “you insist on misunderstanding. They sacrifice it to its heavenly father. They crucify it.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” Dieter said.

“And they do psilocybin?”

“The psilocybin they got from me.” He turned his gaze toward the ceiling beams. “They get high and crucify it, and they ask, Little Lamb Who Made Thee?”

“And what does the lamb say?”

“The lamb says baaa .”

Marge shook her head.

“They got a lot of nerve,” she said. “So do you.”

She stretched out across the floor and thrust her clasped hands between her knees. Dieter’s red swollen face hovered above her.

“You’re a Jew,” she heard him say.

She stiffened and stared up at him.

“Am I? Does that make us buddies?”

Dieter eased down beside her, still holding his wine.

“I detect a certain astringency in your manner. I thought it might be Jewish.”

“Because Jews dislike bullshit?”

“That’s not my experience. They’re just fussy.” His flowing red face was close to hers; she could smell the

wine on his breath. She thought that he was going to kiss her, but she did not move. He pulled back and removed himself from her space, crawling off the blanket.

“I was not always as you see me now,” he said.

“Me neither.”

“I know what you want from him,” she said a little later, “but what does he want from you?”

“He wants to sell me three kilos of heroin. That’s all he wants.”

“No,” she said, “he has some hit on you.”

“I suppose it’s that I’m part of his history. That’s the way his life has been — he takes his history seriously. He takes people seriously.” Dieter began to laugh. “He takes everything seriously. He’s a serious man, like your President— un homme sérieux . He’s a total American.”

“You’re being snotty.”

“Not at all. I know him very well. I was his first master.”

“That’s a funny thing to hear somebody say,” Marge said.

She saw that Dieter was not listening to her. He was staring past her with a smile still on his face.

“He was beautiful. He was your natural man of Zen. You could have done anything with that guy.”

“What does that mean?” Marge asked. “What do you mean, you could have done anything with him?”

“He was open. He was there. He was. When I called it Those Who Are, it was him I thought of.”

“Those Who Are what?”

Dieter discovered her in front of him.

“He was incredible. He acted everything out. There was absolutely no difference between thought and action for him.” He clapped his hands and held them together in a grip that whitened his fingers. “It was exactly the same. An enormous self-respect. Whatever he believed in he had to embody absolutely.”