Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“Tell her it’s agreeable,” Antheil said.

“It’s agreeable!” Danskin called amiably. He turned back toward Antheil. “It’s agreeable?”

“Sure,” Antheil said.

Danskin looked at him sullenly.

“Where’s Hicks?” He shook his head. “They’re getting foxy. It’s getting dark and they’re getting foxy.”

“She’s not being foxy,” Converse said. “She means it.”

“This is one of those times when you have to be optimistic,” Antheil told them. He pulled up his transmitter antenna and told Angel to move the truck up.

“Better be careful,” Danskin said. “That Hicks’ll kill you… Hey,” he called across to Marge, “where’s your buddy?”

“He’s hiding.”

“Hurry up,” Danskin shouted. “Carry a light.”

When she went back inside, he was sitting on the altar steps fitting the M-70 attachment to his rifle. Beside him were a few of the little five-inch cartridges.

“You handle it any way you want to,” he told her. “I’ll cover you.”

“I don’t want you to cover me,” she said. “I need a light,” she told Dieter. Dieter turned to Hicks.

“Give her a light,” Hicks said.

Dieter took a hurricane lamp from beneath his console and tried it and handed it to Marge.

“Keep it on while you’re going down. When you reach even ground turn it out.”

Marge was trembling. He avoided her eye.

“Just one bad flash after another,” she said. “It has to stop.”

“Do what you feel the need of.”

“What are you laughing at?” she demanded of him.

“What are you always laughing at?”

“I’m not laughing.”

“When you get to the dirt road,” Dieter told her, “run. Make sure the light’s out.”

Going out the door, she looked back at Hicks. He was securing the M-70 grenade launcher to his weapon.

Hicks and Dieter moved to the doorway and watched her walk to the top of the trail.

“She didn’t even say goodbye,” Hicks said. “How about her?”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

Hicks laughed at him.

“You think so, do you?”

He looked out into the gathering shadows.

“Man, are they ever out there. Their ears were picking up. You can feel the spit on their teeth.” He turned to Dieter, smiling bitterly. “You just don’t care, do you? You just want her out of here.”

“I do care,” Dieter said. “What she says is right.”

“She’s hysterical. She’s tired of living.”

He went back to the bedroom and carried the new package he had made into the front room. A backpack of Kjell’s was slung on a hook over the console wires — Hicks shoved the package inside it.

“We’re doing this your style,” he said. “Where things aren’t what they seem. She’s carrying sand down there.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Did you see her walk out, Dieter? You dig her walking to her fate thataway? Nothing but class.”

“You’re not going to beat those people, Hicks. They don’t care about your games.”

“She’s the love of my life, no shit,” Hicks said. “Beats hell out of Etsuko. Out of all of them.”

“Hicks,” Dieter said, “be warned. They’re smarter than you.”

“Now I don’t believe that for a minute,” Hicks said. He put the pack on his back and set the automatic fire. “The trails still the same as they were?”

Dieter nodded.

“Well, I’m gonna give it a shot. Down through the shelter the way your man came up.”

“It’s absurd,” Dieter said. “You’ll get everyone killed for nothing. You can’t do it.”

“Oh man, don’t go and piss me off. Of course I can. Why can’t I?”

Dieter shivered.

“Your woods still light up all nice?” Hicks asked him.

“They haven’t been lit for a long time. Most of them work, I think.”

“When you hear a round, light them up. Get on the mikes — I want a real deluge of weirdness. I want an opera.”

“Yes,” Dieter said, “I can see that. But in real life, you can’t pull it off.”

“Well then, fuck real life. Real life don’t cut no ice with me.” He transferred a couple of clips from the seabag to his pockets.

“Do you think they’d do something like this for you?”

“Come on,” Hicks said. “What kind of a question is that.” He went around to the rear door and listened for a moment.

“Watch this, Dieter,” he said, “this is gonna be the revolution until the revolution comes along.”

Sheltered, as he hoped, from the opposite pinnacle, he ran along the dammed stream with the rifle slung over his shoulder. He held the barrel pointing downward with one hand and in the other clutched his dope and a light.

The trail dipped steeply into darkness, a barely visible vein among the rock and root. There was no wind at all in the forest; he was sweating, short of breath. For a minute or two he could see Marge’s light below him.

Shapes came out of the darkness at his eyes.

Not that I was ever any good at this, he thought, a lover is what I am. The something in everybody’s hole, everybody’s shift and stir, everybody’s handler. An easy man to walk away from.

A half mile down was the entrance to the Indian shelter. The rocks that concealed it were clear in his recollection, but in the almost total darkness it took him nearly twenty minutes of feeling along packed earth at the bottom of the bluff before he found the right tunnel. The trouble made him angry and despairing. He tossed the bag and his light into the chest-high opening and struggled up into it, lashing out with his foot at the spider webs. He wriggled into it, feet foremost, lying on his back, clutching the slung rifle and shoving the bag and light along with his heels until he heard them fall. Another push and he was able to sit up; the tunnel opened into a chamber. He found the light and turned it on.

The walls were the solid stone of the mountain, rising to a vault forty feet above and covered to an improbable height with a Day-Glo detritus of old highs.

THERE ARE NO METAPHORS , it said — in violet — on one wall. Everywhere he turned the light there were fossilized acid hits, a riot of shattered cerebration, entombed. The floor was littered with filter tips and aluminum film cans, there were mattresses reverting to the slime, spools of tape and plastic pill bottles. A few light brackets and speakers were strung with rusted copper wire over supporting pegs set in the stone. The unnatural colors had hardly faded at all.

He walked across the chamber and into a smaller area separated from the first by a partial wall of factory brick. The ceiling there was lower, supported by an oak pole that rose, through a brick-lined hole in the dirt floor, from a lower story. He tried the pole, dropped the lighted lamp and the sack into the hole, and eased down along the pole.

The hole was the mouth of a brick chimney which widened to form a buttress for the upper story. The place into which he had descended was the Dick Tracy Room; the lamp shone on Dick’s neat rep tie and on the base of his mighty chin. Next to him there were portraits of Flyface and Flattop and Vitamin Flintheart. A girl named Lightning Webb had painted them there years before because it was the center of a hollowed-out hill, a Dick Tracy sort of place.

He left the heroin there. The walls of the Dick Tracy room narrowed into a tunnel, through which he had to move in a crouch. As he remembered it, there were tarantulas in the tunnel; he walked heavily, trying not to touch the walls. It was a long way before he got a taste of the outside air. When he did, he turned the light out and went more slowly, trying the invisible ground ahead. When he felt the breeze, he knelt down and felt for the edge of the drop he knew would be ahead.