Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“ They have Janey !” Converse shouted.

“Who’s Janey?” Kjell asked.

“How do I know they haven’t?” Marge asked desperately. “How?”

Hicks shook his head.

“Tell them to produce her.”

“Produce her?” Marge cried. “Produce her? They’ll burn her with cigarettes.”

“For Christ’s sake, man, they haven’t got her. She’s with your father.”

“ Marge !” Converse called.

Marge knelt on the stone floor.

“How can he do it?”

“You know who they are. I’d do it too, if it was me.”

“Marge!”

Galindez asked who the man was that shouted.

“Her husband,” Dieter told him.

On the far hill, Converse clung to his rock, shouting into fantasy.

“Give it to them!”

“Clear,” Danskin instructed him. “So they understand you.”

“Give it to them! They’ll let us go. If they don’t get it—they’ll kill me.”

“Us!” Danskin said.

“Kill us!” Converse shouted.

“How’s anybody gonna know what he’s talkin’ about?” Smitty asked irritably.

“Yell it again, shithead. Louder.”

“Give it to them ” Converse called. “ Or they’ll kill me. And you. They’ll kill everybody. But if you give it to them …” he stopped and drew breath… “ they won’t !”

“You think it’s funny?” Danskin asked.

“Not at all,” Converse said.

Marge stood in the doorway with her eyes closed.

“What was it? What did he say?”

Hicks shuddered. “He’s out of his head. What he says is to give it to them. What else would he say?”

“Suppose we do?”

“What do you think? You think they’ll let us walk?” He went round to the rear door that opened to the stream and looked outside.

“Dieter, let your man take the boy down to his place. You can go too if you like. Keep yourselves at this angle to the building,” he told them, making a wedge of his hand and pointing south. “I don’t think they’ll have a shot at you that way. But go quick.”

“I have to think,” Dieter said. He nodded to Galindez; Galindez and the boy started out the back door.

“While they’re going,” Hicks told Marge taking her by the arm and leading her toward the front door, “you tell them O.K. Say, ‘O.K. Please let us go. We have to dig it up.’”

Marge went to the front door and leaned against the carved doorway.

“O.K.,” she shouted. “Please let us go. We have to dig it up!”

“ Get your ass down here,” one of the men on the hillside called. “ Make it fast !”

“I’m sorry about your horse, K-jell,” Hicks said. Kjell and Galindez were already running across the stream toward the shadowed woods.

“What are you gonna do, Dieter? You staying?”

“Why are you staying, Ray? What is it you’re going to do?”

“We could call the cops,” Hicks said. “That would fake them out.”

“That’s all right with me,” Marge said. “Letting them have it is all right too.” She turned her back to the open door and buttoned her jacket. “It was my goddamn thing. Mine and his. We ought to pay our own way.”

“What are you talking about?” Hicks said to her. “Who you gonna pay?”

“I’ve had it,” she told him. “I’m through — it isn’t worth it”

“I guess it depends on how you think,” Hicks said.

Marge wept.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she said softly, “they’ve earned it. They can have the dope and me with it.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Look,” she shouted, “there are a million people down there. They can’t kill us all in front of all those people. I can bring it down there and hand it over.”

“You’d never make it.”

He went into the room in which he had slept. It was a narrow room like a monk’s cell; the single window was small and square, set in a brick casement. At one time it had been blue with flowering trees in each corner but Dieter had whitewashed the walls since then.

His seabag and the backpack lay on the bare mattress. From one he took the cellophane bag in which he kept his toothbrush and razor and shook the contents out onto the floor. From the other, he took the packet in which the drug was wrapped and removed its outer covering of newspaper. Then, he went quietly across the corridor and out 287 the back door into fading twilight. It was a clear tranquil evening, squirrels chattered in the pines, sparrows chanted.

“I’m bringing it down,” Marge shouted from the front door. “I’m bringing it!”

He could not understand what they shouted back.

Kneeling beside the pool where the stream was dammed, he took fistfuls of the fine dry sand between the stones and flung them into the cellophane bag. Finally, he set the bag down and held its end open and shoveled earth in, sand, small stones and all. He took the bag of sand inside and wrapped the newspaper and oil cloth around it and put it in the backpack where the dope had been. Before he tucked the heroin under his mattress he took a pinch of it and sprinkled it in the layer between the newspaper and the oil cloth on the package of sand. He dragged the backpack and seabag into the front room.

“I’m taking it down,” Marge declared. “I told them.”

“The minute they get it in their hands, they’ll blow your head off.”

“Not in front of all those people they won’t. I’ll give it to them in the village. I can get down the way we came up.” Hicks took the trigger housing and the stock of his M-16 from the seabag and started to assemble it.

“Do we have to have more of this stuff with guns?”

“Talk to them about that.”

Dieter came in from the tower and watched Hicks assemble his weapon. “What are you doing?” Hicks rummaged through the bag for clips.

“Look at your friend,” Dieter said to Marge. “The Furor Americanus.”

“She wants to take it to them,” Hicks said.

“She can try it,” Dieter said.

“That’s our buddy John they got over there,” Hicks said with a blank smile. “We want to help him out.”

“Now it’s guns and sacrifices,” Dieter told them. “The whole number.”

“Well,” Hicks said, “it can’t all be trout fishing and funny lights. We got some old dues coming up.”

“We’re already dead,” Dieter said. “It’s all manifestation.”

“Speak for yourself, Dieter. I’m not dead.”

“Go ahead and play it out with each other then,” Dieter said. He went to the refrigerator for another jar of wine. “You’re all one.”

Hicks took the jar from him and drank with a grimace.

“Some of us are more one than others.”

“I’m taking it down,” Marge said. She opened the flap of the backpack and looked inside; then snapped it closed, and held it against her body. The denim jacket she wore was slack over her shoulders, damp hair was pasted against her temples. She looked pale and sickly, fatal.

“We did this—John and I. I won’t have anybody else fucked up over it.”

“Since when do you give junk away? You need it.”

She slung the pack over her shoulder and went quickly through the front door. Hicks made no move to stop her.

She took the pack toward the cliff edge. Twenty yards from the house, she set it down in front of her and shouted into the valley.

“Here it is! Meet us in the village and we’ll let you have it!”

“ Say again ,” someone called.

“I have it here. Meet us in the village and let him go.”

When she turned in the direction of their voices, she saw the horse.

Converse, with Smitty close beside him, stared at the figure of Marge on the opposite hill. “Look at her,” Smitty said to him. “I could put a shell through that stuff.”