Dog Soldiers

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THEY WAITED IN A GRASSY HOLLOW concealed from the house across the canyon by an outcropping of blue-black rock. Smitty was leaning over the ledge spitting, watching his spittle whip on the wind and sail into the treetops below.

“Lost In Space is right,” he said. “Weird stuff in the woods. Walkin’ everywhere.”

Converse watched him spit with fascination. His thick lips puckered as he sought secretions to disgorge. The pink point of his tongue slid between his lips conveying gathered saliva, a homely little entity in the cosmos.

On the climb, Converse had fallen back on the Long View. It came to him that Smitty, in some respects, bore a physical resemblance to Ken Grimes. What a ruffianly sense of humor things had, he reflected, to compose themselves now into a Grimes, then into a Smitty.

He glanced at Danskin and saw that he too was watching Smitty spit. There was a fond possessive smile on his face.

Danskin extended a leg and kicked Smitty on the elbow, causing him to lose his balance for a moment.

“Whoa,” Smitty cried, and seized firm ground.

“What are you thinking about, dipstick?”

Smitty pulled himself away from the ledge.

“A dream,” he said.

Danskin nudged Converse covertly.

“I know all about that shit,” he told Smitty. “Tell me, I’ll interpret.”

Smitty blushed and bared his gums.

“I got this guy,” Smitty told them, “it’s like him.” He pointed to Converse. “I kidnaped him, right? But suddenly he’s gone. I want the bread from his folks. But I don’t have him. I’m gonna be like the dudes up in Canada, I’m gonna cut off his ear like and send it to them. Pay up or I slice more. But he’s gone. I got to cut my own ear off and mail it.”

Danskin clapped his hands in delight.

“Wait, wait,” Smitty said. “It doesn’t work. I got to cut more of myself off. They still don’t pay up. I got to cut myself all into strips and mail it all to his folks.”

Danskin rolled over on his back, his belly heaving.

He waved his hands, fingers splayed, like a Salvationist.

“You wonder,” he asked Converse, “why he’s my buddy? Who else could have such a dream?” When he had finished laughing, he stared at Converse.

“How about you? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking, ‘Why me?’” Converse said.

“Ha!” Danskin said.

“You did wrong,” Smitty informed him, licking the spittle from his lips. “You gotta admit it. You’re a crook.”

“I’m not a crook at heart,” Converse said.

Smitty was staring into the brush above them. They turned suddenly and saw Antheil climbing down to their cover.

“I surprised you completely,” he said. “I could have been anybody.” He looked down at them peevishly. “What are you doing lying around up here?”

“We had a guy bringing us up,” Danskin told him, “but he cut out on us. I don’t know where he went or how he did it.”

“You shot at him?”

“Of course,” Danskin said.

“Well he’s up in the house now — Angel saw him. He must have got up there some way.”

“We looked,” Danskin said. “We can’t find it.”

“How about these wires. Did you follow them?”

“The wires run down the cliff and into the woods.

There’s no trail.” Antheil leaned against the rock and peered over at the house for a moment.

“I’ve been following wires all day. They’re strung up and down sheer drops.” He sat down on the short grass beside them and took another Geological Survey map from inside his safari jacket. “According to this thing, there are two trails up there. Neither of them exists. The trails I’ve found aren’t on here and none of them goes anywhere.”

“So,” Smitty said, “they’re not so dumb.”

“I don’t get it,” Danskin said. “I thought you had this place doped out. Don’t you have any information? Isn’t there a file on these people?”

“Look,” Antheil said, “every cornpone cop down here knows the way in. All these wetbacks know the way. Of course there’s a file.” He put his map away. “We had to be discreet. We didn’t want to make it official until certain things were taken care of. I thought we could improvise a little. It seemed reasonable enough.”

Smitty looked patiently from Danskin’s face to Antheil’s.

“Maybe it’s a bummer,” he suggested finally. “Maybe we should just drop it.”

Everyone turned to look at Converse.

“No,” Antheil said.

“It’s getting dark. While we’re fucking around looking for a trail, they’ll come down here and zap us.”

“I’ll back you up,” Antheil told him.

“Yeah?” He looked at Antheil with something close to contempt. “You really went for this one, huh?” Antheil stared back at him, stony-faced. “If they can’t get to a car, they can’t get out. Angel’s got

the road covered and he’s as good as they come. They can’t leave the house without being seen. If they try to walk out we’ll run them down.”

Danskin gnawed his finger in silence. “You get yourselves where you have a clear shot at the house. Talk to them. Tell them you’ll waste Asshole here.”

“Oh, man,” Danskin said, “what do they care? They’ll laugh at us.”

“Tell them you’ve got the little girl.”

“They know fucking well we got no little girl.”

“Try it, I’m telling you.” He turned on Converse in fury. “You talk, Asshole. Use your influence with your wife.”

Smitty laughed.

“Because goddamn it,” Antheil told Converse, “I’m gonna kill you if you don’t produce.”

“I think he realizes that,” Danskin said.

They watched Antheil climb quickly up the bank and walk into the woods looking over his shoulder.

Danskin’s dark eyes were bright with anger. “He’s uncomfortable turning his back, you notice that? He’s got a bad conscience.”

“He’s flipping,” Converse told them. “He’s obsessed.”

“He flips,” Smitty said, “and our balls get busted.”

Danskin took Converse by the sleeve and pushed him against the bank. “Up,” he said. “One thing at a time.”

They went back into the woods and wandered among the trees for a while, trying to find where the Mexican had gone. After a few minutes, they gave up and followed a trail that led through the edge of the woods, following the line of the bluff.

“Let’s try it here,” Danskin said, when they had gone a short way. “It’s gonna get dark on us.”

They went crouching through the brush; Danskin kept one hand on Converse’s arm and carried his air marshal’s pistol in the other. Smitty came behind with the rifle.

Just below them was another ledge with a rise of dark rock behind which they could shelter. The stone house was directly across the way and from their new point of vantage they could see the top of its bell tower and a corral against its wall in which a white horse stood.

“Now we play the game,” Danskin said when they were lying in the rocks’ shelter. “Now we play The Lady or the Tiger.” He still held Converse by the arm; he tightened his grip. “What do you think, Converse? You think she’ll come through for you?”

“I don’t know,” Converse said.

Smitty watched the opposite mesa with his binoculars for a while and broke into laughter.

“Hey, man.” he said. “I’m gonna shoot that horse.” He turned to Danskin, excited and pleading. “Can I?”

Danskin chuckled tolerantly. “What an idiot,” he said to Converse.

“Sure,” he told Smitty, “go ahead.”

There were three shots, one following another, dogged, obsessive. After the second they heard a grunt and after the third a deep bellow, loud and explosive as the shot itself. Kjell screamed in the bell tower.

Marge jumped to her feet.

Hicks was already on the ladder when Kjell came stumbling down. His eyes were wild and he was so pale that Hicks thought at first that he had been shot. He pressed past Hicks and started for the front door. Marge and Galindez intercepted him.

Peering through the slot, Hicks saw the dappled horse on its side in the corral, striking the ground before it with a fore-hoof like a circus horse counting to music. The horse’s teeth were bared and its nostrils bloody, its flank was awash with bright arterial blood.

“For shit’s sake,” Hicks said.

He had a look through the glasses and noted that the pickup had moved out of sight. There were no signs of life on the opposite hillside but it was plain that the shots had come from that direction. The sun was almost gone behind the pinnacle to the west, shadows moved up the higher slopes. He set the glasses on the rail and went be low.

“Would you believe they shot the horse?”

“I believe it,” Kjell shouted at him. “I saw it.”

“They’re crazy,” Hicks said disgustedly. “They’ll be shooting out the windows next. We ought to put mattresses up.”

“Are we going to stay here?” Marge asked. “Won’t they come up?”

“If they knew how,” Dieter said, “they’d be here.”

“How’d you lose them?” Hicks asked Galindez.

Galindez answered him in Spanish, something about a galeria.

“I was thinking,” Kjell said, “we could hide out in there. That’s what it’s for.”

“Might be the place for you, K-jell. I don’t care for holes much myself.”

“Look,” Dieter said, “it isn’t necessary. We can get to Elpidio’s place without even crossing the road. There are other people there.”

“Maybe we’re better off up here, Dieter. Down in the valley they got us in their pocket. It’s kind of our game up here.”

“But there are all these people down there,” Marge said. “They’re your friends, aren’t they? Won’t they help us?”

“Yes and no,” Dieter said. “Their heads are in a curious place. If they see there’s trouble they’ll go away. They’re pacifists. And they have a very detached view of the world.”

A man’s voice echoed over the valley.

“Hello,” the voice wailed. “Hello.”

“Hello, yourself,” Hicks said.

The voice called again.

“Marge! It’s John!”

She stared at Hicks in panic.

“It is,” she said. “It’s him.”

Hicks went up the ladder, picked up the glasses, and scanned the opposite hillside. Their heads were visible over a rock ledge — Converse, and beside him a blond man squinting down the sight of a hunting rifle. Hicks looked at the rifle barrel long enough to remember that the corner of sun to the left of the pinnacle was strong enough to reflect the lenses of his binoculars. He ducked before the shot and the bullet hit the rail and ricocheted dreadfully against the bell.

“It tolls for thee, motherfucker,” someone cried, and there was echoing, half-hysterical laughter.

Hicks ducked back through the trap and went below

“Yes, it is,” he told Marge. “They got him.”

“Oh my God,” Marge said. She started toward the lad der.

“Stay off there,” Hicks told her. “Listen through the door, they don’t have a shot at it.”

He opened the front door and stood by it.

“Marge!” Converse called to them. “Let them have it!”

“I can’t stand it,” she said.

“Marge! They have Janey!”

She put her hands to her ears.

“That’s a lie, Marge,” Hicks said. He took her by the wrists. “If they had they’d have her in sight.”

“They have Janey!” Converse shouted.

“Who’s Janey?” Kjell asked.

“How do I know they haven’t?” Marge asked desperately. “How?”

Hicks shook his head.

“Tell them to produce her.”

“Produce her?” Marge cried. “Produce her? They’ll burn her with cigarettes.”

“For Christ’s sake, man, they haven’t got her. She’s with your father.”

“Marge!” Converse called.

Marge knelt on the stone floor.

“How can he do it?”

“You know who they are. I’d do it too, if it was me.”

“Marge!”

Galindez asked who the man was that shouted.

“Her husband,” Dieter told him.

On the far hill, Converse clung to his rock, shouting into fantasy.

“Give it to them!”

“Clear,” Danskin instructed him. “So they understand you.”

“Give it to them! They’ll let us go. If they don’t get it—they’ll kill me.”

“Us!” Danskin said.

“Kill us!” Converse shouted.

“How’s anybody gonna know what he’s talkin’ about?” Smitty asked irritably.

“Yell it again, shithead. Louder.”

“Give it to them” Converse called. “Or they’ll kill me. And you. They’ll kill everybody. But if you give it to them…” he stopped and drew breath… “they won’t!”

“You think it’s funny?” Danskin asked.

“Not at all,” Converse said.

Marge stood in the doorway with her eyes closed.

“What was it? What did he say?”

Hicks shuddered. “He’s out of his head. What he says is to give it to them. What else would he say?”

“Suppose we do?”

“What do you think? You think they’ll let us walk?” He went round to the rear door that opened to the stream and looked outside.

“Dieter, let your man take the boy down to his place. You can go too if you like. Keep yourselves at this angle to the building,” he told them, making a wedge of his hand and pointing south. “I don’t think they’ll have a shot at you that way. But go quick.”

“I have to think,” Dieter said. He nodded to Galindez; Galindez and the boy started out the back door.

“While they’re going,” Hicks told Marge taking her by the arm and leading her toward the front door, “you tell them O.K. Say, ‘O.K. Please let us go. We have to dig it up.’”

Marge went to the front door and leaned against the carved doorway.

“O.K.,” she shouted. “Please let us go. We have to dig it up!”

“Get your ass down here,” one of the men on the hillside called. “Make it fast!”

“I’m sorry about your horse, K-jell,” Hicks said. Kjell and Galindez were already running across the stream toward the shadowed woods.

“What are you gonna do, Dieter? You staying?”

“Why are you staying, Ray? What is it you’re going to do?”

“We could call the cops,” Hicks said. “That would fake them out.”

“That’s all right with me,” Marge said. “Letting them have it is all right too.” She turned her back to the open door and buttoned her jacket. “It was my goddamn thing. Mine and his. We ought to pay our own way.”

“What are you talking about?” Hicks said to her. “Who you gonna pay?”

“I’ve had it,” she told him. “I’m through — it isn’t worth it”

“I guess it depends on how you think,” Hicks said.

Marge wept.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she said softly, “they’ve earned it. They can have the dope and me with it.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Look,” she shouted, “there are a million people down there. They can’t kill us all in front of all those people. I can bring it down there and hand it over.”

“You’d never make it.”

He went into the room in which he had slept. It was a narrow room like a monk’s cell; the single window was small and square, set in a brick casement. At one time it had been blue with flowering trees in each corner but Dieter had whitewashed the walls since then.

His seabag and the backpack lay on the bare mattress. From one he took the cellophane bag in which he kept his toothbrush and razor and shook the contents out onto the floor. From the other, he took the packet in which the drug was wrapped and removed its outer covering of newspaper. Then, he went quietly across the corridor and out 287 the back door into fading twilight. It was a clear tranquil evening, squirrels chattered in the pines, sparrows chanted.

“I’m bringing it down,” Marge shouted from the front door. “I’m bringing it!”

He could not understand what they shouted back.

Kneeling beside the pool where the stream was dammed, he took fistfuls of the fine dry sand between the stones and flung them into the cellophane bag. Finally, he set the bag down and held its end open and shoveled earth in, sand, small stones and all. He took the bag of sand inside and wrapped the newspaper and oil cloth around it and put it in the backpack where the dope had been. Before he tucked the heroin under his mattress he took a pinch of it and sprinkled it in the layer between the newspaper and the oil cloth on the package of sand. He dragged the backpack and seabag into the front room.

“I’m taking it down,” Marge declared. “I told them.”

“The minute they get it in their hands, they’ll blow your head off.”

“Not in front of all those people they won’t. I’ll give it to them in the village. I can get down the way we came up.” Hicks took the trigger housing and the stock of his M-16 from the seabag and started to assemble it.

“Do we have to have more of this stuff with guns?”

“Talk to them about that.”

Dieter came in from the tower and watched Hicks assemble his weapon. “What are you doing?” Hicks rummaged through the bag for clips.

“Look at your friend,” Dieter said to Marge. “The Furor Americanus.”

“She wants to take it to them,” Hicks said.

“She can try it,” Dieter said.

“That’s our buddy John they got over there,” Hicks said with a blank smile. “We want to help him out.”

“Now it’s guns and sacrifices,” Dieter told them. “The whole number.”

“Well,” Hicks said, “it can’t all be trout fishing and funny lights. We got some old dues coming up.”

“We’re already dead,” Dieter said. “It’s all manifestation.”

“Speak for yourself, Dieter. I’m not dead.”

“Go ahead and play it out with each other then,” Dieter said. He went to the refrigerator for another jar of wine. “You’re all one.”

Hicks took the jar from him and drank with a grimace.

“Some of us are more one than others.”

“I’m taking it down,” Marge said. She opened the flap of the backpack and looked inside; then snapped it closed, and held it against her body. The denim jacket she wore was slack over her shoulders, damp hair was pasted against her temples. She looked pale and sickly, fatal.

“We did this—John and I. I won’t have anybody else fucked up over it.”

“Since when do you give junk away? You need it.”

She slung the pack over her shoulder and went quickly through the front door. Hicks made no move to stop her.

She took the pack toward the cliff edge. Twenty yards from the house, she set it down in front of her and shouted into the valley.

“Here it is! Meet us in the village and we’ll let you have it!”

“Say again,” someone called.

“I have it here. Meet us in the village and let him go.”

When she turned in the direction of their voices, she saw the horse.

Converse, with Smitty close beside him, stared at the figure of Marge on the opposite hill. “Look at her,” Smitty said to him. “I could put a shell through that stuff.”

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

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

“Sure,” Antheil said.

Danskin looked at him sullenly.

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

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

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

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

“He’s hiding.”

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

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

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

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

“Give her a light,” Hicks said.

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

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

Marge was trembling. He avoided her eye.

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

“Do what you feel the need of.”

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

“What are you always laughing at?”

“I’m not laughing.”

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

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

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

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

“It’s the right thing to do.”

Hicks laughed at him.

“You think so, do you?”

He looked out into the gathering shadows.

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re an idiot.”

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

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

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

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

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

Dieter nodded.

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

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

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

Dieter shivered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shapes came out of the darkness at his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He lay on his belly, his head and shoulders overhanging the bluff, trying to see into the black woods. It seemed to him that he heard women singing far off. Now and then, a patch of purple glistened in the darkness before him, a little flash from his mushroom.

There were people who claimed to have gone into the line on acid but he had never believed them.

He was not very high, not high at all, it seemed to him — but prone to small marginal hallucinations. He felt at home in the darkness.

After lying still for a while it occurred to him that he was losing time; he felt along the edge of the rock face for the handholds that were carved there and when he felt two of them, swung himself over the edge and started down.’ He lowered himself very slowly, his feet scurrying over the rock to find the next foothold. It was awkward and he was off balance. With each descending step, his weight more oppressed his grip.

He was three quarters of the way down when, he heard the first flutter — a second later a solid weight crashed into his chest, closing off breath and knocking him from his handhold. He landed with his ankles together and rolled over on his shoulder, lying still until his breath came back. When it came, he felt the wounds on his chest — there was blood on his shirt. A black shape whistled close over his head and disappeared into the trees; a bat he thought at first, then realized that it must have been an owl or a nighthawk, panicked bird, a freak, to the Japanese the worst of omens.

There was no trail where he was and he saw no light. He stumbled downward, making an unconscionable amount of noise.

He would be below them now. They would come down the trail to his left, Marge from the right. Acting on instinct, they would be able to intercept her where her trail joined the dirt road at a point he reckoned to be almost directly below him. He struck off through the woods again, wary of the drops and deadfalls he knew were all around him.

The women’s voices came to him again — they were faint but real enough. The Brotherhood’s women — singing in the village.

A little farther down, he saw a shape below him that made no sense. He slowed and stalked it, bringing his weapon up — when he saw what it was, he ducked and hurried off to the left, easing into steep hollow grown with ferns which he had made out just in time.

It was the pickup truck and through its window he could see the lighted end of a cigarette burning. Covered in ferns, he sought higher ground, then sat listening as hard as his concentration allowed. His frame arched from the fall but he was beginning to enjoy himself. The folly and complacency of the smoker in the truck were a great com fort to him.

I’m the little man in the boonies now, he thought

The thing would be to have one of their Sg mortars. He was conceiving a passionate hatred for the truck — its bulk and mass — and for the man who sat inside it.

The right side for a change.

Marge tried to make it like walking into the ocean, picturing herself a swimmer on a beach stepping into the tide. The image of ocean kept her almost calm; she clung to it.

All it could do, she assured herself was kill — there would be no need to talk to it. At intervals she shifted the package from arm to arm.

Where the grade of the trail eased, she switched off her light. The sky was moonlit but the moon itself invisible, sealed off by close hills. There was light enough for her to make out tree shapes and rocks along the trail. She heard singing but she had forgotten whether the voices were real or imaginary.

A sound in the woods on her right caused her to stop; the sound was like a shod footstep on metal with the creak of a steel hinge. She could smell gasoline. Turning round slowly, she saw against the dark trees the figure of a man in a broad-brimmed hat above on the trail. Oceanic comforts shattered; her body ached with fear.

A little farther on, she was certain that she had passed a second man who was standing just beside the trail. The man followed her, moving through the brush, level with her descent.

“Stop,” a voice whispered. She stopped.

“I have it,” she said softly.

“Shut up,” the voice whispered back. A whisper of authority, clearly enunciated.

The three of them stood in the darkness; for what seemed several full minutes neither of the men moved or spoke.

Hands took the package from her.

“Where is he?” she asked.

The figures before her swayed as the package passed between them.

“Right over there,” a man said.

“Where?”

“Just right down there,” the man’s voice told her. “Just ahead. Turn your light on.” She moved away from them and switched on the flash light; its beam probed among rocks and ferns. There was no one.

One of the men who had intercepted her stepped off the trail and a few moments later headlights flashed out of the darkness into which he had gone. He had set the package on the fender grid of a truck and was unwrapping the tape that bound it. The man in the Stetson was coming behind her, about ten paces back.

Ahead on the trail, in a clearing where it intersected the dirt road on which the truck was parked, she saw someone move out of the shadows. She hurried toward them.

“John?” she called.

In spongy darkness among ferns, they watched her light.

“It could turn out O.K.,” Smitty told Converse. His arm was thrown loosely, in a comradely fashion, around Con verse’s neck; in his other hand he held a large square pistol. He had passed the rifle to Danskin who was waiting in the brush behind them.

“I hope so,” Converse said. The fear of death had come back for him with darkness, a mindless craving for light. Danskin moved down with them, crouching on one knee.

“Here she comes. They got it.”

He stood up and went quickly across the trail.

“She brought it,” Converse said. “Don’t hurt her.”

“No, no,” Smitty told him earnestly. “No need, man.”

Marge’s light grew larger; he could see her bare legs and recognize the Ensenada sandals she wore. Smitty rose slowly, his hand resting on Converse’s shoulder. He had released the safety on his pistol and was leveling the weapon in Marge’s direction.

Converse heard her call to him..

He leaned back on his heels and prepared to jump. There was no force to uncoil, he would have to go on nerves, as always.

Antheil called up from the truck.

“Whoa now, folks! Just a minute here!”

Smitty paused in what Converse realized was the act of taking aim. Converse dived for where the gun might be seized and the hand that held it.

“Go, Marge,” he shouted.

“Go, Marge,” a laughing voice called. It was Danskin across the road. There was a rifle shot close by.

Smitty’s arm was like iron; he could not bend it. He looped his leg between Smitty’s legs, bent his knees, and hung on. The pistol went off twice as he turned his face from Smitty’s left-hand blows. As they wrestled, Converse heard to his astonishment a sound which he was certain might be heard in Vietnam and nowhere else — a pwock, like a steel cork popping from an empty metal drum, the sound of an M-70 grenade launcher firing its cartridge. In a moment a monstrous ball of fire swelled up under the trees down the hill from them.

He had been used to thinking of Smitty as a weak link and the man’s strength surprised him. His own was ground down — Smitty’s hand was shortly free. He turned to stare over his shoulder at the fire and then adjusted his grip on the gun while Converse, turtled on the ground, scurried backward in a panicking flail of arms and legs. Clawing at pine needles, trembling in every muscle, he covered up awaiting the shell — when the forest around them burst into pure white light, then darkened and glowed white again. Smitty froze, his eyes wild. Converse turned over, landed a kick below his knee, and lunged for the gun a second time. Desperately, they searched out each other’s hands — there was only skin.

They rolled on the floor of the flashing forest and around them erupted what sounded like an artillery barrage. Smitty was struggling for freedom now; Converse clung to him afraid to let go. Marge and her light had disappeared.

Smitty and Converse together rolled down a bank and landed on the packed earth of the trail. The din of battle swelled over them — bazookas, mortars, rockets, tank guns — it was Dienbienphu, Stalingrad. They scrambled to opposite sides of the trail, Converse moving on his elbows toward cover and low ground. As he crawled into the brush it occurred to him that there was something wrong with the artillery noises. Breath. Spit. There were loud speakers in the trees. It was someone doing it, someone playing games with a microphone.

But the column of white flame down the hill rose higher; at its core was the dark outline of a truck. Danskin stood in the firelight without his rifle, he was searching for something inside his jacket. A few feet from him a burning Stet son hat marked the trail.

The roar of mock battle coming from the trees subsided into drunken laughter — but there was a machine gun firing now, a real one and close by. Converse struggled farther from the trail — shells pounded into the earth around him, peppered the trees, chewing up leaf and branch. He shoved himself farther along, trying to put at least a tree trunk between himself and the automatic fire. The flashing lights blinded him and oppressed his brain.

As he huddled against the roots of a great oak tree, from the dazzle of lights above his head there sounded a great voice, louder than the weaponry. “Form is Not Different From Nothingness,” the voice declared.

Converse shut his eyes and cringed.

“Nothingness Is Not Different From Form.”

“They Are the Same.”

Converse was compelled to wonder if nothingness and form were not, in fact, the same. He kept his head down.

When the voice came again, it rose above rifle fire up the trail that was answered by another burst from the machine gun. Converse became aware that the flashing lights above him were revealing his position. As he prepared to crawl again, he saw Smitty run past him along the trail, in the direction of the village. Twenty feet on, Smitty stopped suddenly, sliding on his heels, turned round as though he had forgotten something of importance and charged headlong into a stand of pine saplings; his feet left the ground as though he intended to jump over them.

A network of violet lights flashed from the face of a sheer rock higher up the hill and Converse saw Angel and Antheil crouching back to back at its base. They had hunting rifles like Danskin’s. A pistol went off somewhere near the burning truck sounding thin and tinny after the heavier weapons; they turned toward the sound and Bred together, composed against their illuminated rock like figures in a sculptured frieze commemorating their own valor. Angel fired and loaded with a speed that baffled vision.

“They Are the Same,” the voice said.

The machine gun opened up again, first near Converse, spraying the earth and foliage around him, then dusting the trail, finally finding the rock face. The shells rang a demented steel band’s tattoo off its violet surface, and shattered the lights and wires in a phantasmal burst of stinking smoke and electrical flame.

Raising his head Converse caught a glimpse of Antheil’s figure rolling across the trail. But he had not been hit, his roll was coordinated and calculated, as different — even at a glance — from the sickening spin of a dying man as anything could be. Two figures crashed through the brush behind him, heading downward; he saw them cross the dirt road and disappear into the darkness of the flat ground at the foot of the hill. The machine gun fired on after them. From the flying twigs and leaf meal, Converse judged its angle to be a few feet above his head. The gunner changed clips and went at it again, setting up a line of constant fire that closed off access to the village.

“They Are the Same,” the voice in the trees declared.

When the firing stopped, he looked up and saw that all along the range, empty forest was bursting into light. The flashing illuminations lit rank on rank of motionless pine, on remote silent ridges far above them. On the lower slopes, baubles danced and gleamed. He stared in wonder.

Darkness settled on the place where he hid until the only light close by came from the flames that licked about the hulk of Antheil’s pickup truck and the branches nearest it which had taken fire. The air was thick with smoke.

Converse crawled along over holly. The gunner had changed position but he kept firing. The darkness into which Angel and Antheil had retreated flickered with licks of flame as dry leaf caught and sputtered out.

Converse rolled over on his side and urinated sideways into the brush. After a few more rounds, he decided to attempt communication.

“Chieu hoi,” he shouted to the gunner.

The firing stopped for a moment, then resumed.

“Where are you?” Hicks called back.

“Out in front of you.”

“You’re in the way, man.”

Converse got to his feet and approached the trail at a crouch. He moved along the edge of it for several yards until he was even with the smoldering truck. A package wrapped in plastic lay on the ground just in front of him; he picked it up.

“I’m coming in,” he called ahead of him. He thrust the package under his arm like a football and rolled into the stand of pine saplings on the other side of the trail. A shadowy figure recoiled from his advance.

“Marge?”

She was sitting on the ground at the base of a rock; there were hot M-16 cartridges and broken glass bulbs all around her. Hicks was sprawled across the rock itself, with the smoking weapon under him. His breath sounded far back in his throat, almost a moan.

“He’s been shot,” Marge said. “He keeps passing out”

Converse reached up and touched Hicks’ arm. He felt blood on it. “What happened?” Hicks’ body stiffened in a sudden spasm. He raised himself on his elbows and brought up the weapon.

“For Christ’s sake. Are you alone?”

“At the moment,” Converse said. “How are you?”

Instead of answering, he swung the piece around and nudged Converse aside with the barrel and Bred a round at the rock wall across the canyon. Marge and Converse bent away from the noise, dodging the cartridges.

“There’s two of them,” Hicks declared. “I got them boxed. I can keep them out there all night.”

Converse lifted himself to the rock on which Hicks was lying; he could see nothing beyond the burned truck but dark trees and the mass of the rock wall.

“That fucking guy,” Hicks said. “Who is he?”

“He’s some sort of cop. He’s not straight.”

“No shit,” Hicks said.

“There are more of them,” Converse told him. “Two others.”

Hicks shook his head. “I got one. I guess he got the other.” He leaned his head on the rock and his shoulders trembled. “He was gonna peel everybody’s potatoes, that guy.”

“Figures,” Converse said.

“How are you?” Marge asked Hicks.

He took a deep breath and swallowed.

“This is what you do. You get down there and get my four-wheel drive. Drive it out to the highway while I keep them in here. Then you’re gonna pick me up on the other side. I have to go back up and cop.”

“And cop?” Converse asked. “Are you crazy?”

Marge took the bag that Converse had carried in and tossed it between them.

“This? This is here. Who needs it now?” Hicks reached down into it, took a handful of the stuff that was inside and flung it in their laps. Marge and Converse picked up the grains and sniffed at them.

“‘The pellet with the poison’s in the chalice from the palace,’ “ he recited, “‘but the flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true.’ ”

He rolled over on his shoulder and fired off another whole clip at the trees.

“It’s up the hill,” he told them. “I’ll get it.”

“No,” Marge said.

“You go in there and get that vehicle. Anything else in there that runs — slash the tires. Don’t leave them anything. When you get on the highway you go west until you’re crossing flat ground — you’re gonna see dry washes and salt. When you come to tracks crossing the road you turn off and you follow the tracks back here toward the mountains. You’re gonna see me on those tracks.”

“He’s bleeding,” Marge told her husband. Hicks reached down and started punching Converse’s arm with his fist. “Go for Christ’s sake — while they’re still back there. You think you know better than me? Do as you’re told.” Converse stood up, pulling Marge with him. When he stepped out on the trail, she followed. She held his sleeve as they went and it gave him an odd feeling. Smitty and Danskin had been holding him by the sleeve for days. From the grove of little pine trees, Hicks continued his fire round after round.

“Are they really back there?” Marge asked.

“They better be,” Converse said.

All the lights were on in the village, but the lighted win dows were vacant, the tents gone. The field where the rows of trucks had been parked was empty. They went cau tiously past car skeletons and the ruined tepee. At the edge of the rubbish pit a woman holding a tartan beverage cooler fled from them.

In the center of the village street a single truck remained. The driver was a young Mexican; he had the hood up and was working grimly on the truck’s engine while his family stood by. There were three children who were still staring, rapturously, at the face of the mountain.

Marge and Converse went to the Land-Rover and Con verse took a camper’s ax from under the back seat and set about slashing the tires of Danskin’s station wagon with it. The Mexican family watched him in silence. The young man did not look up from his truck’s engine. Hicks’ M-16 clattered on.

Converse got behind the wheel of the Land-Rover and stared at it.

“Keys,” he said.

Marge threw up her hands and shook her head.

He went through his pockets, found a nail clipper and began working the screws out of the front panel. “They didn’t have Janey,” Marge said. He was shaving down the insulation on the starter wire. “No, they didn’t. She’s with Jay.”

“Thank God,” Marge said. “That at least.” When the engine turned over, the fuel gauge registered a quarter full. Converse exchanged glances with the Mexican truck driver and gunned for the road out. He moved the Land-Rover as fast as it would go until a bad curve fright ened him. He had difficulty with the four-wheel drive.

“Could you always do that?” Marge asked.

“Hot-wire it? No, I learned it over there. From a Vietnamese.”

“That’s a switch.”

“Yes,” Converse said. “It is.”

There was a clear road ahead of them. For nearly a half hour they climbed—for the hump of the ridge, then the road descended in hairpins along the north side of the wall. Marge poked her head out and looked up and down the track.

“We’re fucked now,” she said. “There’ll be cops.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me,” Converse said. “I suppose there will be.”

“What do we tell them when they stop us?”

Converse sighed. “I don’t know. If they give us back to Antheil we better get a receipt for ourselves. Antheil,” he told her, “is that guy back there.”

“He must be a pretty corrupt cop.”

“Yes,” Converse said.

“I suppose,” Marge said, “they were waiting for us all the time.”

“Yes, they were.”

“I knew it would happen.”

“I did too,” Converse said. She was leaning over to see his face. He kept his eyes on the road.

“Did they give you a tough time?”

“Pretty tough.”

“I knew they must have,” Marge said, “when you said they had Janey.”

“Sorry about that.”

“You couldn’t help it.”

“You know,” Converse explained, “they said… or else.”

“Right,” Marge said.

After the next turn, they saw lights ahead—the tail lights of a line of trucks moving before them out of the valley. They had overtaken the main body of the Brotherhood’s retreat. They moved behind the last truck at about fifteen miles an hour. Small brown fingers clung to its tailgate grid, frightened eyes peered from under blankets at their headlights.

“He wants us to pick him up,” Marge said.

“I heard him.”

She was silent.

“Even if we get that far,” Converse told her, “he won’t be there. You must realize that.” She had buried her face in her hands. “I’m sick,” she said. She curled herself against the seat. “Look,” she said after a moment, “I have to try. But you don’t. Maybe if we get through here you can get up to Janey.”

“He won’t be there.”

“Him,” she said, “he might be.”

“If he is,” Converse told her wearily, “he’ll just have the dope and the goddamn thing will start over again. He’s not a sane person. And he’s not very bright.”

She wiped her face with her sleeve.

“He came down for you,” she said. “That’s why he came down. We could have gotten out.”

Fatigue wore him down. He kept himself hunched forward to see through the dust and gloom ahead and his muscles ached.

“That can’t be true.”

“He’s not a sane person,” Marge said. “And he’s not very bright. Sometimes,” she told him, “people do simpleminded things like that. They take a chance to help their friends. Can’t you respond to that?”

“Yes, I can respond to it,” Converse said. “I’m responding to it. He won’t be there.”

“Haven’t you ever done anything like that?”

“Yes and no,” Converse said. When he turned to her, she moved her back to him pressing her forehead against the hard metal seatback. “Like what?” he demanded. “I don’t know what that guy did or why he did it. I don’t know what I’m doing or why I do it or what it’s like.”

“It’s something simple,” Marge said. She twisted in the seat, bringing her head to rest against the plastic window. “Jesus, I think I’m really sick now.”

“Nobody knows,” Converse told her confidently. “That’s the principle we were defending over there. That’s why we fought the war.”