Dog Soldiers

_

CONVERSE AND HIS COMPANIONS SPENT THE FIRST EVENING of their journey at a hotel called the Fremont. It was in the mountains, across the road from a yellow slope on which Herefords grazed.

As soon as Converse determined that it was not the last day of his life, he began to drink in celebration. He drank Bacardi because that was what Danskin liked.

Danskin and Smitty sat on the bed playing chess with a portable set that had tiny plastic pins for pieces. In play, Danskin was imperturbable; he slumped motionless over his own belly, his shoulders hunched, his feet on the floor. His breathing was always audible; for all his size and apparent strength, he did not seem to be very healthy. Smitty hummed and tapped his foot and licked his lips frequently.

“Check…” Danskin said wearily. “And mate.”

Smitty’s eyes narrowed in panic. He removed his king from its fatal position and surveyed the board.

“Where the fuck did that come from? I never seen it.”

“Checkmate,” Danskin said.

He watched Smitty move the king from one square to another, and finally replace it in the trap.

“You got me,” Smitty said.

Danskin sighed.

When they stood up, he struck Smitty across the mouth with his fist — a lightning right cross from nowhere that had the whole weight of his trunk behind it. Smitty caught it fiat-footed; he had not even tried to duck. The blow stood him on tiptoes and he staggered backward and caught himself against the wall. He felt his lip, spat blood, and walked into the bathroom. Danskin followed him stolidly.

“You stupid little bastard, I’m tired of your jailbird chess. You better learn to play.”

He turned to Converse, who was pouring another Bacardi.

“I hate jailbird chess,” he explained. “I hate the style. No foresight, no reasoning. Just like a little kid.” He pursed his lips and spoke mincingly, raising his voice for Smitty to hear. “Just like a little tweety bird! Oooh, here’s a move. Oooh, there’s a move. It’s fucking degrading.”

Smitty came out of the bathroom holding a face towel to his lip, and sat down on the bed.

“You hit my fucking bridge, man,”

“Tough tit. Why don’t you read a chess book once in your life?”

“Plenty of guys will belt you when they lose,” Smitty said thickly. “Fuckin’ Danskin — he wins and he hits you.”

Danskin shrugged and lay down beside Smitty with a book of road maps of the national parks.

“Where do you think I learned the game, man?” Smitty demanded. “I learned it in the slams, I can’t help that.” He looked at the bloody face towel. “Fuck you, man, I ain’t playin’ no more chess with you.”

Danskin looked up at Converse.

“Play chess?”

“I’m very weak,” Converse said.

Danskin laughed.

“He’s very weak,” he told Smitty.

“I don’t think I have the cast of mind for it.”

“That’s odd,” Danskin said. “It can’t be that you’re stupid, can it?”

“No,” Converse said.

He went to sleep in his chair.

When he woke up, he had the sense that some hours had passed. It seemed to him that there had been sunlight on the drapes before and there was none now. His head ached, and he was thirsty; he was on the floor.

When he tried to stand, his legs would not respond. He twisted round and saw that there were handcuffs on his ankles.

One of the small table lamps was lit. Smitty sat beside it in a blond wood armchair giggling at him silently. Danskin was in bed with a pillow over his head.

“Where you going?” Smitty asked merrily.

“I’d like to get some water.”

“Go ahead,” Smitty said.

“For Christ’s sake,” Converse said. “I agreed to come out here. I don’t see the necessity for this kind of thing.”

“If you want water, get it. I’m not stopping you.”

He drew himself up and hopped to the bathroom.

“I’ll wake up the whole damn place this way,” he told Smitty.

“Fuck the whole damn place.”

Converse drank and washed his face under the tap. He held to the sink to keep from falling over. When he had finished, he hopped back into a chair across the room from Smitty.

There was a red binding mark around Smitty’s spindly arm; the skin in the crook of his elbow was black and blue. His undersea eyes were at peace.

“You from New York?” Smitty asked.

“Yes,” Converse said.

“You know Yorkville?”

“Yes.”

“You know Klavan’s?”

Converse knew Klavan’s well. It was a bar on Second Avenue in which he had drunk illegally when under the required age. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1955, he had been beaten up there and it was there he had attempted the seduction of Agnes Comerford, a nursing student at Lenox Hill Hospital. He had invested a considerable amount of his life’s energy in transporting himself as far from Klavan’s, in every respect, as he was capable.

“No,” he said.

The idea of being held prisoner in a California motel by a denizen of Klavan’s was profoundly distasteful to him.

“You know, I was in Vietnam too,” Smitty said. “I got fucked up there.”

“What happened?”

“I stepped on a pungi stick. Hurt? Jesus! It got me the fuck out of there, though.”

“Good,” Converse said. Smitty glanced over his shoulder at the bed, and listened with satisfaction to Danskin’s asthmatic breathing.

“Some nut, huh?”

Converse grunted.

“You know what his I.Q. is? One hundred and seventy. A rating of genius.”

“I’m not surprised,” Converse said.

“You’re riding with the guy and some classical music comes on the pipe — he says that’s Mozart. That’s Beethoven. What good does it do him?”

“How do you know each other?”

“Through Antheil. He introduced us.”

“Antheil’s quite a fella.”

“He’s the coolest,” Smitty said. “Fuckin’ guy’s got bread stashed away, a beautiful home, chicks coming and going. They say the system don’t work, man — don’t tell that to Antheil.”

“Does he pay you?”

“You think I’m out here for nothing? You think I’m a buff?” He tossed his head with self-satisfaction. “I got a crack at a job with the agency after this.”

“Don’t you have a record?”

“That don’t mean shit. If Antheil says you’re in, you’re in. And I could really go for that, man.”

“You could be a second Antheil.”

“You’re not kidding,” Smitty said. “How about Danskin? Does he want to work for the agency too?”

Smitty looked over his shoulder again and lowered his voice.

“He’s a brute, man, a psycho. A dude like that couldn’t deal with the public.”

Converse nodded thoughtfully and slid back onto the floor to sleep. After a few moments, he heard Smitty approach softly. He opened his eyes and turned over on his side.

“I was married,” Smitty said.

“Is that right?”

“I had enough of that, though. It’s stupid.”

“I suppose it’s a matter of personnel,” Converse said.

“Look at you,” Smitty told him. “Look at the grief you got.”

“It’s a funny situation.”

“You’re lucky we came along, man. We’ll give you some peace of mind.” Converse turned his back on Smitty and leaned on his elbow.

“I seen your old lady,” Smitty said. “She’s big.”

“Big?” Converse said. “She’s not big.”

“Yeah, she is. I seen her.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“Maybe so,” Smitty said.

Converse eased away from him. He had been drawing closer and he smelled.

“My wife’s in Staten Island,” he told Converse. “She got hot pants for this guy twice her age. A guy that owned a restaurant out there.”

“Maybe,” Converse suggested, “you shouldn’t talk about it.”

“When I was in the can,” Smitty said, “we did this thing. We’d talk about our old lady — like where they were, what they were doing.”

Converse pretended sleep.

“What they look like. How they like to fuck. Whether they were fucking somebody.” He put his hand on Con verse’s shoulder and shook him. “Right?”

“Right,” Converse said.

“Some guys couldn’t take it, they went batshit. It would drive you nuts.”

His hand slid from Converse’s shoulder, along his side, to the inside of his thigh. Converse rolled over convulsively and faced him.

“Keep your hands off me.”

Smitty was not discouraged.

“Your wife is fucking that guy, you know that.”

“Just keep your hands off me,” Converse said.

“Keep your hands off him,” Danskin said.

Smitty jumped as though he had been struck. Danskin was sitting up in bed staring at them with an expression of deep melancholy.

“Get in bed,” he told Smitty.

Smitty stood up quickly, brushing his hair.

“You didn’t take a shower,” Danskin said. “When you gonna take one?”

“In the morning.”

“Take one now.”

Smitty went into the bathroom to take a shower. Con verse huddled against the wall, with the feeling that Dan-skin was watching him from the bed.

In a few minutes, Smitty came out of the bathroom, turned out the table lamp, and climbed into bed with Danskin. It shortly became apparent to Converse, as he lay in the darkness, that Smitty and Danskin were having sex together. As they went at it, he eased silently across the car pet to where the Bacardi was and very carefully brought it down to the floor with him.

Only fear kept him from retching when he had taken a long drink. When Danskin and Smitty were silent, he crawled to the cot which the management provided for third guests, climbed in it, and pulled the spread over him.

He dreamed of Charmian.

The following morning they started early and drove almost until dusk without stopping. It was superhighway driving through the desert; Danskin and Smitty took turns behind the wheel and they became more tense as the day passed. There were dried apricots and candy to eat and more Bacardi. Converse drank the better part of the rum. They did not make him wear cuffs in the car.

About seven, they left the Interstate and drove with the declining sun on their right through fields of green crops and small farming towns. High brown mountains rose ahead of them.

Once Converse woke to conversation.

“You told him you were in Vietnam. I heard you.”

“I was,” Smitty said.

Danskin looked over his shoulder and saw that Converse was awake. “He was never in Vietnam. He was never anywhere except Haight-Ashbury and the slammer.”

Smitty sat and sulked.

“But when he gets going,” Danskin said, “he tells stories like you could never forget. Ears cut off. Balls cut off. Little kiddies on bayonets. The most awful shit you ever heard.” He turned to smile at Smitty and wiped sweat from his forehead. “And the kicker is — he was never there.”

“How do you know I was never there?” Smitty said.

“That’s his way of making out, you know what I mean. He meets a chick and right away she’s hearing about the atrocities. ‘And then I machine-gunned all the kids. And then I strangled all their grannies. And then we set the mayor on fire.’ He goes on and on — and you know what?”

“They love it,” Converse said.

Danskin laughed with satisfaction.

“Your fuckin’ A. They love it. The more ghastly, the more horrible, the more they love it.”

“Jesus,” Smitty said, “you’re embarrassing.”

“Then he gives them the switcheroo. He tells them how he was punished for disobeying orders. The general, ‘Smitty, take these nuns out and bury them alive in shit.’ Smitty says, ‘Fuck you, general.’ He punches the general in the mouth and they put him in the joint. That’s what he did time for, he tells them.”

“I don’t know,” Converse said.

“What don’t you know? Did they do all that shit over there? Is it all true?”

“Some of it isn’t, obviously. Some of it is.”

“Man,” Smitty said, “if I was a writer I’d be rich. I ought to do that with you, Converse. I tell you stuff and you write it down.”

“You stupid fuck,” Danskin said, “people always say that to writers. Now he thinks you’re an asshole.”

“Not necessarily,” Converse said. “Sometimes people tell me things and I write it.”

“Then you get the bread,” Smitty said, “and they get shit.”

“Not anymore,” Converse said. As they drove through fields he told them about the stories he had written for Nightbeat. He told them about the Skydiver and the Mad Dentist. He told them Exploding Cigar Kills Nine, Hoarder Crushed By Small Change, and Wedding Night Trick Breaks Bride’s Back. They were amused and it passed the driving time agreeably.

Smitty was a bit shocked.

“How can they put stuff in the papers if it’s not true? Isn’t it against the law?”

Danskin whooped in scorn.

“Not at all,” Converse said.

“You should talk,” Danskin said to Smitty. “Not a true word comes out of your mouth.” He sat thoughtfully for a few minutes and then exploded with laughter.

“You and your pungi stick,” he cried. “One time you’re gonna tell that story one time too many, man. Then you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna make one of those things and put it right through your foot.” He leaned into the back seat and slapped Converse on the shoulder. “Right through his fuckin’ foot I’ll put it. Then he could talk about how it hurts.”

They drove through long shadows in golden light; the road followed a ridge overlooking the valley, then turned south in hairpin curves over high treeless passes through the mountains. In one of the passes they pulled off the paved highway and parked out of sight of it, among limestone boulders. Below, the ground sloped to a brown depression with a pool of slow-moving muddy water at its bottom.

“Let’s take a rest,” Danskin said.

They climbed out of the car and made their way down the slope. Danskin carried the rum and a plastic gallon can.

“It’s a hole,” Danskin said, looking up to the hills around them. “It’s a literal hole.” He threw the plastic can to Smitty. “Fill it up for the radiator. It’s all dry from here.”

He took a sip of rum and passed the bottle to Converse.

“How you doing, Mr. Converse?”

“O.K.,” Converse said.

“You’re pretty cool, considering.”

“Well, I decided to come. I might as well live with it.”

“You decided? What do you mean you decided? You think you could have walked away?”

Converse looked at the sky. Far above, beyond hearing, the tiny silver body of an airplane inched across the cloud less blue. It occurred to him that he had spent a great deal of time on the ground wishing he were in the air, and rather a lot of time in aircraft wishing he were on the ground.

“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” It was a perfect place to kill someone, he thought. A shot would probably be heard for miles — but there was no one within miles to hear. From the top of the pass they had not seen a single sign of human habitation, not a fence, not a wire. Only the plane, six miles up.

“You’re indifferent?”

“I’m trying.”

Danskin reached inside his gray cardigan and removed a pistol. He sat down on a rock and leaned the gun on his knee so that the barrel was pointed a few inches to the left of Converse’s leg.

“See this thing?”

Looking at the gun made Converse sleepy. His eyelids grew heavy.

“Sure I see it.”

“Looks like a regular thirty-eight?”

“I don’t know anything about handguns. I had a forty-five once. I could take it apart and clean it.” He shrugged. “That was a while ago.”

“This is what it shoots.” Danskin took a small canvas roll from his breast pocket and held it out for Converse’s inspection. “That’s the slug. It doesn’t penetrate. It flattens out on contact and mashes the shit out of anything it hits. Makes a wide shallow hole.”

Converse yawned.

“That’s what the air marshals carry,” Danskin said. “Re member that if you feel like hijacking a plane.”

Smitty was carrying the plastic can up the side of a rock where wild flowers grew. The climb was steep and he went slowly.

“Work for it” Danskin called to him. “Work for it, mother.” He shook his head. “He’s gonna do up,” he told Converse.

“Has he a habit?”

Danskin shrugged.

“Sometimes he shoots a bag by himself. Sometimes he doesn’t. I think it’s the spike he likes.”

They watched him climb until he disappeared behind the top of the rock.

“He’s shy,” Danskin said primly.

“He tells me he’s looking for a job in the agency.”

“Who, Smitty? Smitty doesn’t have the intelligence of an Airedale. He can’t tell the difference between a nickel and a quarter. How’s he gonna be in the agency?”

“He says Antheil’ll get him in.”

“Sure. He can be whatever he wants. He can be governor, he can fly. That’s what Antheil tells him.”

“What does he tell you?”

Danskin shook his head slowly. “Don’t, man.”

“Just curiosity,” Converse said. “I know why Smitty works for him. I couldn’t help wondering why you did.”

“I like it. I’m a student of the passing parade.”

Smitty appeared at the top of the rock; his arms flapped loosely at his sides as he scampered down the face of it. He waddled in a contracting circle beside the water and sprawled on the ground.

“Hey, man,” Smitty called happily.

Danskin smiled indulgently down at him.

“Hey, Smitty.”

“You know what, Danskin? It’s too bad we can’t have a fire.”

“It’s too bad we can’t toast marshmallows. It’s too bad we can’t have a sing-a-ling.” Asthmatic laughter shook him, he wrinkled the folds of flesh around his eyes. “You’re a child.”

Danskin walked over to where Smitty lay and stood over him.

“You want me to tell you scary stories?”

Giggling, Smitty covered up and crawled away from Danskin’s feet. “No, man.”

“All right for you. No stories.” He turned to Converse and his stare hardened.

“Why don’t you tell us about Vietnam? What did you do there besides cop scag?”

“I hung around.”

“That’s all?”

“Once I went up the Mekong on a patrol craft with the Navy. And I went into Cambodia with the First Division.”

Smitty was looking up at him with a loose smile.

“You kill anybody?”

“I wasn’t a combatant. I didn’t carry a weapon.”

“Man, I would have,” Smitty said. “I woulda carried every fuckin’ weapon.”

“For most people in the line it was firing at leaves or points of light. There isn’t a lot of personal combat.”

He turned to Danskin and saw in the man’s face a sudden hatred which surprised him, and frightened him as the gun had not.

“You disapprove of that shit, right?” Dumb unreasoning fury welled in Danskin’s eyes. Converse looked away quickly. “You’re against violence and killing. You’re above it.”

“I’ve always…” Converse began. “Yes,” he said, “I’m against it. I don’t know about being above it.”

“You have contempt for it, right?”

He looked into Danskin’s mad eyes and felt anger. It was an unfamiliar sensation.

“I’ve seen people kill,” he told Danskin. “It’s not all that terrific. A snake can do it. So can a mosquito or a few thousand ants.”

“You’re O.K., Converse,” Danskin said. “First you bring people Vietnam scag, then you tell them how it is. So they shouldn’t do the wrong thing and bring you down.” He reached out and gently took the tab of Converse’s collar between his fingers. “Don’t shit me,” he told Converse softly. “You’re a vindictive nasty little prick — I can tell that by looking at your face. But you’re a coward. It’s as simple as that.”

“Maybe,” Converse said.

“Maybe, hah? Listen, man, you think I don’t know what you bastards are like? You think I don’t know how you have fantasies — the guy kicks sand in your face you’re gonna kill him? You karate the walls, you talk tough to the mirror. You eat shit all your life and you hate every fucking minute of it and you’d like to fuck over half the country but you have to swallow it because you got no guts.

I don’t know about that, huh Converse? You think I’m stupid?”

“No,” Converse said.

“You think I’m sick?”

“No.”

“What am I then?”

“Ah, man,” Smitty said. “Don’t get twisted. Take it easy.”

“I could beat you to death, you know that?”

Smitty stood up and dusted himself off.

“Sure he knows it, man. What are you trying to prove?”

“He thinks he’s superior,” Danskin said. “The guy’s a heroin hustler and not even a good one.”

Biting his lip, he walked away from Converse and started up the slope to the road.

“Let’s get going. We’ll drive tonight.”

Smitty gave Converse an apologetic smile.

“Don’t argue with him, Converse. Let him wail when he’s pissed off.”

It was nearly dark, the brown hills melding into shadow, the stars out.

Danskin looked up and down the darkened road and climbed behind the wheel.

“Sit up here,” he told Converse.

Smitty climbed in the back and slammed the door.

“You think it’s a good idea to drive at night like this?” he asked Danskin. “The border patrol rides around up here.”

Danskin switched on the car lights and started up.

“They have enough to look for. They don’t have our plates on their list, they shouldn’t bother us.”

“Antheil should have cooled them.”

“If we get stopped and rousted,” Danskin said, “we take the fall and keep quiet. Antheil can take care of it after. That means you too,” he told Converse.

They rounded curve after curve in the darkness. There were mule deer in the hills and several times Danskin had to halt the car and kill the lights to let them cross the road. Smitty went to sleep in the back.

Converse was dozing when he felt Danskin nudge his elbow.

“Talk,” Danskin said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m going to sleep here. Say something and piss me off.” Converse looked at him for a moment and then leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes.

“Converse.”

“Yeah?”

“I was locked up for nine years, you know that? In the madhouse. For a violent act.”

“Maybe,” Converse suggested, “you’d rather not talk about it.”

“You don’t want to hear?”

Converse hesitated.

“No,” he said.

Having said it, he turned an anxious glance. He could see Danskin’s face dimly in the panel lights; he seemed to be smiling but one could never be sure. Converse shivered.

“You’ve already impressed me,” he told Danskin. “Save it for the next guy.”

“You ever locked up, Converse?”

“Never.”

“Then you’re a fucking virgin. You don’t know what anything’s about.”

“Yes, I do,” Converse said. “Nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty-nine, I was inside.”

“You missed a lot.”

“You think so?” Danskin snorted with contempt. “I missed nothing. Anything was going on outside, man it was going on in there. Sometimes stuff started in there and hit the street later.”

“That I can believe.”

“When I got there, Converse, I was in a dungeon. There was a guy there — anything they put in with him, he’d eat it. A mattress. Your arm.”

Converse nodded.

“I learned to be a pussycat in there. They’d take me down to the shrink and he’d try to piss me off so the goons could bounce me off the wall. I’d smile.

“Finally I got out into population and that was O.K. Nurses, all kinds of dope. I saw it all, Converse — everything you think I missed. We had civil rights assholes come in there. We had a guy who checked into a hotel in Mobile and lived on canned tortillas and tried to radiate love energy all over Alabama until the cops took him out and tied him up. We had a beatnik poet who wore salami patches on his tweed sport coat. The real Mr. Clean — he was there, he was gonna sue Procter and Gamble. A guy who said he was Fred Waring. Another guy, he took a shotgun and blasted four secretaries at Adelphi College. If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t be talking to you because it was dope and politics in that place, just like outside. But man, they did not want me out of there. I didn’t ever think I’d make it. It was kind of a famous case.”

“All right,” Converse said. “What did you do?”

Danskin nodded with satisfaction.

“You know Brooklyn?”

“Sure.”

“Saturday night,” Danskin said. “The Loew’s Lido, East Flatbush. The Searchers is playing. John Wayne.

“I was seventeen years old, I was a freshman at Brooklyn College. I was a virgin. I had never had a girlfriend. So, it’s Saturday night and I’m going to the movies by myself.

“Just as I’m about to buy the ticket, I see the ticket-taker walk into the John. So I ask the cashier for change of a bill and then — very nonchalant — I walk past the doors and into the movie house. I skip my usual bag of popcorn and I go and find my favorite seat. On the left side toward the front.

“Very soon there’s a little commotion at the back and I figure — Fuck, man, I’m discovered. Down comes the usher with his light. Now the usher is a kid I know and his name is Bruce. Bruce and I were at Midwood together. We have a strong mutual contempt. Bruce stands there shining his light in my face and I become extremely upset.

“Because Bruce is really very intelligent Bruce has always had girlfriends and now he has a girlfriend, the sister of a guy I know, the most beautiful girl you could imagine. Bruce is a superb athlete. Bruce has a scholarship to Cornell.

“So Bruce shines the light and he says — in his cultivated about-to-go-to-Cornell voice — ‘O.K., Danskin, wise guy, where’s your stub?’”

Danskin shrugged as he drove, and mocked himself in falsetto.

“‘I don’t have a stub, Brucie. I lost it.’

“So he laughs at me. He says, ‘You were with another guy, there’s two of you, where’s the other guy?’ So me — quick thinker — I say, ‘No, Bruce it was just me.’

“The manager is there now, they’re both standing over me with the light, they’re both laughing. ‘Danskin,’ Bruce says, ‘come with me, please.’ They escort me up the aisle, past maybe twenty people I know or who know me and outside to the cashier’s box.

“‘This is where you buy the tickets,’ Bruce says. And just before he went inside he gave me a look, a little expression, a little twinkle of the eyes which says, ‘Danskin, what a schmuck you are, what a contemptible idiot, what a fucking fool.’”

Danskin sighed.

“Needless to say, I no longer felt like the movies. I walked home and all I could think about was how after the show Bruce is going to meet his girlfriend and he’ll tell her. They’ll laugh about the moron, the funny animal. She’ll tell Bruce how clever he is.

“I got home and for a couple of hours I worked on my stamp collection. That almost always calmed me down. Only this time, it didn’t. I couldn’t get it out of my head, you understand. I realized…” He turned to Converse ferociously. Converse looked nervously at the road.

“I realized this was it! There was nothing else for me to do. I had absolutely no choice.

“First I took my whole stamp collection — I started it when I was about six — I took the whole thing to Prospect Park Lake and threw it in. I could have been mugged. A cop could have grabbed me. But they didn’t. Then I went in my father’s truck and I got a tire iron. I called up Bruce’s mother and she told me he was on a date. He wouldn’t be home until late.

“New Utrecht Avenue, there’s a playground between the subway stop and where Bruce’s house was. I waited in the playground, I sat on a bench holding the tire iron in my lap. Must be four in the morning — out of the subway — here comes Bruce. He didn’t see me until I was right on top of him. I was careful because he knew karate. He would, right?

“When he saw me, man, he knew! He knew then and there.

“The first one is right across the face and he’s down. No karate. Not a sound. I just stood over him and bam! Bam, that’s for your girlfriend. Bam, that’s for your scholarship to Cornell. Bam, that’s for the little twinkle. Bam bam bam bam bam. Lots and lots of times and Bruce’s little twinkle and his scholarship to Cornell is just a lot of mucus on the asphalt. Every light in every building on the street is turned on, three hundred cops are there, and I’m still pounding crud into the street and the playground looks like a meat market.”

“So they locked you up.”

“So they locked me up,” Danskin said. “I feigned mad ness. I babbled, I recited Heine. Nine years. Here I am.”

They rode in silence for a while.

“But you’re still pissed off.”

“Now more than ever.”

“Are you sorry?”

“I’m sorry I got put away. I’m not sorry I wasted Brucie. The fucking guy would remember me all his life. He’d be a rich doctor or the Secretary of Interior and he’d have this picture in his mind of me being thrown out of Loew’s. I’d rather have done the time.”

He seemed to be growing angry again. His jaw trembled.

“He’d be married to Claire. She’d say, remember the great fuck we had the night you threw that schmuck whatshisname out of the movies?”

Danskin released an asthmatic sigh and relaxed.

“That’s not the way I want to be remembered.”

“When I went to school,” Converse said, “they used to tell us to offer our humiliations to the Holy Ghost.”

“That’s sick,” Danskin said. He shuddered with revulsion. “That’s fucking repulsive. Why the Holy Ghost?”

“I guess He likes to see people fuck up.”

“He must get a kick out of you, huh?”

“I think the idea was to make something balance.”

Danskin shook his head.

“People are so stupid,” he said, “it makes you cry.”

“So what happened,” Converse asked, “after you got out?”

“I came out of there with a Jones, that’s what happened. I was dicking this wiggy nurse and she turned me on. On grass. On acid. On screwing for that matter. She was queer for madmen.

“We’d go down to the swimming pool and shoot dilaudid tabs, then morphine. It was really nice. The shrinks would try to get to me so I’d chew the rug and I’d just smile, man. Just — hello sunshine! They’d look me up and down, going hmmmm hmmmm — you know what I mean? And I’m standing there so fucking loaded I think I’m in Rockaway. They wouldn’t go for that now, but in those days it never occurred to them.

“Finally I hit the street and I know shit from nothing. I got a habit the size of Manhattan Island and no dealer will touch me. I appear and they run, right, because I’m incredibly naive and uncool — I grew up in the fucking mad house. I run after them on the street — Please, please — they say Get lost, Lemme alone, Help — I get one guy who’s so far gone he’ll sell to me, and the fourth or fifth time out — slam! We’re both busted by a spade in an army coat and sneakers.

“So my status was weird because I’m just out of the hatch. I got passed around from one guy to another and I end up in the Federal Building having a long talk with this Irish man. I can have a break if I’ll go out to this college on Long Island and hang with the radicals there. They have me by the balls. On account of the bust they can put me back in the madhouse for life. If I bitch anywhere I’m crazy. If I do what they want, I’ll get maintenance and stay out.

“Well, I went out there, man, and after a while I really got interested. I played a couple of colleges in the East — the Feds passed me from one handler to another and I worked up some far-out shit. Chicks want to rob banks with me. I say Let’s go to Nyack and kill all the cops there, they say Great! I say Let’s blow up Orange Julius — they say Right On.

“I knew some people in the movement,” Converse said. “I don’t think they would have gone for you.”

“You can say that,” Danskin said, “but you never saw me work. I got their scene figured. You’re an American college kid — that means you get anything you want. You get the best of everything that’s in — think it up, you got it. So revolution is in — boots and cartridge belts and Chinese shit. All the rich suburban kids — their parents never bought them cap pistols, now they want to kick ass. Revolution — they gotta have that too.

“The richest fuckin’ people in the richest country in the world — you gonna tell them some little guy in a hole in South America can have something they can’t? Like shit, man. If the little guy in the hole can be a revolutionary, they can be revolutionaries too.”

“Did you get a lot of convictions?”

“I did O.K. I was better in the field than in court, though. I turned some guns, some explosives. What I mostly got them was dope busts — that’s how I got to Antheil.”

“Don’t you think sometimes,” Converse ventured… “don’t you think there ought to be more to life than that?”

“You should talk,” Danskin said. “What have I got to learn from you about what there should be?”

Converse was silent.

“Anyway, it’s interesting. I’m like the Holy Ghost, man. I like to see shit heads fall on their ass.”

“Tell me something,” Converse said after a while. “Did you put that drawing on my wall?”

Danskin laughed, incredulous.

“What do you think I am, a moron? Smitty did that. Did it scare you?”

“Yes,” Converse said. “It did.”

Danskin laughed and pounded on the wheel.

“Why, you simple asshole!” he said. “Good for Smitty.”