Dog Soldiers

_

HICKS DROVE ON SPEED. His fatigue hung the desert grass with hallucinatory blossoms, filled ravines with luminous coral and phantoms. The land was flat and the roads dead straight; at night, headlights swung for hours in space, steady as a landfall — and then rushed past in streaks of color, explosions of engine roar and hot wind. Every passing truck left in its screaming wake the specter of a desert head-on — mammoth tires spinning in the air, dead truck drivers burning in ditches until dawn.

Marge nodded in the back seat. Now and then she spoke and Hicks could not understand her. She scratched in her sleep.

The state did not seem like sleep to Marge. She had turned inward from the chaos of motion outside. Her head was filled with freakery — that she was turning to rubber, that her mind had been replaced by a cassette.

Security was fled. Sometimes she simply set the bag on the seat beside her. There was so much that she was prof ligate; the seat was sticky with it, grains of it glistened on the rubber matting of the floor. After doing up, she would sit beside him in the front for a while, but they did not speak very much, there was nothing that would bear exchange.

They stopped at night — so that Hicks could sleep for three hours or so, drop more speed, and put them on the road again. They avoided the Interstates, the military reserves, the Indian reservations, trying for roads that were obscure but not deserted.

Late in the second day, they passed miles and miles of spinach fields watered with sprinklers. Roads met at perfect right angles; the white farmhouses had groves of pale aspen surrounding them. A town called Moroni had a plaster angel in its dusty main square and they stopped there for gas and bought lunch meat and whole-wheat bread at a Japanese grocery.

By the time night fell, their road led upward over the slopes of half-fallen mountains where broken boulders were piled on each other’s backs. In the twilight, the great rocks came to look like statues and the scrub pine growing from the crevices beneath them like offering flowers.

They drove all night to climb the ridge. A few hours before dawn, Hicks pulled over to sleep.

“Who’s up here?” she asked him.

“My alma mater’s up here,” he said with his eyes closed. “My freaked-out old roshi. They have writing doctors — this guy is a writing roshi.”

“You mean he deals?”

“Deals isn’t the word.”

While he slept, Marge listened to owls.

Late the next morning, Hicks was laughing to himself as he drove. The sky was obscene in its brightness, the crimson rocks a bad joke. Then, gradually the route wound downward, switchback after switchback. Trees were thicker, there were wildflowers beside the road. Abruptly they were driving between clapboard buildings on a street of sorts, in a kind of town at the base of a sheer cliff that kept half the place in welcome shadow.

As they followed the road, Marge became aware that there were people among the unpainted buildings. The first group she saw were children — little girls in frilly white blouses with patent leather shoes. Then, before the next shack, a group of men in beige suits and dark ties. Some of the men carried books under their arms. Farther along, a young black haired woman in a pink blouse nursed a baby in the shade.

The road ended with a curving flourish over a sandy pit

in which lay a few car skeletons and the rotting remnants of a tepee. To one side of the pit was a cluster of orange and blue tents; beside the tents fifteen or so International Harvester trucks were lined up. The trucks were painted in bright colors, Mexican pastels. They were open in the back; each truck had benches across its van with lengths of knotted rope along the sides for hand grips. They were the sort of trucks which one saw carrying braceros in Mexico and southern California.

A group of silent people gathered slowly near the place where they stopped die Land-Rover. They were Mexicans, Marge saw, dressed with a curious formality. All the men wore the same cut of beige suit with wide lapels and thick stitching. Their dark ties were held in place with cheap tin tie clasps. Waves of lacquer black hair curved above their brown faces. There were little boys among them, small replicas of the men down to the tin tie clasps. Instead of shoes, they wore plastic sandals over socks; their feet were covered with dust. Marge stared at them through the insect-spattered windshield. They returned her stare without hostility and without greeting.

“Are those people really out there?” she asked Hicks.

Hicks turned over the engine and looked at her.

“I don’t know what’s really out there.”

He sat rubbing his temples, laughing at something.

Marge climbed out and faced the group. Hicks came around from the other side of the car. “Oh you mean these folks,” he said. “Yeah, these folks are really out here.”

“Hello, brothers,” he told them. “Hola, muchachos.”

They stepped aside for them. Hicks put his arm over Marge’s shoulder.

“Caballeros,” he said clasping her tightly, “caballeros, muy formal.”

More people in the roadway between the shacks, all watching them as they walked holding each other.

“Do they like us?” Marge asked. “Do they want us to go away?”

“As long as we’re not the cops,” Hicks said. “Or the ASPCA, they couldn’t care less.”

He stopped for a moment, looked up and down the street and then moved her toward the largest of the several buildings. There were people huddled in the doorway, facing the interior. Hicks moved her between two low broad backs and into a large whitewashed room.

The room was crowded with men; there were no women among them, although a line of small boys sat with black books in their hands along one wall. Some of the men had chairs to sit in, others stood or squatted on the floor. Everyone was facing a raised platform at the far end of the room where a small brown-skinned man in a dark rayon suit read aloud from a book he held in his right hand. Beside him on the platform was a banner strung on a brass flagpole. The banner showed a curled shepherd’s staff and beneath it a haloed Iamb, hoof raised. A sanctified aura of gold cloth surrounded the lamb’s white body.

The man read in a voice which started low in his throat and rose almost to falsetto and then fell again at the conclusion of each phrase. What he read was like verse or the words of a song and he seemed to begin every stanza at a slightly different pitch so that the sound built a tension which coiled farther and farther back on itself without breaking. His voice did not suit him at all.

The men in the room listened with closed eyes.

Next to the platform, closest to the reader of anyone in the room, was a fair-haired boy of about twelve, the only person there beside themselves who was not Mexican. The boy looked up at the speaker with a wide smile, but it was a spectator’s smile, not a communicant’s.

As Marge watched, the boy turned to them, smiled wider in surprise, and rose to pick his way toward them among the crowd.

The attention of the people in the room followed him as he came up to them. Marge imagined that the people there could see the drug on her or sense it.

The boy led them outside into the sun. He was carrying a faded cowboy hat in his hand and when they were outside he jammed it on the back of his head.

“How are you, you little shit?” Hicks asked him.

“Last time I saw you,” the boy said, “you were fishing for steelheads.”

“I was too,” Hicks told Marge. “Where’s your old man?”

“Up the hill.” Hicks looked around him. “I see the folks are here.”

“That’s right,” the boy said. “You’ll be in time for the fiesta.”

They walked to the jeep and Hicks took out the pack and the bag in which he had put his machine gun. He strapped the pack on his back and slung the seabag over his shoulder.

“This is K-jell,” he told Marge. “K-jell, this is Marge.”

She was tired of the boy’s smile; it had something of the formal beatitude of hippie greeting, mindless acceptance soul to soul. It annoyed her to see those things on a child’s face.

“Let’s go see the old man,” Hicks said.

They walked along the dirt road toward the foot of the mountain, past the car skeletons and the tepee to a patch of soil where rows of blackened vegetable leaf withered in the company of thorny weeds and broom. The patch was en closed with chicken wire.

“Christ,” Hicks said, “Sally’s garden.”

“Yes, sir,” Kjell said.

“They strung that wire underneath the whole bed,” Hicks told Marge. “To keep the gophers out.”

Marge nodded wearily.

“Most people poison gophers. But it was the time of peace and love and all that lives is holy.” He turned to the boy. “You remember that time?”

“I don’t know,” Kjell said.

“In the end somebody got drunk — I don’t remember who — and came down here with a shotgun and blasted all the gophers they could find.”

“That was a reaction,” Kjell said. “Because it was so much work putting in the chicken wire.”

A narrow trail led along the foot of the mountain, turning at length into a narrow windless passage between walls of red rock that widened into a pine glade. The deep shade and the smell of the pines in the heat gave promise of rest. They could hear fast water not far away. Beyond the glade was a grassy field with a stand of cottonwood trees beside a stream. The stream had been dammed with blocks of concrete to form a pool, where bubbles rose from an un seen bottom marring the reflected image of the sheer mountain over them.

“You want a bath?” the boy asked. “The creek’s nice and warm right here.”

Hicks was looking at the rock face.

“Where the hell’s the cable lift?”

“He dismantled it,” Kjell said. “Tore it up just the other day.”

“All the way here I been waiting to ride that cable. What the hell possessed him?”

A small black and white quarter horse was nibbling grass among the trees. The boy walked up to it and pulled its head up with the bridle, leading it out of the trees. A length of red cotton cloth trailed from one of its hind feet.

“What have you got on him?” Hicks asked.

The boy swung into the saddle and brushed the horse’s neck.

“I was trying to make a gypsy hobble. He didn’t go for it.”

“You’ll get your teeth kicked out. How come he took the lift down?”

“Well, Gibbs was here last week. He took it down when Gibbs split.”

The good humor drained from Hicks’ face.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Gibbs was here?”

“Yeah,” the boy said, “he was here. Sorry I can’t take you up behind me but the track’s too steep for anybody riding behind.”

“We’ll walk,” Hicks told him.

Kjell kicked the horse’s flank and trotted off up the stream.

Hicks took the canteen from Marge’s carry bag and stooped at the waterside to fill it.

“Gibbs was here,” he told her, “and I missed him.”

“Is that pretty bad?”

“Well, it’s cruel, that’s what it is. It’s ironical.”

It was a three-hour climb to the top and shade was the only comfort. At every rounding turn they sprawled against the rock to take some water and some salt from a zuzu-stand shaker bag. Step over step, Marge followed his tracks upward; by the time they were under the crest she was cramped and weeping.

Around the last bend was another stand of forest, cedar and pine. Under the sound of wind in the trees were strange soft noises — tinklings and faint bells. Whenever Marge turned after a sound, she caught a small flash of un natural color, a glint of bright metal or glass. As they walked she saw that some of the branches hid wind chimes and mirrors, bells of Sarna, painted dolls.

“He’s got all the woods around here done this way,” Hicks told her. “He’s got speakers out here too. And lights.”

“Doesn’t he like trees?”

“Not him. He’s a pioneer.”

The forest ended at a wall made from the mountain’s stone. They followed it up the slope for about a quarter mile until they came to an arched doorway, large enough for a crouching man to walk through. Above the doorway were inscribed the letters A.M.D.G.

A paved stone path led up from the gate, rising to a clearing that was bordered on two sides by the top of the forest. It seemed at first to be the crest of the mountain — but there was higher ground above, a scrub-grown bluff from which a narrow stream descended. The fourth side of the clearing was sheer cliff drop, attended by a barrier of split rails. From the cliff edge one could see the narrow valley below and the lower ridge across it, beyond that another ridge and another beyond that. At a great distance, the ghostly frost of a snow peak seemed suspended from the clear sky.

At the edge of the clearing farthest from the cliff was a corral from which Kjell’s pony, unhobbled, watched them come up. Near it, within the trees, was a cabin with wires leading in several directions from its roof. A low business like hum sounded from inside it.

The purpose of the place was a vaulted whitewashed building with a tall bell tower. It was a severe building of simple construction — except for the decorated facade around its entryway, approached by three low worn steps. The facade was small but ingeniously worked; scrolls and biblical scenes appeared beside swastikas and rain patterns. A figure in soutane and biretta looked down on martyrs who carried their own heads in one hand and ceremonial gourds in the other. The serpent tempting Eve bore a set of carefully rendered rattles. The upper most figure was Christ in Judgment, wearing the feathered headdress of a cacique.

Marge looked up from the facade to the bell tower and saw that it supported a set of loudspeakers on either side. She shaded her eyes and shivered in the bright sunlight.

A balding red-faced man walked down the steps from the doorway. The first thing about his face that Marge noticed was the mouth. He was bearded and the dark brown hair of his whiskers and mustache outlined the thickness and pinkness of his lips. A breeze stirred the short hairs on his rosy scalp.

“Look,” the man said, “we’ve found you again.”

Hicks nodded to him with a smile that was affectionate and contemptuous. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here. Just took a flyer.”

“We stayed,” the balding man said, “in case everything might begin all over.” He had a very slight accent, Dutch or German.

“The last time I was here,” Hicks said to him, “I was fishing for steelheads. K-jell just reminded me.” He let the seabag fall.

“You should have stayed with us,” the man said.

Holding the same ironic smile, Hicks bent and touched the top of the man’s Mexican sandal. The man had stooped to intercept his gesture.

“What’s the matter, Dieter? Can’t a man loose your sandal these days?”

“These days a man can do what he likes.”

He turned to look at Marge.

“You’re tired?”

She nodded. His smile, she thought, was the same as his son’s, a bit too serene for her liking.

“Is there something we can get you?”

“Who, me? Not a thing.”

“C’mon,” Hicks said, “we just climbed your goddamn mountain. Give us a beer at least.”

They followed Dieter through the ornate entrance and into a large cool room with an enormous stone fireplace facing the door. There was a single narrow window opening on a shaded garden and when the door was closed it was difficult to see. She made out the letters A.M.D.G. over the lintel.

Near the fireplace was a refrigerator; Dieter opened it to shelves piled with Mexican beer and several pitchers of tea-colored liquid. He opened them each a beer and filled his own glass from one of the pitchers.

Hicks took Dieter’s glass from his hand and sniffed the contents.

“What kind of piss is that?”

“Rose-hip wine,” Dieter said.

“Is that a more enlightening drink?”

“Yes,” Dieter said. “The taste of Zen and the taste of rose-hip wine are the same.”

Across from the straight-backed refectory chair in which Marge sat was an altar on which stood a crucifix hung with Christmas balls and gift-wrapping paper. Behind it was a large reproduction of Ilya Repin’s portrait of the dying Moussorgsky.

“So he drinks about twenty pitchers a day of it,” someone said. It was Kjell, sprawled on a mattress in a confusion of electronic equipment — microphones, headphones, speaker tubes, and a labyrinth of insulated wires. A copy of Treasure Island lay face down across them.

“I make it myself,” Dieter said, “it’s stronger than beer. I’m sure the Jesuits did better but they had more organization.” He turned to Marge, who was fidgeting. “What would you like to do? Freshen up?”

“I guess so,” Marge said.

“It’s a long climb without the lift.” He stood hospitably. “It’s outside. I’ll show you.” Marge was going through her bag nervously. “I know where it is,” Hicks said. “I’ll show her.” He picked up the bag and led her through a curtained doorway at the rear of the altar and down a sunlit passage way that opened to an overgrown garden beside the stream.

“You want the John or this?” he asked, showing her the pack.

“I thought I might as well.”

“You’re going right from dilaudid on to the purest shit in America. I can see you passing the time on a ride but you better use some moderation.”

“What the hell,” Marge said, “I’ve already missed my modern dance class.” She took the pack from him. “It’s the kid, I guess. It bothers me.”

He took the works inside out of the wind and loaded the spike for her.

“Someday,” she said, “I’ll get what Gerald got.”

She held the needle point upward and looked at the sky.

“This might be a good place for it.”

“Now, now,” Hicks said to her.

With her tongue in the corner of her mouth, she jabbed her thigh, lay back, and handed him the needle. He sat watching her until she smiled.

“Feel better?”

“Are you kidding?” she asked him.

He left her nodding over the stream, dragged the seabag with the gun in it to a corner of the corridor, and went back to his beer.

“To suffering sentience,” Dieter said, raising his glass. “May it endure.”

“I think you’re loaded, Dieter.”

Dieter looked at the bag which he had set by his feet.

“More in the bag, is there?”

“There’s a lot more in the bag,” Hicks said. “I want to move it.”

“Is that why you came out here?”

“We’re hot. We’ve got to get loose of it.”

“I thought you might have come to stay awhile.”

“How about it, man?”

Dieter shook his head.

“Not here. Not me.”

Hicks let his eyes settle on Dieter’s.

“No? But Gibbs was just here. K-jell told me.”

Kjell looked up from Treasure Island.

“Gibbs brought mushrooms for the fiesta. That’s the only dope we have around here now.”

“Nobody asked you,” Dieter told his son. “Go tune your guitar.”

Kjell tossed his book aside and went out the front door.

“Gibbs brought mushrooms for the fiesta. That’s the only dope we have around here now.”

“Dieter, man, all you have to do is call some people.”

“I don’t call people anymore.”

“Look,” Hicks said, “I have to take care of it. I really went for this one.”

He told Dieter about Converse and Marge and the things that had happened. Dieter went to the refrigerator and took out another pitcher of wine.

“I envy your energy,” he said. “It was there,” Hicks said. “I went for it. Maybe next year I’ll do it all over again.”

“And then next year, it’ll be the same. Lots of scurrying around and no payoff. You should have stayed with us.”

“Well, the fishing was good,” Hicks said, “no question about that. I could put myself to sleep fishing that stream in my head. Pool by pool. Like Hemingway.” He rubbed his face and stood up. “I’m dead, man. I’ve got to crash.”

“Yes, crash,” Dieter said. “You know where it is.”

In the pool beside which Marge sat, the fish were nearly tame. They nibbled wrists and sailed confidently into cupped hands below the surface, but they could vanish in an instant at the slightest capturing gesture, leaving a tiny sunlit ripple. Marge sat and played with them beneath the vaults of time and silence to which she was becoming accustomed.

At some point, she decided to put herself in the water. She left her sour-smelling clothes on the bank and eased in. The bottom was pebbles, the water was sun-warmed; she ducked her head under and came up feeling faintly sick. The wind smelled of pines.

Kjell was sitting on a rock a few yards downstream. She turned around and waved to him mechanically.

“Want some soap?” he called to her.

“Sure.”

He ran inside and came out with a square of lye-smelling homemade soap.

“Look,” he said pointing to the edge of the building, “there’s a shower over there. You use that and the soap won’t hurt the fish.”

He watched her soberly as she climbed out of the stream and walked to the shower. The water was cold, much colder than the stream. She soaped herself as the boy looked on, rinsed, and wrapped herself sarongwise in the towel.

“O.K.?” she asked him.

“Sure.”

He walked across the creek from rock to rock and sat down on the bank opposite her.

“Nice place,” she said.

“Pretty nice. Nothing like it was though.”

“How was it?”

“Oh, it was full of people all the time.

“It’s better like this, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. The fishing’s better.”

“How can you fish,” she asked him, “if you’re worried about soap hurting them? Doesn’t the hook hurt them?”

“I don’t think it’s the same,” Kjell said. “Some people around here used to say fishing was cruel. Dieter says the people who objected to it most are all murderers now.”

“You mean they’ve killed people?”

“Well, it could be symbolic. Or it could be they’ve killed people.”

“I see,” she said. “Have you lived here all your life?”

“Most of it. I was born in Paris though.”

He was quite perfect, an exquisite artifact of the scene like the Indian bells in the trees. He was a child of Advance as she herself was — born to the Solution at the dawn of the New Age.

It was impossible for her not to think of Janey but the drug dulled her panic nicely.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Back east in the hospital. She left here a long time ago.”

“She get tired of the crowds?”

“She thought he was God.”

“Well,” Marge said, “that was silly of her.”

“No,” Kjell said, “she thought he really was God. Some people used to. Once some regular church people came up here to ask him about it.”

“What did he tell them?”

“He kind of let on that he was.”

“Did he think he was?”

“He sort of did. Now he says he wasn’t any more God than anybody else but other people didn’t know they were God and he did.”

“Did you think he was God?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he is. I mean, how could you tell?”

“Now when I was a kid,” Marge said, “there was an organization called the League of the Militant Godless.”

“Goddess?”

“God-less,” Marge said. “They did without.”

“And they were pissed off?”

“Everybody was pissed off when I was a kid. I was pretty pissed off myself.” She stood up and shivered inside the towel. “Hey, it’s nice up here. What is this place?”

“That’s a story,” Kjell said. “It’s called El Incarnaçion del Verbo. It was a Jesuit house in the mission times — then the Mexicans passed a law against Jesuits so the priests buried all their gold and left. Then it got to be part of the Martinson ranch. We go out — me and Dieter — we go out with the metal detector sometimes to look for the gold. We found a whole lot of great stuff. But no gold.”

“How’d Dieter get it?”

“I guess Mom gave it to him. Her name used to be Martinson.”

“Well,” Marge said. “How nice for him.”

She dressed and sauntered into the front room looking for Hicks.

“He’s asleep,” Dieter said. He offered her a beer and she took it. “Couple of hours he’ll be up and hustling and you’ll be on your way.”

“I thought we were on our way here.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with the heroin.”

“I must have it wrong then. I thought you were somehow in the business.”

“You have it wrong.” He sipped his wine and watched her in what she considered to be a rather proprietary way. “How much are you shooting?”

“I don’t really know,” she said. “There’s so much of it.”

“If it’s Vietnamese and you keep shooting it, you’ll end up with a hell of a habit. You may have a habit already.”

“We think it may be all in my head.”

“How long has it been?”

“Not so long.”

“Good,” Dieter said. “Then you can quit if you want to. I can help you.”

“Can you really?”

“Don’t be scornful,” he said. “It’s ugly.”

Marge stretched. She bore him no ill will.

“Please don’t give me hippie sermons, Mr. Natural. I’m not part of your parish.”

He fixed his small gray eyes on her.

“How important is the money to you? Do you really want .him doing this?”

“I don’t give a shit about the money.”

“Good. Throw it over the drop and we’ll go fishing.”

“Talk to him about that.”

He fell silent, sitting with his wine on the bottom step of the altar as though he were trying to gather strength.

“I like you,” he said after a while. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“How nice of you to say so.”

“Has he told you about what we did here?”

“He said you were a roshi who freaked out I don’t really know what that means.”

Dieter took a deep drink of his wine.

“Years ago,” he said gravely, “something very special was happening up here.”

“Was it something profound?”

“As a matter of fact, it was something profound. But rather difficult to verbalize.”

“I knew it would be. Did it have to do with your being God?”

Dieter sighed.

“I am not now — nor have I ever been — God. In any ordinary meaning of the word. I made certain statements for political reasons. In my opinion they were what the times demanded. If things had worked out everything would have been clear in the end.”

Marge laughed.

“You’re like my father — he’s a Communist.” She wiped the mellow smack tears from her eyes and shook her head.

“So many people have it all figured out and they’re all full of shit. It’s sad.”

“Listen,” Dieter announced, “a hippie sermon — When the soul leaves the body it approaches the void and there it is assailed by temptations. In its first temptation it encounters two people fucking — naturally what remains of its prurient interest is aroused. It draws closer and closer until it’s drawn in. It has been visualizing its own conception. It goes back the way it came and that’s the end of liberation. Well, that’s what happened to us,” Dieter said. “I suppose it was the dope that stopped us. We were drawn in because it was so much fun. As a junkie, you should understand that.”

“Absolutely,” Marge said. She closed her eyes. “It’s too bad, it really is. It’s too bad we can’t get out of this shit into something better. If there was a way to do it, I’d say — I’d say — let’s do it.”

“Let’s do it,” Dieter said. “Get him to stay.”

Content within the vaults of the drug, Marge laughed.

“If I could pray,” she said smiling, “I would pray that God would cause the bomb to fall on all of us — on us and on our children and wipe the whole lot of us out. So we could stop needing this and needing that. Needing dope and needing love and needing each other’s dirty asses and each other’s stupid fucked-up riffs.

“That’s the answer,” she said placidly. “The final solution.”

Dieter drew himself up in a magisterial fashion.

“Foolish girl,” he said softly. “That’s the problem, it can’t be the answer. When you say that, it’s cheap junkie pessimism. If you spend your time making holes in yourself and tripping on the cracks in the wall — how else can you think?

“You begin from there,” he shouted at her — “life belongs to the strong!”

“The strong?” Marge asked incredulously, “The strong?

Who the hell is that supposed to be? Superman? Socialist man?” She stood up wearily and leaned against the wall.

“You’re an asshole,” she said to Dieter. “You’re a Fascist. Where were you during the Second World War?”

Laughing to herself, she staggered out of the room and went down the corridor to the cell where Hicks was sleeping. The bag was beside him; she pulled it out and opened it and spent a long time staring at it with wonder. Her hand absently caressed the outer covering in a ridiculous manner and the notion came to her that it was like a child but less trouble. It was a stupid thought and she was not amused. She got up and went out again to the garden where the stream was and sat beside it with her head in her hands. When she looked up she saw Dieter standing in the doorway.

“It doesn’t get better,” he said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him. “Mind your business.”

When she looked up again he was still there. “If I didn’t have it now, I’d be out of my mind. Things are crazy and it’s been horrible. It’s like I haven’t slept for a week.”

He smiled with his thick hairy lips in a way that she thought at first was extremely cruel but when she had stared at him for a few moments she was no longer sure that it was cruelty she saw there.

“But you’re all right,” he said. “You have it.”