Dog Soldiers

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MARGE LAY DOWN BESIDE HICKS, ON THE FLOOR between his mattress and the bag. When she woke up it was still light. Kjell was playing with his horse in the meadow across the warm stream; she sat on the bank and watched him for a while. She walked in the woods at the edge of the meadow and looked at the trinkets in the boughs.

Coming back to the house, the space and the distances began to oppress her. The space was comfortless, the time empty and without any promise of peace; she was at their intersection, and it was not a place she could occupy. It was desperation, nowhere.

She went back into the room and cleaned the spike with alcohol and cooked up in a stained silver tablespoon, making for the timeless vaults. The shot nearly knocked her cold; she went out and vomited beside the shower.

When it was all right, she went into the main room to lie down. Dieter was at his console, working with wires. Beside him, in a Mexican ceramic dish, were clusters of small gray mushrooms, flecked here and there with a curious chemical blue.

She eased herself on a Navaho rug in front of the empty fireplace.

“You want to get high?” Dieter asked her.

“I am.”

He turned from his work to look at her and took a delicate bite from one of the mushrooms.

“That’s not high — what you are.”

He brought the bowl to where she lay and held the mushrooms before her face.

“I used to go down for these myself during the season.

It’s a fantastic scene. Kids sell them.” He nibbled another portion. “The better they are, the more blue. Sometimes the kids who sell them take blue dye and color them.”

She shook her head.

“I’ve been sick.”

Dieter took the bowl away and went back to his console while she coasted among the ceiling rafters.

“What are you doing?” she asked him suddenly. “How can you concentrate if you’re stoned?”

“I can play polo stoned,” Dieter said.

From somewhere in the valley, a trumpet sounded four wavering notes. The striking of colors, an alarm.

Marge smiled when she heard it.

“It’s the trumpet of the Mexican infantry,” Dieter told her. “A very tragic sound. It calls huge numbers of Mexican soldiers into battle against tiny determined bands. The tiny bands hold them off for three months and kill half of them.”

“Does it mean someone’s coming?”

He put the wires aside, picked up a pitcher of wine from the stone floor, and sat down at the edge of her blanket.

“I don’t know what it means. It has something to do with the fiesta.”

“What’s the fiesta like? Is it nice?”

“They take a lamb up on the pinnacle and sacrifice it.”

She looked into his saintly long-lashed eyes. They were naked, comically blue. She laughed.

“To you?”

“Obviously,” Dieter said, “you insist on misunderstanding. They sacrifice it to its heavenly father. They crucify it.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” Dieter said.

“And they do psilocybin?”

“The psilocybin they got from me.” He turned his gaze toward the ceiling beams. “They get high and crucify it, and they ask, Little Lamb Who Made Thee?”

“And what does the lamb say?”

“The lamb says baaa.”

Marge shook her head.

“They got a lot of nerve,” she said. “So do you.”

She stretched out across the floor and thrust her clasped hands between her knees. Dieter’s red swollen face hovered above her.

“You’re a Jew,” she heard him say.

She stiffened and stared up at him.

“Am I? Does that make us buddies?”

Dieter eased down beside her, still holding his wine.

“I detect a certain astringency in your manner. I thought it might be Jewish.”

“Because Jews dislike bullshit?”

“That’s not my experience. They’re just fussy.” His flowing red face was close to hers; she could smell the

wine on his breath. She thought that he was going to kiss her, but she did not move. He pulled back and removed himself from her space, crawling off the blanket.

“I was not always as you see me now,” he said.

“Me neither.”

“I know what you want from him,” she said a little later, “but what does he want from you?”

“He wants to sell me three kilos of heroin. That’s all he wants.”

“No,” she said, “he has some hit on you.”

“I suppose it’s that I’m part of his history. That’s the way his life has been — he takes his history seriously. He takes people seriously.” Dieter began to laugh. “He takes everything seriously. He’s a serious man, like your President— un homme sérieux. He’s a total American.”

“You’re being snotty.”

“Not at all. I know him very well. I was his first master.”

“That’s a funny thing to hear somebody say,” Marge said.

She saw that Dieter was not listening to her. He was staring past her with a smile still on his face.

“He was beautiful. He was your natural man of Zen. You could have done anything with that guy.”

“What does that mean?” Marge asked. “What do you mean, you could have done anything with him?”

“He was open. He was there. He was. When I called it Those Who Are, it was him I thought of.”

“Those Who Are what?”

Dieter discovered her in front of him.

“He was incredible. He acted everything out. There was absolutely no difference between thought and action for him.” He clapped his hands and held them together in a grip that whitened his fingers. “It was exactly the same. An enormous self-respect. Whatever he believed in he had to embody absolutely.”

Marge put a hand to her face and laughed.

“Wow.”

“Wow,” Dieter said. “Wow is right.”

He looked about his chamber fondly.

“You have to know what it was like here then. We didn’t drink — we didn’t do up. We washed our dishes in the stream and listened to the birds. Just… clarity.” He held out his hand and formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger to indicate clarity. “It was before Christine flipped. She was very happy then.”

“I didn’t know happy was part of it. I thought you weren’t supposed to think in those terms.”

“Let’s face it,” Dieter said, “we were happy.”

He took a sip of wine from the pitcher and fixed Marge with his Himalayan stare. She had no idea how many mushrooms he might have eaten. They seemed to have no effect on him.

“I went down all the rivers,” Dieter told her. “Like a prospector. I knew all the gurus and poseurs. Fuji. Mount Athos.” He numbered Fuji and Mount Athos off on his fingers. “But I succumbed to the American dream.”

Marge laughed.

“You don’t seem to me,” she said, “like someone who succumbed to the American dream. You seem more the opposite of that.”

“Not at all,” Dieter said. “When I came I was naïve. I believed all the old bullshit. Innocence. Energy. I believed it so much that for a while it came true for me. Christine and I moved up here — others came. Ray and others. Marvelous things happened to us. We were levitating, we were delirious.”

He farted loudly and without embarrassment.

“Then it occurred to me that if I applied the American style — which I didn’t really understand — if I pushed a little, speeded things up a little, we might break into something really cosmic. The secular world was falling apart. Nobody knew what they were doing or what they wanted. There was a great ear open. Waiting for something.”

Dieter closed his eyes and put clasped hands over the top of his head.

“I was sitting up here hearing it! What they wanted” — with a thrust of his chin he indicated the world below — “I had. I knew! So I thought, a little push, a little shove, a little something extra to shake it loose. And I ended up as Doctor Dope.”

He opened his eyes and shrugged.

“It’s a fucked-up world. One’s a weak vessel.”

“Everybody came down.”

“Nobody came down,” Dieter shouted at her. “We disappeared without a trace. We haven’t been seen since.”

“Look at Ray,” Dieter said. “He’s trapped in a samurai fantasy — an American one. He has to be the Lone Ranger, the great desperado — he has to win all the epic battles single-handed.” He stood up wearily. “It may not be a very original conception, but he’s quite good at it.”

Kjell came in from outside carrying an armload of kindling and set it down next to the fireplace.

“We gonna play Go tonight?” he asked his father.

“We’ll see. Why don’t you go and wake Ray up.”

“He’s awake,” Kjell said. “He’s washing.” He turned to Marge.

“Play Go?”

“I’m sorry,” Marge said, “I’ve forgotten how.”

“Myths,” Dieter was saying. “Phantasmagoria. Projections.”

Hicks came in, drying his face with a towel.

“It was all shit,” he declared. “Wasn’t it, K-jell?”

“Shit as opposed to what?” Dieter asked. “If it was shit, what was the good stuff?”

“It was a flash.”

“It was our responsibility. We should have stayed with that flash forever.”

“Whatever it was, we never put it all together. A miss is as good as a mile with that shit.”

“We used to have a little song,” Dieter said to Marge. “Allow me to recite it for you.

“We had a few laughs,” Hicks said. He was not laughing. He reached into the bowl, took out one of the mushrooms and nibbled at its blue surfaces.

Dieter spread his palms face up and shook them in the gesture of not comprehending.

“Why is it too late?” he demanded. “Maybe it’s not. Look, you don’t want that filth you’re carrying. It takes you nowhere.”

He walked up to Hicks and raised his elbows as though he were about to put his hands on Hicks’ shoulders, but he kept his hands away in the end.

“Stay,” he said commandingly. “Stay, both of you. We’ll give it another shot.”

Hicks looked away from him, and took another bite of the mushroom.

“Look,” Dieter said, “here we are, yes? The last crumbling fortress of the spirit. The world is breaking down into degeneracy and murder. We have to make islands for ourselves like the ninth-century monks. We’re in the dark ages.”

He looked over his shoulder and saw Kjell watching him from beside the fireplace. In a moment the boy went outside again.

“We have to get it down before it goes forever. It may never come together again.”

“Forget it, man,” Hicks said.

“Forget?” Dieter asked in amazement. “You’re joking.

Who can forget?”

“I’d like to help you get it down, Dieter, but I got some shit to move.”

Dieter seized Marge by the arm.

“Tell him.”

She shook her head.

“Nobody bought me no mountain, Dieter. I got to live, damnit.”

“Nonsense! Bullshit! You don’t have to make your living that way.”

“Sorry, man,” Hicks said.

In the hills outside, a rifle shot echoed over and over, diminishing from rim to rim.

They looked at each other.

“That part of the fiesta?”

“No,” Dieter said.

Kjell came in carrying a single log and stood just out of the sunlight that streamed in behind him, with his head cocked toward the open door.

“Sounded like a great big deer rifle,” he said.

Hicks went to the other side of the door and looked out at the stone plaza.

“Hunters?”

Dieter shrugged.

“We’ve never had any before.”

“Wouldn’t be somebody shooting at us, would it?”

“Maybe somebody’s sending us a message,” Dieter said.

There was a brick chamber behind Dieter’s altar where a ladder was pitched against the platform of the bell tower above them. Hicks climbed it, with Kjell following him up.

A whitewashed wooden rail ran around the tower plat form’s protecting wall, and between the rail and the brick surface of the wall was an indented space through which a man could look out from concealment.

Hicks walked the rail’s length peering through the space; Kjell handed him a pair of glasses. He went round again with the glasses pressed against the rail, studying what he could see of the surrounding hills.

“I think you can still smell the cordite,” Kjell said. “Unless it’s my imagination.” He stood still for a moment with his arm out before him. “Wind’s south, I think.”

Hicks went to the south side of the tower and searched out the opposite hill. Of all the nearby hills, its pinnacle was closest to their mountain, and it was the most thickly wooded.

He scanned its high points over and over, but the only movement he could make out was the slow stirring of Dieter’s bright ornaments on the lazy wind.

“They ought to be over there,” he said, “if it’s blowing down on us.”

He made another round of the tower, standing on tiptoe to tilt the angle of the glasses downward toward the valley.

Among the trees on the road far below, he made out a yellow pickup truck. He handed the glasses to Kjell.

“Who’s that?”

“Don’t know them,” Kjell said, when he had looked through the glasses. “Could be… well, I don’t know who it could be. People camping maybe.”

“They’d have to be pretty fucking dedicated to camp around here.” He called down the ladder to Dieter and brought him up, blinking and unsteady in the sunlight.

“Whose pickup is that?”

Dieter took the glasses and Hicks guided their angle to the road. “Never saw it before. He’s blocking the road out to the flats, though. And he can see the house from there.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Hicks said. “Look,” he told Kjell, “hang up here. Let us know if that thing moves or something happens.”

They went below to the main room; Hicks gathered up the wet shirts he had been preparing to hang and pitched them on the stone floor.

“How about walking?” he asked Dieter. “How far was it across the flats?”

“Twenty miles to the highway,” Dieter said. “But whoever is in that car will see you start out.”

“What are the flats like?” Marge asked.

“Well, they’re flat,” Hicks said. “And they’re dry and windy and hot. On the other side of them is a highway that runs a couple of miles from the Mexican border.”

“Surely you’re not going to carry it over there?” Dieter said. “That would be madness. You’d just have to get it back in again.”

“I wouldn’t take it over the line. But I might have a shot at the highway if I thought I could walk twenty miles.”

“The wetbacks do it,” Dieter said. “They follow the ore tracks right into this valley.”

“What about the border patrol?”

“They fly over it a couple of times a week. Not every day.”

“Maybe that’s the border patrol in that pickup, Dieter. Maybe they’re cruising your fiesta.”

“Those people are American citizens,” Dieter said. “The border patrol knows that.”

“They’re setting us up, damnit. They’re setting us up for a bust. That shot was some nark tripping over his cock.”

“One thing I assure you,” Dieter said, “we cannot be surprised up here. Besieged, surrounded, but never surprised. And if they were going to bust us they’d have helicopters and dogs — it’s a carnival the way they do it.”

“Maybe they’re waiting for dark.” Hicks walked to the open door that led to the plaza and slammed it shut. “We’ve been turned, Marge. We’re gonna have to sprint.”

“Hey,” Kjell called from the tower. “Galindez is coming up.”

Dieter opened the door and looked out into the slanting afternoon sun. After a minute or so, a man in a bleached white shirt came up the steps, walking cautiously, and came inside. He looked at the people in the room and at the empty wine jar in Dieter’s hand. When he had recovered his breath, he spoke quietly in Spanish with Dieter.

“There are three men on the hill across from us,” Dieter said when Galindez was done. “They have guns, and one of them has a rifle. There are two more down by the pic up. Galindez says one is a Mexican cop.”

Marge sat down at the altar steps and tucked her knees under her chin.

“What were they shooting at?” Hicks asked.

“At me,” Galindez said.

“Would you get the boy off the roof?” Marge said. “Before somebody shoots him?”

“You were followed,” Dieter said to Hicks.

“We weren’t followed. We were turned.”

“By whom?” Marge asked. “June?”

Hicks shrugged.

“Maybe they made a lucky guess. I’m sorry,” he told Dieter. “We brought you trouble.”

“They’re always out there,” Dieter said. He made a gesture of philosophic resignation; his hand shook. “If June turned us in,” Marge said slowly, “maybe she didn’t get Janey to my father.”

“June is a stand-up chick,” Hicks said. “Don’t worry about it” He turned to Galindez and then to Dieter. “Are they coming up? What are they gonna do?”

“At the moment,” Dieter said, with a faint smile, “they’re lost. Elpidio took them up and left them.”

“What the hell kind of cops are they? Ask him what they look like.”

“One has a beard,” Dieter said when he had spoken with Galindez. “One has bleached hair like a maricon. One is ordinary.”

Hicks examined the portrait of Moussorgsky. “You know what?” he said. “They may not be cops at all.”