Dog Soldiers

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JUST BEFORE SUNRISE, HICKS HELD HIMSELF A STAND-TO. Hunkering close against the shack in the last darkness, he saw blue police flashers playing on the rimrock of the canyon’s far wall. He moved out of the shadows in a crouch so that he would not be visible against the lightening sky behind him. Dangling from a strap around his neck were a pair of the binoculars he had stolen from the Kora Sea.

He settled himself beside a dwarf oak tree on a rise above the house, and poked at the ground around him to start snakes. Across the oak’s dry roots he could see the length and breadth of the canyon. Its upper reaches were filling with pale daylight, but it was still night in the deep defiles where the police were.

At the canyon bottom, four cruisers were spinning blue light; there was an ambulance and four civilian cars, all balanced on the sloping shoulder of the lower canyon drive.

A line of men with lights advanced across the bottom, their beams picking up beer cans and rusted fenders in the thorny brush. There was a handler with two dogs and a second line of men with rakes, hacking at the chaparral.

Hicks rolled over and sprinted back to the shack. He found Marge still sleeping on the pile of blankets near the stove; he knelt down and tried to gentle her awake. Faint sleep lay on the weary angles of her face like thin snow on stone. She woke at once.

“How’s your need?”

She blinked and scratched herself; she had been scratching in her sleep most of the night.

“I don’t know yet.”

He held out two Ritalins and a sopor in the palm of his hand. She took the sopor and closed his hand on the Ritalin.

“We got to run.” he said. “The canyon’s full of cops. They’ll be up here any old time.”

“Oy.”

He grabbed a spade and a clean rag from under the deep sink and ran outside to dig up the stash. It was a cold morning, and his breath frosted on the air. He had no proper clothes for the weather, but the digging warmed him and by the time he had the airline bag above ground the sun was over the ridge.

He kept a Land-Rover, its distributor removed, parked under a tarpaulin in the brush behind the house. The airline bag went into the back of it, covered with a square of oilcloth. Security.

For a few moments he rested, shielding his eyes from the sun, then took the spade and began to dig in the dry earth along the rear wall of the shack. Buried there, contained within a metal footlocker and immersed in grease, he had the complete parts of an M-16 semiautomatic rifle, together within an M-70 launcher attachment. Clips for M-16 and the deadly little five-inch M-70 cartridges he kept in a sealed plastic envelope just under the locker.

He took a canvas seabag from the Land-Rover, wiped the weapon clean of grease, and dropped the lot into the sea-bag.

Marge came out of the house with a box of Kleenex. He waved her away from the canyon.

He went inside and secured. Whatever he thought they might need or might identify them, he stuffed into a back pack. There was no way to conceal recent occupation. When they came, they would know by the smell that the place had been inhabited. They would find the dug ground where he had buried his contraband, and the puke-stained mattress out back.

He loaded the Land-Rover and set about replacing its distributor. As he worked, he expected them to come up the road at any moment. Rat reflexes of flight. He struggled to keep his mind clear, his actions orderly. The Land-Rover started nicely. Marge sat beside him, her arms folded across her chest, her head turned from the sun.

“Hang in, Marge.”

He followed the road for a few hundred yards and then, gambling, turned down the first fire trail that wound down the seaward slope of the ridge.

“I saw them,” Marge said. “What are they after?”

“Bodies.” It was a pleasure to master the curves of the narrow fire trail. Four-wheel drive. “Sometimes they find a car off the road with nobody in it. They have to look for the driver.”

Marge nodded.

“Some of these freaks up here love to strip wrecks. They’ll see a drunk run his car into the canyon and they’ll creep out at night to take the guy’s wallet. They go for the credit cards.”

“Christ.”

“The big ones eat the little ones, up here,” he said. He flung his free arm toward the hanging gardens of the can yon householders.

“All summer these people sweat fire, all winter they sweat the floods. Shit creeps out of the night under those sun-decks, and they know it.” He was shouting at her over the wind and the engine. “Fucking L.A., man — go out for a Sunday spin, you’re a short hair from the dawn of creation.”

“It’s those girls,” she said after a while. “That’s who they’re looking for.”

“If it’s not them,” Hicks said, “it’s some other creature.”

He glanced at her; she looked limp and weepy, coasting on sopors and deprivation.

“Children,” he thought she said.

“Yes. Children.”

Less than a mile above Topanga Canyon Drive, they passed a man riding a brush-chopping machine. The man never glanced at them as they spun the Land-Rover around him, but looking in the rearview mirror, Hicks saw him staring after the license plate.

The fire road led to a driveway connecting to Topanga Canyon Boulevard; the sign facing the highway read Official Vehicles Only. Hicks looked up and down for police cars and rammed the Land-Rover out into the westbound traffic. A helicopter shot across the ridges overhead and disappeared into the adjoining canyon.

They followed the coast road as far as Carillo State Park. Just beyond the park entrance Hicks stopped the Land-Rover before a hot dog stand that had a dachshund in a chef’s cap over it. He bought three plain hot dogs and two cups of coffee. The young counterman thanked him and said Praise Jesus.

“Can you eat?”

She tried nibbling at the bulbous wad of meat and then at the toasted roll. She was holding the frankfurter near her eyes to blot out the morning sun; the ocean wind blew her tears across her cheekbones. She swallowed a little and took a breath.

“I can’t eat it.”

She thrust the hot dog away from her, an object of shame.

“No blame,” Hicks said. He threw the thing in a litter basket. When he had swallowed his hot dogs and gulped the coffee, they were under way again.

The wind off the beach was so powerful it was difficult to hold the Land-Rover in lane. Hicks drove for almost an hour, until they saw a shopping center where the stores were built in the style of log cabins, with a length of hitching post in front of the parking spaces. Across the road from it, on the ocean side, was a cluster of pastel bungalows centering on a ranch house with a flagpole before it. He eased the Land-Rover off the road and up to the ranch house.

Marge stirred and shielded her eyes from the sun and wind.

“What’s this?”

“This is Clark’s.”

They got out of the jeep and he looked her over.

“How are you?”

“Shitty,” Marge said. “Like I have a cold but I guess it’s not a cold. And…” she looked up at him and the very color of her eyes seemed faded; she looked as though she had been injured. “…my head is in a very bad place.”

“Could be worse, right?”

She ran her chambray sleeve across her nose.

“I guess so.”

The office was in a section of the ranch house. There was a tall, tanned man behind the desk who looked like a football player turned actor. He seemed to be deliberately not looking at them.

“Like an ocean view?”

“Certainly,” Hicks said.

He gave them a key and Hicks gave him fifty dollars. They registered in the name of Powers with an address in Ojai and they carried their own bags. Marge opened the bungalow while Hicks parked the jeep in the appropriate space. When he went inside he found her huddled on the bed with the cotton spread wrapped around her.

The ocean view was available through a wall-wide greasy window that admitted the ocean wind as well. It was very beautiful outside. There was a surf running and the breakers were creased with white wind drifts that sparkled in the sun.

“It’s cold,” Marge said.

He found a heater switch beside the bathroom door and forced it up to high. It was difficult for him to keep from staring at the waves.

“My God,” she said, “that goddamn wind.”

He sat down on the bed near her and rubbed her shoulders but her body stayed tense. There was no way for him to know how sick she really was. He had once smoked a great deal of opium but stopping had not been much of a problem to him. He knew nothing about dilaudid.

“Listen to it,” she said. “It’s just cruelty.”

When he took his hands away she settled back on the sheets, still clutching the spread. The pain in her eyes gave him pleasure. If he could make the pain leave her, he thought, and bring her edge and her life back, that would give him pleasure too. The notion came to him that he had been waiting years and years for her to come under his power. He shivered.

“You got too much imagination for a dope fiend.”

She turned her face away.

From the backpack he took a bottle of Wild Turkey he had bought with Converse’s money and a bottle of sopors. He took two quick slugs of the bourbon and fed another sopor to Marge.

“Want some whiskey with it?”

“No.”

“It helped me. I probably wasn’t as strung out as you.”

She was facing the wall and he thought she was crying.

“I can handle the rest of it,” she said. “But what’s in my head is really gruesome.”

“It’s just nerves. It’ll stop.”

“If there’s one word I’ve always hated,” Marge said, “it’s the word nerves. Do you know the picture I get from it?”

“I think so.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah, I know the picture.”

Eventually, he thought, they would have to open the bag for her. He waited until the sopor dropped her into shallow sleep, then opened the door as quietly as possible and went outside.

As soon as he felt the sun, the urge rose in his throat.

Go.

His jeep was ten feet away. He had the keys in his Windbreaker. Go. He walked to the jeep and circled it, inspecting the treads. The treads were just fine.

Hit the road, Jack. And don’t you come back no more.

Dreams.

In the end there were not many things worth wanting — for the serious man, the samurai. But there were some. In the end, if the serious man is still bound to illusion, he selects the worthiest illusion and takes a stand. The illusion might be of waiting for one woman to come under his hands. Of being with her and shivering in the same moment.

If I walk away from this, he thought, I’ll be an old man — all ghosts and hangovers and mellow recollections. Fuck it, he thought, follow the blood. This is the one. This is the one to ride till it crashes.

He watched the afternoon traffic, southbound.

Go anyway!

Thinking it made him smile. Good Zen. Zen was for old men.

There was a rust-colored slat fence connecting the walls of the bungalows, separating the patio from the beach. A stilted walkway led through a gate to the sand. Hicks walked toward the surf with his head down, to keep the blown grains from his eyes. For a while he stood on the soft sand, watching the waves break and the sandpipers scatter under them. He got cold very quickly.

To warm himself, he turned toward the ocean and began the motions of t’ai chi. His thrusts at the ocean wind felt feeble and uncertain. His body was slack, and as he grew colder and more tired, he felt the force of his will diminish.

Not a chance. There was not a chance.

She was some junkie’s nod, a snare, a fool catcher.

It was folly. It was losing.

He planted a foot in the wind’s teeth and shouted.

On our left, he thought, fucking L.A. On our right, the wind. The exercise is called riding it till it crashes.

As he passed over the walkway leading to the court, he saw some gliders being towed above Point Mugu, and he stopped to watch them for a while. He was sweating; the t’ai chi had made him feel better after all.

The choice was made, and there was nothing to be had from chickenshit speculation. The roshis were right: the mind is a monkey.

Marge woke up as soon as he closed the door. She had lodged herself in the space between the edge of the mattress and the wall.

“O.K.,” Hicks said. “Let’s get high.”

She sat up with her hand shading her eyes.

“Is that a joke?”

He had taken the plastic-wrapped package from the airline bag and set it on a chair. “No, it ain’t a joke.”

He set a sheet of white writing paper across the telephone book and lifted a white dab from the package with a picture postcard of Marine World. She watched him raise the post card and shake the powder onto the sheet, flicking it with his finger to dislodge the first flakes. White on white.

“We’ll need some works for you if you’re gonna be a righteous junkie. Maybe Eddie Peace bring us some.”

He made a funnel from the back of a matchbook, took Marge by her damp and tremorous hand and led her to the desk.

He pared away a tiny mound of the stuff with the card board funnel and eased it onto the postcard’s glossy blue sky.

“I don’t know much about dilaudid so I don’t know what your tolerance is. Scoff it like coke and see if you get off.”

He moved the bag from the chair; Marge sat down and looked at the postcard.

“It’s scary,” she said.

“Don’t talk about it.”

She crouched over the stuff like a child and drew it into her nostril. Afterward she straightened up so quickly he was afraid she would pass out. She shook her head and sniffed.

He made a second little mound for her.

“Go ahead. Hit the other one.”

She hit the other one, and then sat stock-still; tears ran from her closed eyes. Slowly, she bent forward and rested her forehead against the desk. Hicks moved the phone book out of her way.

In a few minutes, she sat up again and turned to him.

She was smiling. She put her arms around his waist; her tears and runny nose wet his shirt. He bent down to her; she rested her head on his shoulder. The tension drained from her in small sobs.

“Better than a week in the country, right?”

Holding to him, she stood up and he helped her to the bed. She lay across it, arching her back, stretching her arms and legs toward its four corners.

“It’s a lot better than a week in the country,” she said.

She began to laugh. “It’s better than dilaudid. It’s good.”

She rolled over and hugged herself.

“Right in the head!” She made her hand into a pistol and fired into her temple. “Right in the head.”

He sat down on the bed with her. The glow had come back to her skin, the grace and suppleness of her body flowed again. The light came back, her eyes’ fire. Hicks marveled. It made him happy.

“It does funny little things inside you. It floats inside you. It’s incredible.”

“People use it instead of sex.”

“But it’s just gross how nice it is,” Marge said happily.

Hicks touched her breast.

“Walking with the King. Big H. If God made anything better he never let on. I know all those songs, my sweet.”

Marge sat up in the bed, looking in wonder at the sky outside the window, as blue and regular as the sky over Marine World.

“I see how it works. You have it or you don’t. You have it — everything’s O.K. You don’t, everything’s shit. It’s yes or no. On or off. Stop or go.”

“Write a poem about it,” Hicks said.

She stood up and went back to the desk. She turned to him with a glance of quick mischief. “Please, sir — can I have some more?”

He made a gesture of abundance.

She set about separating another high from the dope on the sheet of paper.

“This one is for jollity,” she said. “Purely recreational.”

He checked the size of the dose and let her wail.

“It’s its own poem,” she said, when the lift came. “Very serious elegant poem.”

“It’s just like everything else,” Hicks said.

She found one of his cigarettes by the backpack and lit it.

He had never seen her smoke before. For a long time she stood looking out at the beach. Hicks watched her, wishing that she would speak to him again — but she was silent now, smiling, blowing smoke at the picture window.

“Remember the night we ran the freaks out?” Hicks asked her. “We made it after. You remember?”

She turned her lofty empty smile on him and he felt, again, a dart of loneliness.

“I remember everything. With absolute clarity. Since you walked in on me.” Her elbow slid from the windowsill where she had been resting it and she almost lost her balance. “Every twitch. Every bead of sweat. Every shiver. Believe me.”

“What can I do,” Hicks said. “I gotta believe you.”

“I’m just a little slip of a thing,” Marge said, “but I’m all primary process. I live the examined life. Not one funny little thing gets by me.”

He got up and went to the desk where the leavings of Marge’s measure lay across the Los Angeles telephone book.

“You would have come in handy. Where you been?”

“I’ve been maintaining an establishment. That’s where I’ve been.”

The matchbook cover Marge had used was wet. He ripped off another one.

“You talking about your old man? That’s an establishment?”

Marge let herself slide down to the floor beneath the window.

“Don’t you put my old man down,” she said. “My old man is a subtle fella. He’s a can of worms.”

Hicks sniffed his dope and shook his head violently.

“The next fucking time he calls me a psychopath — I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

He sat waiting to go off; in a moment he was in the bathroom vomiting bourbon residue from the bottom of his guts. When the vomiting stopped, he brushed his teeth.

Back in the bedroom, he surmised that he was high. The room was all easy lines and soft light, his steps were cushioned. He turned on the television set but he could not get it to work. There were some nice color bands, so he watched those for a while and then turned it off.

“Did you think I left you?” Marge asked him. “Is that why you did up?”

Hicks shrugged.

“Just for old times’ sake.”

He lay down on the bed beside her and watched dust columns spin before the window.

“Yes, it’s easy,” he said, laughing foolishly. “Yes, it’s good.”

“It is good, isn’t it?” Marge said. “I mean high quality.”

“So they tell me.” He leaned into the pillows and breathed deeply. “This is a different ball game,” he said.

Marge was staring at the ceiling with an expression like reverence.

“It really had me there,” she said. “I had cramps. My nose wouldn’t stop running. I was genuinely sick.”

“Maybe it was all in your head.”

“Not all of it.”

He moved closer to her and put his hand under the back of her neck. “What a goof you are! Don’t brag about it. It’s not such a tough condition. It’s not what you want.”

“Maybe it is,” she said. “It’s simpler than life.”

“Come on.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “It’s just like everything else. This is life.”

“Where springs fail not,” Marge said.

“Springs?”

She arched her back, letting her weight fall on the bed, making the frame creak.

“Springs fail not,” she said. “It’s a Polish toast. It means ‘to life.’”

Hicks laughed weakly. “Jesus.” He turned over on his stomach and folded his hands between her breasts. “It’s a poem, you cooze. I read it. It’s a poem.”

She put her face close to his and laughed with her mouth open as if in surprise.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s a smack poem.”

Looking into her eyes, he suddenly felt a perfect confidence. The payoff, whatever it was, would take care of itself. There was no stopping him.

He got up quickly and went to the telephone table. It was littered with dope and debris, the smack in its plastic bag lying beside the phone.

“This is ignorance,” he said, and set about packing it away. “This is what they call in the trade ‘plain view.’” When the table was clear and the dope secured, he sat down by the phone with his forehead resting on his palm. “I don’t know what our chances are. I don’t think they’re too great. But I’m gonna call Eddie Peace.”

“Whatever’s right,” Marge said.