Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“They’d have to be pretty fucking dedicated to camp around here.” He called down the ladder to Dieter and brought him up, blinking and unsteady in the sunlight.

“Whose pickup is that?”

Dieter took the glasses and Hicks guided their angle to the road. “Never saw it before. He’s blocking the road out to the flats, though. And he can see the house from there.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Hicks said. “Look,” he told Kjell, “hang up here. Let us know if that thing moves or something happens.”

They went below to the main room; Hicks gathered up the wet shirts he had been preparing to hang and pitched them on the stone floor.

“How about walking?” he asked Dieter. “How far was it across the flats?”

“Twenty miles to the highway,” Dieter said. “But whoever is in that car will see you start out.”

“What are the flats like?” Marge asked.

“Well, they’re flat,” Hicks said. “And they’re dry and windy and hot. On the other side of them is a highway that runs a couple of miles from the Mexican border.”

“Surely you’re not going to carry it over there?” Dieter said. “That would be madness. You’d just have to get it back in again.”

“I wouldn’t take it over the line. But I might have a shot at the highway if I thought I could walk twenty miles.”

“The wetbacks do it,” Dieter said. “They follow the ore tracks right into this valley.”

“What about the border patrol?”

“They fly over it a couple of times a week. Not every day.”

“Maybe that’s the border patrol in that pickup, Dieter. Maybe they’re cruising your fiesta.”

“Those people are American citizens,” Dieter said. “The border patrol knows that.”

“They’re setting us up, damnit. They’re setting us up for a bust. That shot was some nark tripping over his cock.”

“One thing I assure you,” Dieter said, “we cannot be surprised up here. Besieged, surrounded, but never surprised. And if they were going to bust us they’d have helicopters and dogs — it’s a carnival the way they do it.”

“Maybe they’re waiting for dark.” Hicks walked to the open door that led to the plaza and slammed it shut. “We’ve been turned, Marge. We’re gonna have to sprint.”

“Hey,” Kjell called from the tower. “Galindez is coming up.”

Dieter opened the door and looked out into the slanting afternoon sun. After a minute or so, a man in a bleached white shirt came up the steps, walking cautiously, and came inside. He looked at the people in the room and at the empty wine jar in Dieter’s hand. When he had recovered his breath, he spoke quietly in Spanish with Dieter.

“There are three men on the hill across from us,” Dieter said when Galindez was done. “They have guns, and one of them has a rifle. There are two more down by the pic up. Galindez says one is a Mexican cop.”

Marge sat down at the altar steps and tucked her knees under her chin.

“What were they shooting at?” Hicks asked.

“At me,” Galindez said.

“Would you get the boy off the roof?” Marge said. “Before somebody shoots him?”

“You were followed,” Dieter said to Hicks.

“We weren’t followed. We were turned.”

“By whom?” Marge asked. “June?”

Hicks shrugged.

“Maybe they made a lucky guess. I’m sorry,” he told Dieter. “We brought you trouble.”

“They’re always out there,” Dieter said. He made a gesture of philosophic resignation; his hand shook. “If June turned us in,” Marge said slowly, “maybe she didn’t get Janey to my father.”

“June is a stand-up chick,” Hicks said. “Don’t worry about it” He turned to Galindez and then to Dieter. “Are they coming up? What are they gonna do?”

“At the moment,” Dieter said, with a faint smile, “they’re lost. Elpidio took them up and left them.”

“What the hell kind of cops are they? Ask him what they look like.”

“One has a beard,” Dieter said when he had spoken with Galindez. “One has bleached hair like a maricon . One is ordinary.”

Hicks examined the portrait of Moussorgsky. “You know what?” he said. “They may not be cops at all.”

THEY WAITED IN A GRASSY HOLLOW concealed from the house across the canyon by an outcropping of blue-black rock. Smitty was leaning over the ledge spitting, watching his spittle whip on the wind and sail into the treetops below.

“Lost In Space is right,” he said. “Weird stuff in the woods. Walkin’ everywhere.”

Converse watched him spit with fascination. His thick lips puckered as he sought secretions to disgorge. The pink point of his tongue slid between his lips conveying gathered saliva, a homely little entity in the cosmos.

On the climb, Converse had fallen back on the Long View. It came to him that Smitty, in some respects, bore a physical resemblance to Ken Grimes. What a ruffianly sense of humor things had, he reflected, to compose themselves now into a Grimes, then into a Smitty.

He glanced at Danskin and saw that he too was watching Smitty spit. There was a fond possessive smile on his face.

Danskin extended a leg and kicked Smitty on the elbow, causing him to lose his balance for a moment.

“Whoa,” Smitty cried, and seized firm ground.

“What are you thinking about, dipstick?”

Smitty pulled himself away from the ledge.

“A dream,” he said.

Danskin nudged Converse covertly.

“I know all about that shit,” he told Smitty. “Tell me, I’ll interpret.”

Smitty blushed and bared his gums.

“I got this guy,” Smitty told them, “it’s like him.” He pointed to Converse. “I kidnaped him, right? But suddenly he’s gone. I want the bread from his folks. But I don’t have him. I’m gonna be like the dudes up in Canada, I’m gonna cut off his ear like and send it to them. Pay up or I slice more. But he’s gone. I got to cut my own ear off and mail it.”

Danskin clapped his hands in delight.

“Wait, wait,” Smitty said. “It doesn’t work. I got to cut more of myself off. They still don’t pay up. I got to cut myself all into strips and mail it all to his folks.”

Danskin rolled over on his back, his belly heaving.

He waved his hands, fingers splayed, like a Salvationist.

“You wonder,” he asked Converse, “why he’s my buddy? Who else could have such a dream?” When he had finished laughing, he stared at Converse.

“How about you? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking, ‘Why me?’” Converse said.

“Ha!” Danskin said.

“You did wrong,” Smitty informed him, licking the spittle from his lips. “You gotta admit it. You’re a crook.”

“I’m not a crook at heart,” Converse said.

Smitty was staring into the brush above them. They turned suddenly and saw Antheil climbing down to their cover.

“I surprised you completely,” he said. “I could have been anybody.” He looked down at them peevishly. “What are you doing lying around up here?”

“We had a guy bringing us up,” Danskin told him, “but he cut out on us. I don’t know where he went or how he did it.”

“You shot at him?”

“Of course,” Danskin said.

“Well he’s up in the house now — Angel saw him. He must have got up there some way.”

“We looked,” Danskin said. “We can’t find it.”

“How about these wires. Did you follow them?”

“The wires run down the cliff and into the woods.

There’s no trail.” Antheil leaned against the rock and peered over at the house for a moment.

“I’ve been following wires all day. They’re strung up and down sheer drops.” He sat down on the short grass beside them and took another Geological Survey map from inside his safari jacket. “According to this thing, there are two trails up there. Neither of them exists. The trails I’ve found aren’t on here and none of them goes anywhere.”